Innholdsfortegnelse for April 1, 2013 i The Nation

The Path Does Not Run Smooth…
 Gainesville, Fla.
 “A Path for Immigrants?” [Feb. 25] rightly states that the proposed immigration bill is paved with “broken glass.” As advocates for migrant farmworkers, my colleagues and I realize that only a percentage of the estimated 11 million undocumented people here will benefit from the reform package and become citizens. The bill is fraught with difficult requirements: the lengthy process from declaration to green card to citizenship can take up to ten years, and the cost—from the initial fine to back taxes to application fees—is very high. Unless these issues are addressed, there will still be millions ripe for INS detention, deportation and exploitation.
 PHILIP KELLERMAN, president
Harvest of Hope Foundation
 _________________________ …and the Flow Will Not Be Stanched
 Cambridge, Mass.
 Great thanks for…

In olden days, it used to be that the bad
 guys robbed the banks. Now it seems the bad guys are running the banks, at least the big ones, and robbing the rest of us. Nearly every day, newspapers have another disturbing report about how the largest and most influential banks managed to escape prosecution for their blatant fraud or else finagled outrageous subsidies and profits from their monopolistic dominance of the financial system. The worst that happens to privileged bankers who are “too big to fail” is an occasional scolding lecture from angry members of Congress. 
 Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown, fresh from his impressive re-election victory last fall, is back again with a simple, straightforward solution: make the big boys smaller. He is introducing legislation, co-sponsored by Republican…

On the Thursday morning before Christmas, about fifteen women, mostly Latina but some Eastern European, stand scattered on a curved asphalt shoulder overlooking the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. As yeshiva school buses and somber men in black topcoats pass by, an older Hasidic woman comes close and asks a Latina, in Yiddish-accented English, “Clean today and tomorrow?” “No, sorry,” replies the worker, who is already booked for Friday. The Hasidic woman eventually hires a middle-aged Polish worker, who trails her home at some distance.
 It is thirty-six degrees and windy, but a patch of shifting sunlight warms Hellen Rivera, a luckless jornalera, or woman day laborer. Tall and fair-complexioned, Rivera looks so unlike the other Latina workers that I mistake her for Polish. She wears a long, black wool coat and orange…

Books Discussed in This Essay Lixiprothesma daneia By Petros Markaris. Gavriilides. 432 pp. €22. Oikonomiki krisi kai Ellada Edited by Adriana Vlachou, Nikos Theocharakis and Dimitris Mylonakis. Gutenberg. 411 pp. €25. The Global Minotaur America, the True Origins of the Financial Crisis and the Future of the World Economy. By Yanis Varoufakis. Zed Books. 296 pp. Paper. $14.95. Sozetai o Titanikos? Apo to Mnimonio, xana stin anaptyxi. By Nikos Christodoulakis. Polis. 233 pp. €12.50. 22 Pragmata pou mas lene yia tin elliniki krisi kai den einai etsi By Christos Laskos and Euclid Tsakalotos. Kentro Psychagogias Monados. 238 pp. €13.85 . To agnosto paraskinio tis prosfygis sto DNT Pos kai yiati ftasame sto Mnimonio. By Panagiotis Roumeliotis. Livani. 383 pp. €16.50. Anonymoi chreokopimenoi By Christoforos Kasdaglis. Kastanioti. 248 pp. €12.…

The tenth anniversary of the American invasion of Iraq is upon us, and we are invited to assess the result. An unbroken record of waste, futility and shame presents itself to the retrospective view. There was the passage by Congress of the dangerously vague and elastic Authorization for Use of Military Force in place of the congressional declaration of war the Constitution requires. There was the infamous day the “shock and awe” campaign was unleashed, when a great and
ancient city was bombarded as a world that overwhelmingly rejected the attack watched in helpless dismay—a day that burns in memory as one on which a long-premeditated crime occurred in broad daylight. There were the flimsy deceptions and self-deceptions by which the war was rationalized to the American Congress, the American people,…

Click on the Elliott Abrams page on the website of the Harry Walker speakers’ agency, and you’ll learn a great deal about its subject. He is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of Tested by Zion: The Bush Administration and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, recently published by Cambridge University Press. An ex–congressional staffer, former national security 
official in the Reagan and Bush II administrations, and a member of more boards and organizations than one can easily count, Abrams is also, according to the “accolades” provided by the agency, a big hit with the Jewish federations, temples and synagogues to which the Walker pitch is unmistakably directed. 
 Here’s what you won’t learn: in the Reagan State Department, Abrams (who also teaches foreign policy at Georgetown)…

Just weeks after taking office, Mexico’s new president, Enrique Peña Nieto, ordered the arrest of the country’s most powerful union leader, Elba Esther Gordillo. The move garnered international headlines and was widely cast as a sign that the government was serious about cracking down on corruption. But virtually no one in Mexico believes that was the real reason for her arrest.
 The timing alone suggests a different interpretation. Gordillo, president of the National Union of Education Workers (SNTE), was charged with embezzlement and removed from office in late February—shortly after the Mexican Congress gave its final approval to an education reform program that is despised by most of the country’s teachers.
 Gordillo was a longtime ally of the famously corrupt Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), the party not only of Peña…

  What did Clausen see in the sky? Probably no one will ever know. He flew in all excited from the garden (where he had been weeding carrots) and pointing to the clouds exclaimed: There, there! I asked him: Would you like a drink? But he, with a wild look in his eyes, just kept repeating: There, there! He wouldn’t respond to anything. Later he was taken to an insane asylum. (His furniture ended up on the auction block.)   What did Clausen see in the sky? Probably no one will ever know. (translated from the Polish by Piotr Gwiazda)…

THE SCHOOL CLOSURE EPIDEMIC: On March 7, some 500 protesters—including American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten—blocked a road and entrances to a hearing that would decide the fate of twenty-seven Philadelphia schools. As police escorted a handcuffed Weingarten and eighteen others off the premises, the School Reform Commission voted to shutter approximately one in ten district schools by the end of the year.
 In Chicago, eighty schools are on the chopping block; in New York, the number is twenty-two. Twenty-eight closures have been proposed in Detroit, fifteen in Washington, and more in Sacramento, Baltimore, Birmingham and St. Louis. Although the politics differ by district, a shared sense of foreboding hangs over several major cities.
 Neoliberal school reformers call 
this “school choice.” Parents have voted with their feet, they argue,…

I first met Hugo Chávez in New York City in September 2006, just after his infamous appearance on the floor of the UN General Assembly, where he called George W. Bush the devil. “Yesterday, the devil came here,” he said. “Right here.… And it smells of sulfur still today, this table that 
I am now standing in front of.” Then he made the sign of the cross, kissed his hand, winked at the audience and looked up. It was vintage Chávez, an outrageous remark leavened with just the right touch of detail (the lingering sulfur!) to make it something more than bombast, cutting through the soporific nostrums of diplomatese and drawing fire away from Iran, which was in the cross-hairs at that meeting.
 The press, of course, went into high…

It’s time for that period of breathless college-hoops hysteria known as March Madness. It’s time for bracketology, Final Four predictions, office pools and the gambling of billions of dollars, legal and illegal. What will go largely unnoted is the fact that kids, ranging in age from 18 to 22 and branded with corporate logos, are producing this tidal wave of revenue—and they’re not receiving a dime of it. 
 Welcome to the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) in the twenty-first century, about as corrupt and mangled an institution as exists in the United States. At palatial college stadiums across the country, players are covered in more ads than stock cars and generate billions of dollars, all to the roar of millions of fans for whom college sports are tantamount to…

The Young Turks’ Crime Against Humanity The Armenian Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing in the Ottoman Empire. By Taner Akçam. Princeton. 483 pp. $39.50. Turkey is a country with two right wings. One is nationalist and secular, built on the oversized legacy of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the nation’s first president. The other is nationalist as well, but rooted in Islam and a renewed interest in the legacy of the Ottoman Empire. For all their differences, the two sides share some crucial features: besides being nationalist, they are also anti-imperialist, see Turkey as having a unique role to play in the region, and are not inclined to consider themselves as being on the right. Although the Islam-based wing currently governing the country—with Tayyip Erdogan of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) at…