Katrina vanden Heuvel | The Nation

WISCONSIN'S RECALL. The June 5 Wisconsin recall elections are "the most ambitious set of recall elections in American history," reports John Nichols in this week's issue. Wisconsin's recall is nothing short of a "grassroots rebellion against the determination of Governor Scott Walker and his legislative lieutenants to destroy unions, slash public sector wages and benefits, cut education funding and tear open the social safety net." If successful, writes Nichols, the results would be seen as a "rejection of the idea that cutting taxes for the rich while attacking unions and slashing services will somehow spur job growth." We're proud to endorse the campaign of Walker's Democratic challenger, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, who former Senator Russ Feingold described as “a lifelong progressive [who] stood with me in voting against the deregulation that led to the Wall Street crash, opposing the Patriot Act and reforming our system of campaign finance.” Find out how you can support and join Barrett's campaign, here.

YEMEN: A SAFE HAVEN FOR MILITANTS? US counter-terrorism policy in Yemen made headlines this week after the Obama Administration issued a broadly defined executive order that imposes sanctions "on individuals and entities who threaten the peace, security, and stability of Yemen by disrupting the political transition." And just last week, intelligence officials claimed to have foiled an alleged terrorist plot orchestrated by AQAP, a branch of Al Qaeda based in Yemen. National Security correspondent Jeremy Scahill has reported extensively from inside Yemen, detailing how the Obama Administration has dramatically escalated drone strikes and increased logistical support to the Yemeni military. Appearing on Al Jazeera's Inside Story, Scahill explains that continued US drone strikes have sparked enormous backlash, which have only served to radicalize Yemenis. And on NPR's Fresh Air with Terry Gross on Thursday, Scahill explains how the Obama Administration's (not so) targeted killing operations and support of forces inside Yemen will make it likely that Yemen becomes a safe haven for terrorist groups. Be sure to listen to the interview, and you can read Scahill's reporting from inside Yemen, available here.

FACEBOOK'S CALLOUS ONE PERCENTER. "These guys [have] become emblematic of a class of one percents who think they don't owe anything to the countries that made them great," Nation columnist Ilyse Hogue told MSNBC's The ED Show on Wednesday. Eduardo Saverin, a Facebook co-founder, declared last week that he's renouncing his US citizenship to avoid paying taxes on the windfall he stands to gain after Facebook goes public. "Saverin’s craven selfishness," writes Hogue, "will help us rethink not only enforcement of our tax code, but also how we recognize and define loyalty and patriotism for all of us, immigrant and native-born, who call America home." The story prompted action from Senator Chuck Schumer and Bob Casey, who on Thursday proposed legislation to crack down on tax-dodging expatriates. Under mounting public criticism and outrage, Saverin issued a statement, which is available here.

PROGRAMMING NOTE: I'll be on MSNBC's Melissa Harris-Perry, Saturday at 10am ET to discuss the news of the week with the Washington Post's Ezra Klein, Nation Contributor Victoria deFrancesco Soto, and Reason.com's Nick Gillespie. Tune In!

SAVE 'THE AMERICAN PROSPECT.' I wrote Friday about the importance of magazines of opinion as an essential source for great political ideas and debates that shape and confront our country. That is why we were saddened by news that The American Prospect might close its doors at the end of may unless it can raise close to $500,000. As I explained, The Nation and the Prospect share some great DNA. And it has long been home to intelligent journalism, smart reporting and terrific coverage of progressive ideas and policy. They urgently need your help. Join me in keeping the Prospect alive.

CONGRATULATIONS MELISSA HARRIS-PERRY. Hats-off to Nation columnist and MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry for being named a finalist in the 2012 National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) Salute to Excellence. Her essay, "Are We All Black Americans Now?" was one of just three selected in the Magazine Commentary/Essay category. Harris-Perry’s provocative column is reflective of her larger role in our public debate. As a professor, author, and national voice, Harris-Perry is an intellectual tour-de-force. Her provocative ideas and cogent analyses weave together issues of race, gender, politics and society. In her columns and on her weekend MSNBC show, she challenges us to think, and invites us to debate.

SPRING BOOKS. The Nation's bi-annual Books & Arts special issue is here. This spring’s edition features a timely and provocative essay on motherhood by former Harper's senior editor Jennifer Szalai; a powerful reflection on the works of Kurt Vonnegut by William Deresiewicz; an inside look at the letters of Samuel Becket, and much more. The Nation remains proud to be one among few remaining publications that devotes its pages to book reviews. At a time when many media organizations are scaling back, we remain committed to a free-standing Books & Arts section, in print and on the web.

As always, thanks for reading. I'm on Twitter--@KatrinaNation. Please leave your comments below.

Editor’s Note: Each week we cross-post an excerpt from Katrina vanden Heuvel’s column at the WashingtonPost.com. Read the full text of Katrina’s column here.

Consider $2 billion lost on a bad bet, plus billions more as investors dumped the stock, a providential warning. When Jamie Dimon, the imperious head of JPMorgan Chase, revealed that the bank had lost so much on a derivatives trade gone bad, it was clear warning that, four years after blowing up the economy, the big banks are still playing with bombs.

This was no rogue trader. Dimon admitted to “many errors, sloppiness, bad judgment” in “poorly executed” derivative trades. Heads may roll, but these were authorized trades by the bank’s leading—and notorious—trader, Bruno Iksil, the “London Whale.”

Dimon, of course, has been Wall Street’s most vociferous critic of banking reforms, deploying an army of lawyers and lobbyists—at the cost of an estimated $7.4 million in 2010— to try to delay, dilute and disembowel the Dodd-Frank legislation. The unrelenting legal and lobbying campaign has clearly intimidated the regulators, forcing delays beyond the dates mandated by the statute. Most recently, the bank lobby seemed on the verge of defenestrating the Volcker Rule, which would limit commercial banks from gambling with depositors’ money. That rule, itself a pale shadow of the Glass-Steagall Act repealed during the Clinton years, might have constrained the kind of opaque, risky bets that led to the losses.

Editor’s Note: Each week we cross-post an excerpt from Katrina vanden Heuvel’s column at the WashingtonPost.com. Read the full text of Katrina’s column here.

In his final interview as president of Russia, Dmitry Medvedev was asked to comment on many of the issues one would expect—relations with the United States, Ukraine and Georgia, government corruption… and the Pussy Riot case.

While you might not have heard much, if anything, about Pussy Riot in this country, the feminist punk rock collective has roiled Russian politics. Back in February, on the eve of Russia’s presidential election, it gave an impromptu performance of “Punk Prayer” on the pulpit of Christ the Savior Cathedral—Moscow’s Russian Orthodox equivalent of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City. The performers wore ski masks, jabbed and kicked at the air and genuflected to verses imploring the Virgin Mary to “get rid of Putin, get rid of Putin, get rid of Putin.”

It seemed a feisty—perhaps to some tasteless—musical prank, amplifying the demands of thousands who’d protested in Moscow’s streets since December. And it probably wasn’t the most tactful way to attract a broad spectrum of supporters to the opposition’s views. But these punk rockers have been around for a couple of years, taunting authorities with their flamboyant performance art and music. On video, their action almost has the feel of a flash mob—and a small one at that—albeit at the nexus of power between church and state.

But the authorities didn’t view it as so benign. On March 3—one day before the presidential election won by Putin— two members of Pussy Riot, Maria Alyokhina and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, were arrested “by heavily armed police officers” for allegedly participating in the performance. Two weeks later, another band member, Irina Loktina, was arrested.

All three women have been charged with “hooliganism” and face up to seven years in prison. Despite the fact that two of the women are mothers of young children, they are all being held in pre-trial detention, which was recently extended from April 24 to June 24. According to the New York Times, “There is every indication that it will be extended again, with a trial unlikely to start until the fall.”

The women have written to President Medvedev and asked that he look into the legality of the decision to open a criminal case against them. Amnesty International has declared them prisoners of conscience. (There are only two other well-known prisoners of conscience in Russia—former oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky and his business partner Platon Lebedev.) Their case has led punk rockers, women and feminists in the United States to try to raise awareness and support for Pussy Riot too. Indeed, the Free Pussy Riot campaign has gone global.

But in Russia in particular, key (even conservative) newspapers, Russian women and protesters who filled the streets before the parliamentary and presidential elections have taken up their cause—signaling a real backlash against the government for its harsh response.

Muckraking blogger, lawyer and protest leader Aleksei Navalny called the arrests “senseless and horrible cruelty, which is much worse than their very stupid but small offense”—an offense which he said “obviously cannot be punished harsher than five days of arrest.” He noted a recent case of an election commissioner’s daughter who “ran over two people,” one of whom died and the other was “maimed.” The sentence was three years “in a settlement colony”—and it was suspended for fourteen years because the woman is the mother of a young child.

The case has also illuminated and exposed divisions in the Russian Orthodox Church itself—between the hierarchy and many in the rank and file. The church has been at the forefront in calling for all involved in the Pussy Riot performance to be punished for their “blasphemy.” In fact, according to the New York Times, priests said they were “ordered to circulate” a letter calling for the punk rockers “to be punished as severely as possible.” The Moscow patriarch denied it. But a senior Orthodox cleric said the performers “have declared war on Orthodox people, and there will be a war.”

Many in Russia view the actions and hyperbole the church is engaging in as a thinly veiled effort to deflect attention from its own corruption, power and immense wealth.

Indeed, when I was in Moscow in early April, a story broke that the Orthodox Church had photoshopped Patriarch Kirill I’s Breguet watch worth at least $30,000 out of a photo on its website—but neglected to remove the reflection that was still visible on the table where the patriarch was seated. The patriarch also won a $600,000 lawsuit for dust damage to an apartment he owns in an expensive building, and bloggers allege that he has a “large country house, a private yacht and a penchant for ski vacations in Switzerland.”

Many Russians feel that this kind of bad publicity was the real motivating factor behind the church’s organizing a massive demonstration in front of the cathedral last week. Crowd estimates range between 30,000 and 65,000 people—large by any measure—as the church called on supporters to help it “defend itself” against a “campaign of blasphemy,” including the Pussy Riot performance, the Times reports. The church bused in people “from over a dozen dioceses,” including “the Night Wolves, a group of nationalist motorcyclists.” It was a real show of strength—as big or bigger than any of Moscow’s pro-democracy demonstrations—and priests who opposed the gathering were denounced by Patriarch Kirill I as “traitors in cassocks.”

Boris Kagarlitsky, director of the Institute of Social Movements and Globalization and a keen observer of Russian society and politics, writes: “The Pussy Riot affair has turned into a PR disaster for the Russian Orthodox Church, adding to the scandals with the Patriarch. The women are under arrest and much of the religious Christian community is disgusted with the position of the hierarchy which is behind the persecution. The mass rally organized to pray for the church [for being] ‘attacked’ and even ‘persecuted’ by Pussy Riot made things even worse. Some priests publicly protested against the policies of the Patriarch—for the first time in many years. Now we have a growing movement to defend secularism, which wasn’t there even a month ago.”

The Pussy Riot case has revealed real fissures between the secular and more conservative elements of Russia, and within the Russian Orthodox Church itself. Medvedev didn’t quite seem to comprehend the significance—despite the fact that the issue came up in his final interview—responding that the women “got exactly what they were seeking—popularity,” and refusing further comment.

Maybe they did want popularity. Or maybe they simply wanted to do exactly what they did—make a bold political statement without physically damaging the church or harming anyone. Either way, detention and up to seven years prison for these actions seems riot-worthy. It’s time to free Pussy Riot.

With an unflinching investigative look at the Koch brothers’ money and power, Brave New Films has once again created a film full of rollicking and rigorous facts that informs and challenges corporate media with the truth. The latest in a series of tough and sharp social justice films—check out Rethink Afghanistan, WAL-MART: The High Cost of Low Price and Sick for Profit—Koch Brothers Exposed should be a wake-up call for people across the political spectrum to take action to halt the selling off of our democracy.

As radio and television host Ed Schultz says of the film, “Every person in this country who cares about democracy should care about this work.”

I was interviewed for the film—seemed a valuable project because it raises perhaps the central question of our time: are we a democracy or are we now a plutocracy? And what kind of country, what kind of society, what kind of economy do we want to live in?

Throughout American history—though there have been major challenges and pitfalls—there has been a degree of balance between government and market. But we are now living in a moment when the extremist right wants to shatter that balance and is using its resources to throw the country back to Gilded Age inequality.

No one is pursuing that course more aggressively than Charles and David Koch.

This film exposes tactics used by the Koch brothers to sway political power in their favor, while illustrating the dangers of unchecked influence concentrated in the hands of the few. This includes their efforts to suppress voter rights, re-segregate public schools, weaken EPA regulation, and privatize Social Security.

The strategy pursued by the Koch Brothers has a potent history. As Bill Moyers describes in his Nation cover story “How Wall Street Occupied America,” the late Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell’s confidential memorandum in 1971 to his friends in the US Chamber of Commerce was “a call to arms for class war waged from the top down.” It was a blueprint for what is now coming to fruition with the phenomenon of the Koch brothers, Citizens United, and a right-wing activist Supreme Court ready to roll back decades of New Deal jurisprudence.

Moyers lays out how “the Powell Memo”—in response to bipartisan support for new regulation of air quality, lead paint, pesticides and the creation of the EPA—urged corporate America to “fight back and fight back hard. Build a movement. Set speakers loose across the country. Take on prominent institutions of public opinion—especially the universities, the media and the courts. Keep television programs ‘monitored the same way textbooks should be kept under constant surveillance.’ And above all, recognize that political power must be ‘assiduously cultivated; and that when necessary, it must be used aggressively and with determination’ and ‘without embarrassment.’ ”

In his memo, Powell called for the creation of think tanks, legal foundations and front groups aligned through “careful long-range planning and … consistency of action over an indefinite period of years, in the scale of financing available only through joint effort, and in the political power available only through united action and united organizations.”

Moyers notes that corporate PACs and lobbyists subsequently multiplied, as did “other organizations united in pushing back against political equality and shared prosperity": for example, the Business Roundtable, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, the Manhattan Institute, Citizens for a Sound Economy (precursor to what we now know as Americans for Prosperity).

“They triggered an economic transformation that would in time touch every aspect of our lives,” writes Moyers.

Now the Koch Brothers have become a symbol of something that is corrosive and dangerous to fulfilling the great possibilities of this country. They are the poster boys for the 1 percent. Brave New Films has done a service in researching and calling out their actions and activities.

Most of these activities are devised to deploy the Koch’s political agenda. Sure, people have a right to fight for the political society they want to live in. But when the concentration of power and wealth is so great, and what Robert Reich in his new book calls “the Regressive Right” is so strong, we are in peril of losing our democracy.

The film exposes the impact of Koch activities on public policy. Take Social Security, which the Koch Brother are working to dismantle by funding an echo chamber of think tanks. Brave New Foundation researchers reveal a $28.4 million Koch effort that has manufactured 297 opinions and commentaries, 200 reports, 56 studies and six books distorting Social Security’s effectiveness and purpose.

“The Koch Brothers are funding think tanks spreading an enormous amount of disinformation about Social Security,” Senator Bernie Sanders says in the film.

Koch-backed groups are also pushing onerous voter ID requirements on minorities and the poor. They have funded efforts to potentially thwart 21 million Americans from voting by writing and proposing voting suppression bills in thirty-eight states.

“The Koch Brothers support laws that are the most aggressive attempt to roll back voting rights in this country that we’ve seen in over a century,” says Benjamin Jealous, president and CEO of the NAACP.

One of the film’s most wrenching sections tells the story of a low-income neighborhood near a Koch chemical plant in Crossett, Arkansas. The facility emits large quantities of formaldehyde, a known human carcinogen. The surrounding area is noticeably affected by air pollution—especially in a minority neighborhood dying of cancer.

“We have fifteen homes in this area, and maybe eleven people have died with cancer,” says one resident.

Not surprisingly, the Kochs have gone on the attack against filmmaker Robert Greenwald and Brave New Films. Greenwald responds by arguing that Americans should not fall for the Kochs’ attempt to change the subject from their own disproportionate and deleterious impact on the country.

“The smears and name-calling may not be pleasant but [it] won’t stop the film from being shared by 25 groups partnering with us and thousands of people online,” Greenwald writes.

Indeed starting May 8 the film will be available in millions of homes via streaming outlets. Stay tuned too for house parties, screenings, and actions around the country. Don’t miss this film.

“Corrupt corporate forces are trying to buy our democracy, with disastrous consequences,” says former Senator Russ Feingold. “Koch Brothers Exposed helps shed a light on how.”