Katrina vanden Heuvel | The Nation

At midnight last night $85 billion in federal budget funds were sequestered by the Treasury Department.

This week at The Nation, we looked at the human costs of the austerity measures about to be imposed on our country. Instead of obsessing over a manufactured deficit crisis, I argued, we should be focusing on putting financially battered Americans back to work. It’s time to stop extortionists like Wall Street billionaire Pete Peterson and the Fix the Debt campaign from holding our country’s economic future hostage.

To that end, Washington correspondent John Nichols assesses the terrifying contributions of “money power” like Peterson’s to framing, if not fully instigating, the austerity agenda. In our broken political world, where debates are being shaped by corporations, he asks whether President Obama is willing to stand up to big money in government. On Democracy Now!, he discusses the impending crisis in further detail and the billionaire austerity mongers driving it, “advocating for zombie ideas—ideas that have been slain by the voters, and frankly even by Congress, and yet they walk among us.”

As George Zornick reports, at least 35,000 attended the rally in Washington, DC, on the National Mall last Sunday for the Forward on Climate march, a project of 350.org, the Sierra Club and the Hip Hop Caucus. “This is the last minute in the last quarter of the biggest, most important game humanity has ever played,” Van Jones told the crowd gathered in opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline. “President Obama, all the good that you have done, all the good you can imagine doing, will be wiped out by floods, by fires, by superstorms if you fail to act now to deal with this crisis.”

Prior to the rally Bill McKibben—author, longtime activist and president of 350.org—told reporters that building a movement gives the president the support he needs to say no to the pipeline. And the movement showed up, making the rally the largest of its kind in US history—and the message of activists was clear. “Their audience was really just one man, the only one with the power to stop the project: Barack Obama,” writes Zornick.

“Humanity is staring down the barrel of a calamity beyond measure, and the president is one of the few people on earth who on his own authority can do something about it,” we write in this week’s issue of The Nation. While President Obama mentioned climate change in his State of the Union address, he hasn’t committed to any of the big steps needed to avert catastrophe. The Keystone XL, a 1,700-mile pipeline that would transport tar sands oil from Canada across the United States to the Gulf Coast, which the president failed to mention in his address, is the most urgent and obvious example of an executive action he could take.

New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman co-chairs the Residential Mortgage Backed Securities working group. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster.)

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.

Editor’s Note: Katrina vanden Heuvel answered five questions for ABC News’s The Note, reposted here. You can read the original interview here.

1) What was your reaction to seeing Sen. Marco Rubio grab a bottle of water as he was giving the Republican response to the State of the Union? He must have known how that would appear, no?

What I saw on Tuesday night was yet another Republican “savior” who is not ready for prime time. Doing TV isn’t easy—in some ways you have to feel for him over the water bottle. But really he’s lucky, because what we all should have been talking about was Rubio’s vote Tuesday to oppose the Violence Against Women Act. The idea, in 2013, that anyone could vote against the Violence Against Women Act and still be considered a serious national political figure is ridiculous and should be the headline. Instead we’re talking about water bottles.