Nation in the News

Hedge Fund Managers Beat the Banks

Countdown on April 8, 2010 - 11:05 AM ET

US unemployment may be hovering just under 10 percent, but some lucky hedge fund managers won't feel a thing. On Countdown with Chris Olbermann, Chris Hayes, Washington editor for The Nation, discusses the news that the top twenty-five hedge fund managers collectively made $25 billion last year. The top earner, David Tepper, pocketed $4 billion by correctly bidding on banks that the government bailed out with taxpayer money. Moreover, because this income is considered capital gains, these hedge fund managers, like Tepper, will pay fewer taxes than a group of Americans who collectively made $25 billion.

As Hayes explains, the news is an indicator of an environment of extreme inequality and underscores how far we remain from a meritocratic order where people are rewarded for their good ideas. The finance sector should be taking money from savings and channeling it into investments--another failure of Wall Street. In order to really rein in the financial sector we must do three things, says Hayes: "Financial regulation that's serious, that breaks up banks and reduces the size of the sector. We need a financial transaction tax, which will tax some of this money sloshing around in these bets and will reduce the size of the sector. And we also need general tax reform, so that we tax people that make that much money a lot at a much higher rate."

--Clarissa Leon

Moscow Seeks Security After Suicide Bombings

GRITtv on April 7, 2010 - 5:53 PM ET

Nation Editor Katrina vanden Heuvel appears on GritTV with Laura Flanders discussing the political consequences to the Moscow suicide bombings that left 39 dead.

Vanden Heuvel argues that the cycle of vengeance and anger of Russia's "9/11s" must be solved through political measures. "One needs to remember the history that president Putin came to power almost ten years ago to this date on the basis of a strong-armed brutal repression of this region in the northern Caucasus, which has been seeking independence, which Russia has been at war with two times," she says.

Clearly Putin had led Russians to believe he has suppressed and stabilized the region, which he has not. Instead, the "Black Widow" suicide bombers are reacting to the occupation of their country and the loss of their husbands and children. Regardless of the political turmoil, vanden Heuvel believes, the recent nuclear arms deal with the US will continue as planned.

--Clarissa Leon

The Cloward-Piven Strategy and The Mad Tea Party

GRITtv on April 7, 2010 - 5:47 PM ET

In 1966 Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven wrote the Nation article: "The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty." Forty-four years later, the Cloward-Piven strategy has come full circle. On Grit TV with Laura Flanders, Nation Senior Editor Richard Kim discusses the strategy, which, according to Glenn Beck and the Tea Party, is rooted in the conspiracy to destroy the economy and possibly the world.

"Glenn Beck has done 28 different programs on it," Kim says. "There are hundreds of thousands of Google hits on it, and what it suggests is that, basically, the Left has cynically manipulated the system for the past forty-four years to crash the global economy, commit massive voter fraud, elect Barack Obama so we can nationalize the banks, take over the government and install a communist, totalitarian regime."

Kim, author of the recent Nation cover piece "The Mad Tea Party", argues that the strategy has become the meta-narrative for the Tea Party. According to them, in the 1966 article, the Cloward-Piven strategy seeks to flood the system with government bureaucracy, thus creating an economic collapse. They have relied on a web of associations to bring the conspiracy more legitimacy--however illegitimate their claims against the Left may be. Now, the Right is working hard to corral the craziness and harness the conspiracy to their cause.

--Clarissa Leon

Ad Policy

Healthcare Bill Needs Reform

John Nichols on April 7, 2010 - 5:37 PM ET

Nation columnist John Nichols and National Organization for Women President Terry O'Neill discuss reform of the healthcare bill on Bill Moyers Journal. O'Neill is frustrated by the sacrifices forced upon the women's movement for the bill and wants to see leadership from Obama. Nichols is excited about the prospects for reform and says that the only mistake progressives could make is to "defend this bill as is."

Nichols briefly discusses a proposal set forth by Democratic Representative Alan Grayson from Florida, which would allow citizens to buy in to Medicare at cost. The proposal is promising, Nichols says, because Grayson's bill has eighty cosponsors and his online petition has received new signatures at the rate of one every six seconds.

"Obama is a cautious president," Nichols says. "It is time to go out and make him do the things that need to be done, and that's an on organizing task."

Separation of Jefferson and History

The Colbert Report on April 7, 2010 - 2:01 PM ET

The Texas Board of Education recently voted on new textbook standards-ultimately rewriting history through a conservative lens. References to Thomas Jefferson as an Enlightenment thinker will be removed and replaced lessons about with John Calvin. On McCarthyism, textbooks will be required to include that suspicions of Communist infiltration were later confirmed and, as Stephen Colbert reports, "any passage describing Joe McCarthy's sweaty jowls be changed to glistening neck pouch."

Though the changes are only implemented in Texas, they impact the entire country because publishers cater their content to Texas standards, as the state represents one of the largest markets for textbooks. As Colbert says, "This battle is not just about Texas, it decides which historical figures all of our children will be drawing mustaches and eye patches on."

Colombia history professor and Nation editorial board member Eric Foner joins Colbert to "answer for his liberal crimes" of writing a popular textbook, without a conservative view, currently being used in Texas. (Foner's "Twisting History in Texas" took the Texas Board of Education to task for in the pages of last week's Nation.) Foner explains why the board's decision is so harmful, "they eliminate people from the past who they don't agree with...[and] the [board] is trying to eliminate any discussion of [historical] injustices which gives students a completely misleading picture of what American history has been."

Foner describes a person or a society without historical knowledge as a person without a memory. Colbert counters with the old adage, those who fail to learn history are doomed to repeat it. "But if you change what history was, doesn't that solve that problem?" Colbert asks.

--Morgan Ashenfelter

Can Obama Talk About Race?

GRITtv on April 7, 2010 - 1:08 PM ET

Co-director of The Advancement Project Judith Browne-Dianis and Nation columnist Melissa Harris-Lacewell join Laura Flanders to talk about whether Obama has done enough to address race. They begin with criticizing the jobs bill passed in March for not incentivizing companies to hire African Americans. Harris-Lacewell compares the importance of addressing minority job concerns to the effects of FDR's programs after the Great Depression.

"Once these incentives were sent to the states and particularly what were the post-confederate states...you could look and see very clearly that states were making racialized choices and urban versus rural choices about how they were spending that money," Harris-Lacewell explains. "Because there were not specific safeguards around race...states made deeply racially biased choices."

Both Browne-Dianis and Harris-Lacewell agree that Obama is not doing enough to tackle issues of race, but there is little room for him to do so because of the backlash that addressing race would create. To combat this Harris-Lacewell suggests that Obama should have employed Vice President Joe Biden as "the race guy."

Offshore Drilling--In Exchange for What?

The Rachel Maddow Show on April 7, 2010 - 11:09 AM ET

After Obama's recent endorsement of offshore drilling, plenty of Republicans have challenged the very policy they strongly supported in the presidential election. Last night on her show, Rachel Maddow notes that though some Republican senators, including Lindsey Graham and John McCain, have come out with "mildly supportive" statements in favor of this "very Republican idea," she can't help but ask what the Democrats are getting out of their support for offshore drilling. Maddow puts the question to The Nation's Washington editor Christopher Hayes.

Hayes agrees with Maddow's opinion that after healthcare, there is no reason to start out making concessions to win Republican support, but Hayes offers three reasons why Obama may be trying.

The first is that Obama is a true believer in negotiating, that "he's going to try to will that to be the case...expecting that somehow the magical negotiating fairy will show up and prompt the Republicans to similarly act in good faith," Hayes explains. The second is just poor politics. The third is that eventually the American people will realize that Obama is trying to be a fair and honest politician. "Politically, the idea is [that] you're constantly extending an olive branch and you're constantly getting slapped in the face and eventually you do that enough the American people will realize who's the one operating in good faith," Hayes explains. The problem with this strategy, Hayes says, is that it produces bad legislation and shifts the debate toward the center. "So all of a sudden...things that were kind of settled, centrist ideas, like we shouldn't torture or we should close Guantánamo...in trying to move towards them you've shifted the parameters of the conversation over."