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A Golden Dawn demonstration in Athens on June 27, 2012. (Flickr/Steve Jurvetson)

—Aaron Cantú focuses on the War on Drugs and mass incarceration, social inequality and post-capitalist institutional design.
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“Household Incomes Remain Flat Despite Improving Economy,” by Annie Lowrey. The New York Times, September 18, 2013.

In what is becoming the most common economic report of the last few years, new data released this week by the Census Bureau shows that income inequality in America remains at a record high: median household income in 2012 was about equivalent to what it was thirty years ago, while the top 1 percent took home their biggest share of income since 1919. As bad as things are now, the pain could be compounded even more in the near future by rising food and raw material prices.

—Owen Davis focuses on public education, media and the effects of social inequality.
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“The First Day of School in Philadelphia,” by Andrew Elrod. n+1, September 16, 2013.

Elrod provides a granular account of Philadelphia’s public school travails, as grassroots organizers and students resist a budget that shuttered twenty-three schools and sheared the district of 3,783 employees. Though the full history of Philly’s school woes is one of protracted dismemberment, Elrod’s street-level reporting shows a quietly smoldering rage massing against the incompetence and neglect of state officials.

—Omar Ghabra focuses on Syria and Middle Eastern politics.

Not Anymore: A Story of Revolution, directed by Matthew VanDyke.

This documentary, which was named the “Best Short Documentary” at the Harlem International Film Festival last week, offers a stunning portrait of a Syrian English teacher who became a photographer to document the destruction after the war began. With Syria finally making its way to the top of the United States’s political agenda over the past few weeks, it’s worth taking the time to hear from Syrian voices on the ground. This intimate profile provides a great opportunity.

—Hannah Gold focuses on gender politics, pop culture and art.
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“The English Goddess Who Went Away,” by Chinki Sinha. Open, September 14, 2013.

Take a moment to shift your focus from standardized tests and cutting youth programs in the classroom…to colonialism and false idols in the classroom! A couple years back, Indian writer Chandra Bhan Prasad invented the Goddess of English in order to get Dalit (formerly “untouchable”) children to focus on their lessons in English, a skill whose mastery brings with it the increased possibility of social mobility. The goddess resembles a dowdy Statue of Liberty with her billowing robes, floppy, wide-brimmed hat and extended left arm proudly brandishing a pen. This extended essay looks at a particular school in Banka, a village in Uttar Pradesh, where an attempt to build a temple for the goddess’s statue has gone under-financed and unfinished.

—Allegra Kirkland focuses on immigration, urban issues and US-Latin American relations.
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“City Leaders Are in Love With Density but Most City Dwellers Disagree,” by Joel Kotkin. New Geography, September 16, 2013.

Jane Jacobs wrote that “there is no logic that can be superimposed on the city; people make it, and it is to them, not buildings, that we must fit our plans.” Yet according to Joel Kotkin, the desire of New Yorkers, Londoners and Porteños to live in human-scale neighborhoods is increasingly being discounted by politicians and developers insistent on the economic logic of hyper-dense, high rise–dotted urban centers. In this searing critique, Kotkin highlights the consequences of unbridled densification: destruction of historic buildings, displacement of lower-income residents, increased pressure on public services and transportation, worsening congestion and, ultimately, the homogenization of the world’s best-loved cities.

—Abbie Nehring focuses on muck reads, transparency, and investigative reporting.

“In New York, Having a Job, or 2, Doesn’t Mean Having a Home,” by Mireya Navarro. The New York Times, September 18, 2013.

In New York City, the gap between wages and rent has reached historic levels. Mireya Navarro illustrates this trend through a portrait of the city’s employed and homeless, a segment of New York growing in size, yet often hidden in plain sight because many hide the truth about their circumstances from coworkers and employers. “The employed homeless are constantly juggling the demands of their two worlds,” Navarro writes. Her reporting shows just how difficult it is to find a way out of the city’s shelter system once entrapped in poverty, homelessness and New York’s unforgiving real estate landscape.

—Nicolas Niarchos focuses on international and European relations and national security.
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“For Pavlos: the antifa rapper killed by Golden Dawn,” by Leonidas Oikonomakis. ROAR, September 18, 2013.

Last year saw the rise of ultra-right fascism in Greece in the form of the Golden Dawn (Χρυσή Αυγή) party as the country was forced through ever worse austerity measures. Now one of the party’s members has admitted to stabbing and killing a prominent left-winger, Pavlos Fyssas, after a soccer game Tuesday night. Oikonomakis provides a moving tribute to his friend, who loved his soccer team and rapping as “Killah P.” At the end of the tribute, he provides important context on the party, the political situation out of which it arose and the lack of action, so far, on the part of the government against Golden Dawn’s violence.

—Andrés Pertierra focuses on Latin America with an emphasis on Cuba.

“Cubans Protest For Return Of Agents Jailed In The US With Yellow Ribbons,” by Andrea Rodriguez. Associated Press via The Huffington Post, September 12, 2013.

September 12 saw a popular response to a Yellow Ribbon campaign, organized to draw the attention of the US public to the case of five Cuban intelligence agents imprisoned in Miami. The Cuban government has insisted that the five had been gathering information only on violent or dangerous exile groups in Miami and has itself detained a US government contractor, Alan Gross, it accuses of espionage.

—Dylan Tokar focuses on Latin America, politics and literature.
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“No One Reads Kafka in Gitmo,” by Molly Crabapple. Medium, September 18, 2013.

While much remains hidden to the journalist wishing to tour the US military prison at Guantánamo Bay, visual artist Molly Crabapple finds a way in to the life of prisoners, staff and locals through everyday details. “It don’t GITMO better than this,” reads a T-shirt at the local souvenir shop.

—Elaine Yu focuses on feminism, health, and East and Southeast Asia.

“Who is a ‘journalist’? People who can afford to be,” by Sarah Kendzior. Al Jazeera, September 17, 2013.

Sarah Kendzior uses the recent passage of the bill protecting reporters from having to reveal their sources (which required the Senate to define a “journalist”) to segue into topics she has been writing about: labor, privilege and the “prestige economy” that exploitatively conflates full-time and part-time work, especially in the changing fields of higher education and journalism. Her reflections on whether it is the profession or practice of journalism that society is seeking to protect today are acute.

Paul Ryan promotes his budget plan in 2011. (AP/J. Scott Applewhite)

Was there a presidential election in 2012? Yes.

Who won? Barack Obama.

Who was elected vice president? Joe Biden.

Who lost for president? Mitt Romney.

Who lost for vice president? Paul Ryan.

Cool, just wanted to get that straight.

The latest scheme from House Republicans might have confused folks.

House Speaker John Boehner, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor and House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan are not quite done threatening a government shutdown as part of the “Defund Obamacare” debacle. But they are already on to their next project: holding hostage any agreement to allow the debt-ceiling to rise.

Traditionally, increases in the debt ceiling to pay for spending that has already been agreed to have been approved with little debate and less opposition. This is how the “full faith and credit of the United States” is maintained, and that’s not the sort of thing that serious political leaders on either side of the partisan divide want to turn into a political football.

But no one accuses Boehner and Cantor of being serious about anything but political games. So, in advance of the mid-October date when an adjustment will be required, they are advancing a new plan—already vetted by the lobbyists on K Street—that would exchange a one-year lifting of the debt ceiling for:

• a one-year delay of Obamacare

• means testing of Medicare and other so-called “entitlement reforms”

• sweeping tax reforms

• pro-corporate tort reforms, including limits on medical malpractice lawsuits

• approval of the Keystone XL oil pipeline

• approval of offshore drilling

• the undermining of regulations on business

• moves that that likely to weaken the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau

• elimination of net neutrality protections for a free and open Internet

“The bill the Republicans propose to put on the floor this week is nothing but a wish list of unrelated and partisan policies they know won’t go anywhere. As a result they are taking their country’s credit hostage to their own small agenda,” House Democratic whip Steny Hoyer, D-Maryland, explained Wednesday.

What’s notable is that this is not a fresh wish list.

It is, essentially, the program Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan ran on in 2012. Romney’s been sidelined—and even blamed by Heritage Foundation head Jim DeMint for failing (because of the Romneycare precedent) to “litigate the Obamacare issue.” But Ryan, the Republican Party’s “idea guy,” remains in the thick of things, and his fingerprints are all over the Republican debt-ceiling demands—just as they were all over the Republican Party’s 2012 platform.

New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait mocks the House Republicans with the astute observation that they are advancing “Romney’s agenda on taxes, regulation of the environment, finance and other business, Medicare, tort reform. That’s their opening demand: implement Romney’s economic plan or melt down the economy.”

The key thing to understand, however, is that the House Republicans did not have to open the Romney playbook for a refresher. They simply turned to Romney’s running mate, who remains a definitional player in their caucus.

That brings us to next question: What is Paul Ryan’s mandate?

After the 2012 election, Ryan chirped: “We made this campaign about big ideas and big issues, which is the kind of campaign we wanted to run, so we ran the kind of campaign we wanted to run.”

True. Ryan’s ideas were front-and-center in 2012.

President Obama acknowledged as much.

“Because our budget reflects our values, it’s a reflection of our priorities,” the president declared on election-eve. “And as long as I’m president, I’m not going to kick some poor kids off of Head Start to give me a tax cut.”

“If we’re serious about the deficit, we can’t just cut our way to prosperity,” Obama explained. “We’ve also got to ask the wealthiest Americans to go back to the tax rates they paid when Bill Clinton was in office.”

Given a clear choice, the voters sent a clear signal.

Ryan and Romney lost the popular vote by 5 million votes.

Ryan and Romney lost the Electoral College by an overwhelming 232-206 margin.

Ryan and Romney lost every swing state except North Carolina.

Despite what Paul Ryan might now choose to imagine, his side lost the battle of budget proposals.

Obama got the mandate—a bigger percentage of the popular vote, in fact, than Presidents Kennedy in 1960, Nixon in 1968, Carter in 1976, Reagan in 1980, Clinton in 1992 and 1996 and Bush in 2000 and 2004.

To say otherwise is to deny the results of the 2012 election.

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Paul Ryan can try if he wants.

But he should remember what happened when he peddled a fantasy about the closing of that Janesville General Motors plant.

After Ryan tried to blame President Obama for a closure was put in play during the Bush presidency, and that resulted from trade and economic policies that Ryan supported, his neighbors in Janesville pushed back.

Ryan lost Janesville, as a vice presidential candidate and a candidate for reelection to his congressional seat.

Ryan lost surrounding Rock County, as a vice presidential and a congressional candidate.

Ryan and Romney lost Wisconsin—by such a resounding margin that NBC’s Saturday Night Live made light of the home-state rejection on the weekend after the election.

But it wasn’t just Wisconsin, and it wasn’t just the top of the ticket.

Democrats were expected to lose seats in the US Senate. Instead, they added two seats and won the popular vote for contested seats nationally by more than 10 million votes—ending up on the winning side of a 54-42 split.

Democrats also won the popular vote for US House seats by 1.7 million votes. In other words, gerrymandering and electoral processes that do not always produce a clear reflection of popular sentiment kept Ryan, Cantor and Boehner in positions of leadership.

Now, they seek to use those positions to make debt-ceiling threats, with the purpose of implementing an agenda that was rejected by the American people. Which brings us to the final question: What was the point of the 2012 election if the will of the people can be thwarted by the politicians whose “big ideas” failed at the polls?

John Nichols slams Ted Cruz’s “fake-bustering” to defund Obamacare.

Demonstrators rallied at the Boston courthouse in protest of the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision. (AP Photo/Steven Senne)

Writing Contest Finalist

We’re delighted to announce the winners of The Nation’s eighth annual Student Writing Contest. This year we asked students to answer this question in 800 words: It’s clear that the political system in the US isn’t working for many. If you had to pick one root cause underlying our broken politics, what would it be and why? We received close to 700 submissions from high school and college students in forty-two states. We chose one college and one high school winner and ten finalists total. The winners are Jim Nichols (no relation to The Nation’s John Nichols), an undergraduate at Georgia State University; and Julia Di, a senior at Richard Montgomery High School in Darnestown, Maryland, and Bryn Grunwald, a recent graduate of the Peak to Peak Charter in Boulder, Colorado, who were co-winners in the high school category. The three winners receive cash awards of $1,000 and the finalists $200 each. All receive Nation subscriptions. Read all the winning essays here.   —The Editor

For decades, corporations have wreaked havoc on our democracy from impoverishing the working class, profiting off military conflicts, poisoning the environment and food supply and taking over public schools. Perhaps, their most destructive target is America’s broken political system. Corporations have played a role in elections since the early part of the twentieth century. It was during the presidency of Ronald Reagan that we saw an increase in their hegemony in politics. But it wasn’t until the 2010 Supreme Court Citizens United ruling, which gave corporations the same free speech rights as individuals, that the corporate sector comprehensively put its stamp of influence on America’s elections.

Shortly after the decision, Super PACs were created and a tsunami of money poured into subsequent election cycles. While donors can’t contribute directly to candidates, they are permitted to bankroll unlimited sums of cash to these federally registered political action committees, which can then endorse specific candidates. By law, no one can force Super PACs to disclose the names of donors, thus creating a trail of dark money. It’s a win-win for the rich who can write million-dollar fat checks without any public scrutiny.

Harvard Law School professor Lawrence Lessig found that just 196 Americans gave more than 80 percent of the individual Super PAC money in the 2012 presidential election. In the entire 2012 election, “ten times what was spent a generation ago, even allowing for inflation,” a cringe-worthy $10 billion was burned through, according to Nation writer John Nichols’s new book, Dollarocracy.

With the need to raise more money to win elections, members of Congress spend nearly all their waking hours on the phone cajoling potential donors. Subsequently, there is a ballooning lobbying industry. In 2009, lobbyists spent $3.5 billion, or roughly $6.5 million per each elected member in Congress. There is also a revolving door between K Street and Capitol Hill. In the past decade, a study found that almost 5,400 former congressional staffers later became federal lobbyists.

Contrary to prevailing sentiment, most of the practices lobbyists are engaging in aren’t illegal. Almost no one is forking over money in return for votes, but rather they take an indirect approach through what Lessig calls the “gift economy.” In his book Republic, Lost, he defines the gift economy as “grounded upon relationships, not quid pro quo.” Lobbyists do a series of favors—fundraising dinners and galas—and slowly build an intimate relationship with the politician. Eventually, they make the person “lose his sense of mission to the public and comes to feel that his first loyalties are to his private benefactors and patrons,” as the late Senator Paul Douglas aptly explained. The politician is successfully in the pocket of the lobbyist.

Corporations will attempt to preserve the status quo at any cost. If they are somehow unable to persuade politicians in voting for a piece of legislation they don’t like, they spend inordinate amounts of money to try to have the bill watered down to the point of ineffectuality or push litigation to stonewall the implementation.

We need a constitutional amendment to overturn the Citizens United ruling. That would require, first, a two-thirds majority vote in both the House and Senate and, second, three-fourths of state legislatures. As of June 2013, fifteen states have already passed state resolutions and ballot initiatives calling on Congress to begin the process. We could also take a leaf out of President Theodore Roosevelt’s playbook. In an annual message to Congress in 1905, he stated, “All contributions by corporations to any political committee or for any political purpose should be forbidden by law; directors should not be permitted to use stockholders’ money for such purposes.” Congress, in response, passed the Tillman Act of 1907, banning political contributions by corporations.

Our country has been hijacked by corporations and sugar daddies—“old, white, rich men,” as New York magazine’s Frank Rich puts it. We no longer live in a democracy but instead a plutocracy. Affecting both the left and the right, big money crowds out the voices of the oppressed, the poor, and minorities. Elections are being sold to the highest bidder. We are living in a time that resembles the epochs of nineteenth-century robber baron politics and the presidency of Richard Nixon than ever before. In Nixon’s time, it was illegal to solicit secret campaign donations from corporations, and the resignation of the presidency was the price he paid.

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It is up to the American people to insist that corporations are not people, money is not speech and elections are not up for sale. Without extraordinary changes to the campaign finance system, politics will remain broken, lobbyists will continue to run amok on Capitol Hill, and we will be indentured by a government of the corporations, by the corporations and for the corporations.

A supporter of the North Carolina NAACP holds stickers protesting the passage of new voter identification legislation. (AP Photo/Gerry Broome)

When the Supreme Court decided the case of Shelby County v. Holder last November, severely limiting the sweep of the Voting Rights Act in Southern states with a history of racial discrimination, here’s what you heard from all the reasonable folks: soon, very soon, Congress would draft legislation restoring said sweep, in ways that honored the new guidelines written into the new Supreme Court decision. They would surely do so in rare bipartisan fashion. After all, the last time the VRA was renewed was for a twenty-five-year extension signed by President Bush in 2006, passed in the House by a vote of 390-33, with the Senate passing the House bill unanimously and without amendment. The “Fannie Lou Hamer, Rosa Parks, and Coretta Scott King Voting Rights Act Reauthorization and Amendments Act of 2006” had been introduced by James Sensenbrenner, one of the most conservative of House veterans. Which means Republicans, and conservatives, must like the Voting Rights Act—Remember that whole “nothing to fear” rap?

Well, that redrafting hasn’t happened yet. Instead, it’s been what Josh Marshall has called “Open Season On Non-White Voting.” Said the AP, “Across the South, Republicans are working to take advantage of a new political landscape after a divided U.S. Supreme Court freed all or part of 15 states, many of them in the old Confederacy, from having to ask Washington’s permission before changing election procedures in jurisdictions with histories of discrimination.” Polling restrictions began passing Republican-controlled legislatures with breakneck speed, like mighty waters once held back by now-crumbling dams. Texas, Mississippi, and South Carolina passed strict voter ID laws. North Carolina passed not just a voter ID law but redrew its political maps and reduced early voting. Georgia redrew its county commission districts to dilute minority power.

But what about that 98-0 Senate tally, and Fannie Lou Hamer and Rosa Parks and Coretta Scott King and moonbeams and unicorns and sunshine in 2006? Were conservatives crossing their fingers when they cast that vote?

Look. Conservatives are time-biders. And they understand, as Corey Robin explains in his indispensable book The Reactionary Mind, that the direction of human history is not on their side—that is why they are reactionaries—because, other things equal, civilization does tend towards more inclusion, more emancipation, more liberalism. They could not survive as a political tendency unless they clothed reaction in liberal raiment. You’ve seen that happen over and over again—like when people like Grover Norquist, whose aim is to roll back the entire welfare state, including Social Security, says what he’s really trying to do is save Social Security.

But they also can be quite plain about what they ultimately want and how to get there, in documents meant to be read by other conservatives—documents shot through with language about biding time, preparing the ground, going to the mattresses: of tactical patience in the service of strategic ends. “Hell,” as National Review publisher William Rusher put it in 1960, “the catacombs were good enough for the Christians.”

Consider, for example, the 1983 paper from Cato Journal “Achieving a Leninist Strategy.” The subject was Social Security, and it proposed “what one might crudely call guerrilla warfare against both the current Social Security system and the coalition that supports it,” to “cast doubt on the picture of reality” promoted by that coalition. (These cats adore imagery of guerrilla warfare, a concept that precisely privileges patience, sedulousness, stealth, misdirection.)

When conservatives talk to one another, pay attention: they say what they want to do, and mean it. And will do just about anything to get there—even, or especially, claiming that they don’t want to do the thing they want to do, until the time is ripe, and they can do it. (See also: here). I’ll never forget the time I was on the radio with Grover Norquist, and pointed out that he hated Social Security and wanted to get rid of it. He shrieked like a stuck pig that he loved Social Security and that he had never wanted and would never want to get rid of it. He freaked out even further when I pointed out that he admired Lenin as one of history’s great time-biders—he kept a portrait of the Soviet strategist on his wall; and don’t forget that he liked Stalin too, precisely because he was a sedulous burrower from within: Stalin “was running the personnel department while Trotsky was fighting the White Army. When push came to shove for control of the Soviet Union, Stalin won. Trotsky got a pick a through his skull, while Stalin became head of the Soviet Union. He understood that personnel is policy.”

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Now, on voting rights, the personnel are in place. The time has been bided. The Fannie Lou Hamer, Rosa Parks and Coretta Scott King masks fall away off, and reveal Theodore Bilbo, Lester Maddox and Leander Perez underneath. The catacombs were good enough for them.

In part one of this series, Perlstein discusses the static position of conservatives on gun control legislation.