Though we love The Nation—exemplified by the myriad of links we post to their site—when it comes to progressive politics in the United States, their coverage is limited to Democrats, what progressive Democrats are doing, should be doing, etc. etc.

Though we aren’t surprised that when it finally covered a Green Party candidate (in this case for South Carolina’s senatorial race) it’s because the Democratic primary winner Alvin Greene is such a party embarrassment and the GOP candidate Jim DeMint is a raging right-wing whack job, and not because Green candidate for U.S. senator Tom Clements is simply the best progressive option in the race.

But ultimately, the coverage is helpful to remind progressive South Carolinian voters that come November, one does not have to choose Scylla or Charybdis. Disappointed Democrats should not just stay home and hand over a senate seat to the Republicans and their runaway train of obstructionism. Instead some Dems see the Green option is what’s best for South Carolina. John Nichols reports: 

Several local [Democratic] party groups have invited Clements to address their events, with the Lower Richland Democrats in Columbia observing, “Many of us Democrats are dismayed at the outcome of our primary for the US Senate. But for those of us who are passionate about providing economic opportunity for working families, saving our democracy from corporate control and saving our planet from irresponsible polluters, we have a viable alternative: Tom Clements.” The Greater Columbia Central Labor Council of the South Carolina AFL-CIO has formally endorsed Clements as the candidate who “will best represent the interests of the working people of South Carolina.”

And why is that? Nichols explains:

Clements is a native Southerner who worked for thirteen years with Greenpeace International and directed the Nuclear Control Institute before taking over in 2008 as southeastern coordinator for Friends of the Earth. He was a campaign manager to former Georgia Congressman Doug Bernard, an experienced player on the international stage since his days as a leading antiproliferation campaigner and an able spokesman on issues ranging from environmental racism to global warming to the green economy. Clements is economically populist, socially progressive and antiwar. And he knows the race should be about DeMint, not the foibles of his Democratic challenger.

Clements is not the only better progressive alternative in elections in November. John L. Gray, is the Green U.S. Senate candidate squaring off against the deplorable Blue Dog Dem Blanche Lincoln and worse, GOPer John Boozman. Illinois’ LeAlan Jones is a far more issues-focused candidate of U.S. Senator than the two big party candidates (Republican Mark Kirk and Democrat Alexi Giannoulias) who have waged a bitter,  mudslinging war against each other.

+ more on Green Party alternatives to US Senate races in 2010 here

(Above, Green Party candidate for U.S. Senate of South Carolina Tom Clements)

In what is possible the most imbecilic piece of commentary outside of a teabagger, The Washington Post’s Kathleen Parker tries to praise our country’s achievements in female equality while reifying the sexist tropes that cage gender categories vis-à-vis “cultural expectations” of “feminine” vs. “masculine” behavior that Obama fails/succeeds in performing. She first makes an example of Hilary Clinton for what has been thought of as her being “too masculine”, and then to Bill:

When Morrison wrote in the New Yorker about Bill Clinton’s “blackness,” she cited the characteristics he shared with the African American community:

“Clinton displays almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald’s-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas.”

If we accept that premise, even if unseriously proffered, then we could say that Obama displays many tropes of femaleness. I say this in the nicest possible way. I don’t think that doing things a woman’s way is evidence of deficiency but, rather, suggests an evolutionary achievement.

Nevertheless, we still do have certain cultural expectations, especially related to leadership. When we ask questions about a politician’s beliefs, family or hobbies, we’re looking for familiarity, what we can cite as “normal” and therefore reassuring.

Parker suggests that we should uphold traditional, “normal,” oppressive ideas of gender for our politicians so they can more effectively lead the nation. Then citing an analysis by the Global Language Monitor of Obama’s BP address and the “13% passive-voice construction” of it, she interprets this to mean he is passive and therefore feminine.

We already dedicated too much space for Parker’s drivel but it is interesting to read her piece (here) along side Eric Alterman’s “‘Cutthroat Crybabies’” column in The Nation (here) where he deconstructs the media and public’s expectation of “emotion” or “outrage” from the President as a result of the BP oil disaster.

Katha Pollitt, in the current (June 28, 2010) issue of The Nation, begins her column recounting how World War II was “the last time Americans accepted the challenge of sacrifice in pursuit of common goals.” War had necessitated rationing, conservation, war bond purchasing, and other efforts that showed an awareness for a bigger, collective “good.” Since then, and now, after (during?) The Great Recession, while millions are still unemployed or under-employed, while the budget hawks in the government nickels and dimes itself out of effective reform that could revitalize our economy and our nation, while consumers self-righteously fume at BP’s environmental destruction, but fail to acknowledge their own fuel thirst that has created the demand for off-shore oil drilling, have Americans become so accustomed to wanting more while contributing less that when a new “national sacrifice” is in order, it is not only seems to be a politically disastrous position, but the existing inequities of our society get replayed and reinforced? 

We must start by looking honestly in the mirror, revisit the ideas of fairness and equality, and refocus on that collective good, as Pollitt fantastically does here:

I would gladly pay higher taxes to prevent layoffs of teachers, cops and firemen; to improve our schools and universities; keep libraries open; expand public transportation; and put unemployed people to work repairing our tattered infrastructure, building public housing, maintaining our parks, staffing childcare centers. And what about that green technology Obama used to talk about—wind power, solar power, high-speed trains? There is no shortage of important work that needs to be done, and the costs of not doing it are very high. Unfortunately, the same leaders who fear asking us to sacrifice by paying higher taxes have no qualms about spending the money we already give them—and borrowing more—to pay for wars, war toys and prisons, while organizing the tax structure around the greed of corporations and the richest sliver of the population. The lavishing of treasure to pay for our militarized, increasingly unequal society is the sacrifice most of us are already making. Is it any wonder that people respond to calls for sacrifice with defensiveness and cynicism?

Adding to the difficulty of selling the public on sacrifice is that the salesman is usually a very rich and successful person who will barely feel the pinch of the policies he proposes. “Americans have become masters of ‘sacrifice avoidance,’ ” intones Eliot Spitzer in his Slate column. This immensely wealthy man, who spent more than $100,000 on prostitutes and thereby cost New York its best shot in a generation at a functioning state government, tells me to read the Gettysburg Address and be inspired to “a greater sense of national purpose”?

Multimillionaires who argue for raising taxes should start by proposing taxes on themselves that would actually lower their standard of living. Until then, they’re not really sharing the sacrifice they want to impose on the rest of us.

Is it a wonder that so many think Americans are the greediest people on earth?

In what is the best review of science books we have ever read that also does double duty as a drubbing of detractors of evolutionary biology (creationists, intelligent design proponents, etc.), University of Chicago professor of ecology and evolution Jerry A. Coyne, highlights Richard Dawkins’ defense of Darwin’s natural selection in Dawkins’ The Greatest Show on Earth and then uses his own tremendous knowledge to deconstruct Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Paomarini’s What Darwin Got Wrong, which attempts to nullify over a century and a half of evolutionary science since the publication of On the Origin of Species.

Coyne compellingly tells us why The Greatest Show on Earth is a must-read:

Dawkins has two goals here. The first is to change the minds of those who doubt or deny evolution by presenting them with more than 400 pages of scientific evidence. But changing minds is a big job, at least in the United States: in a 2006 Time magazine poll, 64 percent of Americans declared that if science disproved one of their religious beliefs, they’d reject the science in favor of their faith. (The British aren’t quite so defiant: one week after its publication, The Greatest Show on Earth debuted at No. 1 on the Sunday Times bestseller list.) More realistically, Dawkins hopes to bolster those who already accept evolution but “find themselves inadequately prepared to argue the case.” And here he succeeds brilliantly.

Having the intellectual arsenal to counter any creationists’ blathering is—to us anyway—worth the $30 for the book.

Coyne generously and very much amusingly scrutinizes Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini’s What Darwin Got Wrong as it becomes all too clear they have not done the necessary homework on evolutionary biology if they are to try to call into question all of the science behind it. He writes:

F&P [Fodor & Piatelli-Palmarini] claim, for example, that selection could never produce winged pigs because of developmental constraints: “Pigs don’t have wings because there is no place on pigs to put them. There are all sorts of ways you’d have to change a pig if you wanted to add wings. You’d have to do something to its weight, and its shape, and its musculature, and its nervous system, and its bones; to say nothing of retrofitting feathers.”

Haven’t F&P heard of bats? Bats evolved from small four-legged mammals, probably resembling shrews. You could say the same thing about shrewlike beasts that F&P did about pigs: how could they possibly evolve wings? And yet they did: selection simply retooled the forelegs into wings, along with modifying the animal’s weight, shape, musculature, nervous system and bones for flying (no feathers needed).

And when F & P try to philosophically refute natural selection because “a theory that doesn’t determine the truth values of relevant counterfactuals [conditional statements about what hasn’t happened but could if certain conditions are met] cannot explain the distribution of traits in the actual world,” Coyne replies:

But wait a minute. If you translate that last sentence into layman’s English, here’s what it says: “Since it’s impossible to figure out exactly which changes in organisms occur via direct selection and which are byproducts, natural selection can’t operate.” Clearly, F&P are confusing our ability to understand how a process operates with whether it operates. It’s like saying that because we don’t understand how gravity works, things don’t fall.

It’s all very possible that the humor and silliness in his review stems from the fact that we are total nerds, but no matter, Coyne convinces us of the necessity to read The Greatest Show on Earth, which could mean, with your help, illuminating another one of those damn creationists.

[Above: Charles Darwin]

James K. Galbraith, author of The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too and senior scholar at the Levy Economics Institute, writes a persuasive treatise on how our government actually spends money and why budget hawks need to STFU a little bit.

We also hear, from the same people, about the impending “bankruptcy” of Social Security, Medicare—even the United States itself. Or of the burden that public debts will “impose on our grandchildren.” Or about “unfunded liabilities” supposedly facing us all. All of this forms part of one of the great misinformation campaigns of all time.

The misinformation is rooted in what many consider to be plain common sense. It may seem like homely wisdom, especially, to say that “just like the family, the government can’t live beyond its means.” But it’s not. In these matters the public and private sectors differ on a very basic point. Your family needs income in order to pay its debts. Your government does not.

[…]

With government, the risk of nonpayment does not exist. Government spends money (and pays interest) simply by typing numbers into a computer. Unlike private debtors, government does not need to have cash on hand. As the inspired amateur economist Warren Mosler likes to say, the person who writes Social Security checks at the Treasury does not have the phone number of the tax collector at the IRS. If you choose to pay taxes in cash, the government will give you a receipt—and shred the bills. Since it is the source of money, government can’t run out.

Galbraith cast sunlight on the notion of “public debt,” historicizing the history of deficits and exposing it for what it really is—political rhetoric.

…no government can ever be forced to default on debts in a currency it controls. Public defaults happen only when governments don’t control the currency in which they owe debts—as Argentina owed dollars or as Greece now (it hasn’t defaulted yet) owes euros. But for true sovereigns, bankruptcy is an irrelevant concept. When Obama says, even offhand, that the United States is “out of money,” he’s talking nonsense—dangerous nonsense. One wonders if he believes it.

Nor is public debt a burden on future generations. It does not have to be repaid, and in practice it will never be repaid. Personal debts are generally settled during the lifetime of the debtor or at death, because one person cannot easily encumber another. But public debt does not ever have to be repaid. Governments do not die—except in war or revolution, and when that happens, their debts are generally moot anyway.

So the public debt simply increases from one year to the next. In the entire history of the United States it has done so, with budget deficits and increased public debt on all but about six very short occasions—with each surplus followed by a recession. Far from being a burden, these debts are the foundation of economic growth.

The fact of the matter is that the government can afford it. It being healthcare overhaul (single-payer system, Medicare, Medicaid), Social Security, education reform, more infrastructure building projects and many other domestic, job creating programs that would move us out of the Great Recession. President Obama and his advisers need a little less “common sense” to creatively address the present economic woes, but a little more of it to explain it to the people; otherwise, the alarmist Tea Party will gladly mis-explain how the American future is a bankrupt one under the current administration.  

Gar Alperovitz, Ted Howard & Thad Williamson report in The Nation on the burgeoning development of large-scale worker-owned, green, and community-benefiting cooperative businesses in Cleveland’s depressed economy. The co-ops are driven by fair business practices including livable working wages and affordable healthcare by its worker-owners.

The authors see this model of co-op enterprise as particularly helpful for mid-size metropolitan cities like Atlanta, Detroit, and Baltimore with slammed economies, but perhaps communities in larger cities like in Harlem can look into this strategy for strong economic development.

The article is great in helping workers and labor organizers think about creative new business models that help communities and uplift lives.

by Daniel WK Lee

Director of the U.S./Middle East Project in New York Henry Siegman’s recent article “Imposing Middle East Peace” in The Nation reiterates what former Prime Ministers of Israel Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert have already warned—that Israel is in danger in devolving into an apartheid state if the Occupied Territories were not relinquished. Siegman writes:

When a state’s denial of the individual and national rights of a large part of its population becomes permanent, it ceases to be a democracy. When the reason for that double disenfranchisement is that population’s ethnic and religious identity, the state is practicing a form of apartheid, or racism, not much different from the one that characterized South Africa from 1948 to 1994. The democratic dispensation that Israel provides for its mostly Jewish citizens cannot hide its changed character. By definition, democracy reserved for privileged citizens—while all others are kept behind checkpoints, barbed-wire fences and separation walls commanded by the Israeli army—is not democracy but its opposite.

This clear examination of what the political status quo in Israel will eventually lead to if current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu continues his underhanded support of new Israeli settlements in the West Bank (read: colonization) should be a great cause of concern if a two-state outcome is still the hope of Israel, Palestine, and the international community. Any more movement which jeopardizes the existence of a Palestinian state east of Israel’s pre-1967 border could not only lead to more political isolation of Israel save for the support of the United States, but inflame the supporters of the moderate Palestinian Authority, reinvigorate the most militant factions of Hamas, and set the stage for another Intifadah. Siegman’s argument for a forceful diplomatic intervention is convincing because more fruitless negotiations risk the aforementioned developments and perpetuate a peace process which the United States upholds an existing double standard whereby Israel is allowed to dishonor previous agreements (i.e. a total halt of Jewish settlements in the Occupied Territories) yet when the PA does not uphold its obligations, it faces sanctions.

So far, the Obama administration has been lax in pressuring the Palestinians and Israelis back to the negotiating table, (ironic, since President Obama is so adamant on forcing Democrats and Republicans together) which fares less and less well for the Palestinians. Whatever strategic interests America has in the region should be enough to re-engage, and if nothing else, 1+ years into his presidency, Obama cannot hope to ride the good global feeling about him too much longer before the world starts to expect him to deliver as much abroad as we do at home.

Jaclyn Friedman considers the larger cultural implications and contexts of Tim Tebow, Focus on the Family, and the Super Bowl for this great essay at The Nation.

An absolute must-read by The Nation’s Jeremy Scahill about Blackwater, their unlawful, in-discriminant killing of innocent Iraqis. (Photo credit: Rick Rowley, Bignoisefilms.org)