Nation magazine: a must for leftists

The Nation is unquestionably the best magazine in America. Every week it publishes excoriating indictments of U.S. domestic and international policies. The Progressive is the second best. However, it is less penetrating and comes out just once a month.

Z magazine has good articles but is inconsistent. Mother Jones runs some excellent muckraking pieces but is often ho-hum. Dissent has precious little dissent.

The New Yorker? The Sy Hersh articles on Bush-Cheney warmongering are superb. Hersh may be the best investigative reporter in America. But the magazine is one of those you repeatedly subscribe to then cancel because it is not political enough.

The March 12 issue of The Nation illustrates why it is essential fare for lefties. It carries at least five excellent articles. And a bonus: a full-page ad against the No Child Left Behind Act with 16 cogent reasons why the act is an utter failure.

The five articles are entitled: “A Trial for Thousands Denied Trial” by Naomi Klein; “The Care Crisis” by Ruth Rosen; “Remembering Norma Rae” by Robert Nathan and Jo-Ann Mort”; and “How to Fix Our Democracy” by Mark Green.

The Klein column angrily portrays the worldwide system of psychological torture by the U.S. government. She focuses on the trial of José Padilla in Miami in which interrogators are using inhumane techniques on prisoners.

Padilla, arrested in 2002, was classified as an enemy combatant and locked up a Navy brig at Charlestown, S.C. Klein writes:

“He was kept in a 9-by-7-foot cell with no natural light, no clock and no calendar. Whenever Padilla left the cell, he was shackled and (forced to wear) headphones…He was forbidden contact with anyone but his interrogators, who punctuated the extreme sensory deprivation with sensory overload, blasting him with harsh lights and pounding sounds.” He was also injected with “truth serum,” probably LSD.

Klein notes further: “The techniques used to break Padilla have been standard operating procedure at Guantánamo Bay for five years…These same practices have been documented in dozens of cases of CIA ‘extraordinary rendition’ as well as prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

America an exceptional country? No, it tortures just like any totalitarian regime.

Profound care deficit

Rosen calls the care crisis a nationwide problem: a broken health care system with 47 million Americans without insurance, lack of affordable child care, extremely low wages, job insecurity and employer exploitation.

Scandinavian countries have child care. America does not. Rosen notes that 168 nations have maternal leave. America does not. About 150 nations mandate paid sick days. America does not.

Expensive? Yes. “But the money is there if we end tax cuts for the wealthy and reduce unnecessary wars…and the hundreds of American bases that circle the globe,” Rosen writes. “If we also reinstate a progressive tax structure, this wealthy nation would have enough resources for all its citizens.’

America the exceptional? Certainly not in health and child care for working families.

‘Norma Rae’

Nathan and Mort write that the 1979 film, “Norma Rae,” is virtually the only American movie of the modern era to deal with unionizing, economic justice and factory workers “demanding to be treated as more than slaves.”

More than 23,000 American workers were fired or penalized last year for legal union activity,” they note. Yet: “Moviemakers are in the movie business, not the social change business. And so tomorrow we won’t go to the tenplex and find movies about Wal-Mart workers fighting for health and pension benefits.” Pity.

Fixing so-called democracy

Green rightly laments U.S. electoral “flaws that have long diminished our democracy and frustrated majority support for progressive reforms.” But the main thrust is denunciation of the Great Usurper in the White House.

President Bush, he notes, has evolved a unitary executive theory allowing him to nullify any law he signs, open mail without warrant, condone torture and squander “an inheritance of centuries of democracy progress.”

On Education

The ad: 1) “Emphasizes minimum content standards rather than maximum development of human potential.” 2) “Applies standards to discrete subjects rather than to larger goals such as insightful children.” 3) “Forces schools to adhere to a testing regime with no provision for innovating, adapting to social change or encouraging creativity.” 4) “Drives art, foreign language, geography, history, civics and music out of the curriculum, especially in low-income areas.”

The Nation, founded in 1865, is the oldest continuously published weekly in America. It has been aptly described as “a magazine for the permanent minority.” True--but alas.