Thank you, thank you, JoAnn Wypijewski. You made me see my tittering over the Sanford affair is misanthopic sneering, not that I regret it in light of the fact that Sanford is a Republican. You beat Katha Pollitt to the punch; what a shame it would have been if all The Nation ran was her moldy trope of glee in the face of hypocrisy and the usual mainstream feminist demand for compulsory monogamy. Most of all, you made The Nation what Navasky has said he's been trying to make it: a place where radicals can take liberals head-on. I just may restart a subscription yet...

Douglas Presler

Minneapolis, MN

I regularly read "Beat the Devil" first. Cockburn's consistently dismissiveness has a certain appeal in our world of superficial politics. However, I have often wondered whom he writes for. After reading his "Twittergasms" column it occurred to me that he is writing for himself. His trivialization of the Iranian mass movement: "those attractive Iranians" or "Neda, who got out of her car at the wrong time" was so cynical that I cannot believe that the rest of his article was anything but a careless collection of thoughts assembled to fill a page for his obligatory Nation column.

As usual, he does make valid points. However, they get lost in his über-contrarian zeal of being dismissive of all liberal and genuinely popular movements. Not only does he not offer any alternative strategy, he even goes so far as endorsing the little fascist of Tehran, who has consistently acted against secular and democratic Iranians. In Cockburn's world, notwithstanding their reactionary nature we should applaud the dark ideologies of the Taliban and the Iranian strongmen because of their anti-Western tendencies, which are primarily cultural.

Has Cockburn had the pleasure of wearing the veil in the middle of July in Tehran? Has he been in the dormitories of the University of Tehran in the dark of the night when the Bassij knocks? How about outside Evin prison on Tehran's northern slopes, looking for a father languishing on the other side of the wall?

Being anti-British did not make Hitler a good man; and Ahmadinegad and Khamenei's anti American rants should not make them role models of the left. The post-election events in Iran are a response to decades of insult and suppression of a people who has persistently fought for its human, national and democratic rights since the beginning of the last century. This was a genuine Iranian mass action that was neither led by nor was it for Mussavi; it was a spontaneous tsunami of frustrated emotions that carried him on its waves. The events were not the first nor will they be the last collective response to the theocratic rule of these mullahs and strongmen.

Mehran Azad

Pittsburgh, PA

It was reported today that the foreign minister was also arrested and exiled. While she may have had an opinion on term limits, it is doubtful she could have influenced the election issue. How many of the "former" president's cabinet were exiled?

I see the OAS is threatening to throw Honduras out of the organization if the elected president is not restored. If that happens we will have to pull our troops out of Honduras. Wouldn't that be unfortunate?

Pervis James Casey

Riverside, CA

Morgenson is right to be concerned about corruption of capitalism today. The last time we had crony capitalism of the sort we have now, we had a stagnant economy and RICO statutes were finally introduced to punish and weed out the widespread corruption siphoning off resources at every level of our economy.

Today, despite decades of positive efforts to deregulate and introduce real competition, which worked for a time, and indoctrination of the best and brightest into Hayek and Ayn Rand, we are back to a Big Man economy.

This Big Man economy thinks nothing of putting its brainpower to gaming our democratic institutions instead of new business, despite the obvious violations of true competitive markets that results from these games.

Their paid-for Congressmen pay manipulative lip service to "free-markets," by which they definitely do not mean "open and competitive markets," for the benefit of the voters, who don't know the difference.

Ms. Morgenson is onto these problems, and she is right. I spend a lot of time polling Gen Y's for work, and they don't know the difference either. Today, they are siding more and more with "socialism," since they see parents, grandparents and friends getting wiped out by what they think is capitalism. They do represent 100M future voters, so this will be tricky in a few years.

I hope they do learn the difference between "democratic socialism" and "totalitarian socialism," because here we've forgotten such distinctions for capitalism. Just like in totalitarian socialism, we've handed the whole place over to a select few who secretly rule Washington with an iron hand and their unlimited political money! They even get away with breathlessly telling Congress that without $Bs in bail-out money, the whole world will disintegrate!

When Ms Morgenson's work finally shows the difference between that and truly "democratic capitalism," she may be somewhere toward achieving her goal! Better do so before 100M Gen Ys turn 18!

Brett Barndt

Johnstown, PA

There are also Palestinians who advocate nonviolence. They are routinely beaten up quite brutally, arrested and imprisoned by Israel.

There is no political authority to appeal to as there was in the USA of LBJ in the 1960 when colored American were looking for justice.

The Zionists' tactics in "peace negotiations " seem to have followed the advice of Yehoshafat Harkabi, chief of Israeli military intelligence from 1955 until 1959, who said in 1973: "We must define our position and lay down basic principles for a settlement. Our demands should be moderate and balanced, and appear to be reasonable. But in fact they must involve such conditions as to ensure that the enemy rejects them. Then we should maneuvre and allow him to define his own position, and reject a settlement on the basis of a compromise position. We should then publish his demands as embodying unreasonable extremism."

As a result, we have in Gaza an open-air prison and, as just reported in Israel's newspaper Ha'aretz, a West Bank checkpoint managed by a private security company is not allowing Palestinians to pass through with large water bottles and some food items.

But none of this is seen in the American media.

Its 2009, and after over sixty years of brutal Ethnic Cleansing nothing seems to have changed.

Mathew Neville

Fort Lauderdale, FL

Obama's way ahead of you, Tom. So is Hillary, and so are the leaders of the OAS. The fact is that for one of the few times in the region's history, the US is actually on the side of the good guys. This fact is driving the right-wingers nuts, as well as frustrating those far-lefties who apparently think that Obama is Claus von Metternich ("Hey, we had him pegged as an imperialist! How dare he act against our preconceptions of him!").

The best place for non-Spanish or non-Portugese speakers to keep up with events is over at The Field. They'll translate key news articles and even Twitters from Latin America.

Tamara Baker

St. Paul, MN

My freedom depends on my health and the health of the person next to me.

I have the right to expect that the person next to me is not going to infect me with some horrible and very preventable disease. It seems to me that by focusing on healthcare we can make our country more productive and safer for everyone.

Gary Amstutz

Lake Isabella, CA

I loved the part about the switchgrass growing up from the floors and roofs of "modernist buildings...left deserted to return to nature." Greg Grandin hooked me right there.

Brilliant transition from 1950s and 1960s migration out of the city to 1989 migration. By the time 2008 rolls around, you can almost see the "constitution of the fields" becoming overgrown with Louise Glück's witchgrass.

Extraordinary writing. Clever how Grandin worked the Berlin wall in there. Oh, and the Clint Eastwood film putting "the iconic white auto worker to rest."

Wow. A moment of silence is in order. It may be the last time we see those outsized tailfins. Does that not epitomize the passing of a brief point in history? There it goes, emphasized by a flash of taillights, fading over a distant hill.

Chris Bruer

Amarillo, TX

Grandin effortlessly captures the myriad of issues encapsulated by the Fordlandia experiment: a misguided attempt to build one of America's first real overseas "company towns," the detritus left by failed dreams and the relevance of the Fordlandia project today. Fordlandia was even stranger and wilder than his article suggests--to get the full story you should read his book.

I spent a number of years researching Fordlandia, most of it drawn from local accounts and Brazilian scholarly work. A few little details that are left out of this article: after Fordlandia failed, Edsel Ford built another town called Belterra, further down the river Tapajos river. No one knows why or how Ford was convinced to do this. This town also failed.

The workers were forced to eat on the run, which perplexed Brazilians, and they smuggled alcohol in watermelons. Ford was attempting to recreate the rubber boom of the Amazon that had enriched the region in the late 1800s before the rubber seeds were "stolen" by the English and transplanted to Ceylon and Sumatra. That is why Ford could buy the 25,000-square-kilometer plot at a bargain basement price.

There is yet another strange episode in the Amazon that remains to this day: the hunting of perfumed woods by giant fragrance companies.

I could have benefitted from Grandin's work. But if you are interested in a fictionalized account of Fordlandia, check out my book Everyone Comes from Belterra: when America Owned the Amazon.

Deji Olukotun

Brooklyn, NY

I'd say that a rational approach would have all recreational drugs available in "drug stores" at numerous locations, perhaps expansions of current liquor stores and tobacconists. Entry and purchase would be open to anyone with a license. Licenses would go to any adult, 18 years old or older, who passed a quick quiz on drugs: the basics of what various drugs can do for you and what they can do to you, in physiological terms in each case. As an adjunct, real drug education would be offered in America's high schools: very short short courses to prepare for the quiz, plus serious, adult discussions of the ethical, political and practical implications of using recreational drugs. And of course, we'd need rigorous enforcement of laws forbidding endangering others while impaired from a drug. As a first step, however--indeed, that thin edge of the camel's nose heading down the slippery slope to the rational--I'll settle for decriminalized pot.

Richard Dee Erlich

Port Hueneme, CA

Undoubtedly, a restoration of progressive taxation is part of the solution to the problem of overly powerful executives overcompensating themselves. However, a much more appealing part of the solution would be to strengthen unions. The best way to keep top-end salaries down is to lift bottom-end wages up. This is especially appealing if it is not imposed by government mandate but won by the workers themselves, through their own self-organization.

It seems to me that this was broadly understood by previous generations. Our failure to recognize the value of unions today, which expresses itself in the gridlock over the Employee Free Choice Act, is surely a telling symptom of what Hayes rightly calls our "benighted" age.

Eric Paul Jacobsen

West Saint Paul, MN

President Obama told us that if we wanted him to do something, then we should make him do it. Undoubtedly this proposed bank regulation will get watered down from the current version if we do not follow his advice. In comparison to the credit card legislation, which fails to ban usury and will turn us into a slumdog nation, the banking regulation is off to only a slightly better start.

Auditing the Federal Reserve by Congress is definitely positive, but it has to be followed by a serious investigation into possible organized criminality in the mortgage crisis. Consider what happened.

It could have been possible that a small number of individuals working together from key positions within the financial industry and the government looted personal home equity, which taken cumulatively comprises the largest asset base in the country. Poisoned-pill subprime and alt-A mortgages were written and sold in large numbers without regard to risk. This event was preceded by systematic acts of deregulation, lessening of oversight and protection from liability. Large financial incentives for writing these mortgages were also put in place. Home equity was securitized, pooled and traded, which obscured the trail of these funds. Poisoned mortgage securities were traded for bank cash and the money moved from the banks to offshore shadow banks as effectively as a bank robbery.

Individuals working together would be aware of the impending failure of the mortgage securities because they were responsible for the booby-trapped securities and could profit a second time by selling the bank stock short, and a third time by insuring the poisoned securities at AIG. When the banks were left holding a large portfolio of toxic mortgage securities, "mark to market" would trigger the banks' failure to meet their capitalization requirement and they would ask for government help. The banking system would need to be shored up with new cash by the taxpayers or allowed to collapse. Interestingly, without the recently added wrinkle of "mark to market," neither the credit bubble nor its bursting would likely have occurred.

Trillions of taxpayer dollars were lost in the mortgage crisis. Are we so numbed by the events of the last eight years that we are going to "move forward" but leave "justice" behind? How do we know that no laws were broken without an investigation? How can you write tough laws until you know what happened? Where is the outrage?

William J. Hague

Hoboken, NJ

The great Los Angeles Dodger announcer Vin Scully often will remain silent and allow the crowd noise to tell the story for those listening on the radio. Even though Scully may well be the most literate baseball announcer during the past fifty years, he knows that silence can sometimes send the clearest message to the listener.

This is exactly what President Obama is doing. He is allowing the voices of the people of Iran to have center stage rather than trying to hog the microphone. It is too bad that his Republican critics don't understand this simple fact.

Richard Neffson

Rohnert Park, CA

I prefer the image of Che in the factory, the image of Che in the field, the image of Che at the microphone. I prefer the image of Che proclaiming clearly and defiantly, "Playa Giron is a symbol for all oppressed peoples. Playa Giron is the first defeat of the Unites States in Latin America but also one of the first defeats of imperialism in the world."

I prefer the image of Che on August 8, 1961, at the Organization of American States meeting in Punta de Este speaking truth to the power of the US system of domination in Latin America when he challenged President Kennedy's Alliance for Progress, a declaration which would result a couple months later in the US-orchestrated expulsion of Cuba from the OAS: "It has been clearly established that these [Alliance for Progress] loans fundamentally will support capitalist business. And since the imperialist monopolies entrenched in each Latin American country have not been condemned, it is logical to suppose that these credits will be used for the development of these entrenched monopolies.… In the free market system in which nearly every Latin American country lives, this means greater exportation of capital to the United States. In this way, the Alliance for Progress definitely will become the means of financing these foreign monopolies in Latin America.… It is clear that in the coming years the current tendency will continue and that raw materials will continue to drop in price. In that case, it is evident that there will be an ongoing and ever greater deterioration in the balance of payments of every country in the Americas, to which will be added the exportation of capital by the monopolies. All of this will be translated into a lack of development, into the absolute opposite of what the Alliance for Progress pretends to be. "

I prefer the image of Che crucified in Bolivia by the empire of the CIA and with his hands cut off, who would have stood with the people of Boliva protesting the privatization of water, and who is resurrected today in hundreds of millions of hearts yearning and striving for liberation and justice around the world. In the end, I prefer the image of Che, the image of hope resurrected found in the Natalie Cardone video Hasta Siempre Comandante.

Earlier this month, forty-seven years after the expulsion of Cuba from the OAS, the countries of Latin America repudiated the vote to exclude Cuba. The name of Che was invoked many times. The role of Che in history is a thousand times more important and more relevant than a conversation about his photographic image and the use of it. And more important still than the historic Che is the Che of today who is alive.

That Che continues to live is of ongoing concern to the oppressive global military industrial media complex headed by the United States. Anyone reading current events in Latin America knows that a powerful trend to the left in all of Latin America is being met by renewed U.S. attempts at subversion in several countries, including Bolivia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Paraguay, and Guatemala. The leaders of these countries invoke the name of Che without shame and with righteous indignation.

It is time to renew the Latin America solidarity movement in the United States and prevent Obama's CIA, USAID, Department of State and Defense Department from embarking on a new period of destabilization and interventions in Latin America.

David Brookbank

Spokane, WA

Laila Lalami's article and one of the posted comments accurately describe the declining state support of California's higher education system. The voters' message to the governor and legislature in the May 19 special election was, "Solve the problems we elected you to fix." Voters rejected taking away funds targeted toward mental health and children's healthcare. It's a two-thirds requirement to pass a budget that is driving this state into financial chaos.

Students have experienced fee increases seven of the past eight years, and the share of the state's budget devoted to higher education continues on a downward slide. To reverse this trend, majority leader Alberto Torrico is working with students and faculty in support of AB 656, a bill to levy a tax on oil companies, who enjoyed record profits last year, and direct the funds to higher ed. A recent Public Policy Institute of California study says the state will face a shortfall of one million graduates by 2025.

There is no better long-term investment than education. It's what made California's economy the largest in the country.

Jeff Barbosa

Davis, CA