Sold Out, Again
I recently downloaded your magazine
from the Braille and Audio Reading
Download website produced by the
National Library Service for the Blind
and Physically Handicapped. I found
Mara Kardas-Nelson’s article about
St. James Parish [“To Stay or Go?”
Sept. 9/16] to be the sad same ol’
same ol’.
I live in Louisiana, should have had
the sense to get out a long time ago. I
do not understand why our politicians
give away so much—so much in taxes
that businesses do not pay, so much in
natural resources—and yet Louisiana
is so often found at the bottom or
near the bottom in so many metrics,
whether in education, income, work-
ing conditions, etc. Texas has a bigger
petrochemical industry but seems not
to give so much away in tax breaks. It
is baffling. David Faucheux
lafayette, la.Blame the Media?
I was struck by Eric Alterman’s ap-
proach to criticizing the Democratic
Party debates [“Destructive Debates,”
Sept. 9/16]. I’ve watched the party of
Roosevelt over the course of 40 years
with increasing disgust. From the
Clinton-Gore team’s decision to “end
welfare as we know it,” which denied
so many the slim public assistance they
received, to the party’s weak support of
abortion rights, the party has consis-
tently let down those who vote for it.
The latest version of a Democratic
president was Barack Obama, who had
kill-list-Tuesday meetings to decide
whom to drone 10,000 miles away.
Under him, the Democrats did not
want to implement decent universal
health care, and that is why we don’t
have it, not because of the shallow ex-
cuse that they “were depending on the
media” to sell it, as Alterman puts it.
They do want to maintain the forever
wars and the insane trillion-dollar-plusPentagon budget. The Democratic
Party’s adherence to the status quo (or
status quo lite) led directly to the disas-
trous situation we are in today; it is not
“assisted suicide by debate moderator.”
Please don’t let the Democrats off
the hook so easily. For the kind of
positive radical change we need in this
country, hold the party itself account-
able for its misdeeds. Thea Paneth
arlington, mass.
Alterman’s column offers a particu-
larly erudite analysis that every Dem-
ocratic Party leader must read. As I
read the piece, I couldn’t help but re-
call when, in 2013, MSNBC’s Chuck
Todd said, effectively, that it’s not the
media’s job to correct Republican
lies about Obamacare. Considering
that MSNBC and CNN are usually
vastly more honest than Fox News,
Alterman just proves that the main-
stream corporate media often walks
on eggshells when commenting on a
right-wing Republican viewpoint. We
are fortunate to have The Nation.
Sal R. Pauciello
irvington, n.j.Re Eric Alterman’s “Destructive
Debates”: As far as the news media is
concerned, it’s all canned news any-
way, all of it.
I.F. Stone said one of the primary
functions of a journalist is to be skepti-
cal of any official statement. Today, it’s
lapdogs “reporting” what they hear in
the echo chambers of the 1 percenters,
who own the news media. It’s a vicious
circle; now it’s up to the citizens to be
skeptical of official statements and what
they hear in the echo chamber. Good
luck on that. The news media only
serves to keep us divided and arguing
over which way the 1 percenters threw
the bone—“Over here! NO! Over
there!” People have to be able to read
between the lines. Nancy Lindsay
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