To the editor: A Wilmington reader recently attributed objections to a proposed Dollar General store to outsiders. He welcomes the new store as a modern convenience, where one could buy (imported) “T-shirts, flowerpots and socks,” just like they supposedly do to pass rainy days in Keeseville. Objections to dollar stores involve the negative effects upon on locally owned businesses and degradation to small-town aesthetics, well documented in articles by the Christian Science Monitor and elsewhere. For instance, the nearby Little Supermarket can expect a 10-30% loss of sales. Profit margins would also vanish as local stores are forced to compete with Dollar General’s vast wholesale network.
Eric Westervelt
Eric Westervelt is a San Francisco-based correspondent for NPR s National Desk. He has reported on major events for the network from wars and revolutions in the Middle East and North Africa to historic wildfires and terrorist attacks in the U.S.
For a decade as a foreign correspondent, Westervelt served as NPR reporter and bureau chief in Baghdad, Jerusalem, and Berlin. He s covered the Pentagon, the war in Afghanistan, and the U.S. invasion and troubled occupation of Iraq, including the insurgency, sectarian violence, and the resulting social and political tumult.
He has reported on the ground from North Africa during revolutions there, including from Tahrir Square during fall of Egypt s Mubarak, the front lines during the civil war and NATO intervention in Libya, and the popular uprising in Tunisia. He s also reported from Yemen, the Arabian Gulf states, and the Horn of Africa, including Ethiopia, Djibouti, and the Somalia border region.
Credit Penguin Random House
Nashville, August 1920. Thirty-five states have ratified the Nineteenth Amendment, twelve have rejected or refused to vote, and one last state is needed. It all comes down to Tennessee, the moment of truth for the suffragists, after a seven-decade crusade.
The opposing forces include politicians with careers at stake, liquor companies, railroad magnates, and racists who don’t want black women voting. And then there are the “Antis”–women who oppose their own enfranchisement, fearing suffrage will bring about the moral collapse of the nation. They all converge in a boiling hot summer for a face-off replete with dirty tricks, betrayals and bribes, bigotry, Jack Daniel’s, and the Bible.
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Spotlight on Chris Hedges
EDITED BY PATRICE GREANVILLE How do you revolt? When you are convinced that only rebellion against a corrupt and sociopathic order will create (or restore) social justice and democracy, and thereby permit the advent of social peace, not to mention the general survival of humanity and the rest of sentience, how do you go about it? Which roads do you follow to maximize success and minimize suffering? This is a question that has preoccupied political thinkers for millennia, so it s not surprising that in our era, with the collapse of the capitalist order apparently almost imminent due to its legendary inability to resolve the overproduction question (now aggravated incalculably by the computer revolution), fine minds continue to come to the fore offering visions and solutions, even in the United States, one of the world s most politically confused, socially pacified and backward nations. And in this rarefied field, Chris Hedges has attracted well-deserved