Innehållsförteckning för February 15, 2016 från The Nation

@thenation.com The Once and Future UN The United Nations is not going to be transformed by the election of a new secretary general, as Barbara Crossette writes, no matter the transparency of the process [“In 2016, the UN Will Be Transformed,” Jan. 11/18]. It is the other election in the autumn of this new year—the election of the president of the United States—that has that possibility. Ban Ki-moon is a noble leader, a man of decency, ideals, and judgment, but he cannot force the Security Council after four years of slaughter and anguish to place the Syrian war on its priority agenda. His predecessor, Kofi Annan, was and is a man of “dignity, confidence, courage, and compassion.” He could not stop the American invasion of Iraq despite mighty efforts. Terrorism…

On January 9, 2008, six days after Barack Obama’s victory in the Iowa caucuses, the Supreme Court heard a challenge to Indiana’s strict voter-ID law, the first of its kind. Ted Cruz, then solicitor general of Texas, filed a brief on behalf of Texas and seven other GOP-led states in support of the law. COMMENT Though Indiana presented no evidence of voter impersonation to justify the measure, Cruz wrote: “The specter of voter fraud has threatened the integrity of the electoral process for the entire history of our Nation.” Indiana did not have to show recent examples of such fraud, his brief argued, because “there is no right to be free from any inconvenience or burden in voting.” Such burdens increased dramatically after the Supreme Court upheld Indiana’s law and…

While Hillary has touted the economic achievements of her husband’s administration as a model for her own, the evidence shows that working people suffered under the economic policies of the Clinton White House. Let’s take a look at just one metric—wages: $5.15 Minimum hourly wage when Bill Clinton left office 35% Decline in the value of the minimum wage between 1968 and the end of Clinton’s presidency $13.60 Average real wage (in 2001 dollars) for nonsupervisory workers during Clinton’s presidency—2 percent lower than it was under Ronald Reagan “The bargaining power of workers is surprisingly low.” —Current Fed chair Janet Yellen, back in 1996…

It’s no secret that America is experiencing a crisis of economic inequality, or that Congress and the Supreme Court have made it worse by inviting the nation’s wealthiest citizens to play a dominant role in politics. What remains largely hidden, however—thanks in significant measure to the decline of serious, in-depth political journalism—is the degree to which the super-wealthy have managed to seize control of not only the electoral process, but also many of the institutions that shape the political landscape. I’m ashamed to admit that I had little understanding of the scope of the activities that Charles and David Koch have undertaken to mainstream their radical libertarian ideology until I read Jane Mayer’s pathbreaking account in The New Yorker in 2010. (I fought a losing battle on the jury of…

(Some surnames have been omitted due to privacy concerns.) CARLOS AGUIRRE-VENEGAS, 30 Died: Oct. 10, 2014 Carlos was deported six times before he was incarcerated for illegal re-entry. “Nothing at all could keep him away,” said Berenice Venegas, his wife and the mother of their three children. NESTOR GARAY, 41 Died: June 28, 2014 Nestor would never have been placed in a private, immigrant-only federal prison if he’d become a US citizen like his brother Enrique. Nestor’s path to citizenship was derailed after his drug arrest. PABLO ORAMA, 62 Died: March 24, 2014 Pablo visited the prison clinic multiple times over an eight-month period, complaining of chest and shoulder pain. He was given Maalox and told to avoid spicy foods. He died of heart disease. JESUS ENRIQUE ZAVALA MONTES, 28…

In March 1144, a dead body was found in the forest outside the town of Norwich. No one paid much attention to it at first. England was then in the middle of a civil war between Stephen and Matilda, the grandchildren of William the Conqueror. In East Anglia, where Norwich is located, the war was particularly violent. Soldiers hung men and women by their thumbs for extortion. Others met a different fate: “Knotted ropes were put round their heads and twisted till they penetrated to the brains,” according to one contemporary. “They said openly that Christ and his saints were asleep.” The large library in Norwich was burned; a kidnapping ring terrorized the surrounding area. It wasn’t unusual for dead bodies to turn up without much explanation. So when a…

In early 2015, shortly after his victory in a heated re-election contest, Michigan Governor Rick Snyder began exploring a run for president. With his business experience and electoral success in a blue state, Snyder was considered a viable potential candidate, so he embarked on a national speaking tour and set up a fund-raising organization. Its name: Making Government Accountable. As Snyder was testing the presidential waters, however, his government was shirking its accountability to constituents concerned about their water supply. In April 2014, the city of Flint had switched its primary water source from Lake Huron, through Detroit’s system, to the Flint River. Approved by an emergency manager appointed by the governor, the move was supposed to save the beleaguered city millions of dollars. But residents soon began reporting that…

In trying to burnish her credentials as a can-do populist and portray Bernie Sanders as a purveyor of naive socialist fantasies, Hillary Clinton has increasingly invoked Bill Clinton’s presidency as her economic-policy lodestar. When Hillary was asked at the January 17 Democratic debate whether Bill would be advising her on the economy, she responded: “I’m going to have the very best advisers that I can possibly have, and when it comes to the economy and what was accomplished under my husband’s leadership in the ’90s—especially when it came to raising incomes for everybody and lifting more people out of poverty than at any time in recent history—you bet.” There is no doubt that dramatic departures from past US economic trends occurred during Bill Clinton’s presidency, including the simultaneous fall of…

In advance of the Iowa primary, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders have duked it out over who would tackle Wall Street best. Clinton’s reform package aims wide, extending scrutiny from the banks to smaller players who played an outsized role in the financial crisis. Sanders—who, unlike Clinton, has rejected Wall Street money—actually takes a narrower approach that favors a popular but insufficient strategy to “break up the banks.” If Sanders wants to challenge modern finance, he should incorporate and surpass Clinton’s plan. It’s helpful, first, to understand why many find Sanders’s approach insufficient. Sanders wants to break up the banks in two ways: by size and by line of business. Picture a horizontal cut making the largest banks smaller. Then picture a vertical cut separating ordinary banks from the investment…

Seth Freed Wessler writes in this issue about the deadly conditions at the country’s privately run, immigrant-only prisons. In The Nation’s June 15, 1985, issue, attorney Craig Becker and graduate student Amy Dru Stanley warned against the growing privatization of correctional facilities: “For the state to abdicate its power of punishment to the lowest corporate bidder will seal off prisons more completely from constitutional and popular controls. It will also sever any connection between justice and punishment, transforming the terms of the debate over the social objectives of incarceration from retribution, deterrence and rehabilitation to productivity and profit.” The authors quoted a prisoner’s letter to a newspaper asking: “Is our society to put sadism on a profit-making basis?’” In an e-mail, Becker and Stanley—now the general counsel for the AFL-CIO…

Some years ago, i faced up to the futility of report-ing truths about America’s disastrous wars, and so I left Afghanistan for another mountainous country far away. It was the polar opposite of Afghanistan: a peaceful, prosperous land where nearly everybody seemed to enjoy a good life, on the job and in the family. It’s true that they didn’t work much–not by American standards, anyway. In the United States, full-time salaried workers supposedly laboring 40 hours a week actually average 49, with almost 20 percent clocking more than 60. These people, on the other hand, worked only about 37 hours a week, when they weren’t away on long paid vacations. At the end of the workday, about four in the afternoon (perhaps three during the summer), they had time to…

13M Americans who get their drinking water from private wells with more than 10 ppb (parts per billion) of arsenic present 11M Americans whose tap water contains more rocket fuel than the EPA considers safe 20% Water-treatment systems in the nation that recently violated key provisions of the Safe Water Drinking Act 6% Water-treatment systems in the nation that were fined or punished for those violations $1T Amount needed to fix America’s drinking-water infrastructure “They had the information.” —Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha, a pediatrician in Flint, Michigan, on the lead-poisoning crisis caused by the city’s water supply…

Over the last several years, the GOP has led a campaign to disenfranchise voters under the guise of ending voter fraud, a practice rarer than Iowans declaring their support for Jeb! Bush. 0 Number of prosecutions for voter impersonation in North Carolina over the course of a decade 318,000 Registered voters in North Carolina who lack the government-issued ID required to vote under a stringent 2013 law 600,000 Texans who are registered to vote but will be unable to do so because they cannot meet the photo-ID requirements set out in the state’s new identification law 300,000 Registered voters in Wisconsin who lack the necessary ID “We have fought for, died for, and struggled for our right to vote. You can take these 57 pages of abomination and confine them…

David and Charles Koch are individually worth nearly $43 billion apiece. What could the Kochs buy with their billions instead of an endless torrent of libertarian nonsense? $ All 30 NBA Teams Several teams are valued at more than $1 billion, but just one of the Kochs could purchase all 30 teams and still have a few billion left over. $ For-Profit Student Debt Eight of the top 10 colleges where students incur the most debt are for-profit. Topping the list is the University of Phoenix, currently under federal investigation, where former students owe $35.5 billion. The Kochs could abolish this debt and put their remaining billions toward our $1.3 trillion in national student-loan debt. $ A Real Jurassic Park After the release of last summer’s Jurassic World, fans calculated…

Where claudio fagardo-saucedo grew up, on the colonial streets of the mexican cityof Durango, migrating to the United States was almost a rite of passage. It was following the stream of departures from Durango in the 1980s that the lanky young man left his family and traveled north. His mother, Julieta Saucedo Salazar, heard that he’d found jobs working as a laborer in Los Angeles. But they soon lost touch. “We did not know much about him, really,” his younger sister told me. Fagardo-Saucedo worked, his jobs sometimes taking him out of California, and occasionally he got into trouble—once for “possession for sale” of cocaine, another time for stealing jewelry. Every seven or eight years, his mother recalled, he’d return to her house—but never by choice. “They caught him all…

It’s 1983, and a family has landed at the Damascus airport. The father, who has avoided military service, bribes his way into the country. Accompanying him are his foreign wife and small blond son. Outside the airport, Syria assails them. A scrum of screaming cab drivers fights over the startled new arrivals. Cabbies abandon the brawl and compose themselves on the sidelines, combing their hair and smoking cigarettes, until the last one left shouting—and close to keeling over from his exertions—hustles the family into his taxi. He ashes his cigarettes through the moving vehicle’s missing floorboard. This scene of homecoming and culture shock falls about halfway through the first volume of The Arab of the Future, a graphic memoir by the French-Syrian cartoonist Riad Sattouf. The book delivers a vision…