Innehållsförteckning för December 23-30, 2013 från The Nation

Cannabis: Hemper Fidelis
 Our special issue on pot, “Dope and Change” [Nov. 18], despite occasioning some canceled subscriptions, epithets (“childish,” “deplorable,” “dishonest,” “irresponsible”) and a cry of outrage (“a whole issue on marijuana? This is not news”), was highly popular: “makes good sense,” “long overdue,” “appreciated,” “thank you for your excellent issue on the marijuana law insanity.” Said “Don Quixokie” of Tulsa, “I am pleased with the way society is moving on the marijuana issue, but I fear the government won’t be joining us for another generation. Don’t hold your breath—
unless you’ve taken a big drag.” Your letters and comments follow. —The editors
 _________________________ What were your editorial writers smoking when they wrote that pot-smoker George W. Bush was “elected” president? 
 RICK BAUM Oakland, Calif. _________________________ Thank you for…

Before coming here this evening, I thought to say something about what is lately on my mind—what is on all our minds, whether we know it or not—something that has swept through our lives and taken us up in ways that are useful and even spectacular, but also
worrisome—and so ubiquitous and loomingly present in everything we do: the way we communicate and take care of ourselves and find things out and look to be entertained. Well, that would have to be the Internet. So to begin, I want to congratulate those short-listed content providers here this evening. 
 The World Wide Web was conceived as a somewhat academic resource some years ago, but its years of development since the 1980s have seemed to me the work of a moment, coming…

There are more than 16 million retail workers in the United States, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and this year many big-name stores asked their employees to work through the Thanksgiving holiday. It seems the frenzy of Black Friday has paved the way for the new Black Thursday, and at least a dozen stores—including Best Buy, Walmart and Target—opened their doors in the middle of Turkey Day.
 The employees most affected by this trend are likely to be working part time for low wages, and despite their low income many are also the primary earners in their households.
 —Von Diaz Colorlines.com
…

In 2010, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, which represents Florida’s tomato pickers, launched the Fair Food Program (FFP). This initiative ensures decent wages and working conditions for pickers. Every fast-food corporation that sources its tomatoes from Florida has signed on to the plan except Wendy’s.
 Students, farmworkers and activists across the country protested the week of November 15 to demand that Wendy’s sign the FFP.
 In Columbus, near Wendy’s HQ, more than 200 protested. “Students and residents in Wendy’s hometown will not stop until Wendy’s makes a verifiable commitment to the Fair Food Program,” said Cruz Bonlarron Martinez of the Student/Farmworker Alliance. —Aaron Cantú…

When the media frenzy subsides and Republicans run out of scare stories, the country will be faced with the most important question about Obamacare: Can it deliver what it promised? Thanks to the Affordable Care Act, a new business model is rapidly emerging in the medical-industrial complex that, in theory, can dramatically reduce the inflated costs of healthcare while serving everyone—rich and poor, healthy and sick. But the reformed system will also still rely on the market competition of profit-making enterprises, including insurance companies. A lot of liberal Democrats, though they voted for Obama’s bill, remain skeptical. 
 “In the long arc of healthcare reform, I think [the ACA] will ultimately fail, because we are trying to put business-model methods into the healthcare system,” said Washington Representative Jim McDermott. “We’re…

 “Dance? Dance is pretty much just people dancing.” The choreographer Mark Morris is responding to a question from one of fifty or so earnest music lovers gathered for a performance of his work. It is the second night of the Ojai Music Festival, held in the bucolic hippy enclave of Ojai, California, about a two-hour drive northeast from LA. Morris is looking very pleased with himself, in rumpled cargo shorts, a red polo shirt, matching red socks and Franciscan-style sandals. With his broad chest and even broader belly, a scraggly beard, leonine head of graying hair and gleaming greenish eyes, he looks like a Welsh poet, a mischievous Buddha, a disheveled and possibly disreputable emperor. In his right hand he daintily clasps a tartan umbrella angled to protect his eyes…

@chrislhayes The Thanksgiving Turkey Pardon tradition must look deeply bizarre and perverse to people in other countries, future observers.
 @RichardKimNYC Low wages>low prices >low wages>low prices. The #BlackFriday vicious circle.
 @WorkingAmerica There is no economic excuse for Walmart’s low wages. They can pay a living wage and meet obligations to shareholders. #WalmartStrikers 
 @fightfor15 A very special happy holiday to @WholeFoods workers who won today off by going on strike. Collective action gets the goods.
 @JessicaValenti Sex is a vital piece of people’s lives, health and happiness—wanting to have it without fear of pregnancy is moral & just #HandsOffMyBC
 @JillFilipovic A Thing Everyone Should Know: Hobby Lobby insurance used to cover birth control. Then Obamacare became an issue & they pulled coverage.
 letters@thenation.com…

On the campaign trail this year, Bill de
Blasio repeatedly channeled New Yorkers’ anger over gentrification, the widespread sense that the city is turning into a playground for the rich that locks out everyone else. “I see people suffering and feeling like they’re losing their grip on the place, and my job is to help New Yorkers live in New York. It’s not to clear the place out and see it fully gentrified,” the mayor-elect was quoted in New York magazine in June. 
 That means when de Blasio takes office, he’ll be attempting to solve a problem that is plaguing major urban centers all over the world. Housing prices are soaring in San Francisco as technology workers stream into once-affordable neighborhoods like the Mission District. In June, London housing prices…

It was in London that I had, for the first and only time in my life, the displeasure of seeing Evelyn Matthei, the right-wing candidate who aspires to become Chile’s new head of state and who will, according to all the polls, be resoundingly beaten by former President Michelle Bachelet on December 15. 
 My unintended encounter with Matthei happened on October 8, 1999, a few blocks from the Thames, in front of the magistrates’ court on Bow Street, where British judge Ronald Bartle was about to announce whether Gen. Augusto Pinochet, arrested a year before by Scotland Yard for crimes against humanity, could be extradited to Spain. As I happened to be in the English capital on my way to a literary festival with my wife, Angélica, I decided…

Eighty-two years after being pulled off a Memphis-bound freight train, baselessly accused of raping two white women, threatened with lynching and subjected to years of blatant miscarriages of justice, the three Scottsboro Boys who had not yet been acquitted or pardoned were posthumously cleared by the State of Alabama on November 21. 
“Today is a reminder that it is never too late to right a wrong,” one state legislator said. But however important as a symbolic gesture, the overdue action only underscored the fact that justice delayed is justice denied: though all nine Scottsboro Boys were out of prison by 1950, none had easy lives after being acquitted or paroled. One died in prison after being convicted of manslaughter; another was, again, falsely convicted of rape; and another killed his…

This past April, the Youth Against Settlements website posted a letter from Samer Tariq Issawi, a Palestinian imprisoned by the Israeli government. “I invite you to visit me, to see a skeleton tied to his hospital bed, and around him three exhausted jailers,” he wrote. “Sometimes they have their appetizing food and drinks around me. The jailers watch my suffering, my loss of weight and my gradual melting.”
 Initially locked up in 2002 for violent crimes, Issawi was released in 2011 as part of the Gilad Shalit prisoner exchange. In July 2012, Israeli forces imprisoned him again after he violated the terms of his parole by traveling to the West Bank. A military committee refused to let him see the evidence against him as it sought to impose the remainder…

The Silence of Animals On Progress and Other Modern Myths. By John Gray. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 228 pp. $26. If there is one issue in contemporary life that supposedly defines the progressive nature of liberal societies, it is gay rights. Over the past half-century, most of the world’s Western democracies have seen incredible strides toward fuller acceptance of gay people. In the United States, the pace is, if anything, increasing, as each step toward full equality—from the striking down of anti-sodomy laws, to the Supreme Court’s recent decision voiding the Defense of Marriage Act, to the increasing number of state legislatures legalizing gay marriage—builds on prior ones. 
 The sense of history moving forward is not limited to people who cheer on this expansion of rights. When Justice Antonin…

One of the greatest challenges facing American education today is a fantasy, spun by billionaire-funded “think tanks” and often repeated uncritically by
politicians and pundits, that our schools are failing, that teachers are shirking their responsibilities and that unions are
 the root of the problem. Unfortunately, the peddlers of these distortions have held the microphone for so long that the word “reform” is now associated with the crudest assaults on the very infrastructure of public education.
 It’s not that reform isn’t called for. Schools are beset with difficulties, mostly born of the inequalities rampant in the larger society. But, as ought to be obvious, education reform must be in the public interest—on behalf of public schools and the children who attend them—rather than private interests, furthering “the corporate agenda for public…

The forces of science and sanity scored a partial victory on November 22, when the Texas State Board of Education gave preliminary approval to fourteen new science textbooks that provide unqualified, unadulterated descriptions of both evolution and climate change. Texas’s SBOE has long been a warren of creationists and climate-change deniers eager to use their position to muddy the teaching of basic science in public schools—a serious problem, since the choices that get made in Texas, the second-largest textbook market in the country, end up influencing the larger textbook landscape.
 Four years ago, the board passed new curriculum “standards” meant to force textbook companies to present weaker treatments of evolution and global warming. It followed up by trying to pack the textbook review teams with junk-science zealots. But thanks to…

Can it really be the holiday season already? With one turkey down (don’t forget latkes on the side) and one to go, it’s time to take out the checkbook and support groups that are trying to make the world a little happier and fairer all year round.
 1. Texas Abortion Funds. Governor Rick Perry and the GOP-dominated State Legislature have managed to shut down a third of Texas abortion clinics, leaving women in vast swaths of the state stranded without services. Many are poor and face grueling and costly journeys to the nearest provider. If you make only one charitable gift this year, help state abortion funds finance their care. Make out your check to National Network of Abortion Funds, with “Texas” in the memo line. National Network of Abortion…

Throughout the Muslim world, a
groundswell of feminist sentiment is growing among women who are seeking to reclaim Islam and the Koran for themselves. For decades, many women believed they had to choose between their Muslim identity and their belief in gender equality. It was an impossible choice—one that involved betraying either their faith or their feminist consciousness. Four years ago, a global movement called Musawah—“equality” in Arabic—began to make the case that women can fight for justice and equality from within Islamic tradition. For many Muslim women, this came as a revelation.
 Musawah was spearheaded by twelve women, from countries as diverse as Egypt, Gambia, Turkey and Pakistan, who spent two years laying out the movement’s guiding principles. It was officially launched in 2009 at a meeting in Kuala Lumpur…

When Aaron Swartz committed suicide 
at the age of 26 in January, the online world was stunned. He had been the golden boy of the Internet—a leader in the advocacy of online rights who had also made major programming contributions to some of the most important platforms on the Web. 
 Why did he kill himself? His friends and family are convinced it was because unrelenting federal prosecutors indicted him on thirteen felony counts, threatening to put him away for up to ninety-five years. There is certainly no disputing that Swartz found himself on the wrong side of prosecutors who were going to do everything in their power to incarcerate him, even though it is now clear that he committed no crime. But apart from the tragedy of his death,…

Never mind the cocaine. When I remember the 1970s, I think of roller disco: dense crowds of people jacked high off the floor on their four-wheeled boots, zooming, teetering, slipping in and out of control as they showed off for one another. That’s the dizzying sensation that David O. Russell keeps spinning you into in his deliriously enjoyable American Hustle, a combo caper film, romantic comedy and political satire based on the FBI’s 1978 Abscam operation. How loosely based, only a disco pedestrian would ask. As the opening title says, “Some of this actually happened.”
 So much garrulous energy comes spilling out of the movie that before the plot can get well under way, three different voiceovers are already competing for your attention. The first gives the viewpoint of Irving…