Innehållsförteckning för October 12 - October 19, 2015 från The Nation

Missed Message? Kai Wright’s article “A Demand, Not a Plea” [August 31/September 7] states that the August 8 event at which two Black Lives Matter activists interrupted Bernie Sanders was a Sanders rally. That is incorrect: Senator Sanders was a late addition to the event, which was titled “Social Security, Medicare & Medicaid: Celebrating Decades of Success.” I am the chair of Social Security Works Washington, the primary sponsor of the event, and I initiated the invitation to Sanders. The event had been planned for over six months and was intended to highlight the success of the programs in serving the diverse communities of the Puget Sound region on the 50th anniversary of Medicare and Medicaid and the 80th anniversary of Social Security, as well as the need to expand…

The first sign that this was no ordinary literary event was the lady wandering around with a sousaphone. But then there’s nothing ordinary about the literary career of George Scialabba. Nation readers know him as the author of brilliant book reviews, going back to 1993, on a staggering number of topics and authors, from Edmund Wilson to Irving Kristol to Pier Paolo Pasolini to—just this past May—Steve Fraser. You might also know him for contributing masterpieces of the essay writer’s craft to publications like Agni and Salmagundi. For 35 years, however, faculty members at Harvard’s Center for Government and International Studies pretty much knew him as the dude who scheduled their seminars. So when George finally retired from the 9-to-5 job that sustained him, John Summers, the editor of The…

Ross Douthat, the New York Times columnist and anti-choice conservative Catholic, has responded at some length on his blog to my postelection column, in which I posed some pointed questions for pro-lifers. My format gives me much less space, but I’m going to try to take up his major points here. Then we can move on, which most of you have probably already done. 1) Illegal abortion. What would happen if the United States made abortion a crime? Experts cite very high rates of unsafe clandestine procedures in parts of the world where abortion is banned, but Douthat dismissed my example of Brazil—where, despite a virtually total ban, the abortion rate is higher than in the United States, and more than 200,000 women end up in the hospital each year—on…

THIS IS A PIVOTAL MOMENT FOR JUSTICE IN AMERICA. as we approach the 10th anniversary of john Roberts’s appointment as chief justice, we face a presidential election in which the future of the Supreme Court hangs in the balance. For decades, the Court has been a deeply conservative institution, defined largely by the Republican presidents who have appointed its life-tenured justices. Since Chief Justice Earl Warren retired in 1969, Republican appointees have outnumbered Democratic appointees 12 to four. Justices Antonin Scalia and Anthony Kennedy, vestiges of the Reagan administration, continue lending influence to a presidency that ended nearly 30 years ago. But it is also an aging Court ripe for change. Four justices (Scalia, Kennedy, Stephen Breyer, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg) will be in their 80s by 2018, likely giving…

› Parents Involved was the final nail in the coffin of Seattle’s integration efforts. In 2008, 34 of the city’s 98 schools were considered “racially imbalanced,” with a minority population 20 percentage points or more above the district average. This was in sharp contrast to the peak years of integration, when just one school was considered racially imbalanced. › The racial achievement gap at Seattle schools has remained significant in the wake of Parents Involved. In 2012, fewer than 40 percent of black third-graders were meeting or exceeding math standards, compared with 85 percent of their white peers. Fourth-grade reading tests revealed similarly stark disparities (53 percent compared with 90 percent). Addressing the gap has emerged as a priority in negotiations to resolve the city’s teachers strike. › Other districts…

› In the wake of Iqbal and Twombly, the percentage of motions to dismiss for “failure to state a claim” granted by federal courts has increased dramatically. A quantitative study published in the University of Richmond Law Review in 2012 found that the dismissal rate increased from 46 percent prior to Twombly to 61 percent in the wake of Iqbal. › Civil-rights cases were hit particularly hard by Iqbal and Twombly. A 2011 study published in the Kentucky Law Journal found that the percentage of motions to dismiss granted in employment- and housing-discrimination cases increased significantly. The number of discrimination cases dismissed in whole or in part for “failure to state a claim” rose roughly 350 percent from pre-Twombly to post-Iqbal.…

273 Number of botched executions in the United States since 1900 155 Number of exonerated death-row inmates since 1973 (the year the death penalty was reinstated) 3 Number of executions since the Glossip decision was reached in June 15 Number of executions using midazolam since 2013 7% Attempted lethal injections that fail $3M Average cost of executing a death-row prisoner $1.1M Average cost of keeping an inmate in prison for life 70% US citizens living in states that conducted an execution between 1996 and ’98 33% US citizens living in states that conducted an execution between 2011 and ’13…

London The political earthquake that delivered the leadership of Her Majesty’s Most Loyal Opposition into the hands of a white-bearded socialist vegetarian with a long history of opposing the monarchy continues to produce aftershocks. On September 12, Jeremy Corbyn, a 100–1 outsider on the left of the Labour Party who had trouble scraping together the required 35 nominations from fellow party members in Parliament to even enter the contest, was elected party leader with a whopping 60 percent of the vote. Much like Bernie Sanders’s campaign, Corbyn’s challenge to the ruling consensus on everything from the inevitability of austerity to Britain’s supposedly inveterate hostility to refugees attracted hundreds of thousands of enthusiastic, mostly younger voters. He transformed a contest that had been seen as a dreary coronation into a lively,…

Visiting Bolivia in July, Pope Francis apologized for the Catholic Church’s role in “crimes committed against the native peoples during the so-called conquest of America.” Yet just as The Nation was going to press, the church was about to commit another grievous wrong, one for which some future pope will have to apologize in turn: the canonization of Junipero Serra, late-18th-century founder of the California missions, a network of forced-labor camps where indigenous peoples were systematically abused, enslaved, and annihilated. “That spiritual fathers should punish their sons, the Indians, with blows,” Serra once wrote, “appears to be as old as the conquest of these kingdoms.” Seventy years ago, former Nation editor Carey McWilliams punctured the myth of benevolent mission evangelism in his classic Southern California: An Island on the Land,…

The 10th anniversary of John Roberts’s term as chief justice of the United States has incited a bout of amnesia in the ordinarily astute mind of the junior senator from Texas, whose recent denunciations of Roberts were swiftly complicated by the resurfacing of a National Review article he wrote in 2005 arguing that the then-nominee was “undoubtedly a principled conservative” and that “the Senate should confirm him swiftly.” Ted Cruz would have known better had he been reading The Nation. “Enthusiastic expansion of the power of the executive branch, whether in the guise of policing or the presidency, is the most consistent thread of Roberts’s career,” Bruce Shapiro wrote in these pages at the time. “In this sense he’s no conservative; he’s an apostle of big and often unreviewable government.”…

HUDSON V. MICHIGAN IS ONE IN A SERIES OF CASES IN WHICH the Roberts Court has blessed police officers with extraordinary power. This power authorizes cops to engage in the kind of violent and undemocratic policing that make places like Ferguson and Baltimore look less like American cities and more like the outposts of some totalitarian regime. The scandal, it turns out, is not bad-apple cops. The scandal is that the conservative justices on the Roberts Court have provided the legal framework for black lives not to matter to the police. The Constitution be damned: This was apparently the perspective of a Detroit police officer named Jamal Good, who admitted that he routinely violated the long-standing requirement that police “knock and announce” their presence before entering a home. Good found…

› Arbitration clauses, which can act as a barrier to class actions, are in widespread use by financial-service providers. A recent Consumer Financial Protection Bureau investigation found that 53 percent of credit-card issuers, 86 percent of private student loans from the largest lenders, and 88 percent of the largest mobile-wireless providers include arbitration clauses in their contracts. › While fewer than 8 percent of banks and credit unions include such clauses in their checking-account agreements, those that do represent 44 percent of insured deposits. › The CFPB’s review of the 1,060 arbitration cases filed by consumers between 2010 and 2011 found that only 341 cases resulted in decisions by arbitrators. Of those, 32 brought relief and 46 led to debt forbearance, with a combined total of less than $400,000. During…

PERHAPS THE MOST HIGHLY CHARGED CASE OF THE 2013 TERM began life as a series of modified “corporate personhood” jokes. Does the post–Citizens United notion of corporate personhood include the right of a corporation to have and practice a religious faith? Can a craft store go to church? Where does it park? Does it quilt its own hat? By the end of the term, nobody was laughing—especially not women. In Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, the Supreme Court held, by a 5–4 vote, that the Affordable Care Act’s contraception mandate violated the religious-freedom rights of corporations. The ACA required that many employers provide comprehensive insurance—including pricey birth-control coverage—to their workers. The pill can cost upward of $25 a month, and the onetime cost of an IUD can reach $900, not including…

It’s hard to exaggerate the damage inflicted on the American Israel Public Affairs Committee by the congressional defeat of its efforts to torpedo the Iran nuclear deal. It is not as if AIPAC won’t live to fight again, because it will, but this defeat has ruptured the status quo, possibly forever. The extent of its efforts to defeat the deal was unprecedented, even for a lobby known for its no-holds-barred political combat against past White House initiatives that it considered unfriendly to Israel. AIPAC and its cutout, Citizens for a Nuclear Free Iran, reportedly budgeted more than $20 million for a campaign that included television spots, full-page newspaper ads, and demonstrations at the offices of AIPAC-friendly members of Congress who appeared to be wavering, accompanied by threats and warnings from…

The fact is that Scott Walker never knew why he was running for president. He just knew that he wanted to be president. Before his formal announcement, Walker’s three years of positioning—rather than governing—Wisconsin had earned him something akin to front-runner status. He led the polls nationally and in key states. He had plenty of money. And he seemed to be the one candidate who genuinely appealed both to billionaires and to Tea Partisans. But Walker could only offer them old war stories about wrangling with unions in Wisconsin. That counted for something with wealthy Republican donors, but it didn’t mean much to the voters who would decide the winner of Republican caucuses and primaries. Polling shows that support for labor unions has been on the rise since 2009. Democrats…

In 2010, according to The New Republic, Jennie Linn McCormack was arrested for taking abortion-inducing medication and charged under a 1972 Idaho law that prohibits women from aborting their fetus themselves. McCormack was unemployed, living on $250 a month, and already a mother of three. She knew that an abortion would cost $400 to $2,000, depending on how far along she was. In 2014, Marlise Machado Muñoz was kept on life support in a Texas hospital under a state law that required her to be kept alive until her 14-week old fetus could be delivered. According to Think Progress, Muñoz’s family wanted to stop the extraordinary measures keeping her alive, but the hospital refused. After a grueling two-month legal battle, a judge ruled in favor of the family. In 2015,…

› The Supreme Court’s decision in Knox v. SEIU threatened the legality of fair-share fees, which cover the costs of collective bargaining and are not used for political activities. This ruling could carry a high price for workers. › According to a 2012 report from the Economic Policy Institute, workers who have collective-bargaining agreements with their employers (whether they’re part of a union or not) are 18.3 percent more likely to have health insurance, 22.5 percent more likely to have pensions, and 3.2 percent more likely to have paid leave than nonunion workers with comparable skills, experience, and education. › The EPI report also found that workers covered by collective-bargaining agreements earn 13.6 percent more on average than comparable workers who do not have such agreements.…

IN THE PAST NINE MONTHS, THE STATE OF OKLAHOMA HAS TRIED TWICE to execute Robert Glossip. Sentenced to death in 1998 for the murder of his boss, Glossip was one of four death-row inmates suing the state over its use of an unreliable drug cocktail that contributed to botched executions. In January, the Supreme Court issued a stay and agreed to hear his case; in a bitterly split 5–4 decision, the Court ruled that Oklahoma could continue to use the procedure. But when the state sought to execute Glossip on September 16, new evidence suggesting that he’d been framed by his codefendant prompted a state court to stay his execution again, a mere three hours before it was carried out. That court is working fast to review Glossip’s new claims,…

ACROSS 1 In the distance, an expedition in Africa without any clothes (4) 4 Passenger lists fine mess aboard parts of ship (9) 10 Person with property consisting of narrow passageway—mostly, it’s depressing (9) 11 Part of barrel? It’s ignited again (5) 12 Arnold, e.g., turned over bread with skill (7) 13 Professor’s funny bone (7) 14 Knitting equipment, demonstrating craft without necessity (10) 16 Doubtful second after the first (4) 18 Beginners in basketball exercised two hours one March (4) 19 “Packaging” sounds like psychiatrist talk (6-4) 24 Leader of radicals, in coalition, came together (7) 25 Exaggerated motion from fluid, wild cat (7) 26 On their faces, often, adult snakes exhibit slimy green spots (5) 27 Pests hiding in Western lair—don’t worry about it (5,4) 28 Filthy scum…