Innehållsförteckning för November 2, 2015 från The Nation

Judging the Court Kudos for the special issue “The Case Against the Roberts Court: A Decade of Justice Undone” [Oct. 12, 2015]. It is one of the best issues of The Nation that I have read. I agree completely with your indictment of the Roberts Court. In my opinion, John Roberts is the worst chief justice in the history of the Court except for Roger Brooke Taney. JOHN A. MATTA BRADENTON, FLA. It was distressing to read how the Roberts Court has turned legal precedents against their original intent and fashioned them anew to serve the rich and powerful. In so many ways, American courtrooms no longer deliver justice to ordinary people. David Cole observes [“The Roberts Court’s Greatest Hits?”, Oct. 12] that one more liberal on the Court would…

Immigration is now at the roiling center of the 2016 presidential-campaign conversation, thanks largely to Donald Trump, whose unlikely command of the Republican race is based in good part on his take on the immigration question. Trump’s outrageous lies and shocking prescriptions—build a wall along the entire southern US border, deport 11 million people, repeal birthright citizenship—are decidedly fringe notions. Yet he has succeeded in stoking nativist and racist sentiment in the party’s base and pushing the entire Republican field to the right. One wonders whether he will next call for sending the Statue of Liberty back to France. Trump’s anti-immigrant hysterics, to say nothing of his party’s successful efforts to paralyze immigration reform, are a far cry from the mood 50 years ago, when President Lyndon Johnson stood at…

At the press conference for the New York Film Festival’s screening of Steve Jobs, the film’s screenwriter, Aaron Sorkin, and Jobs’s biographer, Walter Isaacson, were repeatedly asked to address themselves to the film’s central question: “Had he been a bit nicer, could Jobs have put a dent in the universe the way that he did?” They were both pleased to see the issue raised, as it’s a big question (and one that might also be asked regarding, say, Pablo Picasso, Ted Williams, or Miles Davis, the subject of the NYFF’s closing-night film). You will be hearing a great deal about it as this extraordinary film opens nationwide and scoops up countless award nominations. But to focus on Jobs’s mercurial personality is also to obscure a far more important point about…

This brief item appeared in The Nation of August 31, 1940: “A new high in Jim Crow segregation was reached recently in Dania, Florida (near Miami). Bodies of Negroes buried in the Dania cemetery were dug up—with due legal formality—and carefully transported to a new cemetery reserved for Negroes.” The little information that exists about the episode is this: The Dania cemetery—on the old Dixie Highway— had been integrated since around the turn of the 20th century. But after a segregated cemetery was opened nearby, the remains of two dozen early black settlers were loaded onto a truck, driven across some railroad tracks, dumped in the ground, and covered with a pile of rubble and old tombstones. In 1985, a man named Marvin Merritt, now deceased, told the local paper…

ON A SPRING MORNING A FEW YEARS AGO IN ST. LOUIS, MISSOURI, Etta Daniels, a spry 72-year-old with oval wire-frame glasses, was in the northeast corner of Greenwood Cemetery, where she often came on Saturdays, searching for gravestones “before they disappear.” She’d already spent more than a decade helping families locate and honor their loved ones buried in Greenwood. That day, she was joined by 69-year-old Barbara Harris, who is “not usually one to go to the woods.” Wearing gardening gloves and long sleeves to keep off the poison ivy and bugs, Harris was hoping that, with Daniels’s help, she could find her great-grandmother’s grave. “We had to crawl over great big trees that had fallen,” Harris says of the trek through one of St. Louis’s oldest African-American cemeteries, founded…

ACROSS 1 Cut the budget severely to pinch a penny—that’ll make a big impression (6) 4 Where dozens can be found with wounds or bruises (8) 9 Cause trouble when discussing something that helped Charles get around? (5,4) 11 Wear down the rodent’s insides (5) 12 Tiny measure of anxiety from getting beheaded (8) 13 Space object sounds more substantial (6) 15 Host ignoring the odds of team scheme (5) 17 Precious walk-around, indeed (9) 18 French guardsman’s projectile: silver bread (9) 20 Take place of Orange County dog (5) 22 Obnoxious kid from Southern California is the subject of experiments (3,3) 23 See a friend beginning to mount a fruit tree (4,4) 26 Letter from the professor’s helper (5) 27 Fire engulfs center of Odessa neighborhood belonging to a…

Democrats took the debate stage in Las Vegas at a crucial moment in American history. As wealth inequality metastasizes to unsustainable levels, rich Americans and powerful corporations wield unprecedented—and growing—control over our politics. Voters are demanding answers. This deep dissatisfaction has fueled the surprising rise of Bernie Sanders, who now leads Hillary Clinton in several key primary states. In Las Vegas, the candidates largely followed his lead: There was a substantive discussion about free college tuition, government action to raise wages, prosecuting Wall Street criminals, and expanding Social Security. There was even an exchange about the merits of socialism. Early in the debate, Anderson Cooper actually had occasion to ask, “Is there anybody else on the stage who is not a capitalist?” The Democrats leaned eagerly left throughout the evening.…

In a 1937 radio address, the economist John Maynard Keynes said that “the boom, not the slump, is the right time for austerity at the Treasury.” The time to pay down debt isn’t when the economy is weak, since the necessary spending cuts and tax increases would exacerbate a recession, but instead when times are good. But what if good times aren’t right for austerity either? What if we should just service our debt—i.e., pay the minimum—and chill? This piece of advice is coming from an institution that, for many on the left, is synonymous with austerity: the International Monetary Fund. The IMF’s retiring research chief, Olivier Blanchard, is an MIT-trained New Keynesian, and the research team he oversaw during the Great Recession pushed the discussion into brand-new territory. A…

In a report commissioned by Cuyahoga County, Ohio, former FBI agent Kimberly Crawford concluded that the shooting of 12-year-old Tamir Rice by Officer Timothy Loehmann was “reasonable.” Here are five choice quotes from that report. 1“A twelve-year-old with a gun, unquestionably old enough to pull a trigger, poses a threat equal to that of a full-grown adult in a similar situation.” 2 “The quickest, most efficient and practical way for a law enforcement officer to forcibly bring about a timely halt to threatening actions is to deprive the subject’s brain of the oxygen necessary to continue conscious action.” 3 “…the fact that the weapon possessed by Rice was an airsoft gun is not relevant to a review of the reasonableness of Officer Loehmann’s actions.” 4 “…the 911 caller’s uncommunicated speculations…

41.3M Number of immigrants living in the United States 13% Percentage of the US population who are immigrants 31% Percentage of children living with poor families who have immigrant parents 414K People deported from the United States in fiscal year 2014 4.7M People who would be spared from deportation under an Obama executive order blocked by federal courts “My deportation will be your funding.” An undocumented youth interrupting a speech by Hillary Clinton to protest her campaign donations from private prison companies…

$44,888.16: Average yearly wage in the United States $5,155: Average annual salary of a worker in China’s private sector $3,200: Yearly base wage of a Foxconn worker at the start of 2012 $4,200: Yearly base wage of a Foxconn worker at the end of 2012, following reports on labor practices 64%: Percentage of Foxconn workers who say their pay doesn’t meet their basic needs, as of 2012 3,000: Apple logos carved by a Foxconn iPad worker per shift 14: Foxconn employees who committed suicide in 2010 9%: Wage increase for Foxconn workers after the wave of suicides at the company 25%: Quota increase for Foxconn workers after the wave of suicides…

In a world of complex and systemic violence, legal reason sometimes follows an imaginative narrative arc. Take the case of Charles K. Goodridge, a computer programmer in Texas, who sued Hewlett-Packard, his employer of nearly a decade, for racial discrimination. He lost his job as part of a settlement in that case. Already in his late 40s, he was unable to find other regular work and was eventually evicted from his apartment. As Anand Jahi, Goodridge’s cousin and a graduate student at Princeton, wrote in YES! Magazine, “economic devastation turned him into a trespasser.” And so, early on the morning of July 9, 2014, Goodridge was discovered in the fitness center of his former building by Francisco Ruiz, an erstwhile neighbor and off-duty county constable who moonlighted as a security…