Innehållsförteckning för March 7, 2016 från The Nation

@thenation.com Deadly Inequality Congratulations to Seth Freed Wessler on his article about im-migrants incarcerated in privatized prisons [“Separate, Unequal, and Deadly,” Feb. 15]. These human beings don’t deserve to be treated differently from any other prisoner in the federal system. I’ve seen my share of “bad institutions” in over 30 years of travel and visits to 828 jails in 49 states and numerous prisons in the United States and beyond. Based on these visits, I’m not surprised by what Freed Wessler described. Too often I found such prisons under-staffed, and the staff undertrained. What is really sad is that the Fed-eral Bureau of Prisons now applies a double standard when it comes to confining immigrants. Anybody who has read American correctional history understands that up until court involvement in the…

COMMENT Antonin Scalia was a paradoxical figure. The late Supreme Court justice is widely credited as one of the most brilliant and important jurists in American history, having changed legal debates on the fundamental question of how judges should interpret the Constitution. But at the same time, he was on the losing side of many of the Court’s most important decisions, including those that upheld the Affordable Care Act, affirmed Roe v. Wade, struck down sodomy prohibitions, extended judicial review to Guantánamo detainees, recognized same-sex marriage, permitted affirmative action, and invalidated the death penalty for juveniles. For a historically influential judge, he lost a remarkable number of headline cases. So how influential was he really? Of course, many great justices have been on the losing side of important cases. Indeed,…

Bush v. Gore. Hobby Lobby. Citizens United. Gutting the Voting Rights Act, affirmative action, gun control, the Violence Against Women Act, and—one last middle finger raised against human progress—EPA regulations to control global warming. These are just a few of the disastrous 5–4 Supreme Court decisions in which Justice Antonin Scalia, who died last week at the age of 79, participated. If it were all up to him, we’d be even worse off: He was in the minority voting against the Affordable Care Act and same-sex marriage, and in favor of people being executed for crimes they committed as children. In his world, women would be barred from the Virginia Military Institute (and who knows where else), Roe v. Wade would be long overturned, and Miranda warnings would be history.…

Of the many figures that Donald Trump has been compared to, perhaps the most precise antecedent for his style of right-wing populism is Huey Long, quasi-dictator of Louisiana during the Great Depression. In January 1935, the broadcaster Raymond Gram Swing warned Nation readers not to underestimate his appeal. As one of Long’s opponents said, “The North…is misled into dismissing him as a clown and has no conception of Huey’s talents and of his almost invincible mass appeal.” Swing concurred: “When his hour strikes, Huey will attack the rest of America with the same vehemence” with which he took over Louisiana. “He will pose as a misunderstood man…. He will be direct, picturesque, and amusing, a relief after the attenuated vagueness of most of the national speaking today…. He will assail…

Once again, Justice Antonin Scalia is at the center of a presidential-election controversy. Fifteen years ago, in December 2000, he was a part of the 5–4 Supreme Court majority in Bush v. Gore that halted the Florida recount and handed the election to George W. Bush. The much-maligned decision is a regrettable example of the Court placing politics above the law, with five Republican-appointed justices ignoring constitutional principles to propel a new Republican president into office. In later years, Justice Scalia’s defense of the case boiled down to a breezy “Get over it!” On February 13, Scalia, ever brilliant, witty, and unrepentant, died at the age of 79. His death creates a vacancy on a closely divided Court that decides, often by a single vote, some of the nation’s most…

When asked directly whether environmental racism was at play in Flint’s water crisis, Michigan Governor Rick Snyder replied last month, “Absolutely not.” But the city’s money-saving shortcuts have now poisoned, with their own tap water, up to 8,000 children as well as many other residents, most of them black. “Environmental racism” describes the fact that people of color and low-income people are most likely to be situated near sources of contamination and away from clean water, air, and soil. A city like Flint, where more than half of the population is black in a state that’s nearly 80 percent white, and where the poverty rate is above 40 percent, is a textbook case, whatever Governor Snyder says. Across the country, African Americans are more than twice as likely as whites…

In the run-up to South Carolina’s hotly contested GOP primary, Donald Trump leads the field with support from 35% of the Palmetto State’s Republican voters, according to Public Policy Polling. Trump’s supporters revealed additional thoughts in the survey, including: • 38% say they wish the South had won the Civil War; • 70% support flying the Confederate flag at the State Capitol; • 80% support a ban on Muslims entering the US; • 33% think practicing Islam should be made illegal; and • 31% would support a ban on gays and lesbians entering the country as well.…

THE IMMEDIATE CRISIS MAY HAVE PASSED, BUT MOST AMERICANS STILL HAVEN’T RECOVERED from the worst economic disaster since the Great Depression. Wealthy Americans, on the other hand, are doing better than ever. In the three years after the recession hit, economist Emmanuel Saez has calculated, the top 1 percent captured an incredible 91 percent of the nation’s income growth. This latest surge in inequality has not gone unnoticed. In 2011, the Occupy movement’s “We Are the 99 Percent” rallying cry thrust our nation’s great divide onto the center stage of American politics. In 2014, an international best seller from a previously unknown French economist, Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, sounded the alarm about the global plutocracy that will emerge if current trends continue. In 2015, Black Lives Matter…

The streets were old, but all the people were young, Striding forward with great purpose, Girls smiling openly in the faces of boys. Not every boy noticed, but we all kept walking forward, Over the bridges, under the trees, Streets not growing wider But the buildings growing taller, taller than the trees, And not just taller but more mannered, ornamental, asking also to be seen. How did this happen? Where were our parents, our teachers, People who long before us had worn Footpaths into roads, roads into thoroughfares? We walked to the park, to the station, Skin beneath our sideburns soft as a girl’s. We watched the swan’s nest growing larger Though we never saw the swan build anything. It sat along the riverbank or floated placidly across the water…

340 Days that President Obama has left in his second term, counting from the date of Antonin Scalia’s death 125 Longest period, in days, that Congress has taken to vote on a Supreme Court nominee 25 Average number of days before a Supreme Court nominee has been confirmed, rejected, or withdrawn their name 6 Number of justices confirmed in a presidential-election year since 1900 “Any president’s judicial nominees, after full debate, deserve a simple up-or-down vote.” Mitch McConnell, current Senate majority leader, back in 2005…

Justice Antonin Scalia, who spearheaded the Supreme Court’s hard-right turn, didn’t always follow his own best advice. In his dissent to Romer v. Evans, a 1996 case concerning discrimination against LGBTQ people, he wrote: “It is our moral heritage that one should not hate any human being or class of human beings.” But in the same dissent, he attacked same-sex attraction as “reprehensible” and compared it to “murder,” “polygamy,” and “cruelty to animals.” Scalia’s bile toward LGBTQ people spilled into his 2003 dissent in Lawrence v. Texas, in which he sided with the “many Americans [who] do not want persons who openly engage in homosexual conduct as partners in their business, as scoutmasters for their children, as teachers in their children’s schools, or as boarders in their home.” He also…

Whether Donald Trump will win the Republican nomination, no one can tell—but what’s already clear is that he’s brought fascism back into the mainstream. At his rallies, Trump promises to make America great again by pouring scorn on women, Mexicans, African Americans, Asians, immigrants, LGBT people, the disabled, his opponents, and reporters who dare to criticize him. Every time he comes up with a new insult, his supporters whoop and cheer, seemingly confident in the belief that they are not now, nor would they ever become, one of his targets. Lately, he has taken to picking out individual protesters—a Black Lives Matter activist, a Muslim woman, a Sikh man—and offering them up to the jeering crowd, before having security escort them out. The message is unmistakable: There is no room…

WE KNOW OUR FUTURE DEPENDS ON FINDING A WAY TO KEEP fossil fiuels in the ground. But who should bear the cost of the transition to a clean-energy economy? Developing nations like India and China have rightfully argued that the wealthy industrialized countries must cut their emissions fastest and deepest, since they’ve prospered the most, historically, from carbon consumption. The same logic applies in the United States, where the households of the top 1 percent account for significantly more than their fair share of this country’s energy use. America’s super-rich drive bigger cars, heat larger homes, and log more air-fight miles, often in luxury private jets. But our heaviest carbon users don’t pay the real social and economic costs of such activities; they face no surcharge or monetary consequence for…