Innehållsförteckning för Jul-06-15 - 7/13/2015 från The Nation

@thenation.com Magic Bullets, Dangerous Shields Katha Pollitt’s clarion essay [“Magic-Bullet Birth Control,” June 8] is a stark indictment of male politicians who want to make pregnancy irreversible. Their fetal protectionism imposes sectarian religious doctrine on our “free” country, denying women—mostly poor—a choice. Nations that do better in maternal and child health allow safe abortion as an option, while promoting contraception. Conservatives also oppose end-of-life choice, reflecting the religious tenet—starting with Adam and Eve—that human will is evil. As with the fetus, we sanctify patients in permanent vegetative states, such as Terri Schiavo. E. JAMES LIEBERMAN, MD POTOMAC, MD. I had an immediate, visceral reaction to Katha Pollitt’s column. I am a victim of the Dalkon Shield and have almost died twice, had two surgeries, and was hospitalized an additional four…

COMMENT The rebellion of House Democrats that blocked the president’s trade deal with Asia is more than a political humiliation for Barack Obama. The defeat shocked Washington, where the cynical rule is “to get along, you go along.” Even though the Obama-Boehner-McConnell forces are attempting to resuscitate the “fast-track” gimmick, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) fiasco will be remembered as the start of something far bigger—the revival of the Democratic Party as a born-again advocate for working people and economic justice. After 25 years of losing out to Wall Street and corporate interests, the party’s faithful base managed to take down its own president’s sweetheart deal with big money. The left-liberal policy groups and grassroots activists agitating for change stood their ground against the power elites and, for once, they triumphed.…

With roughly 16 months to go before the 2016 presidential election, it has already become clear that the long trend toward increasingly worse election coverage is not about to be interrupted. The primary problem—and I am already sick of saying this—is the inability of mainstream-media professionals to acknowledge the dominant role that unrestricted bribery plays in shaping our political discourse. Making matters worse is the related problem of a Republican Party in thrall to a series of postures determined, on the one hand, by its super-wealthy funders and, on the other, by the ignorant superstitions of its fundamentalist base. But there is a third problem at the center of our political universe: that of voluntary journalistic stupidity. It’s not that the journalists are stupid. It’s that they believe they must…

1919 DW Gibson reports in this issue on the shredding of rent-stabilization protections, one symptom of the latest housing crisis in New York City. According to a 1919 Nation article, another such crisis followed World War I. Lack of “a unified scheme of regional development” was one cause of that crisis, wrote 23-year-old Lewis Mumford: “The weakness of the city-planning movement up to the present has been due to its constriction within the present tangle of private property interests. In spite of the opportunity opened by the new transit lines, the entire development of the Bronx and Queens and hither-Brooklyn has been left in the hands of the realty corporations and private builders. It is hardly needful to point out that in this situation the financial profit of ground owner…

KSHAMA SAWANT STANDS AT A PODIUM INSIDE All Pilgrims Christian Church in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood, surrounded by brightly colored posters with messages that range from Stop the Violence to No Homophobes No Transphobes No Assholes No Excuses. She is speaking to a standing-room-only crowd, calling for the neighborhood to take “collective responsibility” for fixing its problems. “As an immigrant, as a woman, and as a person of color,” she tells them, “I know from firsthand experience what it means to even have verbal slurs directed at you. It never leaves you.” Sawant has called the meeting alongside the Gender Justice League to discuss a spike in violence, particularly against transgender women, in the rapidly gentrifying, historically gay neighborhood. She is asking the audience to suggest “neighborhood-based solutions” that she…

ACROSS 1 Around back of kitchen, attack a pancake (6) 4 Portal opened wide, nearly revolving with effort (8) 9 Money spent unwisely on overtime (3-4) 11 After a short time, cry uncontrollably about launch of evil policy the CIA depends on (7) 12 Carly improved synthetic fiber (5) 14 Mock authority imprisoning myself with Cheney endlessly (8) 16 Small tool to make part of a brake (4) 17 Nineteenth-century artifacts, collected initially in haphazard variation (10) 19 Lives with different man, almost exactly as hot (10) 21 Reversed sushi ingredient’s decrease? (4) 23 Jerk in retreat dodges grapefruit, lemons, and oranges (8) 25 Lots of grass in Oregon, ultimately breaking ordinances (5) 27 Protection for a finger that some might say is a thign? (7) 28 How Macbeth introduces…

Nearly a year ago, Eric Garner’s death on Staten Island while being arrested for selling loose cigarettes illustrated just how easily things get out of control with “broken windows” policing. It prompted a nationwide reexamination of the illogical premise that cops can best combat violent crime by racking up busts on petty offenses like littering, jaywalking, or playing music too loudly. Garner’s death was the first in a disturbingly long string of police killings of unarmed black men and children over the past 12 months. These outrages have radicalized what ought to be a self-evident statement that black lives matter. And yet, despite this scrutiny, the philosophy of “broken windows” policing still retains credibility with the mayors, councils, and police chiefs of most major American cities. If anything can shatter…

In early June, a little-noted bill got a historic boost. For the first time ever, Republicans sponsored a pregnancy bill, the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, which would require the country’s employers to make small adjustments— allowing more frequent bathroom breaks, providing a stool to sit on, switching a worker’s duties so they don’t include heavy lifting—so that pregnant employees can stay on the job. It sounds like a small thing, and for most employers it would be. But this is the first year that two Republican senators got on board with the idea that half the workforce may at some point become pregnant. Discrimination against pregnant employees is the clearest sign we have that the American workplace still operates under the archaic idea that men go to work and women…

If there’s one thing more disconcerting than Republicans opposing Barack Obama at every turn, it’s the rare occasion when they actually agree with him. True, the gridlock resulting from their dysfunctional obstinacy is unproductive. But there is something comically reassuring about the predictability of their childlike tantrums. If Obama said Rachel Dolezal was white, the GOP would swear blind she is black. So when Obama recently teamed up with congressional Republicans to try to ram through the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) against the wishes of the labor unions, his own party, and the progressive movement in general, he was modeling the kind of bipartisanship we could all do without. The TPP is a deal among the United States and 11 other nations in Asia, Australasia, and the Americas that has been…

2 Presidents who entered office never having married 24 Women who served as first ladies without being married to a president 1858 Year that the term “first lady” first appeared in print; it described President James Buchanan’s niece, who served in the role usually reserved for the president’s wife (Buchanan was a bachelor) 1993 First year that a first lady—Hillary Clinton—occupied an office in the West Wing “I’ve got a lot of friends. We’ll have a rotating first lady.” Lindsey Graham, when asked by the Daily Mail Online who would serve as the bachelor candidate’s first lady…

The US Department of Education announced last week that it will forgive outstanding loan debts of former students of Corinthian Colleges, the now-shuttered for-profit chain that preyed on those whom it described internally as “isolated” and “unable to see and plan well for the future.” The Nation’s Michelle Chen has been keeping an eye on this story for months. February 23 Fifteen former Corinthian students say they will refuse to pay off their student loans. “Their defiance aims to expose structural problems driving the financialization of higher education,” Chen writes. March 31 The Occupy-inspired Debt Collective, which helped organize the debt strike, handdelivers to the DoE hundreds of “Defense to Repayment” requests asking the government to forgive Corinthian students’ debt because the company lied about future job prospects for the…

In her widely reviewed new book Spinster, Kate Bolick charts her attempts to live beyond the marriage plot. Why, Bolick asks, should marriage define a 21st-century woman? Or a man, for that matter. Blueeyed South Carolinian Lindsey Graham, a far cry from the liberal, high-heeled Manhattanite smiling from Spinster’s cover, has seen his GOP presidential campaign derailed by bachelorhood. After joking to the Daily Mail Online that he would have a rotating first lady, he was forced into a round of apologetic interviews. One Vox headline read, with great pathos, “‘I don’t think I’m a defective person’: Lindsey Graham’s moving defense of being single.” Shouldn’t we all feel proud to be single or married, perhaps closer to our family, as Graham claims, or to our female friends, as Bolick does?…

IT IS 7:45 AM, AND 18 REAL-ESTATE professionals are gathered around a conference table in downtown Manhattan, a hairbreadth from Wall Street. They are agents, insurers, asset managers, investors—there is even an architect who uses her allotted 30 seconds of introduction to mention her knack for creating spaces with high-end finishes on economical budgets. Everyone is here to listen to Simon Moule speak. The topic, as described by the invitation, is “making sense of NYC Rent Stabilization Laws,” and Moule is a guru when it comes to understanding what he describes as “millions of rules.” The people in this room seek understanding with a specific endgame in mind: increasing capitalization of a building, if not a portfolio of buildings. As the lawyer who introduces Moule puts it: “If you know…

I have been outside less, I have taken to saying,in the days since my daughter was born—passive, as though it were somebody else who bore her. And bore her, I also havetaken to saying, as though she were a hole. I have witnessed a woodpecker force, through the week, a gape in my neighbor’sbarn side. I have watched as my daughterknocks, woodpecker-like, her searching mouth into my breast. But I don’t mean to say sheinstills in my body an absence. What nothing assembles within me was already there.…