Innehållsförteckning för Sep-14-15 - 9/21/2015 från The Nation

@thenation.com The End of Water Sasha Abramsky’s “Life on the Wrong Side of the Drought” [August 3/10] is excellent in many ways. His description of people in poverty who suffer from lack of water is priceless. But alack! He undermines his article with one gargantuan and egregious omission: animal agriculture. California’s meat and dairy industries suck up 47 percent of the state’s water. It’s a staggering amount used for livestock: 4.8 trillion gallons per year, drop by drop by drop. But Abramsky doesn’t drop one word about factory farming in his article. That’s a very huge elephant he’s ignoring. GENE GORDON WALNUT CREEK, CALIF. The State of California should start aggressively enforcing the public-trust doctrine, a well-established common-law principle that imbues the state with a fiduciary duty to protect public…

The New York Times recently shocked us with the gritty details of Amazon’s high-stress workplace. There are many ways the company amps up the pressure— encouraging anonymous complaints against coworkers, regularly culling the ranks, and relentlessly tracking performance. But one tactic is familiar to many American workers: long hours. “You can work long, hard, or smart, but at Amazon.com you can’t choose two out of three,” CEO Jeff Bezos told shareholders in 1997. Republicans, far from pushing back against the demand for endless hours, have encouraged Americans to work more. “People need to work longer hours and, through their productivity, gain more income for their families,” Jeb Bush said, explaining how he’d get to 4 percent yearly economic growth. (He later backpedaled by claiming that he only meant those who…

Nearly one in three women in the United States will have had at least one abortion by the time they reach menopause. Some will have had more than one. Where are they? In a recent piece on the New York Times op-ed page, I called on them to break their silence. Thanks to clandestine videos produced by the Center for Medical Progress, an anti-abortion outfit, Planned Parenthood is in its hour of need. Independent clinics all over the country are closing due to laws that purport to protect patient safety but are actually intended to put clinics out of business. Ostracism, death threats, bombings, and arson are driving providers out of the field and discouraging new ones from entering it. Restrictions intended to shame women and raise the cost of…

EARLIER THIS YEAR, BUZZFEED UNCOVERED A 1979 TELEVISION INTERVIEW WITH HILLARY Clinton—then Hillary Rodham—who had just become first lady of Arkansas. In the halfhour video, we see a young woman in oversize glasses, calm and smiling as the host grills her about whether she’s too liberal, too feminist, too career-oriented to fit into her new role. The host tells her that she probably cost her husband votes by keeping her last name. (She would later give in and change it.) “You’re not a native,” he says. “You’ve been educated in liberal Eastern universities. You’re less than 40. You don’t have any children…. You practice law.” (She assures him that she and Bill plan to have children and adds, “I’m not 40, but that hopefully will be cured by age.”) After…

THEY EMERGE ONE AFTER THE OTHER—THE anti-austerity parties, the purveyors of hope, the new or newly popular leaders and formations—from Greece to Spain to Ireland, from Turkey to Israel, from Burlington to Britain. They rally thousands, speak out for the dispossessed, challenge moribund elites; they are vilified as populist, deluded, dangerous; they win elections (Greece’s Syriza, Barcelona’s Mayor Ada Colau) or cross parliamentary thresholds (Israel’s Arab Joint List or Turkey’s HDP). They are in a sense successors to mass movements (Occupy, the indignados, Gezi Park, the Arab Spring). They glow for a short time on the bleak world stage; they are blocked, or fail, or fade, and new ones take their place. Jeremy Corbyn puts his bid for the Labour Party leadership in that company. “There is some kind of…

The Democratic National Committee needs to adapt to the new politics of 2016. Instead of constraining debate, as it has so far, the DNC should change course and encourage an open and freewheeling discourse. This is not just the right choice; it’s the politically practical thing to do. Like it or not, the 2016 campaign is in full swing, and Americans are engaging with it. A record-breaking 24 million viewers tuned in to watch the August 6 GOP debate—more Americans than voted in all of the Republican primaries and caucuses of 2012 combined. It’s easy to dismiss these debates as “clown car” spectacles, considering the atrocious statements coming from Donald Trump and his apprentices. Yet since that first debate, Trump and other Republicans have seen their numbers spike in polls…

This occasional election-season column will focus on the deeper disorders of our politics—those evaded or actively concealed by the money-drenched campaigns. One of the hardest-fought battles early in the current presidential campaign is the showdown between Benjamin Netanyahu and Barack Obama over who runs US foreign policy. Neither man, of course, will be on the ballot next year, but if Bibi succeeds in defeating Barack’s nuclear deal with Iran, it will cast a long, dark shadow over the presidential contenders and the prospects for war or peace. This is not the first time the Israeli prime minister has bluntly intruded on US politics, making common cause with the Republican Party’s relentless efforts to demean and disparage the American president. Together, Bibi and the GOP are now trying to poison public…

In May of 1993, The Nation published its first piece about Hillary Clinton. In “The Male Media’s Hillary Problem,” Katha Pollitt wrote that she was “no fan of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s politics,” but she also criticized those male journalists who took out their own career anxieties on the first lady: “It’s funny how those who recoil at Hillary’s position in the Administration return to the old comic view of marriage, in which any husband more congenial than Genghis Khan is assumed to be putty in the hands of his wife, and any wife less demure than Pat Nixon is assumed to be a shrew…. In women, power is always seen as sexual. That’s why people can half-believe all the rumors about Hillary, mutually exclusive though they be: let’s see, a…

THERE IS NO SOUND ON EARTH LIKE THAT OF a quiet man, a dignified man, exploding in primal grief. Nothing compares to it—not fingernails scraping on a blackboard, not the whir of a dental drill through enamel. Nothing. It is the howl of absolute horror, a keening black hole of noise that sucks in everything else. It pulls you into the abyss—extraordinary, out of character, it brooks no dissent. This, the sound announces, is about forever. I heard this noise as I cradled the phone to my left ear in March 2010. I was at home in Sacramento, California, perched desolate on a sofa in the TV room, my wife and children in another room. Six thousand miles away, my father was sitting next to his father’s body at my…

THE BEST SCIENCE-FICTION WRITERS ARE the peripheral prophets of literature—outsiders who persuade us to explore an often uncomfortable vision of the future that shows us not only what might be, but also what should never be allowed to happen, thereby freeing our imaginations from the shackles of our blind rush toward so-called progress. One such prophet lives 90 miles off the coast of Florida, in Havana, and goes by the name of Yoss. In A Planet for Rent, translated from the Spanish by David Frye (Restless Books; paper $15.99), which is set, a little too closely for comfort, sometime in the 21st century, Earth is about to face total collapse, but luckily for humans, this hasn’t gone unnoticed: “The minds of the galaxy had been keeping an eye on humans…

Birthright citizenship—the principle that any person born in the United States is automatically a citizen—has been embedded in the Constitution since the ratification of the 14th Amendment in 1868. This summer, it has suddenly emerged as a major issue in the Republican presidential campaign. Following the lead of Donald Trump, candidates like Rick Santorum, Bobby Jindal, Ted Cruz, and Rand Paul have called for the repeal or reinterpretation of the amendment, to prevent children born to undocumented immigrants from being recognized as American citizens. The situation abounds in ironies. Now a Republican target, the 14th Amendment was for many decades considered a crowning achievement of what once called itself the party of Lincoln. Today, moreover, birthright citizenship stands as an example of the much-abused idea of American exceptionalism, which Republicans…

Finally, the itinerant adjunct-professor community has a hometown paper—wherever “home” may be. Founded by Dushko Petrovich, a New Yorker who travels to teaching jobs in three other states, the Adjunct Commuter Weekly addresses “the lifestyle needs and shared interests of a rapidly growing and increasingly influential demographic”—adjunct professors, the creation of our privatized universities’ collapsing tenure system. The publication’s design is a parody (or perhaps the reality?) of those terrible departmental-newsletter aesthetics: the shaded box, the clip art, the blurry professional head shot. Its highly entertaining, rage-tinged poetry, essays, and surrealist fiction about the adjunct life will distract a precarious professional from grading on the Greyhound all the way from New Haven to Boston. Noting the swelling ranks of educators without healthcare and often living below the poverty line, ACW…

CHRIS CHRISTIE, PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE When thinking now of poor Chris Christie, My heart goes out. My eyes grow misty. The White House door to him was shut, ’Twas said, unless he lost that gut. So bariatric work was done. He dropped some weight—though not a ton, Enough at least so he could chase That White House dream. He’s in the race. But he’s got problems in his state, And Bridgegate came to demonstrate That some of Christie’s straight-talk luster Was based on just a bully’s bluster. So now, despite his smaller tum, He’s near the bottom of the scrum. What must, I’m thinking, make him frown Is all the food that he turned down— The sausage pizzas he rejected So, slimmer, he could be elected, The hamburgers he could have…

London STOP ME IF YOU’VE HEARD THIS BEFORE: A grizzled left-winger with a bold anti-austerity message begins what everyone assumes is a quixotic quest for elected office. His campaign provokes an unexpected wave of public enthusiasm, drawing cheering crowds that embarrass his rivals, and inspiring hordes of previously disaffected young people. Yet the media continue to insist that as an unabashed socialist with no national executive experience, he remains unelectable, while senior figures in his party warn of dire consequences if voters refuse to grow up and settle for a politician whose coronation has begun to seem less inevitable with every passing day. For an American, especially, it is impossible to witness the growing excitement here over Jeremy Corbyn’s candidacy for the leadership of the Labour Party without being reminded…

Of the many names given the brutal, black-flag-waving entity currently marauding its way across the rubble of Syria and Iraq, ISIL is the strangest and the most ironic. The L in the acronym favored by the US State Department stands for “Levant,” a term that for centuries referred to a part of the world where cultures met, borders blurred, and religions, languages, and peoples cross-bred—for better or for worse. In English, the word “Levantine” has long been a pejorative, and at a certain colonial point referred to those upwardly mobile non-Muslim Middle Easterners considered contemptible by commentators of various stripes for being neither here nor there, whether socially or ethically. “Among this minority are to be found individuals who are tainted with a remarkable degree of moral obliquity,” sniffed onetime…

ACROSS 1 Graph to once again take advantage of color (10) 6 Touched fabric (4) 10 Creature you might find in Australia: dead ape (7) 11 Verify argument against a company (7) 12 Tuna salad infested with Rhode Island rodent (6) 13 Where some clergy live, a tabloid is taken in by wrongdoing (8) 14 Actor is angry, flailing about in horse-drawn vehicle (4,5) 16 Bird repressing a cry of pain, namely… (2,3) 18 …a warning from Princess Irene (5) 20 Writing, as I foment trouble! (9) 22 Adventure in Space ruined by commercial exploitation, at first (8) 24 Bricks bother the elite, for the most part (6) 26 Insignificant four (or six) involved in experiment (7) 27 Location in Rome that’s entirely water, we hear (4,3) 28 The Return of the…