The Nation Jun-15-15

@thenation.com Hidden in the Stacks Thanks for Zoë Carpenter’s article “Librarians vs. the NSA” [May 25]. There is a story behind the American Library Association’s advocacy of privacy issues related to the NSA. The ALA is an organization of 57,000 people with a huge number of subdivisions and a governing council. The most prominent advocate against the USA Patriot Act and NSA abuses and for the protection of whistleblowers has been the ALA’s Social Responsibilities Round Table (SRRT). Although the ALA has several intellectual-freedom bodies, it has been more timid than the article suggests. ALA opposition to the Patriot Act has been limited to Section 215, commonly known as the library-records provision. In contrast, the SRRT advocated opposition to the entire act. The SRRT has advocated support for whistleblowers by…

Despite all the hype about the Internet and its start-up offspring, the increase in fresh technological abilities has been accompanied by unprecedented levels of inequality. A small crop of high-tech companies now rank among the largest corporations on earth: Google ($368 billion in market capitalization), Facebook ($232 billion), and Apple ($742 billion), the last of which enjoys annual revenue—$183 billion—that makes it more prosperous than most nations. We’ve entered a new Gilded Age, with its own cutting-edge variations on yesterday’s robber barons. The Internet and associated technologies reflect and amplify the winner-take-all economy in which they are embedded, inseparable from the political and financial revolution that has been unfolding since the 1970s. Our high-tech tools are constrained by market incentives and government surveillance interests that are often intertwined. As multiple…

Two big issues helped Barack Obama secure the Democratic nomination, and with it the presidency, in 2008. The first was the Iraq War, which Obama had opposed when his chief rival, Senator Hillary Clinton, was voting to authorize George W. Bush’s use of military force. The second was trade policy, which Obama said had gone horribly awry with Bill Clinton’s advocacy of the corporate-friendly North American Free Trade Agreement. Although the mainstream media rarely covers trade debates with the seriousness they warrant, Obama understood that this was a critical issue in primary states like Wisconsin and Ohio. He ripped Hillary Clinton for once “talking about how great [NAFTA] was and how many benefits it would bring” and decried “a Washington where decades of trade deals…have been signed with plenty of…

85% Percentage of President Obama’s trade advisers in the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) negotiations who represent corporations 5% Percentage of US trade advisers who represent labor 75K Number of jobs eliminated by the US–South Korean free-trade deal, signed by President Obama in 2011 “I actually have had supporters of the deal say to me, ‘They have to be secret, because if the American people knew what was actually in them, they would be opposed.’” Senator Elizabeth Warren, on the TPP negotiations…

The night after Ireland’s vote counters announced the victory—by a margin of nearly two to one—of a constitutional amendment establishing marriage equality, my daughter and her partner left their Dublin flat to party in the streets with other ecstatic “yes” voters—thousands of lifelong residents alongside throngs of economic émigrés who had flocked back to their birthplace from London or Los Angeles or Seoul or Sydney as part of the unprecedented #HomeToVote campaign. My daughter found herself next to a man so overcome with emotion that he was unable to snap a picture of the occasion. He welcomed her offer to photograph him against the exhilarating backdrop, but couldn’t stop his tears. “I want to leave Ireland better than I found it,” one voter said. Ireland’s momentous vote is an occasion…

Thanks to Jeb Bush’s tongue-tied responses to repeated questions about his brother’s regrettable record as president, we finally had the “Should we invade Iraq?” debate we needed in 2002. And while “reality” did slightly better this time, the debate demonstrated yet again the power of far-right ideologues to pervert simple and obvious truths about the world in order to evade responsibility for the catastrophes their policies unleashed. Recall what we were told at the time: “There’s no debate in the world as to whether they have those weapons…. We all know that. A trained ape knows that,” Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld insisted. “This is going to be a two-month war, not an eight-year war,” the genial über-hawk William Kristol promised. Vice President Dick Cheney assured us that “we will, in…