Innehållsförteckning för Jun-15-15 från The Nation

@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…

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…

On May 23, Cuyahoga County Judge John O’Donnell exonerated Cleveland policeman Michael Brelo, who had been charged with voluntary manslaughter in the deaths of Timothy Russell and Malissa Williams. The facts of the case, as recounted in the judge’s lengthy opinion, are these: Russell and Williams were driving in a 1979 Malibu when, at about 10:30 on the evening in question, they were stopped by an officer who says that Williams shouted out the window, “What the fuck did we do this time?” In O’Donnell’s less-than-coherent description, the officer then “decided not to pursue the stop, which he initiated after Russell turned left without a signal because he had seen Russell do a possible drug deal a few minutes earlier outside the nearby men’s homeless shelter.” That officer “returned to…

ACROSS 1 Spot vehicle on concrete moving forward (11) 9 I can’t burst inflammation by making a scene (6,3) 10 Fish taco’s number 1 with a bun (5) 11 Actor Treat smashed pottery (5-5) 12 Talk with hipster taking heroin (4) 13 Victorian critic to go downhill in race (6) 14 Superlatively weak charge consecrated (8) 18 Wild animals covered with fuzz and connective tissue (8) 20 Outside lair, I returned feeling tense (2,4) 23 Tuna salad for 22’s mother (4) 24 Gum coating Howard Dean initially told a story (10) 26 Peg follows you around Monaco with private student (5) 27 Someone providing an answer cut short relaxation to think (9) 28 Regular face, defiant after an attack (11) DOWN 1 One variable star, full of energy! (7) 2…

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…

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…

The Nation has been thinking about the political implications of new technologies for 150 years. Consider this 1865 editorial about the laying of the transatlantic telegraph: “The cable may be the cord that is to bind nations together in a closer friendship than they have ever yet known, and be, indeed, a link in the chain of events that is to secure peace on earth and good-will to men. “Should it be successful…what a revolution it will work in many of the doings of men!” The changes would largely be “in favor of honest dealings,” The Nation thought, with “private mercantile affairs” most improved. “When all men are put on an equal footing of intelligence as to prices and markets, the advantages that used to come from private advices, or…

The future of policing, it seems, will look a lot like thepresent of policing, just faster and with more math. Instead of using inherent bias and simplistic statistics to racially profile individuals on a street, cops of the future will be able to use complicated statistics to racially profile people in their homes. In the summer of 2013, for instance, the Chicago Police Department implementeda pilot program intended to reduce violent crime. It used an algorithm developed by an engineer at the Illinois Institute of Technology to generate a “heat list” of roughly 400 people who were most likely to become perpetrators or victims of violence. Cops tracked down some of these individuals, showed up at their homes, and warned them they were being watched. Similar programs using technology have…

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…

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…

ABOUT A YEAR AGO, I WANGLED A MEDIA INVITATION TO A “LEADERSHIP DINNER” IN NORTHERN Virginia sponsored by the Intelligence and National Security Alliance. INSA is a powerful but little-known coalition established in 2005 by companies working for the National Security Agency. In recent years, it has become the premier organization for the men and women who run the massive cyberintelligence-industrial complex that encircles Washington, dc: The keynote speaker was Matthew Olsen, who was then the director of the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC). He used his talk to bolster the morale of his colleagues, which had recently been stung by the public backlash against the NSA’s massive surveillance programs, the extent of which was still coming to light in the steady release of Edward Snowden’s huge trove of documents. “NSA…

NICOLE KEPLINGER, 22, HAD LONG SEEN ADS ON FACEBOOK PROMISING FINANCIAL RELIEF, BUT SHE ALWAYS ignored them and assumed that they were scams. Keplinger was drowning in student debt after obtaining a worthless degree from the for-profit Everest College, whose parent corporation, Corinthian Colleges Inc., had recently collapsed under accusations of fraud and predatory lending. But when an offer arrived in her e-mail inbox in April—“Cut your student loan payment or even forgive it completely!”—she thought it seemed more legitimate than the rest, so she called the number. The person on the other end was aggressive. “They wanted my banking information, my Social Security number, my parents’ number and their information. I was like, ‘Wait a minute,’” Keplinger recalled. Even after she said that she lived on a fxed income…

In the spring of 1812, on the eve of commanding more than 600,000 soldiers to invade Russia, Napoleon Bonaparte laid out his plans for the future of Europe. “We need,” he told his former police minister, Joseph Fouché, “a European law code, a European high court, a single currency, the same weights and measures, the same laws. I must make all the peoples of Europe into a single people, and Paris, the capital of the world.” The French emperor had not previously expressed such vaulting ambitions, but as his empire swelled, he came to believe he could bring the continent a degree of unity that it had not known since the fall of Rome. After falling from power himself in 1815, he frequently referred back to these ambitions, and lamented…