Innehållsförteckning för Aug-18-14 -Aug-25-14 från The Nation

Drugs: Equal Opportunity Destroyer
 Re Ishmael Reed’s “The Suburban Curtain” [June 23/30]: I am a 78-year-old white male drug addict and alcoholic. I have a PhD, have taught at some of the most prestigious universities in the world and have been in Who’s Who in America since 1998. I have lived my whole life in the middle class. I entered recovery in 1987, thoroughly addicted to opiates. I relapsed several times, the most recent involving an overdose in September 2013. I began going to meetings of Narcotics Anonymous, Cocaine Anonymous and Alcoholics Anonymous in 1987 and have never stopped attending at least five times a week.
 This is my experience: all drugs (including alcohol) are the same—potentially addictive, potentially lethal; nearly all alcoholics also abuse narcotics; people use substances to…

With this issue, we’re inaugurating “The Score,” a monthly feature about the economy by Bryce Covert and Mike Konczal. 
 The wealth controlled by the top tenth of the top 1 percent has more than doubled over the past thirty years in the United States, approaching levels not seen since the 1920s. The left’s two recent intellectual blockbusters—Thomas Piketty’s bestselling Capital in the Twenty-First Century and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “The Case for Reparations”—published by The Atlantic—indicate the profound uneasiness with this trend.
 Wealth is the ownership of the productive economic elements in society, such as land and corporations. The wealthy control the direction of the economy, and they claim an increasing share of what it produces. But as their influence increases, they avoid being held to the same standard of accountability…

In the not-too-distant future, it’s entirely possible that religious freedom will be the only freedom we have left—a condition for which we can blame the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993. Passed practically unanimously, with support from Ted Kennedy to Orrin Hatch, the ACLU to Concerned Women for America, the bill was a response to the Supreme Court’s decision in Employment Division v. Smith. This case involved two Oregon members of the Native American Church who were denied unemployment compensation after being fired for using peyote, an illegal drug, in a religious ceremony. Justice Antonin Scalia’s majority opinion, which held that a law that applied to everyone and was not directed at religion specifically was not a violation of religious freedom, made a lot of sense to me, then and…

On Friday, June 11, David de la O disappeared. He was walking home from school in rural Santa Cruz Michapa, a small city in El Salvador about an hour’s drive from San Salvador, the nation’s capital. David’s family searched for him all night, without success. The next morning, his remains were found buried in an abandoned field outside town. He had been stabbed four times in the torso; his head, arms and legs had been severed. David was only 11 years old. In fourth grade, he had been learning long division and multiplication and practicing verb tenses. With no leads to go on, the police speculated that David was killed and dismembered by gang members because he refused to join their ranks. (He went to school in an area controlled…

Where the question are you alright usually finds one very much not alright. Cellphone at the bus stop, cellophane, wind, Hasty Mart in its collar of pigeon spikes. With smokes in front of the sports bar, careerists mid-shift lit at dusk by the inner light of cheap bottles of domestic. Like payphones, cords have been cut that tied them to the world. Let me off here, the primary neighbourhood, I’ll walk the traffic’s bank, its decorative plantings and contradictory signage, the current, I can’t brave it. Fortunes approach right-angled in their vehicles of delivery, hearts beat quickly in anticipation or dread inspired by the landmarks. How long have I traveled here in these years of gentrification and not realized they’re gone—the inconvenient, inadequate, or taken for granted? The psychic welcomes…

An effective covert operative, like a gifted emergency physician, must have a high tolerance for ambiguity. In murky situations fraught with intellectual or ethical unknowns, the professional resolutely makes life-or-death decisions to prevent lasting injury to the body or the body politic. But what distinguishes the good spy from the gifted doctor is an appreciation for the usefulness of ambiguity.
 In December 1969, Robert Ames, a model US patriot and high-ranking CIA Arabist, began courting the “Red Prince,” Ali Hassan Salameh, whose other epithets in Kai Bird’s The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames (Crown; $26)—“warlord,” “terrorist,” “guerrilla fighter”—are not quite as high-toned. Considered complicit in the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics, among other Black September attacks, Salameh was high up in the…

More than three weeks after Israel launched its latest assault on the Gaza Strip, and with no durable truce on the horizon, the situation in Israel/Palestine has descended into new and uncharted horrors. What began as a brute incursion by Israel, accompanied by a hail of Hamas rockets, has
 exploded into something shockingly worse: a bloodletting that, as The Nation went to press, had killed more than 1,200 Palestinians and fifty-six Israelis and pummeled Gaza into a landscape of human despair. Meanwhile in the West Bank, where thousands of Palestinians have poured into the streets for the largest protests in years, Israeli soldiers have responded with live ammunition; ten Palestinians were killed in a four-day period. And in Israel, where an empowered far right is ascendant, nationalist mobs have attacked…

Do the public school closures in Newark, New Jersey, violate the civil rights of the city’s black students? That’s what the US Education Department is seeking to find out in a new investigation, Reuters reported on July 23. 
 Black students account for 52.8 percent of Newark’s public school enrollment but 73.4 percent of those affected by closures in the 2011–2012 school year. White students, meanwhile, account for 7.9 percent of the district but just 1.1 percent of those whose schools were shuttered.
 The school “reform” plan One Newark is set to close thirteen more public schools in the city.
 —Julianne Hing
 Colorlines.com…

August 15, 2012, marked the first day that “Dreamers,” a class of undocumented youth who arrived in the US as children, were able to apply for work authorization under DACA, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.
 That same day, Arizona Governor Jan Brewer used her executive power to stop drivers’ licenses from being issued to DACA beneficiaries.
 In November 2012, members of the Arizona Dream Act Coalition (ADAC), along with the ACLU and other groups, filed a lawsuit against the governor, claiming the ban violates the Constitution’s equal protection clause. 
 On July 7, the Ninth Circuit issued a preliminary injunction against the ban. Moving forward, the ADAC will host a series of actions to highlight the lawsuit against the governor and increase public support.
 —Reyna Montoya…

“Elicia Anna” is the nom de Internet of a
27-year-old Romanian prostitute who has worked in one of Amsterdam’s famed window brothels for the last four years. This spring, she launched a blog, Behind the Red Light District, and when I was in Amsterdam reporting on prostitution laws, a Dutch advocate for sex workers’ rights suggested I read it. Anna’s writing, the advocate said, would help me better understand the reality of legalized prostitution—a reality far removed from the lurid tales told by European anti-prostitution campaigners who seek to criminalize the purchase of sex.
 Written in English, Behind the Red Light District takes on what Anna sees as the myths propagated by the “rescue industry,” the confluence of radical feminists, conservative Christians and members of law enforcement who seek to save…

The actress Sarah Polley generally comes across as smarter than the films she’s in. Her performances keep something in reserve, radiating intelligence without generating heat. Even when playing the lead, which she does too infrequently, Polley keeps a low profile. In magazine interviews that invariably mention her resistance to the trappings of celebrity, she has described herself as having been “really cynical about acting,” and her sidestepping of emotional abandon often creates extra-narrative tension. Hers is a strangely communicative detachment, one that flatters the attentive viewer from a distance.
 Born in 1979 to two Toronto actors—on whom more later—Polley began performing in her youth, appearing as the pint-sized comic heroine of Terry Gilliam’s swashbuckling The Adventures of Baron Munchausen and in the Canadian television series Ramona and Road to Avonlea.…

As The Nation has warned repeatedly, the unthinkable may now be rapidly unfolding in Ukraine: not just the new Cold War already under way but an actual war between US-led NATO and Russia. The epicenter is Ukraine’s eastern territory, known as the Donbass, a large industrial region heavily populated by Russian-speaking Ukrainian citizens and closely tied to its giant neighbor by decades of economic, political, cultural and family relations.
 The shoot-down of Malaysian jetliner MH17 on July 17 should have compelled the US-backed government in Kiev to declare a prolonged cease-fire in its land and air attacks on nearby cities in order to honor the 298 victims, give international investigators safe access to the crash site, and begin peace talks. Instead, Kiev, with Washington’s backing, immediately intensified its attacks on…

American austerity rarely receives the same kind of attention paid to Europe’s evisceration of its social programs in the name of balancing budgets. But American austerity is no less brutal. Consider Detroit: since Michigan Governor Rick Snyder imposed an “emergency manager” system on the city, stripping authority from local elected officials and steering Detroit into bankruptcy, residents already battered by deindustrialization have faced cuts to their pensions and services. The early months of 2014 saw thousands of families who could not pay their utility bills targeted for water shutoffs.
 But something instructive happened when Detroiters and their allies across the country rallied in July to highlight the denial of water, which is identified by the United Nations as a human right. The proponents of austerity were put on the defensive,…

Just before President Richard Nixon announced his resignation four decades ago, Nation editor Carey McWilliams recapped the whole sordid episode and saw some cause for hope. His optimism may have got the better of him:
 “The debate on Watergate has been a profoundly educative experience and it will continue for a long time. A recrudescence of McCarthyism is always possible but seems unlikely. The new political energies generated in the 1960s have not been entirely dissipated by any means. Nor have the lessons of the war in Vietnam been forgotten. Strong undercurrents of political unrest are evident even if the direction they may take is not. Vice President Gerald Ford may well be discredited by his support of Nixon and the names of Ronald Reagan and John Connally can now…

Three months after Alessandro Spina’s death in July 2013, Ilario Bertoletti, his Italian editor, published a memoir in which he described his first near-encounter with the notoriously reclusive writer: “It was June, 1993. The bell rang in the late afternoon; moments later, a colleague entered my office: ‘A gentleman dropped by. He looked like an Arab prince, tall and handsome. He left a history of the Maronites for you.’”
 The editor made some inquiries and discovered that Spina had been quietly publishing a number of novels and short stories since the early 1960s. It was an oeuvre that charted the history of Libya from 1911, when Italy invaded the sleepy Ottoman province, all the way to 1966, when petrodollars sparked an economic boom, exacerbating the corruption and nepotism that eventually…

I recently attended a meeting in New York City filled with urbanists discussing the question of affordable housing, when a developer proposed that what the city needed was a revival of the SRO (single-room occupancy) building, a type that originated as the boarding house but ceased to be legal for construction in 1954. His thought was that these would not be the flophouses of old but more like post-college dorms, right down to the group bathrooms—places of towel-snapping and bonhomie in which conviviality would substitute for space. This new class of very small apartments—“micro-housing,” as it’s come to be called—has been much discussed of late; indeed, the Bloomberg administration promoted such units as an important piece of the solution to our housing dilemma.
 Micro-housing has a long history and embodies…