Innehållsförteckning för Sep-01-14 -Sep-08-14 från The Nation

Sunni-Shiite Class Struggle
 “Against Intervention in Iraq,” your lead editorial for July 7/14, is correct, but it misses a decisive point. It echoes most media by referring to the struggle between Sunnis and Shiites as “sectarian.” Sectarianism may be the form the wars take, but in substance they are a classic long-simmering class struggle that has predictably erupted into revolution, engulfing the entire Middle East. Behind all the infinitely complex alliances are the disenfranchised Shiite masses rising up against the Sunni ruling classes, which have co-opted the wealth (read: oil) in collusion with Western capital.
 Analyze the struggle along class lines and the alliances, shorn of their sectarian masks, make sense. Shiite Iran has had its “revolution”—however derailed it was from a progressive outcome—and supports the Shiites; in Saudi Arabia,…

On any given day, Immigration and Customs Enforcement keeps at least 34,000 immigrants locked up while they wait for their cases to be heard in immigration court. Many of these detainees are incarcerated not because they are dangerous or likely to skip their court dates, but because ICE must meet an arbitrary quota set by Congress. This quota, which is often referred to as the “detention-bed mandate,” is a disgrace and should be eliminated.
 The quota is written into the federal law that appropriates funding for ICE. Congress requires the agency to “maintain a level of not less than 34,000 detention beds” at any given time. The quota was first enacted in 2007, and it appears yet again in the 2015 appropriations bill currently pending in the House of Representatives.
…

On Saturday, August 9, 18-year-old Michael Brown was shot and killed in the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, by a local police officer whose identity has not been released. Brown was walking with a friend, 22-year-old Dorian Johnson, on his way to his grandmother’s residence. Johnson says the two were walking in the street when a police car approached and the officer instructed them to “get the fuck onto the sidewalk.” They told the officer they were almost at their destination. Johnson says at that point, the officer slammed his brake, backed up and asked, “What’d you say?”, while opening his car door and attempting to get out. The door hit Brown and then closed. Johnson says the officer then grabbed Brown by the neck.
 “They’re not wrestling so much as…

In this issue, William D. Cohan writes about the high-stakes negotiations that led to a $13 billion settlement by JPMorgan Chase for its shady dealings in mortgage-backed securities before the financial crisis. Be a fly on the wall as Jamie Dimon, the bank’s famously vainglorious CEO, goes out of his way to schmooze a top Justice Department official. “You have so much power,” the banker croons. “You have no idea how much power you have.”
 “Well, I’m not a Master of the Universe like you,” the DOJ official responds.
 The Nation has been around long enough to have covered the career of J.P. Morgan himself, who founded Dimon’s institution. In a January 22, 1903, editorial titled “Paternalistic Finance,” the magazine noted that Morgan’s recent testimony before the Interstate Commerce Commission…

Eduardo Blumwald’s genetically modified plants don’t look much like “Frankenfood.” Filling four modest greenhouses in a concrete lot behind Blumwald’s laboratory at the University of California, Davis, the tiny seedlings, spiky grasses, alfalfa, and peanut and rice plants in plastic terracotta-colored pots look exactly like the ordinary varieties from which he and his fellow researchers created them. Blumwald’s lab lies just ten miles from Monsanto’s 90,000-square-foot vegetable seed building, a glassy edifice larger than the hangar for a 747. The Monsanto facility is one of the largest centers in the world for plant breeding and genetic engineering. But in the fourteen years that Blumwald, a professor of cell biology, has worked here studying the DNA of crop plants, he has hardly ever spoken to anyone from Monsanto.
 Blue-eyed and round-faced,…

Within the past twelve months, Scarlett Johansson has been an alluring and rapidly expanding artificial intelligence in Her; a seductively murderous extraterrestrial in Under the Skin; and now, in Lucy, a superintelligent, post-sexual, sometimes deadly freak of evolution. For a woman who is two inches shorter than Woody Allen, this is some résumé. It’s obvious that the game but vulnerable waif of 2003’s Lost in Translation did not just grow up but has gone on to transcend the merely human, and in record time. Why this should have happened isn’t so clear.
 Given the disparities in financing and distribution among the films I’ve just mentioned—which vary from the artisanal to the mega-industrial—as well as the differences among them in style and tone, it would be a mug’s game to rush…

The United States is now at war with the Islamic State, the ruthless jihadi organization that controls much of eastern Syria and western Iraq. The air drops of humanitarian supplies to tens of thousands of besieged Yazidis, who are threatened with genocide by the fanatics of the IS, has justifiably
 earned widespread support. But those air drops, combined with US airstrikes against IS forces advancing on Iraq’s Kurdish region, mean that less than three years after the departure of ground troops, American armed forces—including at least 1,000 military advisers—are back in Iraq. 
 Although the White House says that the airstrikes will be limited in scope, President Obama has brought the United States to the brink of a perilously slippery slope. Indeed, the administration, which says its air campaign could…

Richard Nixon’s forced resignation from the presidency forty years ago this August was, in addition to being one of the greatest moments in the history of liberal Schadenfreude, also a turning point in the history of the American national security state.
 It’s not as if previous presidents, particularly Lyndon Johnson, Nixon’s predecessor, were somehow scrupulous in observing the constitutional limits on executive power. It’s just that, thanks to his taping system—and his utterly incompetent cover-up efforts—Nixon showed us just how rotten the core of our system had become. And yet, to the degree that anything has changed in the past four decades, it has almost always been for the worst.
 John Dean, Nixon’s White House counsel, went to prison for his part in the Watergate cover-up. Since then, however, he…

On July 21, members of Fresno Immigrant Youth in Action gathered at Democratic Congressman Jim Costa’s office in Fresno, California, to kick off Migrant Lives Matter, a statewide campaign led by the California Immigrant Youth Justice Alliance and Immigrant Youth Coalition.
 In a region heavily populated by immigrant families, Costa hasn’t spoken out against the deportation of forty people to dangerous conditions in Honduras; nor has he asked President Obama to grant administrative relief to the 11 million undocumented people in the US.
 MLM is targeting Democratic representatives to take action or be placed on a “Deportation Party” list. Activists delivered a letter to Costa demanding that he oppose efforts to deport immigrants back to violent conditions. In response, Costa promised to set up a meeting and work with the…

In the end, the abject fear of Ben Wagner
got Jamie Dimon to cave.
 For much of 2013, Dimon, the chairman and chief executive of the formidable JPMorgan Chase & Company, was telling anyone who would listen that it was unfair and unjust for federal and state prosecutors to blame him and his bank for the manufacture and sale of mortgage-backed securities that occurred at Bear Stearns & Company and at Washington Mutual in the years leading up to the financial crisis. When JPMorgan Chase bought those two failing firms in 2008, Dimon argued, he was just doing what Ben Bernanke, Hank Paulson and Timothy Geithner had asked him to do. Why should his bank be held financially accountable for the bad behavior at Bear and WaMu?
 It was a clever…

It’s been almost ten years since progressives, determined to undo the accumulated damage of the Reagan-Bush era, took a page from our opponents’ successes and got to work building our own policy, organizing and electoral infrastructure. At the outset of this effort, in the run-up to and aftermath of the 2004 presidential election, I had a ringside seat as an aide to George Soros, who played a crucial role. I’ve recently become president of the Democracy Alliance, an organization of donors whose founding was one of the turning points in building a stronger, more cohesive progressive movement. So I have an unusual vantage point for reflection on what we have managed to do well in the last ten years. 
 First, we’ve seen much more coordination among donors. Progressive foundations…

A sad result of the tremendous worldly success of contemporary art is that the whole enterprise has come to seem terribly normal. Some critics and collectors have tried to evade this dull consequence by pursuing the work of the “outsider artist.” Henry Darger and Eugene Von Bruenchenhein are always going to be strange, and their art will never fail to radiate the clear light of their foreignness to any institution, market or social grouping that tries to smother them in the fog of its approval. That’s fine, but our fascination with such figures should not make us forget that even the most socially and intellectually adept of artists may harbor sovereign idiosyncrasies. For them, too, as Trevor Winkfield writes, “the true core of an artist’s audience, those whom artists rely…

After years of frustrating fights to defend voting rights in the battleground state of Ohio, Nina Turner says she “decided that it was time to step up and go all in for free and fair elections.” While the veteran state legislator continues to support lawsuits and appeals to Congress, she is trying to get to the heart of the matter by running for secretary of state. 
 In Ohio and more than three dozen other states, the secretary of state serves as the chief election officer, responsible in varying degrees for such matters as determining which candidates and initiatives appear on the ballot; applying the rules that determine how hard it is to register or cast a vote; conducting recounts; and protecting the integrity of the electoral process. Yet it’s…

In a video recorded on July 1, a white California Highway Patrol (CHP) officer, Daniel L. Andrew, is seen chasing, knocking down, straddling and repeatedly punching a black woman on the side of a freeway. That woman, 51-year-old Marlene Pinnock, is now speaking out to media in Los Angeles. 
 In an interview with ABC-7, Pinnock says she has no idea why Andrew assaulted her in such a vicious fashion. Pinnock is still recovering from the beating: she remains in pain from the swelling and slurs her speech.
 The CHP, which says it’s prioritizing the investigation into Pinnock’s beating, has taken the officer off patrol duty.
 —Aura Bogado Colorlines.com…

This summer, the fiftieth anniversary of Freedom Summer, has been a very bad season for any instantiation, anywhere, of Martin Luther King’s “beloved community.” From our immobilized Congress to explosions in Pakistan, from corruption in Afghanistan to war in Ukraine, from the rise of Hindu fundamentalism in India to the ungoverned spread of the Ebola virus in West Africa, from the breakdown of negotiations in Gaza to deadly confrontations between police and unarmed citizens from Philadelphia to Albuquerque, a restless undoing boils across the globe.
 As I write, I listen to a radio remembrance of the useless toll of World War I, with its millions of honorable dead. Following that, a spoken essay about the birth of the atomic age at Hiroshima. Rumination about the shooting of Archduke Franz Ferdinand…

When JPMorgan Chase agreed to settle mortgage-related securities claims for a record-breaking $13 billion last fall, the deal was hailed in many corners as a historic breakthrough. In some ways, it was. After much delay and apparent reluctance to prosecute the “too big to fail” banks for their fraudulent activities in the months leading up to the 2008 crash, it seemed the Justice Department was finally showing some spine. Using the threat of a strong civil complaint as leverage, federal and state officials negotiated a landmark agreement with JPMorgan that included $9 billion in shareholder cash and $4 billion in mortgage relief. 
 In recent months, it has become clear that the Justice Department is using the JPMorgan settlement as a template for similar negotiations with other Wall Street firms.…

Moral Imagination Essays. By David Bromwich. Princeton. 350 pp. $27.95. The Intellectual Life of Edmund Burke From the Sublime and the Beautiful to American Independence. By David Bromwich. Harvard/Belknap. 500 pp. $39.95. Shortly after the rosy glow of Barack Obama’s coronation had receded, a literature professor at Yale became the most regicidal of his critics. Taking as his megaphones The New York Review of Books, London Review of Books, and a series of websites and other venues across the political spectrum, David Bromwich—known mainly for his sensitive readings of early-nineteenth-century British poetry and prose—wrote some of the era’s most personalized and inquisitorial broadsides against the president. In piece after piece by Bromwich, Barack Obama could do no right. The former junior senator from Illinois takes himself to be more king…