The Nation Oct-13-14

Snail’s Pace
 Re Mychal Denzel Smith’s “The New Fight for Racial Justice” [Sept. 15]: It appears that the outcome of the civil rights movement has been to replace “Blacks not welcome” with “This is not about race.” TheDom
 * * * When Cops Kill
 I have lived in St. Louis all my life. What happened to Michael Brown is sad, and it’s even sadder that this is not unusual [“The Struggle Renewed,” Sept. 15]. Years ago, two unarmed young men were killed here by police officers in a fast-food parking lot. One is said to have jumped on the hood of the car and shot the driver fourteen times. No one was prosecuted.
 Prosecutor Bob McCulloch, who is in charge of the Brown investigation, will do all he can for…

Hundreds of thousands of people filled the streets of New York City calling for climate justice on Sunday, September 21, in the largest mass protest to date against government and corporate inaction on the overheating of our planet. Organizers of the People’s Climate March said that
 2,646 demonstrations were held that day in 156 countries. “We said it would take everyone to change everything,” said Eddie Bautista, the executive director of the New York City Environmental Justice Alliance, one of the groups that organized the march. “And everyone showed up.”
 At last transforming the “climate movement” into a “people’s movement,” the march boasted an unprecedented diversity, including many thousands of union members as well as representatives from indigenous peoples’ organizations, students, anti-poverty, family and faith groups—even a contingent of business…

Charter-school advocates and others who claim the mantle of education reform have now seen their ideas put into practice in a number of areas—from high-stakes testing to digital learning to the takeover of “failing” public schools. The results are in. How are they doing? Suffice it to say, if this were a high-stakes test, they’d fail. 
 As the articles in this issue illustrate, the strategies pursued by education reformers frequently dovetail with those of austerity hawks. The latter burnish their conservative credentials by cutting budgets and defunding schools. The reformers sweep in to capitalize on the situation, introducing charter chains like Rocketship and K12, which produce real no benefits for students. The chains do, however, generate cash for investors—a new trove of public money directed to private coffers. The…

Is the most powerful man in professional sports about to lose his $44 million-a-year job? That’s what the sports world is wondering following a month in which NFL commissioner Roger Goodell was exposed as an utterly insensitive, incompetent cover-up artist. Goodell has fumbled before—on the issue of head injuries—but this time he erred on the more sensitive and far-reaching issue of domestic violence.
 Goodell’s problems started over the summer when he suspended Baltimore Ravens player Ray Rice for two games under the NFL’s personal-conduct policy following the star running back’s assault on his then-fiancée Janay Palmer (now Janay Rice). Video had emerged of Rice dragging an unconscious Janay from a casino elevator in Atlantic City, New Jersey. If Goodell had just suspended Rice for eight games at that point, all…

Nation editors and contributors have been sweeping up the awards lately. Editor and publisher Katrina vanden Heuvel won the 2014 Norman Mailer Prize for Magazine Publishing. The Norman Mailer Center and Writers Colony, which sponsors the award, said, “Your work with The Nation has taken what was an important voice in the contemporary discourse and turned it into an indispensable one.” Vanden Heuvel also received an Eleanor Roosevelt Val-Kill Medal Award, given to those who have made “a significant contribution to society in the arts, education, citizenship, philanthropy, community services, and other humanitarian concerns….” And vanden Heuvel and The Nation won the 2014 Champion in Activism Award from the Center for Community Change.
 Other winners include contributing writer Kai Wright, who received the 2014 Salute to Excellence award for investigative…

The war whoops of the pundit class helped propel the nation into yet another doomed military adventure in the Middle East. Ghastly beheadings by a newly discovered enemy were the frightening flashpoint. The president ordered bombers aloft, and US munitions were once again pounding battlefields in Iraq—and, at the time of this writing, in Syria. The president promised to “degrade and destroy” ISIS. Here we go again, I thought. This is how modern America goes to war. When the superpower Goliath is challenged by sudden savagery, it has no choice but to respond with brute force. Or so we are told. Otherwise, America would no longer be a convincing Goliath. 
 Citizens and members of the uniformed military are tired of war, but both in a sense are prisoners of…