Innehållsförteckning för October 8/15, 2018 från The Nation

The United States Supreme Court is, by design, a profoundly antidemocratic institution, and as Republicans get ready to ram Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination through the Senate, it’s worth pointing out that it doesn’t have to be this way. In 21 state supreme courts, justices are elected by the people; in 14 others (and in several other democracies), they are selected by a nonpartisan committee. But at the federal level, the Nine are handpicked by the president—an office that Democrats would have won in six of the last seven elections if those elections had been determined by the popular vote. Instead, the Electoral College, hatched in part to protect the interests of the slave states, handed victories to Donald Trump and, with an assist from the Supreme Court itself, George W. Bush—giving…

Subprime mortgages designed to fail. Student-loan payment plans that cover interest but not principal. Car insurance that costs less for white drivers than people of color. And payday lenders for when you have nowhere left to turn. The predatory practices of these four industries shape the everyday lives of many people in this country. In Land of the Fee: Hidden Costs and the Decline of the American Middle Class, University of Missouri history professor Devin Fergus reveals an increasingly stark pattern of economic exploitation through charges, fines, and interest. He argues that over the past half-century, consumer protections have been chipped away, innovated around, or just poorly conceived in the first place, resulting in a system in which the few are extracting obscene wealth from the daily necessities of the…

The federal government is setting free the financial predators of higher education. In August, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos moved to reverse Obama-era accountability regulations on for-profit colleges, which market themselves primarily to working parents and veterans and have repeatedly been found to burden students with massive debt while providing little to no improvement in their employment prospects. Under President Obama, the Department of Education instated the so-called gainful-employment rule, which mandates that the federal government monitor the debt of for-profit college graduates relative to their postgraduation income. If an institution’s average student-debt-to-income ratio gets too high, then it risks losing access to federal financial-aid support. DeVos plans to end this oversight by July 2019. She has also announced that she will try to restrict the ability of individual states to…

THE CONSUMER FINANCIAL PROTECTION BUREAU HAD A DIFFICULT BIRTH. WRITTEN INTO THE DODD-FRANK REFORMS IN the aftermath of the 2008 financial collapse, the CFPB was created to protect consumers from payday lenders, credit-card companies, student-loan sharks, and debt collectors. That made the bureau a natural target of those industries. In 2012, lobbyists pushed Congress to eliminate the position of CFPB director in favor of a five-person board, and to put Congress, not the Treasury, in charge of its funding. They also tried to slow down the bureau’s formation, recalls Christopher Peterson, a former CFPB official who served as a special adviser to the bureau’s first permanent director, Richard Cordray. “Members of Congress would send letters demanding explanations,” Peterson says. “That doesn’t sound like that’s that big of a job, but…

60% Percentage of retired senators from the 2008 Senate Banking Committee who went to work for the financial industry 40% Percentage of congressional senior staff involved in the response to the 2008 crash who have gone on to work for the financial industry 1,447 Number of former federal employees hired to lobby for financial firms from 2009 to June 2010, including 73 members of Congress 88% Percentage of Goldman Sachs lobbyists in 2016 who at one point worked for the federal government $1M Amount made by former congressman Barney Frank, cosponsor of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, on the board of directors of Signature Bank since 2015…

In August, Saeed Moshfegh, an Iranian PhD student at the University of Miami, suddenly found that he couldn’t access his Bank of America account. For the past seven years, he’d submitted proof to the bank every six months that he was a legal US resident. Then, without notification, that paperwork was deemed unacceptable, according to the Miami Herald. Moshfegh missed his credit-card and rent payments. Recent press reports have highlighted the number of people—including US citizens—who have been shut out of their Bank of America accounts because they were deemed to have responded inadequately to inquiries about their citizenship or residency status. Proof of citizenship isn’t required to open a bank account, and a spokesperson for the federal government told the Miami Herald that banks hadn’t been instructed to collect…

My husband’s curious affection for Senator Susan Collins used to be a joke around our house. “My Susie,” he sometimes called her. But as we watch the Brett Kavanaugh nomination unfold, he’s finally coming round. Collins sure seems reasonable and pleasant on TV. She’s not a religious fanatic or a libertarian weirdo. She says she’s pro-choice. I like her scratchy voice and that scrunched-up way she smiles. But face it, she is not going to save us from a Justice Kavanaugh. (“Are you sure?” my husband interjects at this point. “You shouldn’t write your column as if you know.” OK, fine. Prove me wrong, Senator Collins!) It’s not as though people haven’t tried to persuade the Maine Republican to vote against him. “There has been a huge campaign organized by…

IN HER CRAMPED BUNGALOW ON THE OUTSKIRTS OF SYLVA, a small town in North Carolina’s Jackson County, Carrie McBane is speaking with two strangers, Brigid Flaherty and Sharon “Lois” Cullins, about her lack of health care, her low wages, and the growing opioid epidemic in the surrounding community. Flaherty heads a progressive policy organization called Down Home North Carolina, which she co-founded shortly after the 2016 elections. Cullins, a recovering addict, is one of DHNC’s paid canvassers. In prison, Cullins turned her life around and began working as a peer counselor for other addicts. Since then, she has made it her mission to work on community organizing. A 55-year-old African American, Cullins comes off as fearless; since she began working with Flaherty’s group in late 2017, she has often canvassed…

In early September, both the sports and marketing worlds were hit with shock waves when news broke that Colin Kaepernick, the quarterback blackballed by the National Football League for kneeling during the national anthem to protest police violence and racial inequity, would be the face of Nike’s 30th-anniversary “Just Do It” ad campaign. The first print ad was an unairbrushed black-and-white close-up of Kaepernick’s face with the WORDS BELIEVE IN SOMETHING. EVEN IF IT MEANS SACRIFICING EVERYTHING. This was followed by a televised ad, first released online, that Nike aired during the NFL’s opening game of the season. The whole thing sent social media into paroxysms of confusion. Liberal and left-wing commentators found themselves largely praising the decision by the global sneaker behemoth and promising to buy an array of…

As President Trump and his Republican quislings continue to undermine our democracy, the punditocracy obsesses over another apparent threat to the nation: liberal intolerance. When New Yorker editor David Remnick disinvited former Trump strategist Steve Bannon from his magazine’s annual festival, The Wall Street Journal ran an article bemoaning the “growing list of news organizations that have reversed their decision to engage with conservatives after a public outcry.” On The New York Times’ op-ed page, ex-Journal opinion editor Bret Stephens crossed into Crazytown when he concluded that “what this really means is that Remnick is no longer the editor of The New Yorker. Twitter is.” He added that the magazine was “on the road to [becoming a] left-wing version of Fox & Friends.” This controversy followed another media firestorm sparked…

IN THE FALL OF 2011, JANET GORNICK, A PROFESSOR OF POLITICAL SCIENCE AT THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK, WENT DOWN TO Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park to join Occupy Wall Street. For the past two decades, Gornick had been working at the Luxembourg Income Study, an organization with a branch in New York City that amasses data sets on income and wealth disparities around the world. Gornick knew from her work that economic inequality had long been a subject of scholarly inquiry. “There were hundreds of working papers assessing its causes, looking at how welfare states mitigate market-driven inequality, and so on,” she recalls. But for most of her tenure at the LIS, the study of inequality was still a niche field, and an academic one at that. Save for a…

@thenation.com The Media vs. Trump Michael Massing is right: It was wrong for The New York Times to allow gratuitous “opinionizing” in a June 23 news article saying President Trump “slinked away” from a clash with LeBron James “the way a bully does when faced with unexpected resistance” [“Journalism in the Age of Trump,” Aug. 13/20]. That should have been edited out. Bad Times. But beyond that, Massing’s criticisms of how the press and others are too gosh-darn hard on the president strike me as ridiculous. The opinion pages of the Times and The Washington Post are dominated by anti-Trump voices, even among the conservatives? Oh, boo-hoo. The late-night comics all make fun of the guy, reinforcing his supporters’ belief that “the media are monolithically and hopelessly arrayed against him”?…

One of the many relatable details about Mitski—the Japanese-American singer-songwriter born Mitski Miyawaki, but known among her burgeoning fan base simply by her first name—is her relatively unhindered Twitter presence. Though most 27-year-olds don’t boast Mitski’s 80,000-plus followers, her dispatches retain the humor of any young person caught in the stupefied daze of social-media addiction. And like her music, Mitski’s tweets reveal a casual and disarming vulnerability: “if u have a presentation or meeting or just have to go show ur face in public when u feel like utter unpresentable garbage I suggest u go see my tiny desk video,” she writes in one, “where I showed up to NPR to be documented forever looking like a big pulsing void and radiating pain and I still did it.” That “Tiny…

ACROSS 1 They promote 28 nuts (11) 9 Wild beast takes LSD the wrong way and steps down (9) 10 Storage site to get rid of marijuana? (5) 11 Small leaves annoy and repel Mr. Flynn (an old-time movie star) (5,5) 12 Critical mass requires serenity (4) 13 Oranges, enclosed by bruised rind and protected from the elements (6) 14 “Tito, drunk, walks into a bar…”—that’ll slay ’em (8) 18 Thailand’s capital has trendy administrative district (8) 20 Stop playing in winter outerwear (6) 23 Western singer is enthusiastic (4) 24 Grasp tangled hempen cord (10) 26 Eliminate hint of prurient desire (5) 27 Our group getting back in sack with a prostitute (9) 28 Where managers are 1A, after putting things in order (7,4) DOWN 1 Essentially, Paul quit…