Innehållsförteckning för October 17, 2016 från The Nation

The Cruelest Prosecutor After reading Jessica Pishko’s “Is Angela Corey the Most Hated Prosecutor in America?” [Sept. 12/19], I don’t understand how Corey stays in office. There should be someone to say, “No more—this has to stop!” I thought sending a child to prison for life was bad enough, but to convict a woman who defended herself against an abusive husband is inconceivable. She should be removed from office yesterday, if not sooner. I can only hope that there are others like myself who see the rage in this woman and believe she should be in jail. Frank E. Shirley yakima, wash. The Nation Replies We are pleased to report that Corey lost her reelection bid by 38 points on August 30. She’s the first sitting Jacksonville state attorney ever…

Wells Fargo’s rap sheet would put a mob boss to shame. This article inaugurates a new column, “Insurgencies,” which will appear on TheNation.com and occasionally in print. It will probe the clash between people and plutocrats, failed shibboleths and new ideas, and explore the emerging strategies linking people in motion with progressive champions in office. “The business model of Wall Street is fraud,” Bernie Sanders proclaimed repeatedly on the stump. Wall Street’s big banks seem intent on proving his case. Most recently, Wells Fargo—whose CEO, John Stumpf, was celebrated as “banker of the year” by American Banker in 2013—has been fined $185 million for abusing its own customers. From 2011 to 2015, the company opened nearly 2 million bank accounts and more than 500,000 credit cards for customers who didn’t…

The Washington Post’s editorial page disgraced itself recently with a frontal attack on its own news division. The September 17 missive masqueraded as a demand that President Obama deny Edward Snowden’s plea for executive clemency, falsely blaming Snowden for a series of actions that were taken not by the famous whistle-blower but by the newspaper itself. (Snowden revealed nothing; the Post and The Guardian did.) Leaving the argument’s lack of merit aside, the editorial probably came as a significant surprise to many of the paper’s readers. After all, as The Nation’s Katrina vanden Heuvel pointed out on the Post’s op-ed page, the paper “submitted these articles to the Pulitzer Prize board, seeking and rightfully winning a Pulitzer for public service.” Glenn Greenwald, one of the reporters originally contacted by Snowden…

His folks had been telling the media that as a great debater, Clinton had more to lose. Trump, on the other hand, just had to not swear, spew misogyny, or tell obvious lies in order to exceed expectations. Clinton went in as “the AP high-school history teacher,” conservative Hugh Hewitt observed on MSNBC, tooting a misogynist dog whistle, while “Trump is the loud but winning football coach.” Well, the football coach flopped—badly. Trump came in unprepared and never got more serious as the night went on. Clinton found a way to sound competent without being overbearing or scolding. From early on, Trump hectored, interrupted, and talked over her, and she handled it with aplomb. She regularly advised the audience to check HillaryClinton.com for real-time fact-checking. “Donald, I know you live…

Snitow was an original member of Redstockings, the 1970s radical-feminist group that included Shulamith Firestone. Today, she’s a professor of gender studies at the New School and an activist who directs the Network of East-West Women, connecting feminists in the United States with those in Eastern Europe. Snitow sits on the editorial board of the democratic-socialist magazine Dissent and has recently published a book collecting a lifetime of essays, The Feminism of Uncertainty. —Sarah Leonard Sarah Leonard: Your feminist work takes a thousand forms—why? Ann Snitow: Relatively few people have done this crazy thing that I did, where I decided to be a full-time activist and a full-time professor. How did I do that? I’d love to say, “Magnificent me! My energy is endless.” Unfortunately, that’s not true. It had…

In 1831, the young french aristocrat alexis de tocqueville and his friend Gustave de Beaumont, both lawyers in their early 20s bored by their desk jobs at a courthouse in Versailles, traveled to the United States. They ostensibly came to study American prisons, but more importantly to see for themselves the great American experiment with democracy, which both intrigued and terrified them. After nine months in Jacksonian America, which saw the pair ranging from the drawing rooms of New York and Boston to the frontier outpost of Saginaw in the Michigan Territory, and from the pestilential swamps of Frenchified New Orleans to the still largely barren national capital on the banks of the Potomac, they returned home—Tocqueville to write a book that would become a classic, Democracy in America, Beaumont…

15% Minimum level of support at which a candidate must poll to be included in the presidential debates 7.2% Current support for Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson 2.4% Current support for Green Party candidate Jill Stein 53% Voters who want to see three or more parties included in the debates “We asked to verify for proper credentials, she did not have them.” A Nassau County Police spokeswoman, on why officers escorted Green Party candidate Jill Stein from the campus of Hofstra University, where she was doing prearranged media interviews outside of the official debate — Astha Rajvanshi…

Sixty-five years ago, W.H. Auden published a curious little essay in these pages about Alexis de Tocqueville, the subject of this week’s cover story. “De Tocqueville stands out as one of the noblest examples of an attitude which may be called the Counter-Revolution,” Auden wrote. “This must not be confused with Reaction, which refuses to recognize the just element in the Revolution and wishes to regard it as a simple rebellion. The Counter-Revolutionary has no wish to return to the condition which preceded the outbreak of revolution; he wishes rather to save the revolution from failure.... “The central issue of the world revolution at present in progress is the right of every human body to the food, light, housing, medical attention, and so forth necessary for health.... The body knows…