Innholdsfortegnelse for July 22-29, 2013 i The Nation

No Good Deed Goes Unpunished
 Plymouth, Mass.
 In “The IRS Mess” [June 3], The Nation mentions allegations that the Internal Revenue Service targeted groups with the words “tea party” or “patriot” in their tax documents. Since it is well-known that the Koch brothers have used Tea Party groups as fronts for funneling money to right-wing causes, I believe the IRS did not overstep its bounds in directing extra scrutiny toward them. The IRS was just doing its job. Shame on the Obama administration for caving in to right-wing pressure and on the Justice Department for opening a criminal investigation.
 CYNTHIA CURRY
 _________________________ Wooster, Ohio
 When will we admit that sorting “charitable” from “political” causes, and figuring out the amount of any budget attributable to each, is impossible? Then we can…

A BIPARTISAN CHECK ON WAR-MAKING: When Congressman Peter Welch traveled to the Syrian border last spring, he came away with the impression that “there’s an enormous risk that we ‘Americanize’ what is a civil war. So anyone, politicians foremost among them, who likes to suggest as an armchair general that there’s [an] easy and definitive way to provide a military solution to this festering civil war…is mistaken.” So it is that the Vermont Democrat is working with Republicans Chris Gibson and Michele Bachmann on a bipartisan effort to restrict direct military aid to Syrian rebels by the Obama administration. “Congress must accept its responsibility, not abdicate it,” says Welch, a key player on the House Oversight and Government Reform Subcommittee on National Security.
 The legislation is part of a broader…

In the struggle for equality, it’s not always about the wins. As we’ve now learned from Texas feminists, losing well—gloriously,
 even—can be almost as important. A sweeping abortion ban is expected to pass the state legislature nearly two weeks after it was shut down by State Senator Wendy Davis’s eleven-hour filibuster and a roaring pro-choice crowd. Its passage will be a travesty: it will force thirty-seven of the state’s forty-two abortion clinics to close; women will be compelled to carry sick and dying fetuses to term; and all abortions after twenty weeks will be banned—even for victims of rape or incest. It’s a horrible defeat for Texas women. But the impact of that loss may be softened somewhat by the extraordinary fight against it, one that brought a state-level bill…

Senator Elizabeth Warren has introduced what I would call a seismic proposition, one very likely to disturb the sleep of complacent politicians. Why, she asks, should the Federal Reserve lend money to banks at an interest rate of less than 1 percent when the government intends to charge students 6.8 percent interest on their college loans? The senator posted an amusing billboard on her official website: WANT TO BORROW MONEY FROM THE GOVERNMENT? DON’T BE A STUDENT. BE A BANK. 
 Warren has proposed legislation—her very first bill—to correct this anomaly. Instead of doubling the student loan rate from 3.4 to 6.8 percent, as the government did in July, she wants it reduced to the same rate that banks are charged at the Fed’s discount window: 0.75 percent. In addition,…

The film of the year is Enemy of the State. I don’t ordinarily go in for pronouncements like that, let alone make them in July; but we live in unusual times, and in this case the month hardly matters. Enemy of the State came out in 1998.
 In those days, the op-ed chorus was not yet chanting that 9/11 had changed everything, and Edward Snowden, future leaker of the National Security Agency’s secrets, was a 15-year-old high school student. In retrospect, maybe a film critic could be forgiven for having laughed off Enemy of the State, interpreting it as a projection of the conflicts within producer Jerry Bruckheimer’s psyche, rather than praising it as a reasonably accurate depiction, in pop movie images, of the power of a hidden government, permanent…

Dressed in an immaculate white shirt and white pants, a straw hat with a hot pink band and the customary rainbow sash, 84-year-old Edie Windsor looked like she was having the time of her life as a grand marshal of this year’s New York City Pride parade. As well she should. Four days earlier, the Supreme Court had issued a 5-4 ruling in the case that bears her name, United States v. Windsor, to which she was an unusually active plaintiff. The decision strikes down Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act, which prohibited the federal government from recognizing same-sex marriages. A 5-4 ruling in another gay rights case, Hollingsworth v. Perry, restarted same-sex marriage in California. With these two legal victories, 30 percent of Americans now live in…

On Sunday, June 30, as the Brazilian soccer team scored three goals against its Spanish rival in the finals of the most controversial Confederations Cup in history, thousands of Brazilians outside the renovated stadium in Maracanã endured the same tear gas bombs and rubber bullets (manufactured by the Brazilian “nonlethal” arms company Condor) that have been used in countries like Bahrain and Turkey to repress anti-government protesters. Unfair Players: FIFA • Police, read a huge yellow flag carried by protesters.
 Over the previous three weeks, more than 1.5 million Brazilians took to the streets in dozens of cities, in protests initially motivated by a hike in public transportation fares but that soon included demands such as the end of corruption, more investment in health and education, and a more consistent…

On a sunny Saturday this past may, far down on the city’s black South Side where corner stores house their cashiers behind bulletproof plexiglass, about 150 activists assembled at Jesse Owens Community Academy. In just a few days, Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s appointed Board of Education would vote on the largest simultaneous school closing in recent history. Owens, along with fifty-three other public schools, was on the chopping block. A recent Chicago Tribune/WGN poll found that more than 60 percent of Chicago citizens opposed the closings, and a healthy cross section of them had turned out for the first of three straight days of marches in protest.
 Women in red Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) T-shirts registered participants; a vanload of purple-shirted SEIU marchers lingered in excited anticipation; an activist from the…

“Each plant is huge,” writes Yashar Kemal in They Burn the Thistles. “It is twice, three times, five times larger than in other soils. Even the colours of the flowers, of the brilliant green grasses, of the trees are different. The greens are crystal-clear, the yellows pure yellow like amber. The reds blaze like flickering flames, and the blues are a thousand times bluer than elsewhere.” Kemal is renowned for his lavish descriptions of the Turkish countryside in the wild south and southeast regions of Anatolia, where he was born in 1922 into a Kurdish family. His characters come into focus against it, trudging over mountains or building fires; tending crops or gossiping with neighbors; plotting against malicious landlords or doing time for their foiled plots. In 1969, when They…

Hank Sanders grew up in segregated, rural southern Alabama and in 1971 moved to Selma—the birthplace of the Voting Rights Act. Before the VRA, only 393 of the 15,000 black voting-age residents in Dallas County, where Selma is located, were registered to vote. Less than a year later, after federal registrars arrived in August 1965, more than 10,000 black voters had been added to the rolls. Sanders experienced firsthand how the VRA transformed Selma and the rest of the country. In 1983, he became the first African-American state senator from the Alabama Black Belt since Reconstruction, representing a new majority-black district created by the VRA. 
 Thirty years later, Sanders watched in disbelief this June as the Supreme Court overturned the centerpiece of the VRA in Shelby County v. Holder.…

The United States has always ridden a roller coaster of bitter division regarding the meaning and status of our civil rights. It is the best of times! It is the worst of times! One study among several shows that a majority of white Americans now feel that “any gains made by members of minority groups necessarily come at [our] own expense.” The implications of this unfortunate tension go well beyond racial politics, however; and during the month of June, a veritable arpeggio of Supreme Court holdings highlighted a perceptual chasm whose address will have to be the next leg of a civil rights movement embracing all Americans.
 First, the Roberts Court has strongly endorsed a pre–civil rights era notion of states’ rights. In striking down the Defense of Marriage Act…

A year after I quit my job to stay home with my first child, I read Linda Hirshman’s Get to Work (2006), which chided well-educated women for doing just that. Why, she wondered, would a congressman “listen to someone whose life so resembles that of a toddler’s?” Although my daughter was napping on me, I still managed to scrawl in the margins, “Because they vote!” I was her target audience, and I felt under attack.
 Since then, similar books have followed, notably Leslie Bennetts’s The Feminine Mistake (2007) and Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In, published this year. While Sandberg pays more lip service to the hard work stay-at-home mothers do, her thesis is largely the same as that of her predecessors. She is quick to point out the risks of taking…

Many months before America’s allegedly tallest building—the 1,776-foot One World Trade Center—was topped out in May, it had already asserted itself on the skyline, especially around my home, half a dozen blocks away. The height of the building has been the object of some contention because its uppermost 408 feet comprise a toothpick-like spire implanted on a flat top. The body empowered to confirm its stature, the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, has yet to reach a final decision. The matter has become controversial because the developer decided some months ago to forgo, for reasons of cost, the fiberglass sheath with which the architect, David Childs, had intended to protect the spire and establish it fully as part of the building. Childs was so indignant that he publicly…