The Nation January 28, 2013

Get the Lead Out
 Sebastopol, Calif.
 In their “It’s the New Economy, Stupid” [Dec. 17], John Cavanagh and Robin Broad make excellent points about the grand possibilities that await the actions of intelligent and informed citizens and caring governments. I agree with all of it. But not enough is said regarding the massive inertia—financial, economic, military and political—that can, with the swipe of a casual paw, clear out all that is in the path of its continuance. Until our endangered planet becomes a significant concern, that inertia will continue, if not increase. To wit, fracking, mentioned in the same issue: one would think that such obviously careless and destructive technology would not even be considered in today’s “green awareness” era. 
 RICHARD SANSOM
 _________________________ Want Mayo on Those Dollars?
 Cornville,…

After accepting a mini-bargain that includes tax hikes for Americans making more than $400,000 a year, Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell announced: “The tax issue is finished, over, completed.” By shutting down debate on revenues while holding the line on the debt ceiling, McConnell and the GOP hope to turn their defeat in the fiscal cliff fight into a victory for austerity in the debt ceiling and sequester battles ahead. If they prevail, Social Security and Medicare benefits could end up back on the chopping block, and other cuts to government programs could trigger a “lost decade” of American economic decline.
 It is impossible to negotiate with this position; it would be terrific if President Obama took Nancy Pelosi’s advice and simply raised the debt ceiling by invoking the Fourteenth…

Six and a half years ago, I drove out to Lompoc federal penitentiary in the hills outside Santa Barbara to interview Weldon Angelos, a young man who had received the improbable sentence of fifty-five years without parole for selling marijuana, ostensibly while carrying a small pistol in an ankle holster. 
 A rap artist from Salt Lake City and friend to Napoleon and other eminences of the hip-hop world, Angelos had been ensnared by an informant in a series of undercover marijuana purchases that reeked of entrapment. What might have been a two-bit state pot case became a high-stakes federal case. When Angelos—who denied carrying a gun when dealing—refused to enter a guilty plea, the feds played hardball, piling more indictments onto the original charge. In December 2003, more than…

JUSTICE DELAYED, JUSTICE DENIED: In 
1980, the Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit overturned the false convictions of the Wilmington Ten, a group of civil rights activists charged with firebombing a white-owned grocery store in North Carolina in 1971. 
But for the next few decades, they remained felons in the eyes of the state—until Governor Beverly Perdue pardoned all ten 
on January 2. The monumental decision came more than forty years after the young organizers were framed for the crime. Four
of them—Jerry Jacobs, Ann Shepard, Connie Tindall and Joe Wright—died waiting for their names to be cleared and their access to educational and job opportunities restored. 
 Their conviction was overturned after three key witnesses admitted in 1977 that prosecutors bribed them to give false testimony against the defendants.…

During his first term in office in the late 1990s, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was considered the most polarizing leader the country had known. The left refused to forgive him for his part in the incitement that led to Yitzhak Rabin’s 1995 assassination, while the right adored him for leading the opposition to the Oslo Accords. Now approaching his fifth election campaign as head of the Likud party, Netanyahu doesn’t generate that much passion anymore. His fans are less enthusiastic, while his critics have grown tired. More than anything, it seems that a majority of Israelis have simply grown accustomed to him. At a time of regional upheaval and international instability, Netanyahu’s ability to maintain the status quo seems enough to deliver what, according to all indications, should be…

The battle over Barack Obama’s nomination of Chuck Hagel to be US secretary of defense has many of the elements of a typical episode of insider bloodletting. These happen routinely in every administration whenever powerful interests perceive a threat to their power. Fortunately, this brawl carries with it the potential to explode some foreign policy shibboleths that have imprisoned insider thinking and undermined the nation’s interests and ideals for more than thirty years.
 In almost every respect relevant to the position for which he was nominated, Hagel is remarkably well qualified. A highly decorated Vietnam veteran, he told an interviewer that he could recall promising himself during his time in Vietnam: 
“If I ever get out of all of this, I am going to do everything I can to assure…