“I Plead the Sixth”
The waiting room of the New Orleans juvenile court is hot and crowded. Its garishly painted walls stare down on angry parents, manacled teenagers and the occasional lawyer. In a corner, Victor Papai, the head of indigent defense at the juvenile court, shares a 4-foot-by-10-foot office with a staff of six part-time attorneys. Each handles…
Assignment: Vietnam
Another Vietnam: Pictures of the War From the Other Side Edited by Doug Niven. National Geographic Society, 240 pages, $50.00 During the Vietnam War, dozens of photographers working for the North Vietnamese Communist Party fanned out across the country. They took pictures of workers seeking to raise production in state-owned factories, of handsome peasants with…
Hard Luck and Welfare
Hands to Work: The Stories of Three Families Racing the Welfare Clock By LynNell Hancock. William Morrow, 320 pages, $25.95 After fleeing abuse at home, Brenda Fields and her children, Ty, 3, and Loreal, 17, found themselves on the doorstep of the Emergency Assistance Unit on East 151st Street in the Bronx on a brisk…
White Parents, Black Children
Gift Children: A Story of Race, Family, and Adoption in a Divided America By J. Douglas Bates. Ticknor & Fields, 270 pages, $21.95 Secret Thoughts of an Adoptive Mother By Jana Wolff. Andrews and McMeel Publishing, 148 pages, $12.95 Loving across the Color Line: A White Adoptive Mother Learns about Race By Sharon E. Rush.…
Interring a Dream
The U.S. Supreme Court’s April 15 decision in a school desegregation case called Belk v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education was just a single line long and entirely devoid of explanation. A federal trial judge had recently ended more than a third of a century of judicial supervision over the North Carolina public schools, which dated…
Judge on the Stump
The conclusion of the Supreme Court’s term usually brings a spate of opinions in the most contentious and closely divided cases of the year, and this year’s session did not disappoint. On its final day, the Court issued four 5-to-4 rulings, among them its controversial decisions on school vouchers and student drug testing. All but…
The Taxonomist: Sam’s Amazing $5,000 Dream Coat
You can hardly pick up the newspaper these days without reading about some freshly discovered corporate tax shelter scam, whether it’s an Enron-style tax-haven subsidiary or a Bermuda shell company. The Bush administration and House Republicans, who generally support these kinds of tax abuses, have been in full stall mode, hoping to ride out the…
On the Contrary:
Nearly 25 years ago, in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, the U.S. Supreme Court held that educational institutions may consider the race of their applicants in making admissions decisions. But the Court didn’t clarify the constitutional justification for racial preferences. Are they permissible only when offered as remedies for previous discrimination (to…
How Bushes Get Beaten
Only a short time ago the Democratic presidential candidate in 2004, whoever that might be, seemed to face two possibilities: losing to George W. Bush by a respectable margin or being wiped out in a colossal landslide. Such dismal prospects, if they had persisted into next year, would have hampered Democratic fund raising and put…
No War for Oil!
The war in Afghanistan is a sham. The Bush administration had advance knowledge of the September 11 attacks but took no action, using the assaults on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon as an excuse to topple the Taliban regime and legitimize the takeover of Afghanistan. Well-placed government insiders, knowing of the impending attacks,…
Future Imperfect:
The claim Philip Kindred Dick, California nutcase and sci-fi seer, holds on our imagination is a particular one. Dick’s signature as a writer is a sort of pre-epileptic hum or aura, an intimation of fast-approaching crisis. Something dislocates, something accelerates, a wire touches another wire and we know — quiveringly — that we have to…
All-Capitalist Class War
Where in the annals of class conflict do we put the current tiff between America’s investors and its CEOs? Up until a few weeks ago, this would have been considered a question not worthy of an answer. Both groups bobbed on the same tide. They felt the same exultation when their stock rose, the same…
Can Liberals Save Capitalism (Again)?
Seven decades after the Great Depression, Democrats have their work cut out for them.
Falling Dollar, Rising Debt
The value of the U.S. dollar has dropped more than 15 percent against the euro since February. That may not sound like a big deal — a bit of bad news for American tourists this summer, a bit of good news for American manufacturers selling things abroad. But, in fact, it could be a sign…
Unilateralism Revisited
Among democratic politicians and political consultants, the accepted wisdom is that George W. Bush has been successful in foreign policy but a flop in domestic policy. This assessment is based more on polling than personal conviction, although some would-be presidential candidates, such as Rep. Dick Gephardt and Sen. John Kerry, have actually endorsed key parts…
