Yes, John Roberts, Race Still Matters

By Jeffrey Toobin, The New Yorker

29 April 14

t’s challenging to keep up with the latest in racist tirades, so let’s attempt a brief review. Last week, Cliven Bundy, a Nevada rancher who became a conservative folk hero for his refusal to pay his debts to the federal government, said that he often wondered if black people fared better as slaves. Then, over the weekend, a tape of what appears to be the voice of Donald Sterling, the owner of the Los Angeles Clippers, surfaced, and it featured Sterling instructing his girlfriend to avoid being photographed with black people and to refrain from bringing African-Americans to the Clippers’ basketball games.

Bundy and Sterling represent an ugly corner of contemporary American life, but it is one that is entirely invisible in recent Supreme Court rulings. In the Roberts Court, there are no Bundys and Sterlings; the real targets of the conservative majority are those who’ve spent their lives fighting the Bundys and Sterlings of the world.

Chief Justice John Roberts has made a famous utterance on the subject of race, and it’s a revealing one. The remark came in a case in which the Justices addressed perhaps the most celebrated precedent in the Court’s history: Brown v. Board of Education. In that decision, in 1954, the Justices ruled that segregated public schools were by their nature unconstitutional. In 2007, the Justices evaluated one of the many attempts that communities have made to address the legacy of legal segregation in schools. Seattle used race as one factor to determine which schools some students attended; the goal of the local initiative was integrated schools. But the Court struck down the Seattle plan as a violation of the Constitution and of Brown. Even to ameliorate segregation, the consideration of race was unconstitutional. In Roberts’ evocative phrase, “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” In other words, those who were trying to integrate the schools were the ones doing the “discriminating.”

The majority engaged in the same kind of blame-shifting in a recent case, Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action. In response to an earlier Supreme Court decision permitting some forms of affirmative action at the University of Michigan’s law school, voters in the state passed a constitutional amendment barring any use of race in admissions. The question in the Schuette case was whether the Michigan amendment violated the U.S. Constitution. It was a close, difficult case, and the Court concluded, by a vote of six to two, that the answer was no; voters could ban affirmative action if they so chose.

It was as if the Justices in the majority and those in dissent were writing about different countries. Justice Anthony Kennedy’s opinion suggested that the debate over affirmative action should and could take place in a genteel, controversy-free zone. “In the realm of policy discussions the regular give-and-take of debate ought to be a context in which rancor or discord based on race are avoided, not invited.” (Yes, it “ought” to be, it just may be that it isn’t.) Kennedy said that the rights guaranteed by the Constitution include the people’s right to “try to shape the course of their own times and the course of a nation that must strive always to make freedom ever greater and more secure.” Apparently, this noble endeavor includes banning affirmative action.

In her dissenting opinion, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote about a country where the Bundys and Sterlings still hold considerable sway. Indeed, she went beyond the simple bigotry of the Bundys and Sterlings and found that more subtle wounds of racism still exist in this country. “Race matters,” she wrote, “because of the slights, the snickers, the silent judgments that reinforce that most crippling of thoughts: ‘I do not belong here.’” Indeed, Sotomayor threw Roberts’s famous line back at him. She quoted him—“The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race”—and then wrote, “It is a sentiment out of touch with reality, one not required by our Constitution, and one that has properly been rejected as not sufficient to resolve cases of this nature. While the enduring hope is that race should not matter, the reality is that too often it does. Racial discrimination … is not ancient history.”

The vile words of the rancher and the basketball tycoon showed just how right Sotomayor was. Even if her colleagues insist otherwise, racial discrimination, far from being ancient history, is as fresh and new as the latest alert on your phone.

The Link Between Parkinson's and Your Produce

By Elizabeth Kucinich, Reader Supported News

29 April 14

pril is Parkinson's Awareness month. While we have come a long way since James Parkinson first published An Essay on the Shaking Palsy in 1817, we need to be doing more.

According to the Parkinson's Disease Foundation, "Parkinson's is a chronic, progressive, neurological disease and is the second most common neurodegenerative disease in the United States." It affects an estimated 500,000 to 1,500,000 people in America, is the 14th leading cause of death and costs at least $14.4 billion annually.

Although there is much promising research, there is no known cure for Parkinson's disease. Also, relatively little is known about how Parkinson's disease develops. Research suggests that the cause of Parkinson's disease is a mix of heredity and environmental factors. Pesticides in particular have been repeatedly linked to Parkinson's disease. According to the Parkinson's Disease Foundation, one major environmental factor is pesticide exposure. A meta-analysis in 2012 found that those who live in rural areas or near farming communities where pesticides are used are at a greater risk of developing Parkinson's.

2,4-D is the name of one pesticide, produced by Dow Chemical, that has been linked to Parkinson's disease. Many veterans may recognize 2,4-D as half of the chemical concoction used in Vietnam called Agent Orange. According to research from the Parkinson's Institute, farmworkers exposed to 2,4-D are at double the risk of contracting Parkinson's disease.

Pesticides used in industrial agriculture, and 2,4-D in particular, may be contributing to the growth of Parkinson's disease. Again, according to the Parkinson's Disease Foundation, cases of Parkinson's are expected to more than double by 2040.

Tragically, that rate might be optimistic. Approximately 50 million pounds of 2,4-D is used annually in the United States on residential lawns, golf courses and in agriculture. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, 2,4-D is already the nation's seventh largest source of dioxins in the environment. This ranking might be even higher if EPA considered dioxins emitted in the 2,4-D production process.

Now, these numbers are likely to jump. Dow Chemical has genetically engineered corn, soybeans and cotton to be resistant to 2,4-D so it can be used as a weed killer and sprayed directly on the food crops. If approved, use of 2,4-D could skyrocket to 176 million pounds per year by 2020, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

We need to do more research to fully understand and address the cause of Parkinson's disease. Until then, it seems prudent to minimize exposure to potential risk factors, not exacerbate them. While at first glance disease rates and agricultural practices have no obvious connection, deeper analysis shows that the two may in fact be closely related. What we put into our environment - our soil, water, even our food - can eventually come back around and have consequences for our own bodies. It's time for regulators, policy makers, even everyday citizens to start keeping these connections in mind and make decisions accordingly. Pesticide-promoting crops like Dow's new genetically-engineered corn, soy and cotton are a serious step in the wrong direction.