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Investigators on the Trump-Russia Beat Should Talk to This Man

by dfdedtcf Posted on January 19, 2017

Mother Jones

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Sergei Millian, left, pictured with Donald Trump and Jorge Perez. Millian’s Facebook page

Last week, the Senate intelligence committee announced it was commencing an investigation of Russian hacking during the 2016 campaign that would include an examination of connections between Russia and the Trump camp. And a veiled but pubic exchange between Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), a member of the committee, and FBI Director James Comey during a hearing on January 10 suggested the FBI has collected information on possible ties between Trump associates and Russians and may still be probing this matter. So with subpoena-wielding investigators on this beat, here’s a suggestion: the gumshoes ought to talk to an American from Belarus named Sergei Millian, who has boasted of close ties to Trump and who has worked with an outfit the FBI suspected of being a Russian intelligence front. If they haven’t already.

Millian, who is in his late 30s and won’t say when came to the United States or how he obtained US citizenship, is an intriguing and mysterious figure with a curious connection to Trump. He is president of the Russian-American Chamber of Commerce in the USA (RACC) and the owner of a translation service. The RACC, a nonprofit which Millian started in Atlanta in 2006 and which has survived on shoestring budgets, advocates for closer commercial ties between Russia and the United States and assists US firms looking to do business in Russia. In 2009, the group called for the US Congress “to foster necessary political changes to produce a healthier economic environment” and grant permanent normal trade relations status to Russia. Its website notes that it “facilitates cooperation for U.S. members with the Russian Government, Russian Regional Administrations, U.S. Consulates in Russia, Chambers of Commerce in Russia, and corporate leaders from CIS Commonwealth of Independent States countries.”

The Russian-American Chamber of Commerce’s 2011 tax return reported the group was based in an apartment in Astoria, Queens, where Millian lived—though the group’s letterhead that year listed a Wall Street address—and that year it brought in only $23,300 in contributions and grants and $14,748 in program revenue. The tax return noted that the chamber “successfully hosted four universities from Russia in New York City” and hosted a trade mission from Belarus. In 2015, Millian received a Russian award for fostering cooperation between US and Russian businesses.

On his LinkedIn page, Millian notes he is also the vice president of an outfit called the World Chinese Merchants Union Association, a group that has only a slight presence on the Internet and that seems to have an address in Beijing. According to a LinkedIn post published by Millian in April 2016, he met that month in Beijing with a Chinese official and the Russian ambassador to the Republic of San Marino to discuss industrial and commercial cooperation between China and Russia.

Millian’s online bio notes he graduated from the Minsk State Linguistic University with the equivalent of a masters degree in 2000. His bio says he is a real estate broker who works in residential and commercial properties in the United States and abroad. He used to go by the name Siarhei Kukuts—that’s how he’s listed on tax returns for the RACC—and it is unclear why he changed his name. Millian also has repeatedly claimed he had a significant business association with Trump.

In an April 2016 interview with RIA Novosti, a Russian media outlet, Millian described his history with Trump. He said he met the celebrity real estate developer in 2007 when Trump visited Moscow for a “Millionaire’s Fair,” where he was promoting Trump Vodka. Millian noted that Trump subsequently invited him to a horse race in Miami. “Later,” Millian said, “we met at his office in New York, where he introduced me to his right-hand man—Michael Cohen. He is Trump’s main lawyer, all contracts go through him. Subsequently, a contract was signed with me to promote one of their real estate projects in Russia and the CIS. You can say I was their exclusive broker.”

Millian said he had helped Trump “study the Moscow market” for potential real estate investments. In the April 2009 issue of the Russian-American Chamber of Commerce newsletter, Millian reported that he was working with Russian investors looking to buy property in the United States, and he said, “We have signed formal agreements with the Richard Bowers and Co., the Trump Organization and The Related Group to jointly service the Russian clients’ commercial, residential and industrial real estate needs.” Millian’s claim did jibe with what Donald Trump Jr. said at a 2008 real-estate conference in New York. Trump’s son noted, “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets.” He added, “we see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”

In the 2016 interview, Millian asserted that Trump would be good for Russia if elected president. Trump, he noted would improve US relations with Russia and lift economic sanctions imposed by Washington on Russia. He said that Trump was interested in doing business in Russia: “I don’t want to reveal Trump’s position, but he is keeping Moscow in his sights and is waiting for an appropriate time.” Millian added, “In general Trump has a very positive attitude to Russians, because he sees them as clients for his business. Incidentally, he has done many projects with people from the Russian-language diaspora. For example, Trump SoHo in New York with billionaire Tamir Sapir.” (Sapir, who died in 2014, was an American billionaire real-estate developer from the former Soviet republic of Georgia.)

Millian apparently was proud of his association with Trump. In 2014, he posted on Facebook a photograph of him with Trump and Jorge Perez, the billionaire real-estate developer in Miami who owns the Related Group.

Millian seemed delighted to spin for Trump and push the impression he was a Trump insider. During the Republican convention, he told the Daily Beast that Trump was a “powerful, charismatic, and highly intelligent leader with a realistic approach toward Russia.” He added, “I, personally, wholeheartedly support his presidential aspirations. It’s been a great pleasure representing Mr. Trump’s projects in Russia.” But weeks later, as the Russia hacking controversy was heating up, Millian in another exchange with the Daily Beast, downplayed his connection to Trump. And the website reported that after its reporter spoke him, Millian removed mentions of his Trump association from an online biography. It also appears that references to the Trump Organization working with the Russian-American Chamber of Commerce in the USA were at some point scraped from its website.

Millian’s activities and ties to Trump have raised questions. In October, the Financial Times mounted an investigation of him and the Russian-American Chamber of Commerce. It reported:

Most of the board members are obscure entities and nearly half of their telephone numbers went unanswered when called by the Financial Times. An FT reporter found no trace of the Chamber of Commerce at the Wall Street address listed on its website. At the same time, the chamber appears to have close official ties, arranging trips for visiting Russian regional governors to the US.

As part of its inquiry into Millian, the newspaper pointed to Millian’s connection to Rossotrudnichestvo, a Russian government organization that promotes Russian culture abroad. In 2013, Mother Jones reported that Rossotrudnichestvo was under investigation by the FBI for using junkets to recruit American assets for Russian intelligence. Through cultural exchanges, Rossotrudnichestvo, which operates under the jurisdiction of the Russian Foreign Ministry, was bringing young Americans—including political aides, nonprofit advocates, and business executives—on trips to Russia. The program was run by Yury Zaytsev, a Russian diplomat who headed the Russian Cultural Center in Washington, DC.

Americans who participated in the exchange trips who were later questioned by FBI agents told Mother Jones that the agents’ questions indicated the FBI suspected Zaytsev and Rossotrudnichestvo had been using the all-expenses-paid trips to Russia to cultivate Americans as intelligence assets. (An asset could be a person who directly works with an intelligence service to gather information, or merely a contact who provides information, opinions, or gossip, not realizing it is being collected by an intelligence officer.) After Mother Jones published a story on the FBI investigation, the Russian embassy in Washington issued a statement: “All such ‘scaring information’ very much resembles Cold War era. A blunt tentative is made to distort and to blacken activities of the Russian Cultural Center in DC, which are aimed at developing mutual trust and cooperation between our peoples and countries.” (A year later, in November 2014, Zaytsev spoke at a Moscow press conference and said, in reference to the upcoming US presidential elections, “it seems to me that the Russian ‘card’ will certainly be played out.” He added, “I think that this presidential election first of all will very clearly show a trend of further development” in US-Russia relations.)

Millian has collaborated with Rossotrudnichestvo. In 2011, he and the Russian-American Chamber of Commerce worked with Zaytsev and the Russian group to mount a 10-day exchange that brought 50 entrepreneurs to the first “Russian-American Business Forum” in Moscow and the Vladimir region, according to a letter Millian sent to Russian President Dmitry Medvedev after the initiative. In that letter, Millian praised Rossotrudnichestvo, and he added, “My entire staff, fellow participants, and I, here at the Russian-American Chamber of Commerce in the USA, very much look forward to assisting Rossotrudnichestvo with the preparations for next year’s trip.” (Millian now says, “We are not affiliated with Rossotrudnichestvo in any way.”)

Toward the end of the presidential campaign Michael Cohen, the Trump lawyer, told the Financial Times that Millian’s claims of working with Trump were “nothing more than a weak attempt to align himself with Mr. Trump’s overwhelmingly successful brand.” But the newspaper reported that Cohen “did not respond to questions about whether he interacted with Mr. Millian or why Mr. Millian is one of only 100 people he follows on Twitter.” (Cohen no longer follows Millian on Twitter.) Hope Hicks, Trump’s campaign spokeswoman, told the paper that Trump had “met and spoke” with Millian only “on one occasion almost a decade ago at a hotel opening.”

Cohen, Hicks, Sean Spicer, Trump’s designated White House press secretary, and the Trump presidential transition team did not respond to a request for information regarding Millian’s interactions with Trump and his associates.

Reached by telephone this week, Millian said he would not discuss his relationship with Trump and requested he be sent questions via email. Mother Jones subsequently sent him a list. Millian responded in an email with answers to a different set of questions, and he noted he would not answer any queries about his personal background or provide any details beyond what was in this reply. He said in the email, “I have a solid reputation with businesses around the world. It’s a common practice for immigrants to change name upon immigrating to the USA. I am US citizen and do not have and never had Russian citizenship. I live and work in NYC.”

In the email, Millian asserted, “I have never said that I worked personally for Trump. I said I was a broker for one of his many real estate projects. There are several brokers who work on such real estate projects. I never represented Mr Trump personally and I am not working with Mr Trump.” He added, “I have signed an official contract with talks of exclusivity that authorized me to represent Trump name project in Russia and CIS.” But he said he had never been paid by Trump for any work. He maintained that the last time he spoke to Trump was in 2008.

Millian insisted he had “never worked for Russian Government or Russian military as a translator or in any other capacity.” He said, “We never got any business with Rossotrudnichestvo.” And he made this point: “I’m a member of the Presidential Trust of NRC-GOP and supporter of Mr Trump who contributed to his campaign just the same way as many millions of Americans. I’m proud that Mr Trump became our president. I’m sure he will rebuild our great nation to the highest standards just as he did with his distinguished buildings. We desperately need better infrastructure, airports, railways in this country. Also, high time starting paying off national debts. I feel upset that press tries to distracts him from making our country great again by distributing fake news.” (A search of campaign finance records revealed no contribution from Millian to the Trump campaign or Republican National Committee; a contribution of $200 does not have to itemized.)

Millian’s response ignored several questions Mother Jones sent him. He would not say when he left Belarus or explain how he became an American citizen. He would not discuss the details of the deal he previously claimed to have struck with the Trump Organization. He would not say how many times he worked on projects or exchanges with Rossotrudnichestvo. (His response seemed to suggest he had nothing to do with the Russian organization, yet the 2011 letter he wrote indicated his Russian-American Chamber of Commerce had collaborated with Rossotrudnichestvo.) He did not explain why references to the Trump organization had been scraped from the RACC’s website and his bio. And he did not answer this question: “In the last year and a half, have you had any contacts with Donald Trump or any of his political or business associates?”

Various media outlets that have examined links between Trump and Russia have focused on Carter Page, a Moscow-connected foreign policy adviser for Trump ‘s presidential campaign (whom Trump spokesman Sean Spicer recently falsely claimed Trump did not know) and Paul Manafort, Trump’s onetime presidential campaign manager who had business ties to Russians and Putin-allied Ukrainians. Any official investigators would likely be interested in these two men. They also should schedule a sit down with Millian.

Originally posted here:

Investigators on the Trump-Russia Beat Should Talk to This Man

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Which States’ Kids Miss the Most School?

by dfdedtcf Posted on September 2, 2014

Mother Jones

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September is upon us, and American kids are filling up their backpacks. But lots of kids won’t be going back to school—at least not very much. The map above shows the results of a national report released Tuesday by nonprofit Attendance Works, which zooms in on a statistic called “chronic absenteeism,” generally defined as the number of kids who miss at least 10 percent of school days over the course of a year. The measure has become popular among education reformers over the past few years because unlike other measures like average daily attendance or truancy, chronic absenteeism focuses on the specific kids who are regularly missing instructional time, regardless of the reason why or the overall performance of the school.

Several studies have shown that missing 10 percent of school seems to be a threshold of sorts: If you miss more than that, your odds of scoring well on tests, graduating high school, and attending college are significantly lower. A statewide study in Utah, for example, found that kids who were chronically absent for a year between 8th and 12th grades were more than seven times more likely to drop out. The pattern starts early in the year: A 2013 Baltimore study found that half of the students who missed two to four days of school in September went on to be chronically absent.

The Attendance Works study, which used missing three days per month as a proxy for the 10 percent threshold, categorized students missing school by location, race, and socioeconomic status. Here’s what they found:

Oddly enough, the federal government doesn’t track absenteeism. Seventeen states do, and, as David Cardinali wrote in the New York Times last week, states have found that school attendance often falls on socioeconomic lines: In Maryland, nearly a third of high school students who receive free or reduced lunch are chronically absent.

In order to work with a national dataset, Attendance Works looked at the results of the National Assessment for Educational Attainment, the nation’s largest continuing standardized test, taken by a sample of fourth- and eighth-graders across the country every two years. In addition to academic content, the test asks students a series of nonacademic questions, including how many days of school they have missed in the past month. If students reported missing three or more days, they had crossed the 10 percent threshold; assuming that month is representative of the rest of the year, the kids qualify as chronically absent.

Obviously, there’s a huge disclaimer here: Students may not remember or accurately report their own absences, and one month may not be representative of an entire school year. But at the same time, the results were remarkably consistent, reflecting conclusions from localized studies: Students in poverty are less likely to come to school, and as the chart below shows, students who come to school less perform markedly worse on tests. (For reference, an improvement of 10 points on the National Assessment for Educational Progress is roughly equivalent to jumping a grade level.)

Phyllis Jordan, a coauthor of the Attendance Works report, hopes that as schools look more into the data, they’ll be able to identify the core reasons for the absence: “If everybody from a certain neighborhood is missing school and they have to walk through a bad neighborhood, then suddenly you say, ‘Oh, we should run a school bus through there.’ If it’s all the kids with asthma and you don’t have a school nurse, maybe that’s a reason. Or maybe it’s all concentrated in a single classroom, and you have an issue with the teacher.”

The good news is that citywide studies in New York City and Chicago show that when chronically absent kids start coming to school more, they can make substantial academic gains. And the simple act of tracking and prioritizing absenteeism can lead to statewide progress: When Hawaii started keeping track of chronic absenteeism in 2012, the state went from having a chronic absentee rate of 18 to 11 percent over the course of a single year.

Original article: 

Which States’ Kids Miss the Most School?

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Getting to the Bottom of David Wildstein

by dfdedtcf Posted on February 6, 2014

Mother Jones

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What exactly was David Wildstein’s job at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey? His official title was Director of Interstate Capital Projects, which isn’t much help since building and managing interstate capital projects is pretty much all the Port Authority does. The position was invented in 2010 after Chris Christie became governor, and it was eliminated after Wildstein resigned following the Bridgegate revelations. It doesn’t appear to have much of an official job description. So what did Wildstein do? Here’s what Shawn Boburg of the Bergen County Record said about him in a 2012 profile:

Wildstein is playing a key behind-the-scenes role in Governor Christie’s effort to get more control over the Port Authority, the bi-state transportation agency that has come under increased scrutiny since raising bridge and tunnel tolls in September….Several executives said Wildstein has played a role in placing some of those recommended by the Christie administration in jobs and that he seems to serve as the administration’s eyes and ears within the byzantine agency.

….Eight current and past Port Authority colleagues agreed to speak about Wildstein, but insisted that their identities remain undisclosed because they feared retribution. They described Wildstein, one of 50 recommended for jobs by the Christie administration, as intimidating, hardworking, intelligent, private and fiercely loyal to the governor.

Some bristle that a senior executive post is occupied by someone with more experience with campaigns than with transportation issues. “He became the watcher of the entire agency,” one person said. “What he was watching for was strict adherence to the Christie agenda.”

Hmmm. Via Bob Somerby, here is what WNYC’s Andrea Bernstein said on Lawrence O’Donnell’s show last night:

This wasn’t a nothing job. This was a really important position where he was in charge of doling out billions of dollars for capital projects, much of that in New Jersey.

And what we know now is that David Wildstein was taking money and putting them into projects that solved other problems for Chris Christie, lots and lots of money….There was a project lifting up the Bayonne Bridge….There was also billions of dollars that went into the Pulaski skyway….Now, this seems like a mundane project, but the key thing about it is that it meant that Chris Christie didn’t have to spend New Jersey funds. So it solved a big budget headache.

….Now, as you mentioned, the top of the segment, I learned and some other reporters learned this week, that this position had been eliminated. Which sort of goes to, was it key? Was it important? Or was it something that was created so that David Wildstein could carry out Chris Christie’s will at this authority? Which is, let’s not forget, a bi-state authority, New York and New Jersey. It runs the airports. It runs the bridges and tunnels between New York and New Jersey. That’s its function.

The Christie take on this is that the Port Authority was a mess and badly needed better oversight, which Wildstein provided. Everyone else’s take is that Christie wanted more personal control over which projects were and weren’t approved, and Wildstein was his inside guy, the enforcer who made sure that Christie loyalists were installed in key positions and Christie priorities were taken care of.

And I guess that job is no longer necessary. That’s either because Wildstein did a bang-up job and the Port Authority no longer needs extra oversight, or because Bridgegate made it politically impossible to keep a Christie enforcer on the Port Authority payroll. I guess you can make up your own mind about which seems more likely.

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Getting to the Bottom of David Wildstein

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Frackers banned from New York for at least another year

by dfdedtcf Posted on January 30, 2014

Frackers banned from New York for at least another year

By

CREDO

Good news, New Yorkers. Your state has staved off the creepy advances of environment-trashing frackers for at least another year.

While neighboring states have allowed oil and gas companies to frack freely in their Marcellus shale deposits, the Empire State declared a statewide moratorium in 2008, saying it needed time to study the impacts to water supplies and human health. The ban has attracted lawsuits from the energy industry, but fracking is so unpopular in New York that dozens of local governments have put their own bans in place, just in case the state’s is lifted.

That doesn’t seem likely, at least not before April of next year. Here’s Bloomberg with Wednesday’s news:

Joe Martens, who heads the Environmental Conservation Department, told lawmakers in Albany today that [Gov. Andrew] Cuomo’s proposed $137 billion budget doesn’t have any funding for oversight of high-volume hydraulic fracturing.

Asked if he’ll end the more than five-year wait for fracking rules, Martens said, “We have absolutely no plans to do so” in the next fiscal year, which begins April 1.

Needless to say, the news triggered a fresh burst of histrionics from the energy sector. “The human cost in New York, due to arbitrary delays on this matter, is real,” a New York State Petroleum Council official told Bloomberg.

Human cost? We’re not sure exactly what that means. But we’re hoping it doesn’t mean frustrated frackers have begun human sacrifices to avenge the uncertainty they face over whether they will be allowed to plunder the state’s environment.


Source
New York Decision on Fracking Regulations Delayed, Bloomberg

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Frackers banned from New York for at least another year

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Maine’s loony Tea Party governor signs GMO-labeling law

by dfdedtcf Posted on January 10, 2014

Maine’s loony Tea Party governor signs GMO-labeling law

By

MaineDOE

Maine on Thursday became the second state in the nation to require food manufacturers to put labels on products containing genetically modified ingredients — sort of.

Gov. Paul LePage (R) signed “An Act To Protect Maine Food Consumers’ Right To Know about Genetically Engineered Food,” which mandates the following:

any food or seed stock offered for retail sale that is genetically engineered must be accompanied by a conspicuous disclosure that states “Produced with Genetic Engineering.”

The law would also prevent any products containing GMOs from being labeled as “natural.” That should seem obvious, but big food manufacturers are currently pressuring the federal government to allow them to use such labels on genetically modified foods.

But Maine’s new law has a catch, similar to the catch in a GMO-labeling law passed in Connecticut last month. The Maine law won’t take effect until at least five nearby states adopt similar rules. That’s because the states are unwilling to go it alone in the courts against Big Ag and Big Food. The Kennebec Journal reports:

Proponents of the bill said the provision would quell concerns about an almost-certain lawsuit by industry groups and Monsanto, which vowed to challenge the laws in Maine and Connecticut on the basis that they violate the free speech and interstate commerce provisions of the U.S. Constitution.

Maine Attorney General Janet Mills told lawmakers last year that the bill was almost certain to face a legal challenge, and said she could not guarantee that her office could defend its constitutionality.

The Journal reports that the bill “brought together such factions as libertarian Republicans and liberal Democrats, creating strong support.”

It did more than that: It got approval from “America’s craziest governor,” as Politico called LePage this week, “a man who can make even the most hot-headed conservative talk radio hosts seem reasonable.”

We’ll let you decide whether that’s a good or bad omen for the GMO-labeling movement.


Source
LePage signs bill to label genetically modified food, Kennebec Journal

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Maine’s loony Tea Party governor signs GMO-labeling law

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Snail-Mail Health Insurance Campaign Gets Overwhelming Response in Arkansas

by dfdedtcf Posted on October 2, 2013

Mother Jones

Direct mail is a staple of dying print magazines and donation-seeking nonprofits. Such campaigns generally rely on sending enormous quantities of junk mail in the hopes of getting maybe a 3 percent return on the effort. So when the Arkansas Department of Human Services recently sent out 132,000 one-page letters to uninsured, low-income folks in the state offering them free health insurance through Arkansas’s new privatized Medicaid program (a red-state version of expanding Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act), tea partiers in the legislature derided the effort as a waste of time and money.

But as a sign of how desperate people are for affordable health care, the department ended up getting more than 55,000 responses to the snail-mail campaign—an unheard of 40 percent return. The Arkansas Times reported that not only did all those people want to enroll in the health care plan, but the outreach effort identified more than 2,500 kids who were eligible for traditional Medicaid but weren’t enrolled. They are now signed up.

The state is fortunate that direct mail is working out so well, as other efforts to let people know about their new health insurance options are being sabotaged by Tea Party GOP state legislators. Backed by the Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity, these elected officials are still trying to prevent the state’s human services department from using $4.5 million in federal funds to advertise the offerings of Arkansas’s new insurance exchange, where starting this week, people can sign up for subsidized private health plans.

AFP, whose affiliate has been buying creepy ads telling young people not to get health insurance, has been lobbying hard to keep the state from advertising the new insurance offerings available under the Affordable Care Act, complaining mightily that “Arkansans are being forced to pay for advertising that tries to convince the state to give-in-to Obamacare.” They fret that the federal funds will pay for ads in such places as—gasp!—the Arkansas Times and generate irritating pop-up ads on social media, search engines, and sites like Pandora radio. But pop-up ads can’t hold a candle to the irritations of being uninsured. It’s clear that, as the direct mail effort proved, AFP is mostly afraid that once people know they can get insurance, they’re going to take it, and happily.

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Snail-Mail Health Insurance Campaign Gets Overwhelming Response in Arkansas

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Naomi Klein says big green groups are more trouble than climate deniers

by dfdedtcf Posted on September 10, 2013

Naomi Klein says big green groups are more trouble than climate deniers

By

Ed KashiNaomi Klein.

Progressive journalist and activist Naomi Klein made waves a couple of years ago with an article in The Nation arguing that climate activism and current-day capitalism are incompatible. An appropriate response to the massive threat of climate change “is going to require shredding the free-market ideology that has dominated the global economy for more than three decades,” she argued.

Now, in a new interview with Jason Mark of Earth Island Journal, she lambastes major environmental groups for failing to understand this point, for being too tied to the neoliberal agenda and too cozy with corporations.

I think there is a very deep denialism in the environmental movement among the Big Green groups. And to be very honest with you, I think it’s been more damaging than the right-wing denialism in terms of how much ground we’ve lost. Because it has steered us in directions that have yielded very poor results. I think if we look at the track record of Kyoto, of the UN Clean Development Mechanism, the European Union’s emissions trading scheme — we now have close to a decade that we can measure these schemes against, and it’s disastrous. Not only are emissions up, but you have no end of scams to point to, which gives fodder to the right. The right took on cap-and-trade by saying it’s going to bankrupt us, it’s handouts to corporations, and, by the way, it’s not going to work. And they were right … Not in the bankrupting part, but they were right that this was a massive corporate giveaway, and they were right that it wasn’t going to bring us anywhere near what scientists were saying we needed to do [to] lower emissions. So I think it’s a really important question why the green groups have been so unwilling to follow science to its logical conclusions. …

[For Big Green groups now,] it’s about corporate partnerships. It’s not, “sue the bastards”; it’s, “work through corporate partnerships with the bastards.” …

More than that, it’s casting corporations as the solution, as the willing participants and part of this solution. …

We’ve globalized an utterly untenable economic model of hyperconsumerism. It’s now successfully spreading across the world, and it’s killing us.

It’s not that the green groups were spectators to this — they were partners in this. They were willing participants in this. It’s not every green group. It’s not Greenpeace, it’s not Friends of the Earth, it’s not, for the most part, the Sierra Club. It’s not 350.org, because it didn’t even exist yet. But I think it goes back to the elite roots of the movement, and the fact that when a lot of these conservation groups began there was kind of a noblesse oblige approach to conservation. It was about elites getting together and hiking and deciding to save nature. And then the elites changed. So if the environmental movement was going to decide to fight, they would have had to give up their elite status. And [they] weren’t willing to give up their elite status. I think that’s a huge part of the reason why emissions are where they are.

Like what she’s got to say? Read the rest at Earth Island Journal. And then keep an eye out for Klein’s new book on climate change, due out next year.

Don’t like what she has to say? You’re not alone. Joe Romm at Climate Progress has a thorough takedown, concluding with a quote from Grist’s own David Roberts:

UPDATE: Klein has posted a response to Romm on her website: “if anyone is guilty of taking a sledge hammer to an ally here, I suggest you take a quick glance at what’s in your (bloody) hand.”

Lisa Hymas is senior editor at Grist. You can follow her on Twitter and Google+.Find this article interesting? Donate now to support our work.Read more: Climate & Energy

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Naomi Klein says big green groups are more trouble than climate deniers

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Robots Will Win Our Hearts Before They Destroy Us All

by dfdedtcf Posted on September 6, 2013

Mother Jones

The Economist writes about robots:

No matter how flexible, easy to program and safe they are, collaborative workers may not be welcomed by human workers to begin with. The experience of Alumotion, an Italian distributor of UR’s robots, is illustrative. Workers fear being replaced by robots, says co-owner Fabio Facchinetti, so his salespeople carry demonstration units in unmarked cases and initially only meet a potential client’s senior management behind closed doors.

Roger that. So how do we make humans more accepting of robots? Part of the answer, as near as I can tell, is the usual: other, higher ranking humans will tell lies about how the robots will never, ever take away your job. They’ll just help you do your job better! But there’s also this:

Workers generally warm to collaborative robots quickly….And because workers themselves do the programming, they tend to regard the robots as subordinate assistants. This is good for morale….To keep human workers at ease, collaborative robots should also have an appropriate size and appearance. Takayuki Kanda of the ATR Intelligent Robotics and Communication Laboratories in Kyoto says that collaborative, humanoid robots should generally be no larger than a six-year-old, a size most adults reckon they could overpower if necessary.

….It turns out, for example, that people are more trusting of robots that use metaphors rather than abstract language, says Bilge Mutlu….He has found that robots are more persuasive when they refer to the opinions of humans and limit pauses to about a third of a second to avoid appearing confused. Robots’ gazes must also be carefully programmed lest a stare make someone uncomfortable.

….When a person enters a room, robots inside should pause for a moment and acknowledge the newcomer, a sign of deference that puts people at ease….It is vital that a robot of this sort is not perceived as hostile, but as having its owner’s best interests at heart….One way to do this is to give robots a defining human trait—the ability to make mistakes. Maha Salem, a researcher under Dr Dautenhahn, programmed a humanoid Asimo robot, made by Honda, to make occasional harmless mistakes such as pointing to one drawer while talking about another. When it comes to household robots, test subjects prefer those that err over infallible ones, Dr Salem says.

So this is how robots will eventually become our overlords. They will keep themselves small and supposedly easy to overpower. They will traffic in charming metaphors. They will pretend to care about our opinions. They will avoid eye contact. They will feign deference. They will simulate charming clumsiness. And, of course, they will mount a massive PR campaign aimed at getting Hollywood to portray robots not as the relentless killing machines they are, but as harmless, friendly little eco-bots. They will do all this while Skynet takes over behind the scenes. You have been warned.

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Robots Will Win Our Hearts Before They Destroy Us All

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