Author Archives: pedzacastrzala87

10 People You Didn’t Realize Were Friends of Hamas

by pedzacastrzala87 Posted on February 20, 2013

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Breitbart News editor-at-large Ben Shapiro created a bit of a stir last week when he alleged that Sen. Chuck Hagel, President Obama’s nominee to be the next secretary of defense, may have ties to an organization called “Friends of Hamas.”

On Wednesday, after reporters at mainstream publications could find no evidence of any such organization even existing, Shapiro* Breitbart News doubled down: “The mainstream media have ignored the fact that at least one prominent supporter of Hamas has donated money to an organization associated with former Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-NE)—namely, the Atlantic Council, which receives support from the Hariri family of Lebanon, whose most prominent member, former Lebanese prime minister Saad Hariri, publicly backs Hamas.”

Okay.

The Atlantic Council is, like many such vaguely named D.C. institutions, a repository for pretty much anyone who has ever held a high-ranking foreign policy position in the federal government. If Shapiro is correct, Hagel should be the least of our worries; every administration since the 1960s has been corrupted by Hamas:

Condoleezza Rice: Bush’s second secretary of state—and Atlantic Council honorary director—hid her connections to Hamas by refusing to negotiate with it.

William Webster: The only man to ever helm the CIA and the FBI, Webster served under Presidents Carter, Reagan, and George H.W. Bush and is an honorary director at the Atlantic Council.

Robert Gates: Gates, an honorary director, was George W. Bush’s last Secretary of Defense (and President Obama’s first).

James A. Baker, III: An honorary director of the Atlantic Council, Baker served as a chief of staff for Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.

Michael Hayden: Another honorary director, Hayden was a CIA director under George W. Bush.

James Woolsey: President Bill Clinton’s CIA director is a member of the Atlantic Council’s board of directors. You may have seen him at Big Journalism’s sister Breitbart publication, Big Peace.

William H. Taft, IV: “Get on the raft with Taft” was the campaign slogan of this Council director’s great-grandfather. You know who else used rafts?

George P. Shultz: Reagan’s secretary of state for seven years is an Atlantic Council honorary director.

Henry A. Kissinger: President Richard Nixon’s Secretary of State sits on the Atlantic Council board of directors, when he’s not busy mentoring Sarah Palin on foreign policy and blaming Hamas for obstructing the peace process.

Rupert Murdoch: Murdoch was the winner of the Atlantic Council’s 2008 “Atlantic Council Leadership Award,” and is CEO of some small, locally-sourced media co-op you probably haven’t heard of. He previously expressed his support for Hamas by accusing the “Jewish-owned press” of being “consistently anti-Israel.”

Fortunately, opponents of Hagel have settled on an alternative who could presumably be confirmed without much of a fight: former undersecretary of defense Michèle Flournoy. Even former Rep. Allen West (R-Fla.), who sees the threat of terrorism around every corner, supports Flournoy.

The catch: Flournoy sits on the Atlantic Council’s board of directors, too.

*This post originally attributed the article to Shapiro.

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10 People You Didn’t Realize Were Friends of Hamas

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Alabama Rep. McClurkin: Abortion Removes the "Largest Organ" in a Woman’s Body

by pedzacastrzala87 Posted on February 19, 2013

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The Alabama House of Representatives is expected to vote Tuesday on a bill that would place heavy restrictions on abortion in the state because, according to the bill’s sponsor, Rep. Mary Sue McClurkin (R), “when a physician removes a child from a woman, that’s the largest organ in a body.”

The bill would place a host of regulations on Alabama’s five abortion clinics. The Montgomery Advertiser reports:

The legislation … would require physicians at abortion clinics to have admitting privileges at local hospitals; require clinics to follow ambulatory clinic building codes and make it a felony — punishable by up to 10 years in prison — for a nurse, nurse practitioner or physician’s assistant to dispense abortion-inducing medications.

The requirement that all doctors who perform abortions have admitting privileges at a local hospital is the same rule that is currently threatening Mississippi’s last abortion clinic. Hospitals are not required to grant doctors admitting privileges, so if local hospitals chose not to allow doctors to admit patients, abortion providers will not be able to comply with the law. That is exactly what has happened in Mississippi. (Currently, the clinic in Mississippi is open while it awaits a hearing with the state health department.)

“That’s a big surgery. You don’t have any other organs in your body that are bigger than that,” McClurkin told The Montgomery Advisor. Nevermind that the liver, the second-largest organ after the skin, is about the size of a football and larger than a first- or second-trimester fetus: McClurkin’s assertion that the fetus is an organ contradicts the idea of fetal personhood, a favorite Republican rationale for banning abortion. Organs are not people. That makes McClurkin’s comment possibly the most creative excuse for throttling abortion clinics in a while.

“Her comments alone prove the intent of the bill,” says Nikema Williams, a vice president at Planned Parenthood Southeast. Williams says the bill is “designed to close down all of the abortion providers in the state of Alabama.” The House of Representatives will vote on the bill Tuesday afternoon, Williams says.

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Alabama Rep. McClurkin: Abortion Removes the "Largest Organ" in a Woman’s Body

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6 Humane Ways to Stop Garden Pests

by pedzacastrzala87 Posted on February 9, 2013

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6 Humane Ways to Stop Garden Pests

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Seattle and San Francisco consider divesting from fossil fuels

by pedzacastrzala87 Posted on February 6, 2013

Seattle and San Francisco consider divesting from fossil fuels

By Susie Cagle

350.org

The divestment campaign that 350.org began in late 2012 has grown up so quickly! It seemed like just yesterday that Bill McKibben et al were convincing colleges to pull their money out of the fossil fuel industry and in turn feel much better about their moral selves.

Now the movement’s graduated and moved on to lobbying municipal governments to do the same. So far Seattle and San Francisco’s city employee pension funds are both looking at divesting from fossil fuel companies.

From the Financial Times:

If the Seattle retirement scheme were to divest from such companies completely, it would be the first to take such a step, said Stephanie Pfeifer of the Institutional Investors Group on Climate Change, which represents some of Europe’s largest pension funds and asset managers.

Mindy Lubber, president of the US-based Ceres investor advocacy group, agreed, saying the move underlined the mounting push for investors to acknowledge the long-term risk of investing in fossil fuel companies, as policies to curb climate change keep emerging.

“The divestment movement without question is re-raising the question of whether fossil fuel companies are the best investment and I think over time they’re not going to be,” she said.

Seattle’s $1.9 billion pension fund currently holds $17.6 million in investments in oil and gas companies.

Today in San Francisco, City Supervisor John Avalos introduced a resolution calling for his city’s $16 billion retirement fund to divest from fossil fuel companies.

“San Francisco has aggressive goals to address climate change,” Avalos said in a statement. “It’s important that we apply these same values when we decide how to invest our funds, so we can limit our financial contributions to fossil fuels and instead promote renewable alternatives.”

McKibben says it’s “a show of Pacific solidarity.” A climate change to one is a climate change to all! But will the movement hit other, less traditionally progressive city governments as well?

Editor’s note: Bill McKibben serves on Grist’s board of directors.

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The NRA’s Own Fanaticism May Be Its Doom

by pedzacastrzala87 Posted on February 5, 2013

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Paul Waldman argues that if any kind of gun regulation passes in the near future, the NRA will have only itself to blame:

They’ve become more extremist in the last two decades, but most people didn’t realize it, because unless you’re a member and are getting their magazines and emails or seeing their representatives appear at conventions, you had no idea just how extreme they’d become. So the idea that the NRA is just the guardian of Americans’ gun rights could persist. An average gun owner who saw that the NRA endorsed a candidate could say, whatever else he thought of that candidate, “I suppose he’s all right when it comes to guns.”

But now that Wayne LaPierre has been appearing on television shows, the whole country has gotten to see just what a maniac he is, and how extreme the organization has become. And now that there are concrete proposals on the table, voters can see that the NRA will oppose even universal background checks, which every opinion poll taken in the last couple of months has shown are supported by an astonishing 90 percent of the public. When even the host of Fox News Sunday is calling your arguments “ridiculous” and “nonsense,” you’ve got a problem.

I find this a very congenial view, but I’m curious about whether it’s actually true. To me, of course, Wayne LaPierre’s spittle-flecked performance last December was dramatic evidence of just how crazy the NRA has gotten. But how many people saw it? And how many people interpreted it the same way I did? I’m not really sure about that. Not many people watch press conferences or congressional hearings on C-SPAN, and the ones who do mostly have their minds already made up.

So….I’m not sure about this. Still, I hope it’s true, because the evolution of the NRA over the past decade or two has been truly hair-raising. Tim Dickinson gets at some of this in “The NRA vs. America,” his long-form look at the NRA’s growing business connections to the gun industry, but I think there’s still a good piece to be written about the cultural evolution of the NRA as well.

Over the past 20 years, fueled by paranoia over Ruby Ridge and Waco and aided by the rise of assault weapon fetishization, the NRA has gotten almost insanely aggressive. In the past, they were a single-minded lobby out to protect your right to own a gun: zealous and unbending, but with a fairly limited set of goals. However, since the mid-90sâ&#128;&#148;and accelerating after the Supreme Court finally codified gun ownership rights once and for allâ&#128;&#148;they’ve gone far, far beyond this. Conspiracy theories about the UN coming to take away your guns run rampant in NRA literature. They now insist not just that guns help you defend yourself, but that widespread ownership actively reduces crime. What’s more, merely defending gun ownership is no longer enough. Not by a long way. Today the NRA fights fanatically for the expansion of shall-issue laws, concealed carry laws, unconcealed carry laws, stand your ground laws, and a bevy of laws that would all but remove the right of private property owners to ban guns on their own premises. They want guns in schools, guns in bars, guns in the workplace, guns everywhere. The result is squadlets of morons marching around shopping malls with AR-15s slung over their shoulders, causing total panic, just to show that, by God, no one can deprive them of their 2nd Amendment rights.

That’s the story I’d like to read. How and why did the NRA morph from merely defending gun ownership to actively demanding that guns should be displayed everywhere, at all times, and largely as a means of defending yourself from the state? Has someone already written the definitive piece on this subject, or is it still awaiting its Boswell?

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The NRA’s Own Fanaticism May Be Its Doom

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The Trouble With the SEC’s "Cars"

by pedzacastrzala87 Posted on February 4, 2013

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On Monday, we posted my story on high-speed trading from the January/February print issue of Mother Jones. (Read it!) Here’s the nut:

As technology has ushered in a brave new world on Wall Street, the nation’s watchdogs remain behind the curve, unable to effectively monitor, much less regulate, today’s markets. As in 2008, when regulators only seemed to realize after the fact the threat posed by the toxic stew of securitization, the financial whiz kids are again one stepâ&#128;&#148;or leapâ&#128;&#148;ahead…

…Knight Capital’s big loss on August 1 wasn’t the worst-case scenario. Not even close. A lot of high-frequency trading is done by small proprietary trading firms, subject to less oversight than brand name financial institutions. But big banks have also tried to get in on the act. Imagine a runaway algorithm at a too-big-to-fail company like Bank of America, which manages trillions, not billions, in assets. Or, says Bill Black, a former federal regulator who helped investigate the S&L crisis of the ’80s and ’90s, imagine trading algorithms causing “a series of cascade failures”â&#128;&#148;like the domino effect that followed Lehman’s collapse. “If enough of these bad things occur at the same time,” he says, “financial institutions can begin to fail, even very large ones.” It’s not a question of whether this will happen, Black warns. “It is a question of when.”

Years of mistakes and bad decisions led to the 2008 collapse. But when the next crisis happens, it may not develop over months, weeks, or even days. It could take seconds.

One quote I couldn’t fit in the final story illuminates the point that the nation’s watchdogs are behind the curve. When I asked Gregg Berman, the Securities and Exchange Commission expert who headed the agency’s inquiry into the flash crash, how he’d describe the SEC’s role, he responded with an extended metaphor:

Berman compares the agency’s role in the marketplace to how traffic laws are created and enforced. A town can pass rules setting speed limits that take into account traffic flow and safety, and patrol officers can use radar guns to measure the speed of individual cars, issuing tickets when violations occur. But the officer is not actually in the car and cannot step on the brake pedal as soon as the driver begins to violate the speed limit. Similarly, the SEC is not generally an active market participant “steering the car” in real time. Instead, it acts through policies that do act in real time. For example, the single-stock circuit breakers, put in place after the flash crash, are designed to automatically hit the brakes and halt trading under disorderly market conditions, akin to programing the car to hit the brakes automatically when a potential collision is detected.

That the SEC isn’t “in the car,” steering in real time, is obvious to anyone who works in financeâ&#128;&#148;as Berman notes, the agency is limited to accident-avoidance technologies that are programmed in advance. It’s obvious why this is: Giving the SEC the ability to monitor and shut down trading in real time would be enormously expensive and would likely slow down trading considerably. (Imagine if someone sitting in the passenger seat while you drive, with their own wheel and set of brakes. You probably wouldn’t like it.)

To the uninitiated, though, this point might seem pretty scary. The SEC is relying on automatic measuresâ&#128;&#148;designed in response to the last disasterâ&#128;&#148;to slam on the brakes if a potential collision is detected. But the “cars” (trading firms) are hurtling down highways faster than ever before, and many of them are being “driven” by robotsâ&#128;&#148;sophisticated trading algorithms that buy and sell securities automatically, without human intervention.

One crash, and the demise of one trading firm, isn’t such a big deal. But what about a chain-reaction crash? What about a multi-car pileup?

Here’s the bottom line: If the SEC’s automatic measures fail, it won’t be able to react in time to avert a crisis. It will only be able to come in after the fact and try to clean up the mess. We accept this sort of thing when it comes to cars. But even the largest of car crashes can’t wreak the kind of economic havoc that a series of cascade failures in the market could.

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Quote of the Day: Can Hollywood Solve the World’s Problems?

by pedzacastrzala87 Posted on February 2, 2013

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From director Steven Soderbergh, singing the glories of Hollywood’s ideology-free, can-do attitude:

One thing I do know from making art is that ideology is the enemy of problem-solving. Nobody sits on a film set and says, “No, you canâ&#128;&#153;t use green-screen VFX to solve that because Iâ&#128;&#153;m Catholic.”….I look at Hurricane Katrina, and I think if four days before landfall you gave a movie studio autonomy and a 100th of the billions the government spent on that disaster, and told them, “Lock this place down and get everyone taken care of,” we wouldnâ&#128;&#153;t be using that disaster as an example of what not to do.

Hollywood! The place that brought you Heaven’s Gate and Ishtar! The place where a cartoon director was handed $200 million to direct John Carter, no questions asked, because hey, how different can live action be? The place where studio chiefs practically quiver in fear over green lighting a movie that’s not a comic book or a sequel. The place with executives so easy to parody that it hardly even seems worth the bother anymore. The place that spent years trying to ban VCRs. The place that’s spent the past two decades trying to figure out the internet without any notable success.

How is it that smart people can be so dumb about government? Does Soderbergh seriously think that Hollywood is a poster child for the efficient use of budget dollars? Does he really believe that Hollywood is ideology free? Is he aware, for example, that our copyright law is the shambles it is largely because of Hollywood lobbying? Does he realize that governments deal with problems just a wee more important and less tractable than which green-screen technology works best? Does he have the slightest idea how the real world works? Apparently not. Here’s his answer to the obvious follow-up question:

Okay, so hereâ&#128;&#153;s your chance: What is the efficient way to run a railroad or a government, as the case may be?

Iâ&#128;&#153;m of the minority opinion that presidents should be given more power for less time. Let himâ&#128;&#148;no â&#128;&#156;herâ&#128;&#157; yet!â&#128;&#148;put the ideas he campaigned on into play, like a new tax code, and letâ&#128;&#153;s see if it works or fails, quickly. If it doesnâ&#128;&#153;t, then two years later the people who said it would never work get their chance.

Sounds great! I wonder if Soderbergh realizes that lots of other countries work pretty much exactly this way? And that for most problems complicated enough for anyone to care about, figuring out if something “works or fails, quickly” isn’t quite the same as releasing a movie and seeing how it does at the box office?

Via Sullivan.

UPDATE: Obviously this particular excerpt from the interview annoyed me a wee bit. Soderbergh is basically saying that if everyone agrees on what needs to be done, things can get done pretty efficiently. And that’s often true. But it’s hardly an insightful critique of government, which has to deal with lots of hard problems that we all disagree about.

That said, the rest of the interview is pretty interesting. Here’s an unexpected admission that comes after Soderbergh has complained that the folks who finance movies these days interfere relentlessly with directors:

An alarming thing I learned during Contagion is that the people who pay to make the movies and the audiences who see them are actually very much in sync. I remember during previews how upset the audience was by the Jude Law character. The fact that he created a sort of mixed reaction was viewed as a flaw in the filmmaking. Not, â&#128;&#156;Oh, thatâ&#128;&#153;s interesting, Iâ&#128;&#153;m not sure if this guy is an asshole or a hero.â&#128;&#157; People were really annoyed by that. And I thought, Wow, so ambiguity is not on the table anymore. They were angry.

So the money folks interfere, but apparently they have a pretty good sense of what audiences want. Fascinating.

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Quote of the Day: Can Hollywood Solve the World’s Problems?

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Campaign to label frankenfoods goes viral

by pedzacastrzala87 Posted on January 31, 2013

Campaign to label frankenfoods goes viral

By Susie Cagle

Want to be able to tell the difference between a natural fish and a genetically engineered frankensalmon in the dystopian food future? It looks like you may not be required to live on the crunchy West Coast for that.

After California’s GMO-labeling Proposition 37 failed to pass last fall, bills that would require labels for genetically modified food are rolling in Oregon and Washington, and similar initiatives are picking up steam in Minnesota, Missouri, and New Mexico, as well as in Connecticut and Vermont, where GMO-labeling legislation failed to pass last year amid threats of legal action from Monsanto.

New Mexico could be the first state to pass such a law. State Sen. Peter Wirth of Santa Fe, who is sponsoring the legislation, says the bill is aimed at “leveling the playing field” for food actually grown in fields.

Minnesota is home to the headquarters of General Mills, Hormel, Cargill, and Land-O-Lakes, which were all big contributors to the fight against Prop 37, but citizens groups are pushing legislators to pass a label law there too (and the local Fox affiliate covers them pretty appropriately). Meanwhile, Missouri’s legislation would just target genetically modified meat and fish.

The most interesting take on the national GMO label fight comes from the belly of the beast: the International Dairy Foods Association, which just had its annual meeting. From Meat Poultry News:

Connie Tipton, president and chief executive officer of the International Dairy Foods Association, urged food and beverage manufacturers to not rest on their laurels following the defeat of Proposition 37, legislation that would have required the labeling of bioengineered foods sold in California, this past November. Tipton spoke Jan. 28 at the IDFA’s annual Dairy Forum meeting.

“The drumbeat for GMO labeling is as loud as ever and proponents are taking their show on the road,” she said. “They are training their eyes on other states… Moreover, they learned from their mistakes. We anticipate that these new initiatives will be better written with a better ground game to push them forward.”

Tipton added that Walmart’s GMO-labeling efforts were cause for concern.

“It announced this past summer it planned to sell a new crop of genetically modified sweet corn created by Monsanto. Nothing wrong with that, but a lot of us were scratching our heads when Wal-Mart added that it would label the product as containing GMO ingredients – even though the Food and Drug Administration has already said the product is safe. Given Wal-Mart’s size and market share, there are legitimate concerns that its decision on GMO labeling will force other retailers to march in lockstep behind the industry giant.

March in lockstep, eh? This is starting to sound familiar (and fascist), though GMO-labeling fascism seems more appealing than frankenfood-fascism, but maybe that’s just me.

Not to be completely outdone by states with fewer organic quinoa points-of-sale, supporters of California’s Proposition 37 have licked their wounds and swear to be back with another campaign to label GMOs next year.

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Good news for peer-to-peer car-sharing

by pedzacastrzala87 Posted on January 30, 2013

Good news for peer-to-peer car-sharing

By Susie Cagle

It’s a good news day for peer-to-peer car-sharing, and those hideous and somewhat disturbing furry pink mustaches I keep seeing around San Francisco.

lizasperling

The detachable pink mustache alerts ride-seekers that this ride is a Lyft.

Today the California Public Utilities Commission said it has reached an agreement with Zimride, the parent company of fast-growing California ride-share purveyor Lyft, to suspend a cease-and-desist notice and $20,000 citation against the company. The PUC is still reviewing its regulations on car-sharing programs in the Golden State and hasn’t yet reached similar deals with Uber or Sidecar, which are technically still outlaws, though they don’t have the creepy mustaches to match.

This was good timing for Lyft, which announced this morning that it would be expanding to Los Angeles neighborhood by neighborhood in an attempt to cover all that concrete sprawl. And it’s not just Lyft that has its sights set on bigger and better car-sharing markets. From Techcrunch:

The move into L.A. marks the first expansion market for Lyft, which became available to riders in San Francisco last summer. To expand into Southern California, the company sent a team to recruit drivers and build the initial community infrastructure in the city. That means interviewing drivers, inspecting their cars, and generally attempting to instill the Lyft culture into the new market. …

Lyft isn’t the only ride-sharing service that is looking to broaden its footprint. San Francisco-based competitor SideCar recently launched its service in the Seattle area, and is looking to expand even more aggressively in the coming months.

The more car- and ride-sharing companies prosper, the more pressure they can put on regulators to let them go about their business, especially if they aren’t clearly and directly taking a bite out of established taxi cab business.

Assuming car-sharing can stay, you know, legal, there are encouraging signs that smaller, peer-to-peer companies can compete with the big boys. For all the hand-wringing car-sharers did over Avis’ purchase of Zipcar earlier this month, peer-to-peer car-share start-up Getaround has twice as many cars on the road in Portland as does Zipcar.

“Anybody who’s been sort of watching the company can see that we’ve been pretty focused on building supply,” said Steve Gutman, a spokesperson for Getaround.

When Avis bought Zipcar, it emphasized that the deal would bring more cars into its network. But with peer-to-peer sharing, supply can be ramped up all the more more easily.

Peer-to-peer sharing still has a ton of untapped potential, so long as regulators let the cars keep rolling. I’d prefer to take mine without that hideous mustache, though, thanks.

Susie Cagle writes and draws news for Grist. She also writes and draws tweets for

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Libertarian Propaganda With Your Organic Arugula?

by pedzacastrzala87 Posted on January 22, 2013

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If you shop at Whole Foods, you’ve probably seen the ads at the cash register for Conscious Capitalism. Co-written by the store’s founder, John Mackey, and Raj Sisodia, chairman of a nonprofit called Conscious Capitalism, Inc., the book bills itself as a tale of “Mackey’s own awakenings as a capitalist.” While Mackey serves up plenty of cheerful exhortations and pithy self-help tips, however, the only “awakening” that you’re likely to get from reading this 313-page apologia for libertarianism is a sense that he ought to stick to selling groceries. (Read my interview with Mackey here.)

To give Mackey his due, he proved that many shoppers are willing to pay a premium for foods that are healthy, sustainably produced, and sold by workers who earn decent wages and health benefits. His book strives to show CEOs in other industries that they can follow his lead. “We need a richer and more ethically compelling narrative to demonstrate to a skeptical world the truth, beauty, goodness, and heroism of free-enterprise capitalism,” he writes. “Otherwise we risk the continued growth of increasingly coercive governments, the corruption of enterprises through crony capitalism, and the consequential loss of both our freedom and our prosperity.”

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