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A Federal Judge Just Ignored Jeff Sessions and Approved Baltimore’s Police Reforms

Mother Jones

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Despite the opposition of Attorney General Jeff Sessions, a federal judge in Baltimore on Friday locked in place a consent decree between the city’s police force and the Department of Justice. While local officials cheered the order, which seeks to reform the troubled Baltimore Police Department after the Obama Justice Department found widespread unconstitutional and discriminatory practices, Sessions issued a blistering statement predicting that crime would rise as a result.

“I have grave concerns that some provisions of this decree will reduce the lawful powers of the police department and result in a less safe city,” Sessions said. “Make no mistake, Baltimore is facing a violent crime crisis.”

The Justice Department opened an investigation into the Baltimore Police Department in 2014 after the Baltimore Sun revealed that the city had paid out millions in more than 100 civil suits alleging police misconduct and brutality. That investigation expanded the following year after the death of Freddie Gray while in police custody.

Under Sessions, the Department of Justice has begun to walk back its commitment to federal oversight of police departments with discriminatory patterns or practices, a priority of the Obama administration. Earlier this week, Sessions ordered a review of all consent decrees between police departments and the Justice Department. Department lawyers asked the US district court in Baltimore to put off approving the consent decree for at least 30 days so the new administration could review it.

But in his opinion Friday, US District Judge James Bredar said the time for reviewing the agreement had passed. “The case is no longer in a phase where any party is unilaterally entitled to reconsider the terms of the settlement; the parties are bound to each other by their prior agreement,” Bredar wrote. “The time for negotiating the agreement is over. The only question now is whether the Court needs more time to consider the proposed decree. It does not.” The 227-page consent decree, which places new rules and limits on how officers can interact with the public and mandates training in de-escalation tactics, among other areas of training, will take effect immediately.

Sessions’ statement suggests he is wary of the comprehensive oversight of the city’s police department mandated by the decree. He even appeared to question the allocation of resources for what he described as a “highly paid monitor,” who will ensure the decree’s provisions are met. This puts Sessions at odds with the Baltimore Police Commissioner and the city’s mayor, both of whom are highly supportive of the consent decree and spoke out against a possible delay in implementing it. The decree “will support and, in fact, accelerate many needed reforms in the areas of training, technology, and internal accountability systems,” Commissioner Kevin Davis said in a statement Friday. Despite Sessions fears, as Mother Jones previously reported, a recent study by police reform expert Samuel Walker at the University of Nebraska in Omaha found that consent decrees are largely effective in achieving long-term reforms.

Sessions claimed the agreement had been hastily put together in the final days of the Obama administration—and indeed it was finalized shortly before President Donald Trump was inaugurated. The Justice Department had issued its final report last summer, but Baltimore officials reportedly hurried the final agreement after Trump’s election. This ultimately prevented Sessions from halting its progress.

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A Federal Judge Just Ignored Jeff Sessions and Approved Baltimore’s Police Reforms

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Party like it’s 1994! America’s CO2 emissions hit 18-year low

Party like it’s 1994! America’s CO2 emissions hit 18-year low

Shutterstock

The last time America’s carbon dioxide emissions were this low, Nelson Mandela was being inaugurated as South Africa’s president, O.J. Simpson was being chased by police in a white Bronco, and Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin were agreeing to ease up on the whole let’s-point-countless-nukes-at-each-other thing.

U.S. energy-related CO2 emissions steadily rose from the mid-90s until they hit a peak in 2007. Since then, emissions have fallen in five out of seven years. In 2012, emissions were 12 percent below the 2007 level, dipping back to 1994 levels. That’s according to data released Tuesday by the U.S. Energy Information Administration:

EIAClick to embiggen.

Let’s celebrate with a trip down memory lane. Here are the reasons the EIA gives for America’s falling emissions, set to a soundtrack of some of the biggest hits of 1994.

Whoomp!

First, let’s note two things that are not contributing to falling emissions. CO2 output is not falling because the economy is shrinking nor because the population is shrinking. The population grew 0.7 percent between 2011 and 2012 and GDP grew by 2.8 percent — yet energy consumption fell by 2.4 percent.

Here Comes the Hotstepper

Americans are turning to their air-conditioners more frequently to help them beat the heat, but they’re not needing their heaters so much. And that’s notable because it takes more energy to heat a home than to cool it. Last year’s winter and early spring were so warm that, by the end of March, there had been 19 percent fewer days that required heating than the 10-year average.

Hero

Americans and their utilities are making strides in energy efficiency. Electricity generation, transmission, and distribution became 1 percent more efficient between 2011 and 2012.

Fantastic Voyage

Americans drove 3.3 percent fewer miles last year than in 2007, and their cars and trucks are becoming more efficient.

Loser

America has lost a lot of factories and factory jobs. That’s pushing industrial carbon emissions to other countries. Industrial output fell 2.7 percent from 2007 to 2012, and manufacturing output was down 5 percent during the same period.

Stroke You Up

Power plants have been abandoning coal, driving the largest drop in the economy’s overall carbon intensity since record-keeping began in 1949.

So celebrate the good news while you can. Going forward, emissions will probably go up again.


Source
U.S. Energy-Related Carbon Dioxide Emissions, 2012, U.S. Energy Information Administration

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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Party like it’s 1994! America’s CO2 emissions hit 18-year low

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"The Bling Ring": An Artful, Fun Examination of Why Hating America Is Often Completely Justified

Mother Jones

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The Bling Ring
A24
87 minutes

Emma Watson is developing a habit of robbing the homes of Hollywood celebrities. Earlier this month, ensemble comedy This Is the End (sort of a Left Behind for potheads) hit theaters. That film, set in Los Angeles during the Rapture, features Watson brandishing a gigantic ax and angrily stealing food from James Franco‘s house. In The Bling Ring, Watson assumes a similar role, burglarizing the homes of Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton, Megan Fox, Rachel Bilson, and Audrina Patridge.

Watson plays Nicki, one-fifth of the “Bling Ring,” a group of disaffected, bored, fashionista teenagers who decide to rob the houses of famous people. (The rest of the crew is played—with commendable Valspeak dedication—by Katie Chang, Claire Julien, Taissa Farmiga, and Israel Broussard.) Their months-long crime spree snags them a small fortune in jewels, clothing, booze, and designer bags.

As you might have heard, this film is based on actual events. Writer/director Sofia Coppola adapted journalist Nancy Jo Sales‘ amazing 2010 Vanity Fair article (now a 268-page book) profiling the Bling Ring, a.k.a. the “Hollywood Hills Burglar Bunch.” And Coppola did so in a way that emphasizes blunt sentiment and sly commentary over exploitative cinematic impulses. “Sofia and I met several times over the year she was writing the script,” Sales writes in an email. “I was a fan of the director’s and knowing her work there’s no way it could have turned into an exploitation flick…It’s a dark story, a cautionary tale.”

A predictable avalanche of infamy and giddy public fascination followed the arrests of the real-life Bling Ringers. “Think of a major news organization and they were at the Bling Ring hearings,” Sales says. “The New York Times put it on the cover of the Sunday Styles section.” What followed the requisite press coverage was a cyclone of ill-gotten, reality-TV-abetted fame that wasn’t so much a train wreck as it was a heaving paroxysm of America’s worst voyeuristic and material tendencies. (To understand exactly what I mean, watch this psychotic slice of television.)

Sofia Coppola wanted to do everything she could to avoid further fueling the stardom of the real-life Bling Ring—hence her script’s heavy fictionalization and the name changes. For the same reason, I’m declining to print the Bling Ring members’ real names, and will not delve into their post-arraignment exploits. Instead, I will direct you to Sales’ riveting Vanity Fair story and encourage you to watch the film’s insane trailer here:

The movie is artful and wickedly fun, and pulled off with a welcome maturity. To get her actors into character, Coppola had them stage a mock home invasion. “I believe it was her sister-in-law’s house,” The Bling Ring star Israel Broussard tells me. “She gave us a detailed list, by brand name, color, designer of the cloths we needed to get in the closet, shoes, handbags…Sofia gave us an address, the list, and told us to hop in the minivan and go!” The scene in which the Bling Ring raids Paris Hilton’s house was filmed on-site—the socialite opened up her Beverly Hills mansion for the cast and crew to recreate the robbery. Hilton’s home is located in a mega-wealthy gated community where film crews aren’t permitted. So Coppola and company had to sneak in, shoot the sequences, and get the hell out of Dodge. “Paris was very gracious,” Broussard says. They then made their swift getaway—an exit befitting the story of the adolescent gang they unlovingly portray.

The Bling Ring gets released on Friday, June 21. The film is rated R for teen drug and alcohol use, and for language including some brief sexual references. Click here for local showtimes and tickets.

Click here for more movie and TV coverage from Mother Jones.

To read more of Asawin’s reviews, click here.

To listen to the movie and pop-culture podcast that Asawin cohosts with ThinkProgress critic Alyssa Rosenberg, click here.

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"The Bling Ring": An Artful, Fun Examination of Why Hating America Is Often Completely Justified

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The Protests in Turkey, Explained

Mother Jones

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Turkey is experiencing its largest and most violent riots in decades as tens of thousands of young people voice opposition to the moderate Islamist government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Hundreds of protesters and police have been injured as authorities try to quell the fourth day of demonstrations with tear gas, water canons, beatings, and a tightening grip on the media. Today, Erdogan accused the protesters of “walking arm-in-arm with terrorism.” Yet his defiant response is only making the crowds larger. In an echo of the Arab Spring and the Occupy Wall Street protests of 2011, the movement has been galvanized by images disseminated on social media, such as a picture of a policeman spraying tear gas at a young woman in a red summer dress, her long hair swept upward by the blast. “The more they spray,” reads a popular Twitter caption, “the bigger we get.”

Click here to go directly to the latest updates.

Why are people protesting? Nominally, the protests were sparked by a government plan to replace Istanbul’s leafy Taksim Gezi Park with a touristy shopping mall—what the country’s leading historian, Edhem Eldem, sardonically derides as a “Las Vegas of Ottoman splendor.” Trees are especially precious in Istanbul, where only 1.5 percent of land is green space (compared to 17 percent in New York). But the protests quickly became symbolic of much broader concerns about Erdogan’s autocratic and socially conservative style of government.

Istanbul’s secularists chafe at the way he has rammed through development projects in this cosmopolitan cultural crossroads with little regard for the European and non-Muslim aspects of its history; a 19th-century Russian Orthodox Church may be destroyed as part of an overhaul of a port. What’s more, Erdogan has placed new restrictions on the sale of alcohol and availability of birth control. And he has jailed political opponents and members of the media.

How widespread are the protests? Since Friday, there have been demonstrations in 67 of Turkey’s 80 provinces, according to Turkey’s semi-official Andalou News Agency. At least 1700 people have been arrested.

What about damage and injuries? Photos show fires in the street and overturned and burned-out cars. One protestor was killed on Sunday night when a taxi slammed into a crowd, but the government’s press office claims the death was accidental. According to CNN, 58 civilians remain hospitalized and 115 security officers have been injured.

Is Erdogan just another Islamist dictator? Not according to Washington, which holds up Turkey as a shining model for democracy in the Islamic world. Since coming to power in 2002, Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) has twice returned to office with large pluralities of the vote. In recent years, Erdogan has kept up the pace of democratic reforms in Turkey by enshrining individual rights in its laws and placing the military under civilian control. “Yet even as the AKP was winning elections at home and plaudits from abroad,” writes Foreign Policy‘s Steven Cook, “an authoritarian turn was underway…”

In 2007, the party seized upon a plot in which elements of Turkey’s so-called deep state—military officers, intelligence operatives, and criminal underworld—sought to overthrow the government and used it to silence its critics. Since then, Turkey has become a country where journalists are routinely jailed on questionable grounds, the machinery of the state has been used against private business concerns because their owners disagree with the government, and freedom of expression in all its forms is under pressure.

How bad is the crackdown on the press? Pretty bad. At the same time CNN International was broadcasting live from Taksim Square on Friday, CNN Turk, the network’s Turkish-language affiliate, was showing a cooking show and a documentary about penguins.

Manolo88/Reddit

In 2009, Turkey’s tax ministry levied a whopping $2.5-billion fine against CNN Turk’s parent company, Dogan Yayin, in a move that was widely viewed as punishment for its critical coverage of the government. Some journalists who’ve written negative stories about the government and its allies have been fired or imprisoned. See this year-old CNN report on retaliation by the Turkish government:

So how are people in Turkey learning about the protests? Mostly through social media. “Revolution will not be televised; it will be tweeted,” reads a popular Istanbul graffiti scrawl. According to an analysis by NYU’s Social Media and Political Participation Lab, the Twitter hashtag #direngezipark had been used in more than 1.8 million tweets as of this morning—far more than the Egyptian hashtag #Jan25 was used during the entire Arab Spring uprising. And about 85 percent of those tweets that are geocoded have come from within Turkey.

Here’s a taste of what people are sharing:

Facebook has also emerged as a major source of viral Turkey content as citizen journalists use it to post videos of violent protest scenes. The Daily Dot‘s Joe Kloc has compiled some of the most widely shared street scenes:

A tear-gassed protester getting brutally kicked and beaten by police:

This morning, Erdogan called social media “the worst menace to society,” saying it has been used to spread lies about the protests and the government’s response. That’s probably not the best way to look like you care about what the protesters are saying.

What do hackers think about this? Over the weekend, Anonymous launched #OpTurkey, an anti-government hacking and DDoSing operation that resembles its work in Egypt and other countries during the Arab Spring. It has also given activists tools to skirt government internet censorship.

So is this the next wave of the Arab Spring? Not exactly. For one thing, most Turks are not “Arabs,” and they don’t necessarily view their nationality through an ethnic or religious lens. Compared to Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, or Syria, Turkey is much more Western-oriented, stable, prosperous, and egalitarian. From 2002 to 2011, the Turkish economy tripled in size. Per capita income in Turkey is $15,000 (compared to $6,600 in Egypt), and income inequality is less pronounced than it is in the United States. For now, at least, the protests seem less likely to spark a revolution than simply pull the rug out from Ergodan’s political agenda and electoral prospects. That said, Turkey’s last coup was just a little more than 30 years ago. The power dynamic could change quickly if Ergodan overreacts.

Who do I follow for more news about the protests? The blog What Is Happening in Istanbul has been rolling out updates. The leading Twitter hashtags are #direngezipark and #occupygezi. The Guardian is live-blogging the protests. Check back here for updates.

UPDATE 6/3/2013 5:15 ET: During a press briefing on the Turkey protests today, White House spokesman Jay Carney voiced “serious concerns” about the violent crackdown on protesters, whom he characterized as mostly “peaceful, law-abiding citizens exercising their rights.” That’s a far cry from how they’ve been painted by Erdogan.

UPDATE 6/3/2013 5:55 ET: Using a crowd-funding website, Turkish protestors have raised enough money to publish this letter to Erdogan as a full-page ad in the New York Times.

UPDATE 6/3/2013 6:54 ET: Turkish media is reporting that 22-year-old Abdullah Comert, a member of the opposition Republican People’s Party, died tonight of wounds to the head. Turkey’s Star Gazette reports that security forces are investigating the incident. Activists on Twitter immediately blamed police for the shooting, which, if true, would mark the first instance of security forces killing an #occupygezi protestor. However, the allegation hasn’t been independently confirmed.

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The Protests in Turkey, Explained

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Bachmann’s Right: The Founders Would "Hardly Even Recognize" America Today

Mother Jones

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Michele Bachmann has said some crazy things over the years. When her goodbye speech today warned that America is “becoming a nation our founders would hardly even recognize today,” we had to agree.

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Bachmann’s Right: The Founders Would "Hardly Even Recognize" America Today

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New Energy Secretary Moniz is all about energy efficiency

New Energy Secretary Moniz is all about energy efficiency

Energy Department on YouTube

Ernest Moniz addressing an energy-efficiency conference, just hours after being sworn in as energy secretary.

The cleanest electricity is no electricity at all — a fact that is not lost on new Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz.

During his first speech after being sworn into his new post, Moniz said energy efficiency would be one of his top priorities.

From Greentech Media:

Secretary Moniz spoke to a crowd at the Energy Efficiency Global Forum about his upcoming agenda as secretary.

“Efficiency is going to be a big focus going forward,” he said. “I just don’t see the solutions to our biggest energy and environmental challenges without a very big demand-side response. That’s why it’s important to move this way, way up in our priorities.” The audience applauded.

Moniz’s decision to speak at an energy efficiency conference “speaks volumes about how important efficiency is” to his plans at the Department of Energy, said Kateri Callahan, president of the Alliance to Save Energy.

Indeed, Moniz made it very clear that efficiency would be a central priority during his tenure. He backed up President Obama’s call in the State of the Union for doubling U.S. energy productivity by 2030

The Hill reports that Moniz has already started meeting with lawmakers to promote a recently introduced efficiency bill:

New Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz vowed Tuesday to help advance a big bipartisan energy efficiency bill that’s moving through Congress and make conservation a major priority using his existing authorities. …

Moniz said he has met with senior leadership in both chambers of Congress about legislation, noting he sees an opening for the measure sponsored by Sens. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) and Rob Portman (R-Ohio) and a companion plan in the House.

“There is a ways to go to get it together, but there is clearly an interest in moving this,” he said. “This is the kind of initiative that I think has a real chance to move forward and I certainly will work with Senator Shaheen and others to try and help make it work.”

The Shaheen-Portman plan, which sailed through the Senate’s energy panel with bipartisan support recently, contains an array of provisions to boost efficiency in buildings by improving codes, workforce training and other steps.

It also contains measures to help manufacturing plants become more efficient and boost conservation within the federal government itself.

The Energy Department posted Moniz’s 11-minute speech on YouTube:

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Ad Slams Arizona Sen. Flake for Flaking on Background Checks

Mother Jones

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Last month, Republican Sen. Jeff Flake broke with his Arizona colleague John McCain to vote against the background check compromise brokered by Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Pat Toomey (R-Pa.). Soon after, Caren Teves, the mother of Aurora mass shooting victim Alex Teves, went public with a note she had received from Flake the week before he, well, flaked. In the note, the junior senator wrote that “strengthening background checks is something we agree on.”

On Friday, Michael Bloomberg’s Mayors Against Illegal Guns (MAIG) released an ad featuring Caren Teves that will air in Phoenix and Tucson through the end of the month. In the ad, Teves shows the handwritten letter Flake sent her. “The issue isn’t just background checks,” she says. “It’s keeping your promise. And Senator Flake didn’t.”

Flake has disputed the ad’s claim in a Facebook post. “If you are anywhere close to a television set in Arizona in the coming days, you’ll likely see an ad about gun control financed by NYC Mayor Bloomberg,” he wrote. “Contrary to the ad, I did vote to strengthen background checks,” referring to his vote for the alternate gun amendment introduced by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) that included weaker measures to strengthen background checks (and was also voted down).

MAIG and other gun reform groups have vowed to hit Manchin-Toomey opponents hard. Opponents of the compromise have seen their poll numbers drop, and polling by MAIG and other organizations has consistently shown overwhelming support for expanded background checks.

There have been quiet discussions on the Hill about reintroducing an amendment with further concessions to Republicans. But in a meeting with reporters at the Capitol on Wednesday, Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said that although he’d been in daily talks with senators about bringing background checks back for a vote, the Democrats still didn’t have the 60 votes needed to get it passed. Asked if there were any new supporters, Reid replied, “Maybe.”

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Ad Slams Arizona Sen. Flake for Flaking on Background Checks

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Benghazi Isn’t Watergate. But the White House Didn’t Tell the Full Story.

Mother Jones

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The latest revelations about the Benghazi talking points—as opposed to what actually happened at the US diplomatic facility at Benghazi, where four Americans died—do not back up Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham’s hyperbolic and absurd claim that the Benghazi controversy is Obama’s Watergate. But neither are they nothing.

As ABC News reported on Friday morning, the most discussed talking points in US diplomatic history were revised multiple times before being passed to UN Ambassador Susan Rice prior to her appearances last September on Sunday talk shows. The revisions—which deleted several lines noting that the CIA months before the attack had produced intelligence reports on the threat of Al Qaeda-linked extremists in Benghazi—appear to have been driven by State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland, who, it should be noted, is a career Foggy Bottomer who has served Republican and Democratic administrations, not a political appointee. Her motive seems obvious: fend off a CIA CYA move that could make the State Department look lousy. (The other major deletion concerned three sentences about a possible link between the attack and Ansar al-Sharia, an Al Qaeda-affiliated group; last November, David Petraeus, the former CIA chief, testified that this information was removed from the talking points in order to avoid tipping off the group.)

But here’s the problem for the White House: It was part of the interagency process in which State sought to downplay information that might have raised questions about its preattack performance. That’s a minor sin (of omission). Yet there’s more: On November 28, White House spokesman Jay Carney said, “Those talking points originated from the intelligence community. They reflect the IC’s best assessments of what they thought had happened. The White House and the State Department have made clear that the single adjustment that was made to those talking points by either of those two institutions were changing the word ‘consulate’ to ‘diplomatic facility because ‘consulate’ was inaccurate.”

Assuming the talking points revisions released by ABC News are accurate—and the White House has not challenged them—Carney’s statement was not correct. The State Department did far more than change one word, and it did so in a process involving White House aides. So, White House critics can argue, Carney put out bad information and did not acknowledge that State had massaged the talking points to protect itself from inconvenient questions.

This is not much of cover-up. There is no evidence the White House is hiding the truth about what occurred in Benghazi. My colleague Kevin Drum dismisses this recent Benghazi news (“on a scale of 1 to 10, this is about a 1.5”). But the White House has indeed been caught not telling the full story. Despite Carney’s statement, there was politically minded handling of the talking points. Yet in today’s hyperpartisan environment, such a matter cannot be evaluated with a sense of proportion. Obama antagonists decry it as a deed most foul, and White House defenders denounce the the critics. The talking points dispute is not a scandal; it’s a mess—a small mess—and not as significant as the actions (and non-actions) that led to Benghazi. Yet no mess is too tiny for scandalmongers in need of material.

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Benghazi Isn’t Watergate. But the White House Didn’t Tell the Full Story.

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Before the Great Recession, There Was the Long Recession

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

If you had to date the Great Recession, you might say it started in September 2008 when Lehman Brothers vaporized over a weekend and a massive mortgage-based Ponzi scheme began to go down. By 2008, however, the majority of American workers had already endured a 40-year decline in wages, security, and hope—a Long Recession of their own.

In the 1960s, I met a young man about to be discharged from the Army and then, by happenstance, caught up with him again in each of the next two decades. Though he died two months before the Lehman Brothers collapse, those brief encounters taught me how the Long Recession led directly to our Great Recession.

In the late 1960s, I was working at an antiwar coffee house near an army base from which soldiers shipped out to Vietnam. One gangly young man, recently back from “the Nam,” was particularly handy and would fix our record player or make our old mimeograph machine run more smoothly. He rarely spoke about the war, except to say that his company had stayed stoned the whole time. “Our motto,” he once told me, “was ‘let’s not and say we did.'” Duane had no intention of becoming a professional Vietnam vet like John Kerry when discharged. His plan was to return home to Cleveland and make up for time missed in the civilian counterculture of that era.

I often sat with him during my breaks, enjoying his warmth and his self-aware sense of humor. But thousands of GIs passed through the coffee house and, to be honest, I didn’t really notice when he left.

In the early 1970s, General Motors set up the fastest auto assembly line in the world in Lordstown, Ohio, and staffed it with workers whose average age was 24. GM’s management hoped that such healthy, inexperienced workers could handle 101 cars an hour without balking the way more established autoworkers might. What GM got instead of balkiness was a series of slowdowns and snafus that management labeled systematic “sabotage” until they realized that the word hurt car sales.

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Before the Great Recession, There Was the Long Recession

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