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She Was Desperate. She Tried to End Her Own Pregnancy. She Was Thrown in Jail

by BrandenBwp Posted on May 8, 2017

Mother Jones

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Gracia Lam

One night in May 2009, Jocelyn packed a backpack and left the ramshackle house in Naples, Utah, where she lived with her mom and two of her five siblings. She was six months pregnant—a condition that had caused the 17-year-old to drop out of high school and become alienated from her Mormon family. That night she’d broken up with her new boyfriend, who, though not the father, was her biggest source of support.

She planned to hitchhike 2,000 miles to Florida, where her dad lived, even though they hadn’t spoken in years. She only made it to a gas station a block away before she stopped, in tears. Aaron Harrison, a “Goth” 21-year-old, approached Jocelyn and asked if he could help. “I was a mess, I was crying, I didn’t know what to do,” she remembers. “I told him everything. I even told him about thinking of ending the pregnancy.” He asked if she wanted to go to his place nearby and talk.

Jocelyn (which is not her real name), a petite woman with wavy brown hair and a soft twang, told Harrison that her boyfriend had suggested an abortion could be caused by a punch in the stomach, and that they had even discussed resolving her pregnancy problem this way. So Harrison struck a deal with her. If he beat her up so she would miscarry, Jocelyn would give him the $150 she’d brought for her trip. If anyone asked, she’d say she had been sexually assaulted.

He was more than cooperative. Once inside his house, he punched her in the stomach, slapped her face, and bit her neck. Jocelyn says they also had sex, thinking it would help their cover story.

But things quickly got out of hand—”he hit me really hard”—and Jocelyn ran out of the house, shocked, bruised, and appalled by what they’d done. “I felt so sad for my baby,” she tells me. “I felt awful that I’d just agreed to any of it. But I also felt like a victim.” She called her mom and told her she’d been sexually assaulted. Jocelyn’s mom took her to the police station, where she was questioned by a detective. Jocelyn stuck with her story at first, but the cop kept questioning her, she says, well into the middle of the night. After she finally confessed, the police took her to the hospital. Her unborn baby was alive.

The next day, Jocelyn was arrested. “The county attorney said, ‘Take her straight to detention,'” she says. “‘This is insane, this is unacceptable, this is attempted murder.'” Jocelyn was moved to Split Mountain, a juvenile center, and charged with solicitation of murder, which would have been a felony if she were an adult. Harrison was also arrested and charged with attempted murder.

“That was the worst moment of my life,” Jocelyn, now 25, tells me from her home in Vernal, Utah, with two young children cooing behind her.

During his presidential campaign, Donald Trump said women who end their pregnancies ought to face “some form of punishment.” He was met with an onslaught of criticism, even from anti-abortion groups, which characterized his position as “completely out of touch with the pro-life movement.” Before efforts to decriminalize abortion began in the late 1960s, women were rarely prosecuted for attempting to access the procedure. Anti-abortion advocates argued then, as most do now, that women, like their fetuses, were victims. After Trump’s comments, March for Life issued a press release with the headline “No Pro-Life American Advocates Punishment for Abortion.” Jeanne Mancini, the organization’s president, went further, saying, “Being pro-life means wanting what is best for the mother and the baby. We invite a woman who has gone down this route to consider paths to healing, not punishment.”

Trump quickly walked back his statement; doctors, he said, not women, should be punished. But his remarks exposed a tension at the heart of the pro-life legal movement: How can abortion become illegal without punishing the women who seek them? The question has come into greater relief over the last several decades, as state and federal laws have evolved to regard fetal deaths as potential homicides. With Republicans now in control of federal judicial nominations and most statehouses, growing gaps in the abortion rights landscape seem likely to drive more women to self-abort, just as several high-profile cases have shown prosecutors willing to bring charges against those who take desperate measures to end their pregnancies.

Mother Jones has identified at least two dozen cases since Roe v. Wade in which women faced investigation or prosecution for a self-induced abortion, according to a review of news reports, scholarly articles, and court documents. But Jill E. Adams, who leads the Self-Induced Abortion Legal Team at the University of California-Berkeley, says the real number is unknown. In the eight years following Jocelyn’s arrest, eight women, almost all in the Midwestern or Southern United States, have been investigated, charged, or prosecuted for trying to end pregnancies, or for being suspected of doing so. About half the women charged since Roe, including Jocelyn, were accused of homicide, manslaughter, or a related crime—charges enabled by “fetal homicide laws,” which are on the books in 38 states and make killing a fetus a crime.

Fetal homicide laws are the result of a two-pronged strategy that anti-abortion groups adopted after their 1973 Supreme Court defeat in Roe: They pushed state laws that made abortions harder to get and expanded the legal rights of fetuses so that the public, and eventually the courts, would begin to regard the unborn—no matter what stage of development—as children. Advocates started by working to define life as beginning at conception in nonabortion contexts—property or contract law, for instance.

But criminal prosecutions of anyone who killed a fetus soon followed. In one of the earliest such cases, attorneys for Americans United for Life, the nation’s most influential pro-life legal group, fought to get an Illinois man prosecuted for murder after he shot a pregnant woman, allegedly killing her unborn child. (He was found not guilty; a judge was not convinced his bullet had killed the fetus.)

In 1984, the Massachusetts Supreme Court ruled that the state’s vehicular homicide statute should apply to a driver who crashed into a pedestrian and killed her eight-and-a-half-month-old fetus. In 1986, a year after the Minnesota Supreme Court held that the state’s vehicular homicide law shouldn’t apply to fetuses, the Legislature stepped in to pass a fetal homicide law starting from the moment of conception.

These rulings and laws represented the first cracks in the so-called “born alive” rule, which required a child to be alive and out of the womb before it could be considered the victim of a homicide; the standard had been used by virtually every jurisdiction in the United States for more than a century. In 1987, Clarke Forsythe, a new Americans United for Life lawyer, released a paper (paywall) with model fetal homicide legislation aimed at further unraveling the born-alive standard. He led a team of young pro-life lawyers and advocates who argued that in an era with technology that is capable of determining the precise status of a fetus in utero and even, in rare occasions, the cause of death, the born-alive standard was arcane and immoral. “Modern medicine made that rule obsolete,” Forsythe told me.

By 1994, 17 states had fetal homicide laws on the books. Mary Ziegler, a legal historian and author of the book After Roe, says the particular genius of fetal homicide laws was “you could convince lawmakers to pass them even if they were uneasy with the pro-life movement. They were personhood laws, but they didn’t apply to abortion.”

Mountain ranges and hills surround Uintah County, where Jocelyn grew up. Giant dinosaur statues are scattered throughout the area, an homage to nearby paleontology digs. For decades, many of Uintah’s 38,000 mostly Mormon residents worked extracting oil and shale gas. Jocelyn and her five siblings grew up in Jensen, with a population of fewer than 500, in the northern part of the county. Her mother waitressed and her father worked as a carpenter until a back injury forced him to stop. When Jocelyn was 10, he left without a goodbye. Jocelyn’s mom struggled with addiction, and eventually she moved her family into a small condemned home, with no running water or electricity, on her parents’ property in nearby Naples.

By the time she was in 11th grade, Jocelyn, fed up with her mother’s problems and the family’s living situation, moved into a small apartment in Naples, a town lined with fly-fishing shops, industrial facilities, and motels. She was working toward a welding certificate in high school and had started dating a senior she met in class. Then she found out she was pregnant. She knew her ex was the father and her new boyfriend wouldn’t raise someone else’s kid.

“I kind of spiraled,” Jocelyn remembers. “I started to show, and then I was embarrassed to go to school, so I dropped out.” She moved back in with her mother and brothers. Lights and space heaters were powered by extension cords running from her grandparents’ house. If Jocelyn had to go to the bathroom after the doors were locked for the night, she’d have to pee outside.

She struggled with what she should do, weighing the pressure she felt from her new boyfriend to have an abortion. “I didn’t think abortion was wrong or right or indifferent. I was just a 16-year-old with a boyfriend who was the closest person to me at that time.” Utah’s nearest abortion clinic was about 170 miles away in Salt Lake City, and Jocelyn convinced her mom to drive her the three-plus hours across mountains and snow and pay several hundred dollars to end her pregnancy. According to court records, clinicians told her an abortion would be impossible because she was too far along. At the time, state law banned abortion after 20 weeks of pregnancy; Jocelyn does not recall being so far along. (Later that year, the Legislature moved the limit to viability, usually considered 24 weeks.)

On the ride home, Jocelyn remembered the ultrasound and hearing the tiny heartbeat; she worried that abortion wasn’t for her. Adoption was one option, but she couldn’t imagine giving the baby to an anonymous couple. After being turned away from the clinic, Jocelyn swallowed a handful of pills in a failed suicide attempt. “I tried to just get rid of us both. And when I did survive, there was even more disappointment,” she says. “There were no other options. There was nothing else.”

Following success in the states—26 had passed fetal homicide laws by the end of the ’90s—then-Rep. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and other congressional Republicans introduced a bill in September 1999 that would make it illegal to injure or kill a fetus in the commission of a federal crime. Their proposal, called the Unborn Victims of Violence Act, mirrored state laws, with one key difference: Most state laws only protected fetuses starting from some point after the first trimester, but the federal bill sought to cover fetuses from conception. Democrats argued that the measure encroached on abortion rights, and President Bill Clinton threatened to veto it. As a countermeasure, Democrats, led by Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), introduced a “single victim” bill that increased federal punishment for harm done to a pregnant woman, without mentioning her fetus. Neither House bill made it over to the Senate, and the same battle played out for the next three and a half years.

Then, on Christmas Eve in 2002, Laci Peterson—supposedly on a fishing trip with her husband, Scott—went missing. She was eight and a half months pregnant with a son she’d named Conner. Scott’s odd behavior quickly made him the focus of the investigation. When a mistress came forward, three months of tabloid coverage ensued before Laci Peterson’s body washed up on the shore of the San Francisco Bay. Scott Peterson was eventually convicted of murder. At his sentencing, Laci’s mother read a statement to the court, written in Conner’s voice. “Daddy,” Sharon Rocha read, “why are you killing Mommy and me?” Scott was sentenced to death.

Congressional Republicans had found their rallying cry. In 2003, while the Peterson case was ongoing, Sen. Mike DeWine (R-Ohio) and Rep. Melissa Hart (R-Pa.) introduced the Unborn Victims of Violence Act yet again, now dubbing it Laci and Conner’s Law. Rocha wrote to the bill’s sponsors to thank them, adding that she hoped for a future where “no surviving mother, grandmother, or other family member is ever again told, ‘We’re sorry, but in the eyes of the law, there is no dead baby.'” On March 25, 2004, the Senate passed the bill in a 61-38 vote.

At the signing ceremony a week later, President George W. Bush praised Laci and Conner’s Law: “Any time an expectant mother is a victim of violence, two lives are in the balance, each deserving protection, and each deserving justice.”

With the federal law in place, fetal homicide legislation gained new momentum. In several states, legislators enlisted a survivor whose pregnancy had ended after an attack, or a deceased woman’s family, to become the public face of their campaign—Alexa’s Law in Kansas, for instance, or Ethan’s Law in North Carolina. Americans United for Life and other pro-life organizations pointed out that domestic violence can spike during pregnancy and argued that fetal homicide laws could deter abusive fathers. With the federal Unborn Victims of Violence Act as a model, the newest state fetal homicide laws protected fetuses from the moment of conception; several states with laws that previously only applied after viability amended them to start earlier in pregnancy.

Unsurprisingly, abortion rights advocates argued the measures were part of a broader push to roll back Roe, this time by pitting women against the fetuses they’re carrying. “There is no way the state can protect embryos and fetuses separate from the woman without subtracting the pregnant woman,” says Lynn Paltrow, the founder of National Advocates for Pregnant Women, warning that if people come to see fetuses as human beings who can be murdered by an angry boyfriend, they will extend that idea to abortions sought or performed by the woman herself.

But pro-life groups dismissed such criticisms, noting that most fetal homicide laws have exceptions for abortion or other actions (intentional or otherwise) a woman might take to end a pregnancy. “Pro-life legislators and pro-life leaders do not support the prosecution of women and will not push for such a policy,” Forsythe, now the acting president of Americans United for Life, wrote in 2010.

In June 2009, a month after her arrest, Jocelyn skipped trial and was advised by her public defender not to challenge the charge of solicitation of murder. She was sentenced to detention until age 21 and transferred to a juvenile secure facility south of Salt Lake City.

After nearly three months behind bars, she went into labor in August and was transported to a hospital in handcuffs and leg shackles. After giving birth, she was allowed to hold and breastfeed her new daughter while locked to the bed. Leaving her baby at the hospital “was the hardest part,” Jocelyn remembers. “Once they start moving and you watch them come out of you, you love them—they are you. And you can’t even fathom life without them. And then they’re gone. And you’re alone again. And people looked at me and told me I deserved it.” Her daughter, born with a clean bill of health, was adopted by Jocelyn’s aunt, who lives two hours from Naples.

Meanwhile, Jocelyn and her mom found a new lawyer, Richard King, who petitioned the juvenile court to reverse her plea deal, arguing that she had broken no law and that her previous lawyer, who had also represented her ex-boyfriend after he was charged with producing pornographic pictures of her, had a conflict of interest. In October 2009, a juvenile court judge, Larry A. Steele, agreed to reverse the deal.

The judge may have rescinded Jocelyn’s plea deal, but she still had to face the state’s charges in a new trial. King’s defense focused on the text of Utah’s 2009 fetal homicide law, which defined homicide as a person causing the death of another person, “including an unborn child”—except when that death is the result of an abortion. He argued that Jocelyn’s actions had been part of an abortion attempt and demanded the charges be dismissed. Steele agreed: “No one should interpret this ruling to mean this court thinks the minor’s conduct was justifiable. What the minor did was terribly wrong. However, only the legislature can determine whether such conduct as set forth here should be criminal.” The state appealed the decision, but Jocelyn was free.

Days after her release, Carl Wimmer, an ex-cop who was then a prominent Mormon state representative, told reporters that he was going to close the “loophole” that Jocelyn’s lawyer successfully used in her defense: “Abortion and right to life is the top issue for me, and it is something I feel very passionate about.” A month later he introduced a new fetal homicide bill that redefined abortion as a medical procedure performed in the care of a physician. “Jocelyn revealed an extreme weakness in the law, that a pregnant woman could do anything she wanted to do—it did not matter how grotesque or brutal—all the way up until the date of birth to kill her unborn child,” Wimmer told The Nation. He boasted that his bill would make Utah the only state to “hold a woman accountable for killing her unborn child” in cases other than a medical abortion. In March 2010, less than a year after Jocelyn’s arrest, Wimmer’s bill became law.

While Aaron Harrison pleaded guilty in 2009 to attempted murder, Jocelyn’s case climbed to the state’s highest court. In December 2011, the Utah Supreme Court sided with the state, reversing the juvenile court’s decision to dismiss the charges. She was once again at square one, this time under the shadow of the new and more punitive law. Though the law wouldn’t apply to her, a draining and very public trial still loomed. She wanted out. Jocelyn pleaded guilty to solicitation of a crime, a second-degree felony. The charge was reduced to a misdemeanor after she completed 60 hours of community service.

Thus far, Utah is the only state that has strengthened a fetal homicide law in direct response to a self-induced abortion. But several recent cases have shown there are prosecutors ready to use the laws to punish women who perform their own abortions. The methods can be desperately brutal. Women have been targeted for shooting themselves, stabbing their bellies, and drinking toxic levels of herbal tea. In 2015, a Tennessee woman named Anna Yocca was charged with attempted first-degree murder after allegedly using a coat hanger to try to end her pregnancy. She took a plea deal this January after spending a year and a half in jail. In 2009, Indiana amended its 1998 fetal homicide law after a robber shot a pregnant bank teller in the abdomen. In 2013, prosecutors used the law against Purvi Patel, who went to the emergency room after taking pills she bought online to end her pregnancy and experiencing heavy bleeding. A pro-life doctor turned her in to the police. After three years behind bars, Patel was convicted of feticide and neglect of a dependent. She was sentenced to 20 years before the state’s appeals court overturned the feticide conviction last September, accusing prosecutors of “unsettling” overreach.

“I don’t think any of us have any sense of how common home abortion is right now,” says Adams. But surveys sampling the approximately 900,000 women who get clinical abortions each year help give a rough sketch. A national study found that about 2.6 percent of patients reported taking drugs, herbs, or vitamins before seeking an abortion. A 2014 study in abortion-hostile Texas found that 7 percent of patients surveyed in 2012 said they’d done something in the hopes of having a miscarriage before coming in. In 2011, after nearly 100 new state-level abortion restrictions had been enacted, a New York Times analysis found that Google searches for “how to have a miscarriage” or “how to do a coat hanger abortion” had jumped 40 percent compared with the year before. The state with the highest rate of searches, Mississippi, has just two abortion providers. The Times noted that a few hundred searches occurred nationwide for information on inducing abortion by being punched in the stomach.

Having an abortion at home, without the supervision of a physician, is not necessarily unsafe. Misoprostol, a prescription drug in America that is given over the counter in other countries, effectively ends upward of 88 percent of pregnancies within the first 12 weeks. When taken with mifepristone, a prescription-only drug usually dispensed under supervision of a doctor, the effectiveness jumps to over 95 percent. But if the Trump years bring further restrictions to choice, the number of women looking to end a pregnancy outside of clinical care seems certain to increase. Even safe drugs—whether purchased from online dark markets or provided by abortion activists—can be misused or abused or fail, sending women to the emergency room to face not only life-threatening complications, but prosecutors backed by fetal homicide laws. “In the new political reality of 2017,” Adams says, “we could foresee an emboldened anti-choice movement that places women who end their own pregnancies in the bull’s-eye.”

Jocelyn never left the Uintah Basin. When I visit, she takes me on a drive up to Split Mountain, the namesake of the detention center she once called home. A massive cliff face that hulks over the Green River, it’s been a place of solace and reflection for Jocelyn over the last eight years. After being released, she searched for structure and found the Jehovah’s Witness faith and a husband who shares it. Her religious convictions have changed her views on abortion: No longer ambivalent, Jocelyn now believes it is wrong. She’s not in touch with the daughter she birthed while incarcerated. In her community, she can’t talk about her own abortion attempt for fear of judgment. For her husband, an auto mechanic in Naples, the decisions Jocelyn made as a teenager are referred to just as “her past.”

With the youngest of their two daughters, not yet a year old, in tow, we walk to the base of Split Mountain, where our figures are dwarfed. Though her views on abortion have changed, Jocelyn remarks that women who end their own pregnancies aren’t “heartless.” She wishes she’d made a different choice that night. But she understands why she didn’t. “It was the fact that I was left up to my own options, which were…nothing,” she says. But she doesn’t judge other young women. “I know being put in that situation, how desperate women can be.”

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She Was Desperate. She Tried to End Her Own Pregnancy. She Was Thrown in Jail

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Trump and the Guy Who Invented the Global Warming Hoax Meet in Mar-a-Lago

by DrusillaHillier Posted on April 6, 2017

Mother Jones

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This story was originally published by the Huffington Post and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

A skeptic of man-made climate change, President Donald Trump would likely shrug at the notion that rising seas could swallow his beloved “Winter White House” at Mar-a-Lago by the end of the century.

Unfortunately for Trump, climate change is not a hoax or a scam. And the president’s denial about what is happening, just feet from his luxury Florida property, doesn’t make the threat any less real.

Trump has chosen Mar-a-Lago as the place to “break the ice” with Chinese President Xi Jinping, as a senior White House official put it during a background briefing Tuesday. Starting Thursday afternoon, Trump will host Xi for a highly anticipated two-day summit. It will be the first face-to-face meeting for the leaders of the world’s two largest economies and biggest emitters of greenhouse gases.

The two have a lot to discuss, including trade tensions and the North Korean nuclear threat, a White House official said. But if Tuesday’s briefing was any indication, climate change—a critical issue on which the U.S. and China recently parted ways—won’t be on the agenda.

Bob Deans of the environmental group Natural Resources Defense Council told the Huffington Post that the summit presents an opportunity for the two countries to strengthen their relationship and “make real progress on the central environmental challenge of our time.” And to walk away from that would be a big mistake.

“We’re all counting on these two leaders to take this issue seriously and to take it up at Mar-a-Lago,” he said.

In many ways, the location is perfect. South Florida, including Palm Beach County, is already taking steps to prepare for the effects of climate change, namely sea level rise. A 6-foot rise, on the high end of possible scenarios that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has predicted by 2100, would put a significant portion of Trump’s oceanfront resort below the surface.

“Even though he’s president, Mar-a-Lago is not invulnerable to sea level rise,” Palm Beach County Commissioner Steven Abrams, a Republican, recently told Florida’s Sun Sentinel newspaper.

Under former President Barack Obama, the U.S. and China forged a strong partnership in the fight to combat global climate change. Obama and Xi met at the G20 Summit in Hangzhou, China, last September, where they fortified commitments to reduce carbon emissions by formally joining the Paris Agreement and pledged a “continued bilateral climate cooperation.”

That move, along with India’s ratification of the agreement later that month, proved key to the pact taking effect in November.

Today, the story is strikingly different. Obama â&#128;&#149; who believed that “no challengeâ&#128;&#138; poses a greater threat to future generations than climate change” â&#128;&#149; has been replaced by a president who has dismissed the phenomenon as “bullshit” and a “hoax” that was “created by and for the Chinese.”

And where China and the U.S. only months ago found common ground, Trump has chosen to take the country in an opposite, dangerous direction. Since taking office, he has worked feverishly to roll back Obama-era climate policies, and has promised to save America’s dying coal industry, increase oil and gas production and make sweeping cuts at the Environmental Protection Agency that target climate programs.

Meanwhile, China is forging ahead with efforts to move away from coal and reduce emissions, announcing in January that it will invest $360 billion on renewable energy, including solar and wind power, through 2020.

China hasn’t shied away from calling out Trump, both for his Chinese hoax remark and his campaign promise to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris climate pact. At the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, in January, Xi stressed that tackling climate change is a responsibility owed to future generations and urged then president-elect Trump to keep the U.S. in the pact, calling it a “hard-won achievement” that “all signatories should stick to.”

“It is important to protect the environment while pursuing economic and social progress â&#128;&#149; to achieve harmony between man and nature, and harmony between man and society,” Xi said at the time.

Climate change was mentioned only once at Tuesday’s White House briefing about the Trump-Xi summit â&#128;&#149; by a journalist, who asked on what the U.S. and China hope to collaborate now that Trump has reversed course on climate. A White House official said that North Korea is something the U.S. and China could work together on and that there are still “a lot of areas of cooperation,” including public health.

Though there are many unanswered questions about the U.S.-China relationship going forward, one thing that’s become increasingly clear is that China looks poised to lead where Trump is choosing not to.

“Since Donald Trump’s election victory, China has emerged as a potential new leader on the global stage—and today’s address does little to soften the impression that President Xi is taking an increasingly assertive stance on matters of global trade and climate change,” the World Economic Forum noted in a press release about Xi’s January address.

Given Trump’s actions since taking office, it is unlikely he or his team members will strike up a conversation about the threats of climate change. Which means that if the two are to have such a discussion, Xi will have to bring it up. The two will need to look no further than out one of the club’s many windows for the proof.

NASA research shows that global sea levels rose an average of 3 inches between 1992 and 2015. And a University of Miami study last year found that the rate of sea level rise in South Florida had tripled, to about 3/4 inch a year, over the previous decade.

In 2015, in an effort to better prepare for and minimize the effects, Palm Beach County, where Mar-a-Lago is located, hired a “climate change and sustainability coordinator,” urban land use planner Natalie Schneider.

Harold Wanless, chair of the University of Miami’s geological sciences department, understands the situation facing Florida’s coastal areas well. He has co-signed at least four letters to Trump, Mar-a-Lago or a member of the president’s administration, each stressing the urgent need to accept and combat the realities of climate change. None of the letter signees received a response, he told HuffPost.

Wanless can’t understand how Trump could disregard the evidence.

“This is so real,” he told HuffPost. “And it’s so imminent to begin having serious effects on the stability of our coastal environments and its communities and its people. And it doesn’t matter if somebody believes in it or not, it’s happening. And it’s going to be happening at an accelerated rate.”

In a post Wednesday, Melania Hart, director of China policy at the liberal Center for American Progress, listed climate change among the five issues Trump must handle correctly during the summit. She wrote that she expects Beijing will bring up the issue, if for no other reason than to “needle” the Republican president.

“On this issue, the Trump administration is setting the United States up to be the global bad guy, and that will give China leverage to push back against U.S. initiatives on other issues,” Hart wrote. “If the Trump administration denies climate science or refuses to acknowledge the positive role Beijing is playing, that will undermine Washington’s credibility when it claims to be seriously considering new measures on North Korea or trade.”

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Trump and the Guy Who Invented the Global Warming Hoax Meet in Mar-a-Lago

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Trump’s Thin Skin Is Keeping Him From Staffing the Federal Government

by CameronWand Posted on February 19, 2017

Mother Jones

Rex Tillerson’s choice of Elliott Abrams to be his deputy at the State Department was vetoed by the White House. Abrams had once said some bad things about Donald Trump, so he was out. The New York Times reports on what this means:

Mr. Trump remains fixated on the campaign as he applies a loyalty test to some prospective officials….Six of the 15 statutory cabinet secretaries are still awaiting Senate confirmation as Democrats nearly uniformly oppose almost all of the president’s choices.

….It is not just Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson who has no deputy secretary, much less Trump-appointed under secretaries or assistant secretaries. Neither do the heads of the Treasury Department, the Education Department or any of the other cabinet departments. Only three of 15 nominees have been named for deputy secretary positions. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis has a deputy only because he kept the one left over from President Barack Obama’s administration.

Yes, Democrats are slow-walking Trump’s cabinet choices. You can decide for yourself if this is justified. But it’s the deputies who often really run things, and Trump has only managed to name three out of 15 candidates. After he interviewed all those cabinet nominees, I guess he got bored.

In other words, it’s not Democrats who are holding up the rest of government. The problem is that Trump has no idea what he’s doing, and his staff is too busy with Trump’s thin skin and chaotic management style to find qualified deputies that are acceptable to him. After the debacle with his National Security Advisor, I imagine this has gotten even harder. You could almost feel qualified conservatives backing away from Trumpland as that shitshow played out.

Trump has always had a pretty small set of people acceptable to him, and now a shrinking number of experienced players are finding Trump acceptable to them. This doesn’t bode well for basic management of government business, let alone the “change for the ages” that he promised last night.

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Trump’s Thin Skin Is Keeping Him From Staffing the Federal Government

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We Can’t Stop Looking at These Unforgettable Images of the Black Panthers

by MiaOddo02554 Posted on October 15, 2016

Mother Jones

For the 50th anniversary of the Black Panther Party, two exceptional new books take on the legacy and history of one of the most powerful and controversial community empowerment movements in America. One book offers a succinct but in-depth history of the party at its peak. The other scratches the itch that always surfaces around anniversaries like this, asking, “Where are they now?”

In 1968, as a student at the University of California-Berkeley, Stephen Shames befriended Bobby Seale, who became a mentor to Shames. Recognizing the importance of having someone document their revolution, Seale gave Shames unfettered access to himself and the Black Panther Party network to take pictures. It gave Shames an unparalleled, insider’s perspective on the party, from 1968 through Bobby Seale’s campaign for Oakland mayor in 1973. It’s a remarkable body of work, not just for its historical significance, but for the poignancy of the images.

Oakland, 1971. Black Panther children in a classroom at the Intercommunal Youth Institute, the Black Panther school. Stephen Shames from the book Power to the People: The World of the Black Panthers (Abrams). Courtesy Steven Kasher Gallery.

Oakland, July 28, 1968. Kathleen Cleaver, communications secretary and the first female member of the Party’s decision-making Central Committee, talks with Los Angeles Panthers at the Free Huey rally in DeFremery Park (which the Panthers dubbed Bobby Hutton Park). Stephen Shames, courtesy Steven Kasher Gallery.

Power to the People: The World of the Black Panthers, Shames’ new book with Seale, collects photos he shot through 1973 and pairs them with Black Panther Party ephemera and oral history. It’s an excellent introduction to a movement many people see only in a dramatically cinematic fashion. In popular culture, the Black Panthers are associated with tough dudes in cool leather jackets toting guns, fed up with racism and injustice. The truth, of course, is much more nuanced.

The book details how the Black Panthers took a proactive role in bettering poor communities that were ignored, if not outright shit on, by the powers that be. Their school breakfast program—famously reviled by J. Edgar Hoover—set a now-common standard for making sure school children don’t start the day hungry. The Black Panthers helped get old people to the grocery store and, in particularly tough neighborhoods, escorted them to cash their Social Security checks. They launched schools and newspapers, organized strikes, arranged health care for people. Such community “survival programs” were the backbone of the party. As Seale puts it, “The real heroes of the Black Panther Party were the thousands of sisters and brothers who made our survival programs work.”

Shame’s photos concentrate on the Black Panthers’ activities in Oakland and Berkeley, but he also got around, traveling across the United States in 1970 to document Panther activities in Boston, Chicago, New York City, Philadelphia, and Toledo, Ohio, among other cities. This was at the height of tension between the FBI and the Black Panthers, when the group’s headquarters around the country were being raided and bombed and fortified in anticipation of shootouts. A time when Panthers like Fred Hampton were being killed. It was a heavy time.

Shames says his photos are “aspirational,” but the tension and disquiet come through. The photos don’t capture the more controversial aspects of the Panthers, which are instead bluntly dealt with in the text by Seale and others.

Oakland, 1971. Black Panther Gloria Abernethy sells papers at the Mayfair supermarket boycott, with Tamara Lacey in the rear. Abernethy now works for the state of California, and Tamara is a real estate agent. Stephen Shames, courtesy Steven Kasher Gallery.

Oakland, August 28, 1971. Party members carry George Jackson’s coffin into St. Augustine’s Church for funeral services. Jackson was killed in a San Quentin prison riot a week earlier, in which three corrections officers and two other inmates were also killed. Stephen Shames, courtesy Steven Kasher Gallery.

August, 1970, Berkeley. Minister of Defense and Black Panthers co-founder Huey Newton listens to a Bob Dylan album at home shortly after his release from prison. Stephen Shames, courtesy Steven Kasher Gallery.

Oakland, 1973. Black Panther Chairman Bobby Seale campaigns for mayor on a city bus. Seale came in second out of nine candidates that year, only to lose the runoff. But the party’s 1972 voter registration drive helped Lionel Wilson became Oakland’s first black mayor in 1977. Stephen Shames, courtesy Steven Kasher Gallery.

Power to the People wraps up with Shames and Seale reflecting on the current mood in America and the legacy of the Black Panther Party, featuring photos of recent Black Lives Matter protests.

And that brings us to Bryan Shih and Yohuru Williams‘ book, The Black Panthers: Portraits From an Unfinished Revolution (Nation Books).

While no doubt rooted in the past, Portraits From an Unfinished Revolution focuses squarely on the present, with portraits and interviews with former members today. While the authors did an excellent job of tracking down higher-ups in the party, the book smartly turns its focus to the “real heroes,” the group’s rank-and-file members, giving us a fuller picture of life as a Black Panther, and the impact those years had on people’s lives. Some of the former members are now academics. Some are solidly working class. Some are in prison. And many remain active as organizers and activists.

Shih’s simple, powerful, Richard Avedon-esque black-and-white portraits are paired with short pieces on each person: who they were then, where the Black Panther Party took them, and where they are now. Interspersed among the interviews are essays on different aspects of the Black Panthers.

Ericka Huggins was a leader of the Black Panthers Los Angeles chapter along with her husband, John Huggins, who was later killed in a shootout on the UCLA campus. She later founded the party’s New Haven chapter. A longtime director of the party’s Oakland Community School, she helped create educational and social justice programs with an emphasis on spirituality. She is also a professor of sociology and women’s studies at several California colleges and universities. (See our recent chat with Huggins here.) Bryan Shih

Phyllis Jackson grew up in Tacoma, Washington, before joining the party at its national headquarters. She served as a communications secretary and ran a voter registration campaign. She is an associate professor of art history at Pomona College, teaching arts and cinema of Africa and the African diaspora. Bryan Shih

Abdullah Majid (formerly Anthony Laborde), born in Flushing, New York, was a founding member of the Queens Chapter of the party and a full-time party member from 1968 to 1971. At the time of his death this past April, he was incarcerated in Five Points Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison in upstate New York, for his role in the shooting death of one NYPD officer and the wounding of another. Bryan Shih*

Mike Tagawa was born in 1944 at the Minidoka Relocation Camp in southern Idaho, one of the locations where Japanese were interned during World War II. He and his family moved to Seattle. He joined the Air Force and later the Black Panther Party in Seattle, where he now works as a bus driver. Bryan Shih

B. Kwaku Duren coordinated the Black Panthers’ reorganized Southern California chapter (January 1977 to March 1982). After his sister was shot and killed by the police, he helped establish the Coalition Against Police Abuse, which became the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit against the LAPD. The lawsuit was settled for $1.8 million and led to the disbanding of the LAPD’s Public Disorder and Intelligence Division. Duren worked as a paralegal and lawyer in the South Central office of the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles from 1977 to 1990. Bryan Shih

Ronald “Elder” Freeman grew up in Detroit and in the early 1960s moved to California, where he became a founding member of the Southern California chapter of the party, along with his brother, Roland. He was a priest in the African Orthodox Church, was affiliated with the Marcus Garvey Universal Negro Improvement Association, and was a longtime prison reform advocate. Both brothers died of illness within a week of each other in October 2014, a few months after this interview was conducted. Bryan Shih

Elaine Brown chaired the Black Panther Party from 1974 to 1977, the only woman to serve in this top position. The author of two books, A Taste of Power and The Condemnation of Little B, Brown is now executive director of the Michael Lewis (“Little B”) Legal Defense Committee and CEO of Oakland and the World Enterprises, a nonprofit that helps former prisoners create businesses—including an urban farm in West Oakland, where the party was headquartered. Bryan Shih

Taken together, the books offer a well-rounded primer on the Black Panther Party, then and now, top to bottom. You can find books out there with a more detailed history and books that go deep in the political thinking and revolutionary tactics employed by the Black Panthers. Dozens, if not hundreds of academic books parsing the party have been written. If you want to go deep on biographies, they’re out there, too. But for a solid introduction or a quick refresher, you can’t do better than this.

Shames’ photos are on exhibit at the Steven Kasher Gallery in New York City through October 29. Shames and Seales will be doing book signings in DC the last weekend of October, including one at the National Museum of African American History and Culture on October 30. Shih’s photos are part of the Oakland Museum of California’s impressive “All Power to the People: Black Panthers at 50” exhibition, on display through February 12.

* Name corrected.

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We Can’t Stop Looking at These Unforgettable Images of the Black Panthers

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US Arms Sales to Saudi Arabia Will Continue, Despite Allegations of War Crimes

by FelipaCajigas6 Posted on September 22, 2016

Mother Jones

“The United States is at war in Yemen today,” said Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) during a Senate debate this morning over a bipartisan resolution seeking to block a $1.15 billion arms deal that would supply Saudi Arabia with Abrams tanks and an assortment other weaponry.

While the resolution was voted down, 71 to 21, it marked the first time that members of Congress have publicly debated the wisdom of the United States’ role in a conflict that’s left thousands of civilians dead and millions on the verge of starvation. “There is a US imprint on every civilian death inside Yemen, which is radicalizing the people of Yemen against the United States,” Murphy said in support of the resolution. “There really is no way this bombing campaign could happen without United States participation…And this Congress has not debated this engagement.”

For the past year and a half, a Saudi-led coalition of Gulf States has been bombing Yemen, supposedly targeting the Houthi rebels who ousted Yemen’s president in March 2015. But more than a third of the airstrikes have hit civilian targets, including hospitals, schools, and places of worship. The United States has been providing the Saudis with bombs, intelligence, and aerial refueling for its jets.

Senators who opposed the resolution focused more on Iran than Saudi Arabia or Yemen. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) argued that the recent US-Iranian nuclear deal enhanced Iran’s status as regional power, and that the resolution would “further damage our alliance and our partnership with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.” Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-S.C.) played up the relationship between the Yemeni rebels and Iran and glossed over Saudi Arabia’s actions in Yemen (which include allegations of war crimes) as “imperfect.” “If we say no to the Saudis, not only will that be seen as a slight by the Saudis, they’ll buy the arms somewhere else,” he warned.

Some observers don’t find those arguments very compelling. “It’s discouraging that the arguments are more about Iran than Saudi Arabia,” says Cole Bockenfeld, the deputy director for policy at the Project on Middle East Democracy. “A lot of this is tied to reassuring the Gulf countries after the Iran deal.” Scott Paul, Oxfam’s senior humanitarian policy advisor, says it’s not accurate to see Yemen’s Houthi rebels as proxies for Iran. “They’re unique to Yemen and have uniquely Yemeni ambitions and grievances,” he says. “They’re doing so in an incredibly problematic way, but they are not under the command or control of Tehran by any stretch of the imagination.”

Sources: Congressional Research Service, Department of Defense Fiscal Year Series, Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), Defense Security Cooperation Agency

McConnell also said that shutting off the Saudis from American arms would send them looking elsewhere for weaponry. “They don’t have to buy this equipment from us; they can buy it from somebody else,” he said. He added that there’s no evidence that the Saudis have used tanks on the ground in Yemen. However, the Saudis have hinted that they’re prepared to launch a ground attack on the Yemeni capital, Sanaa. Plus, the Saudis can’t easily turn to the Russians, Chinese, or European countries to buy these types of weapons systems. “Almost all of their equipment is US-manufactured,” says Bockenfeld. “For them to transition over to an entirely different kind of weapon from a different country would take several years and billions of dollars—a massive undertaking. Beyond the costs, frankly the US equipment is sought after not just to please and maintain the alliance, but also because it’s the best.”

Graham insisted that such arms transfers—Washington and Riyadh have inked weapons deals worth more than $100 billion since the beginning of the Obama administration—help Saudi Arabia attack Al Qaeda and ISIS. Yet, as Murphy observed, “None of the Saudi bombs are dropping on AQAP Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula; they are all dropping on Houthi targets and civilian targets.”

Despite the resolution’s failure, lawmakers and observers maintain that the vote sent a strong message: that the longstanding US-Saudi relationship is under more scrutiny than ever before. But for now, the flow of arms will not be interrupted.

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US Arms Sales to Saudi Arabia Will Continue, Despite Allegations of War Crimes

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Will Hillary Clinton’s Education Policy Break From Obama’s in a Huge Way?

by LatonyaRaymond Posted on September 9, 2016

Mother Jones

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Before Hillary Clinton gave her speech at the Democratic National Convention in July, organizers fired up the crowd with a video extolling President Barack Obama’s key policies: health care reform that extended coverage to an estimated 20 million more people; the $62 billion bailout of General Motors and Chrysler that saved about 1.5 million jobs; the killing of Osama bin Laden.

But one major issue was conspicuously missing from the highlight reel of Obama’s achievements: education.

This glaring omission is just one of many signs that Clinton is distancing herself from Obama’s education policies. On her campaign website, Clinton’s K-12 page avoids any discussion of testing, accountability, or expansion of charters—the main focuses of Obama’s administration. Perhaps most telling, Clinton’s choices of advisers signal her attempt to move Obama’s test-driven K-12 agenda toward the center.

Clinton’s K-12 working policy group, according to a Democrat close to the campaign, comprises a mix of teachers’ union leaders, proponents of test-driven reforms, and advocates for increased investments in underfunded schools.

The previously unreleased list includes:

Chris Edley Jr. the president of the Opportunity Institute, a California-based think tank that works mostly on early-childhood and college access initiatives
Lily Eskelsen García, the president of the National Education Association, the nation’s biggest teachers’ union
Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, the second-biggest teachers’ union
Carmel Martin, the executive vice president for policy at the Center for American Progress and onetime adviser to former Education Secretary Arne Duncan
Catherine Brown, the former vice president of policy at Teach for America and current vice president of education policy at the Center for American Progress
Richard Riley, the secretary of education under Bill Clinton who’s known for his views that don’t neatly fit into the pro-reform or pro-teachers’ union wings of the Democratic Party. Riley supported testing and accountability but also pushed with equal fervor for smaller classes and more funding for schools.

The inclusion of teachers’ union leaders—who were not advising Obama’s campaigns and are among some of the most powerful opponents of his education policies—marks an especially sharp break from his administration. By contrast, many of Obama’s advisers—and later staffers at the Department of Education—viewed teachers’ unions as obstacles to school improvement and had close ties to the Gates Foundation, which championed many federal policies that encouraged both numbers-driven teacher evaluations and charter schools.

But while Clinton’s K-12 advisers may suggest a more teacher-friendly approach to policy, they don’t exactly indicate that, if elected, she would push for the end of test scores in policy decisions. The Center for American Progress, a progressive DC-based think tank closely aligned with Clinton, has been generally supportive of Obama’s test-based education policies; meanwhile, as education secretary, Riley helped lay the foundation for the modern standards and accountability movement.

Still, Clinton’s teacher-friendly speeches and lack of emphasis on test-based accountability are making many of the reform groups that had influence in the Obama administration nervous. “There’s a lot of anxiety about the transition from this president to the next administration,” said Shavar Jeffries, the president of a think tank affiliated with Democrats for Education Reform, a powerful pro-testing group, during a recent education forum.

“Obama had positioned himself as a reformer who was unapologetically for charter schooling, teacher evaluations, the notion of common standards,” said Rick Hess, a veteran education policy expert with the conservative American Enterprise Institute. “With Clinton, you see an agenda that leans much more toward teacher unions than the Democrats for Education Reform.”

We’re Losing Tens of Thousands of Black Teachers. Here’s Why That’s Bad for Everyone.

Most of Clinton’s shift has to do with two of Obama’s relatively small but widely unpopular federal programs: Race to the Top and School Improvement Grants. These initiatives offered about $9 billion in grants that were tied to prescriptive policies like evaluating teachers based in part on student test scores and to dramatic school “turnarounds,” which included closings and mass firings of teachers. Even though these grants contributed just a tiny fraction to state education budgets (for example, Race to the Top accounted for 0.63 percent in New York in 2011), they had an outsize impact on schools: The numbers of standardized tests and curricula that mimicked multiple-choice questions exploded, especially in schools serving low-income black and Latino students. And as districts fired staff or closed schools with low scores, thousands of educators, especially black teachers, lost their jobs or left teaching all together.

In the last three years, opposition to these policies has gained a lot of steam. Last year, for example, 1 in 5 students in New York opted out of standardized tests, forcing policymakers to remove test scores from teacher evaluations. In August, Black Lives Matter organizers called for a moratorium on both public school closures based on test scores and the expansion of charters to replace them. Many of these opponents argue that test-based reforms haven’t been working: While racial achievement gaps have narrowed slightly since 2001, they remain stubbornly large and shrank far more dramatically before No Child Left Behind (NCLB), when policies focused on equalizing funding and school integration, rather than on test scores.

Perhaps because of how divisive school reform has become among Democrats, Clinton’s education campaign so far has poured most of its energy into its early-childhood initiative—an education issue that has more allies in Congress than any other and has been one of Clinton’s signature issues for decades. There is also a growing pile of evidence that investments in early childhood for poor kids may have bigger returns than a focus on raising test scores. Obama already pushed for expansion of pre-K education, and Clinton wants to make preschool universal for four-year-olds and double the number of children enrolled in Early Head Start, which includes home visits by a social worker or nurse during pregnancy and parent coaching in the child’s first three years. Paul Tough, the author of Helping Children Succeed, found that the United States spends only 6 percent of all public early-childhood dollars on interventions targeting the child’s first two years, even though that’s when kids’ brains are most malleable for positive development. (The rest goes to kids ages three to six.)

When it comes to reform ideas after preschool, Clinton’s campaign page contains relatively few policy details. It does call for investing in K-12 teachers and schools through a “national campaign to elevate and modernize the teaching profession,” rebuilding crumbling public school buildings, and increasing funding for teaching computer science. The boldest and most detailed section discusses the need to disrupt the “school-to-prison pipeline”; Clinton promises to send $2 billion to states to reduce suspensions and expulsions that disproportionately affect black students and “implement social and emotional support interventions.”

Clinton has made clear in speeches that she supports testing, but she has said she wants to have “better and fewer tests”—a position that mirrors comments from both Obama and Duncan over the past two years. Meanwhile, on accountability—which measures to use to evaluate schools and teachers, and what to do when they are not meeting the mark—Clinton’s campaign pages and speeches haven’t offered much detail. But that’s in large part because the new Every Student Succeeds Act, which replaced No Child Left Behind last year, moves these decisions largely to states, and the specifics of its implementation are still being hashed out in Congress.

Many nations with higher-performing students, like Finland, Singapore, and Australia, already use fewer and broader tests for accountability. In these countries, standardized tests are used in combination with real student work, graded by trained teachers, to measure the performance of schools, as NPR’s lead education blogger, Anya Kamenetz, documents in her book The Test. Stanford professor Linda Darling-Hammond—who was considered for the secretary of education job after Obama was first elected, and could again be a top contender if Clinton is elected—has been calling for a similar accountability system in the United States. A 2014 testing-reform plan co-authored by Darling-Hammond recommends fewer multiple-choice tests and increased capacity at the local and state level to develop yearly “performance assessments”—student work that reflects what professionals actually do in the real world, like essays, group work, individual presentations, and science projects.

But that’s just one piece of the larger puzzle, according to José Luis Vilson, a veteran math teacher in New York City and the author of This Is Not a Test: A New Narrative on Race, Class, and the Future of Education. Vilson hopes to see increased investments in professional development and coaching of teachers, far beyond the three to five hours a week that’s typical in American public schools. Teachers in Finland, Singapore, and South Korea spend 15 to 25 hours each week working to improve their craft.

Today, the push to create fewer and better tests and improve teacher training faces the biggest obstacles in the schools that need them the most: those with large numbers of low-income students. In the past 10 years, the per-student funding gap between rich and poor schools has grown by 44 percent. The Title I program, a federal initiative created to equalize these disparities, is broken: A 2016 investigation by USA Today found that 20 percent of Title I money ends up funding affluent school districts. Meanwhile, a majority of US public school students come from low-income families, and about 10 percent of them live in deep poverty—in families that earn less than $11,000 a year.

Clinton has expressed support for more federal funding for poor students and those with special needs in her speeches. In a radio interview this year, Clinton said, “The federal government has an opportunity—and I would argue an obligation—to help equalize spending” on schools.

Jonathan Stith, who as national coordinator of the Alliance for Educational Justice worked closely on the development of the Black Lives Matter policy agenda, said he is encouraged to hear a call for higher investments in struggling schools. But he’s disappointed that Clinton’s K-12 agenda lacks detail and doesn’t include any discussion of systemic racism in education. “The agenda’s vague language can be seized by states to continue to do these same school ‘turnaround’ and push-out policies that have contributed in part to the rise of the Movement for Black Lives,” Stith said.

Ultimately, Stith and others agreed that Clinton’s biggest choices are still in front of her. Whether issues of race, better tests, and access to high-quality education will be addressed with meaningful policy will depend a great deal on the types of advisers and staffers she’d select as president, said Samuel Abrams, professor of education at the Columbia Teachers College and author of Education and the Commercial Mindset. Abrams, who taught in public schools for 18 years, argued that most advisers, staffers, and policymakers in the Education Department must have a proven record of success with the hardest-to-reach kids. “I failed so many times as a teacher,” he said. “Until you understand the complexities of why and how that failure happens, you won’t make good policy in education.”

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Will Hillary Clinton’s Education Policy Break From Obama’s in a Huge Way?

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The US Government Is Literally Arming the World, and Nobody’s Even Talking About It

by AnnelieseV51 Posted on July 30, 2016

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

When American firms dominate a global market worth more than $70 billion a year, you’d expect to hear about it. Not so with the global arms trade. It’s good for one or two stories a year in the mainstream media, usually when the annual statistics on the state of the business come out.

It’s not that no one writes about aspects of the arms trade. There are occasional pieces that, for example, take note of the impact of US weapons transfers, including cluster bombs, to Saudi Arabia, or of the disastrous dispensation of weaponry to US allies in Syria, or of foreign sales of the costly, controversial F-35 combat aircraft. And once in a while, if a foreign leader meets with the president, US arms sales to his or her country might generate an article or two. But the sheer size of the American arms trade, the politics that drive it, the companies that profit from it, and its devastating global impacts are rarely discussed, much less analyzed in any depth.

So here’s a question that’s puzzled me for years (and I’m something of an arms wonk): Why do other major US exports—from Hollywood movies to Midwestern grain shipments to Boeing airliners—garner regular coverage while trends in weapons exports remain in relative obscurity? Are we ashamed of standing essentially alone as the world’s No. 1 arms dealer, or is our Weapons “R” Us role so commonplace that we take it for granted, like death or taxes?

The numbers should stagger anyone. According to the latest figures available from the Congressional Research Service, the United States was credited with more than half the value of all global arms transfer agreements in 2014, the most recent year for which full statistics are available. At 14 percent, the world’s second largest supplier, Russia, lagged far behind. Washington’s leadership in this field has never truly been challenged. The US share has fluctuated between one-third and one-half of the global market for the past two decades, peaking at an almost monopolistic 70 percent of all weapons sold in 2011. And the gold rush continues. Vice Admiral Joe Rixey, who heads the Pentagon’s arms sales agency, euphemistically known as the Defense Security Cooperation Agency, estimates that arms deals facilitated by the Pentagon topped $46 billion in 2015, and are on track to hit $40 billion in 2016.

To be completely accurate, there is one group of people who pay remarkably close attention to these trends—executives of the defense contractors that are cashing in on this growth market. With the Pentagon and related agencies taking in “only” about $600 billion a year—high by historical standards but tens of billions of dollars less than hoped for by the defense industry—companies like Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and General Dynamics have been looking to global markets as their major source of new revenue.

In a January 2015 investor call, for example, Lockheed Martin CEO Marillyn Hewson was asked whether the Iran nuclear deal brokered by the Obama administration and five other powers might reduce tensions in the Middle East, undermining the company’s strategy of increasing its arms exports to the region. She responded that continuing “volatility” in both the Middle East and Asia would make them “growth areas” for the foreseeable future. In other words, no worries. As long as the world stays at war or on the verge of it, Lockheed Martin’s profits won’t suffer—and, of course, its products will help ensure that any such volatility will prove lethal indeed.

Under Hewson, Lockheed has set a goal of getting at least 25 percent of its revenues from weapons exports, and Boeing has done that company one better. It’s seeking to make overseas arms sales 30 percent of its business.

Arms deals are a way of life in Washington. From the president on down, significant parts of the government are intent on ensuring that American arms will flood the global market and companies like Lockheed and Boeing will live the good life. From the president on his trips abroad to visit allied world leaders to the secretaries of state and defense to the staffs of US embassies, American officials regularly act as salespeople for the arms firms. And the Pentagon is their enabler. From brokering, facilitating, and literally banking the money from arms deals to transferring weapons to favored allies on the taxpayers’ dime, it is in essence the world’s largest arms dealer.

In a typical sale, the US government is involved every step of the way. The Pentagon often does assessments of an allied nation’s armed forces in order to tell them what they “need”—and of course what they always need is billions of dollars in new US-supplied equipment. Then the Pentagon helps negotiate the terms of the deal, notifies Congress of its details, and collects the funds from the foreign buyer, which it then gives to the US supplier in the form of a defense contract. In most deals, the Pentagon is also the point of contact for maintenance and spare parts for any US-supplied system. The bureaucracy that helps make all of this happen, the Defense Security Cooperation Agency, is funded from a 3.5 percent surcharge on the deals it negotiates. This gives it all the more incentive to sell, sell, sell.

And the pressure for yet more of the same is always intense, in part because the weapons makers are careful to spread their production facilities to as many states and localities as possible. In this way, they ensure that endless support for government promotion of major arms sales becomes part and parcel of domestic politics.

General Dynamics, for instance, has managed to keep its tank plants in Ohio and Michigan running through a combination of add-ons to the Army budget—funds inserted into that budget by Congress even though the Pentagon didn’t request them—and exports to Saudi Arabia. Boeing is banking on a proposed deal to sell 40 F-18s to Kuwait to keep its St. Louis production line open, and is currently jousting with the Obama administration to get it to move more quickly on the deal. Not surprisingly, members of Congress and local business leaders in such states become strong supporters of weapons exports.

Though seldom thought of this way, the US political system is also a global arms distribution system of the first order. In this context, the Obama administration has proven itself a good friend to arms exporting firms. During President Obama’s first six years in office, Washington entered into agreements to sell more than $190 billion in weaponry worldwide—more, that is, than any US administration since World War II. In addition, Team Obama has loosened restrictions on arms exports, making it possible to send abroad a whole new range of weapons and weapons components—including Black Hawk and Huey helicopters and engines for C-17 transport planes—with far less scrutiny than was previously required.

This has been good news for the industry, which had been pressing for such changes for decades with little success. But the weaker regulations also make it potentially easier for arms smugglers and human rights abusers to get their hands on US arms. For example, 36 US allies—from Argentina and Bulgaria to Romania and Turkey—will no longer need licenses from the State Department to import weapons and weapons parts from the United States. This will make it far easier for smuggling networks to set up front companies in such countries and get US arms and arms components that they can then pass on to third parties like Iran or China. Already a common practice, it will only increase under the new regulations.

The degree to which the Obama administration has been willing to bend over backward to help weapons exporters was underscored at a 2013 hearing on those administration export “reforms.” Tom Kelly, then the deputy assistant secretary of the State Department’s Bureau of Political-Military Affairs, caught the spirit of the era when asked whether the administration was doing enough to promote American arms exports. He responded:

“We are advocating on behalf of our companies and doing everything we can to make sure that these sales go through…and that is something we are doing every day, basically on every continent in the world…and we’re constantly thinking of how we can do better.”

One place where, with a helping hand from the Obama administration and the Pentagon, the arms industry has been doing a lot better of late is the Middle East. Washington has brokered deals for more than $50 billion in weapons sales to Saudi Arabia alone for everything from F-15 fighter aircraft and Apache attack helicopters to combat ships and missile defense systems.

The most damaging deals, if not the most lucrative, have been the sales of bombs and missiles to the Saudis for their brutal war in Yemen, where thousands of civilians have been killed and millions of people are going hungry. Members of Congress like Michigan Representative John Conyers and Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy have pressed for legislation that would at least stem the flow of the most deadly of the weaponry being sent for use there, but they have yet to overcome the considerable clout of the Saudis in Washington (and, of course, that of the arms industry as well).

When it comes to the arms business, however, there’s no end to the good news from the Middle East. Take the administration’s proposed new 10-year aid deal with Israel. If enacted as currently planned, it would boost US military assistance to that country by up to 25 percent—to roughly $4 billion per year. At the same time, it would phase out a provision that had allowed Israel to spend one-quarter of Washington’s aid developing its own defense industry. In other words, all that money, the full $4 billion in taxpayer dollars, will now flow directly into the coffers of companies like Lockheed Martin, which is in the midst of completing a multibillion-dollar deal to sell the Israelis F-35s.

As Lockheed Martin’s Marillyn Hewson noted, however, the Middle East is hardly the only growth area for that firm or others like it. The dispute between China and its neighbors over the control of the South China Sea (in many ways an incipient conflict over whether that country or the United States will control that part of the Pacific Ocean) has opened up new vistas when it comes to the sale of American warships and other military equipment to Washington’s East Asian allies. The recent Hague court decision rejecting Chinese claims to those waters (and the Chinese rejection of it) is only likely to increase the pace of arms buying in the region.

At the same time, in the good-news-never-ends department, growing fears of North Korea’s nuclear program have stoked a demand for US-supplied missile defense systems. The South Koreans have, in fact, just agreed to deploy Lockheed Martin’s THAAD anti-missile system. In addition, the Obama administration’s decision to end the longstanding embargo on US arms sales to Vietnam is likely to open yet another significant market for US firms. In the past two years alone, the US has offered more than $15 billion worth of weaponry to allies in East Asia, with Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea accounting for the bulk of the sales.

In addition, the Obama administration has gone to great lengths to build a defense relationship with India, a development guaranteed to benefit US arms exporters. Last year, Washington and New Delhi signed a 10-year defense agreement that included pledges of future joint work on aircraft engines and aircraft carrier designs. In these years, the US has made significant inroads into the Indian arms market, which had traditionally been dominated by the Soviet Union and then Russia. Recent deals include a $5.8 billion sale of Boeing C-17 transport aircraft and a $1.4 billion agreement to provide support services related to a planned purchase of Apache attack helicopters.

And don’t forget “volatile” Europe. Great Britain’s recent Brexit vote introduced an uncertainty factor into American arms exports to that country. The United Kingdom has been by far the biggest purchaser of US weapons in Europe of late, with more than $6 billion in deals struck over the past two years alone—more, that is, than the US has sold to all other European countries combined.

The British defense behemoth BAE is Lockheed Martin’s principal foreign partner on the F-35 combat aircraft, which at a projected cost of $1.4 trillion over its lifetime already qualifies as the most expensive weapons program in history. If Brexit-driven austerity were to lead to a delay in, or the cancellation of, the F-35 deal (or any other major weapons shipments), it would be a blow to American arms makers. But count on one thing: Were there to be even a hint that this might happen to the F-35, lobbyists for BAE will mobilize to get the deal privileged status, whatever other budget cuts may be in the works.

On the bright side (if you happen to be a weapons maker), any British reductions will certainly be more than offset by opportunities in Eastern and Central Europe, where a new Cold War seems to be gaining traction. Between 2014 and 2015, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, military spending increased by 13 percent in the region in response to the Russian intervention in Ukraine. The rise in Poland’s outlays, at 22 percent, was particularly steep.

Under the circumstances, it should be obvious that trends in the global arms trade are a major news story and should be dealt with as such in the country most responsible for putting more weapons of a more powerful nature into the hands of those living in “volatile” regions. It’s a monster business (in every sense of the word) and certainly has far more dangerous consequences than licensing a Hollywood blockbuster or selling another Boeing airliner.

Historically, there have been rare occasions of public protest against unbridled arms trafficking, as with the backlash against “the merchants of death” after World War I, or the controversy over who armed Saddam Hussein that followed the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Even now, small numbers of congressional representatives, including John Conyers, Chris Murphy, and Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, continue to try to halt the sale of cluster munitions, bombs, and missiles to Saudi Arabia.

There is, however, unlikely to be a genuine public debate about the value of the arms business and Washington’s place in it if it isn’t even considered a subject worthy of more than an occasional media story. In the meantime, the United States continues to hold onto its No. 1 role in the global arms trade, the White House does its part, the Pentagon greases the wheels, and the dollars roll in to profit-hungry weapons contractors.

William D. Hartung, a TomDispatch regular, is the director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy and a senior advisor to the Security Assistance Monitor. He is the author of Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex. To receive the latest from TomDispatch.com, sign up here.

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The US Government Is Literally Arming the World, and Nobody’s Even Talking About It

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Rising seas are lapping at the doors of Trump’s real estate empire

by GenaWatkins Posted on July 7, 2016

Rising seas are lapping at the doors of Trump’s real estate empire

By on Jul 7, 2016 5:14 pmShare

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

On a hot and lazy afternoon in Palm Beach, the only sign of movement is the water gently lapping at the grounds of Mar-a-Lago, the private club that is the prize of Donald Trump’s real estate acquisitions in Florida.

Trump currently dismisses climate change as a hoax invented by China, though he has quietly sought to shield real estate investments in Ireland from its effects.

But at the Republican presidential contender’s Palm Beach estate and the other properties that bear his name in South Florida, the water is already creeping up bridges and advancing on access roads, lawns, and beaches because of sea-level rise, according to a risk analysis prepared for the Guardian.

In 30 years, the grounds of Mar-a-Lago could be under at least a foot of water for 210 days a year because of tidal flooding along the intracoastal water way, with the water rising past some of the cottages and bungalows, the analysis by Coastal Risk Consulting found.

Coastal Risk Consulting/Jan Diehm/The Guardian

Trump’s insouciance in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence of climate change — even lapping up on his own doorstep — makes him something of an outlier in South Florida, where mayors are actively preparing for a future under climate change.

Trump, who backed climate action in 2009 but now describes climate change as “bullshit,” is also out of step with the U.S. and other governments’ efforts to turn emissions-cutting pledges into concrete actions in the wake of the Paris climate agreement. Trump has threatened to pull the United States out of the agreement.

And the presidential contender’s posturing about climate denial may further alienate the Republican candidate from younger voters and minority voters in this election who see climate change as a gathering danger.

When Guardian U.S. asked its readers about their most urgent concern in these elections as part of our Voices of America series, the single issue looming on their minds was climate change.

Real estate professionals, with perhaps an extra dash of self-interest, hold similar views. In a survey published in the Miami Herald last month, two-thirds of high-end Miami realtors were concerned sea-level rise and climate change could hurt local property values, up from 56 percent of them last year.

So too for mayors in South Florida. About a third of the civic leaders in South Florida’s compact of mayors are working on strategies to protect their towns from rising seas — and lobbying Florida’s governor and fellow Republicans in Congress to acknowledge the gathering threat.

Elected officials in those same Florida towns say they are already spending heavily to rebuild disappearing beaches and pump out water-logged streets.

Republicans in coastal districts can’t afford to play politics with climate change, said Steve Abrams, a Republican and mayor of Palm Beach County.

“We don’t have the luxury at the local level to engage in these lofty policy debates,” said Abrams. “I have been in knee-deep water in many parts of my district during King Tide.”

King Tides, the extreme high tides of the autumn, are a growing nuisance in Miami and other areas of South Florida — and are creeping up the manicured lawns of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago from the intracoastal waterway, according to the CRC analysis.

Parts of the estate are already at high risk of flooding under heavy rains and storms, the analysis found. By 2045, the storm surge from even a category two storm would bring waters crashing over the main swimming pool and up to the main building, the analysis found.

Coastal Risk Consulting/Jan Diehm/The Guardian

The historic mansion at the heart of Mar-a-Lago is not going to be underwater, “but they are going to have more and more issues with health and safety, access, and infrastructure,” said Keren Bolter, chief scientist for the firm.

Despite Trump’s pronouncements, there is strong evidence that he — personally — could pay the price for climate change in his property interests along the South Florida oceanfront and intracoastal waterway.

In South Florida, sea level is projected to rise up to 34 inches by the middle of the century and as high as 81 inches by 2100, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

South of Mar-a-Lago, where the elevation is lower, water already pools in the road in front of the Trump Hollywood condos after the briefest of cloud bursts. The luxury development, where three-bedroom units are on sale for up to $3 million apiece, offers “pristine beaches.”

“Right outside your door you’ll find the Hollywood Beach broadwalk, ranked as one of the five best boardwalks in the country,” the company website says.

But Peter Bober, a Hollywood native who is now the city’s mayor, said flooding was becoming a regular occurrence, when storms coincided with high tide.

“We have had neighborhoods where the water has been up to people’s front doors. That is not something that I remember as a kid growing up in the city of Hollywood,” he said.

Meanwhile, the city is spending heavily on pumping systems and to truck in sand to replenish beaches disappearing due to erosion.

Bober said he had seen storms with water pouring over the sea walls of the intracoastal. “Water just floods the entire neighborhood, and there is nothing we can do about it,” Bober said. “We have occasional storms where we are totally overwhelmed.”

Such instances are only growing more frequent. Bolter’s modeling suggests Trump’s Hollywood condos could be turned into islands for up to 140 days a year by 2045, cut off from the low-lying A1A coastal road because of tidal flooding and storm surges. Under a category two storm, a storm surge could wash right up to the front gate.

Further south, the Trump Grande in Sunny Isles also faces a soggy future, according to the projections. In 30 years, the boundaries of the property could face tidal flooding and storm surges for 97 days a year, cutting off access to the A1A road. The beaches could also be scoured away by erosion.

“The big issue here is that if a big storm hits, you have five-foot, six-foot waves, and that is going to eat away even at the grass here. It could push the waves even to where we are standing. And if that is going to eat away this whole area, that could do some serious damage,” Bolter said.

Other Trump-branded properties, such as the golf clubs in Doral and Jupiter, are at higher elevations, above the water line amid projected sea-level rise this century. But Bolter said the courses faced different risks from heavy rainfall and poor drainage because of Florida’s high water table.

Coastal Risk Consulting/Jan Diehm/The Guardian

Scientists have long expected sea-level rise on the southeast Florida coast to occur faster than the global average, advancing rapidly on barrier islands and beaches.

The low-lying coastal areas are exposed to an additional threat of inland flooding from the intercoastal waterways, and contamination of fresh water supply by high tides and storm surges.

But the pace of sea-level rise has accelerated over the last decade because of the collapse of ice cover in Greenland and Antarctica, and because of the weakening of ocean currents such as the Gulf Stream. Nowhere is this as evident as in South Florida.

Since 2006, the average rate of sea-level rise in South Florida has increased to nine millimeters a year from three millimeters a year, for a total rise over the decade of about 90 millimeters, or about 3.5 inches, according to Shimon Wdowinski, a research scientist at the University of Miami.

As a result, flooding in Miami Beach and other low-lying areas has doubled over the last decade, Wdowinski found, using tide gauges, rain records, insurance claims, and other data to construct the flood record. “People should be aware of where they want to invest for their properties,” he said. “I think for the next 20 years it will be OK, but I don’t know if it will be in 50 or 80 years. That’s a different story.”

Other sections of the low-lying South Florida coast are just as vulnerable. In 2012, Hurricane Sandy barely grazed Florida, reserving its fury for New York and New Jersey.

But a subsequent storm unleashed huge waves that uprooted traffic lights and street signs, and caused the collapse of a 1.5-mile stretch of the A1A coastal artery in the center of Fort Lauderdale.

“When the road collapsed, that was basically a huge wake-up call,” said Jason Liechty, environmental projects coordinator for Broward County. “Sometimes when you talk about climate change and sea-level rise it seems very abstract, but if you see big chunks of concrete just sticking up out of the road, it becomes very real.

“It took $20 million and 40,000 truckloads of imported sand so far to raise the mile-long section of road by two feet, sink in metal sheets 40 feet down, and rebuild sand dunes to provide buffers from future storms — and the repairs are still under way four years later.

“So let’s do the math here: You are talking about several hundred million dollars if the whole coast line is affected, and that’s a lot of money,” Liechty said.

A number of towns in South Florida are already beginning to make the investment, calculating that it would be cheaper to put in defenses against rising seas now than wait for a catastrophe.

Miami Beach is spending $400 million to raise roads and install pumps to drain streets that experience regularly flooding at high tide — and to prevent salt water from contaminating fresh water storage inland.

In other sea-level hotspots, such as Hollywood, newer construction — including Trump-branded buildings — are being built on top of steeply graded driveways, above the flood zone.

But for some of South Florida’s cities, there may be no alternative to retreat — even if it means abandoning some of the wealthiest real estate in the country.

In his offices in the historic city hall of Coral Gables, James Cason keeps a poster-size map showing a wide swath of land, sliced up by canals, yacht moorings, and multimillion dollar homes in gated communities with elevations below four feet.

About 34 miles of Coral Gables are exposed to the ocean. The entire area — representing about $3 billion in property and about 10 percent of homes — will be underwater in the second half of the century, according to NOAA’s projections.

Two schools, 20 bridges, 21 pumping stations will all be swamped, according to the projections. Some 302 yachts will almost certainly be trapped behind low-lying bridges. Water treatment plants and pumping stations will no longer work.

Cason has no patience for those, like Trump, who deny climate change is occurring. “It’s an existential threat to a city like us,” he said. So much so that Cason has hired consultants to contemplate a future when it may no longer be able to engineer a way out of sea-level rise.

“What do you do if and when the water is up so high you can’t provide services — when do you stop charging taxes?” he asked. “If your house is underwater, can you stop paying taxes on it?”

He would like to believe that by the end of the century, scientists will have figured out a solution to the rising seas that threaten his city. But there is one thing of which he is certain: Coral Gables will not survive by retreating behind a sea wall.

“There is no Dutch solution,” he said. “You can’t really build a wall around it. It will just come up from below.”

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Rising seas are lapping at the doors of Trump’s real estate empire

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13 Cartoon Portraits of Legendary Blues Artists

by MarlaBuxton Posted on April 25, 2016

Mother Jones

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Before I read the author’s note, there was something that confused me about William Stout’s great new book, Legends of the Blues, due out May 7 from Abrams ComicArts (with an intro by music journalist Ed Leimbacher). Where were Memphis Minnie, Mississippi John Hurt, and Reverend Gary Davis, three of my personal faves? How could he overlook them? Also, why did the artwork feel so familiar, yet so different from other stuff I’d seen from Stout—an acclaimed comics, fantasy, and pop-culture artist and illustrator whose work you’ve undoubtedly seen. And then it hit me: Robert Crumb! This, as it turned out, was the answer to both questions.

Way back when, cartoonist Crumb, a blues and old-time music freak who has drawn his share of artists and album art (you can view some of them here along with our Crumb interview), created a series of 36 Heroes of the Blues trading cards. They included, among others, Memphis Minnie and John Hurt; Stout, an avid blues fan, had loved Crumb’s cards and didn’t want to replicate them. But the others were fair game. Rhino Records founder Richard Foos, a friend of Stout’s, ended up licensing Crumb’s portraits for a series of greatest hits CDs for Shout! Factory. And since Crumb had moved on to other stuff, Foos approached Stout to produce some additional ones in a style similar to Crumb’s.

That’s how it started. But after his assignment was complete, Stout kept it up. He was hooked. While recovering from cancer treatments, he cranked them out, imagining that he would produce a bunch of new trading-card sets. In the end, Denis Kitchen, another friend (and the guy who commissioned Crumb’s original cards) suggested that Stout make them into a book instead.

Legends… profiles a whopping 100 blues artists—many of them you’ll recognize and many you won’t. It’s a must for blues fans or even dabblers—although Stout cautions that purists might be upset by his inclusion of crossover artists. Hey, whatever. The format is simple: Each spread contains the artist’s vital stats; recommended tracks; notable tributes and covers by other artists; and a short, punchy mini-profile of each one. The book comes with a 14-track CD compilation, with some nice gritty old tunes from the likes of Mississippi Fred McDowell, Bukka White, and Rev. Robert Wilkins—I’m listening to it right now!

But the real treat is Stout’s Crumby (sorry) portraits. Colorful, evocative, playful, they pay homage both to the original cards and to the great musicians Stout came to admire. There’s the badass blues guitarist Robert Johnson, said to have sold his soul to the devil in exchange for his chops. Champion Jack Dupree, who made the unlikely leap from pro boxer to pro musician. The highly talented yet modest sideman Papa Charlie McCoy. And Lucille Bogan, notorious for her raunchy lyrics. The Crumb effect runs especially strong with certain portraits—for instance, Slim Harpo, whose tunes were covered by a who’s who of 1960s rock icons. Here’s the Stones doing Harpo’s “Shake Your Hips” way back when.

So, okay, I missed those few musicians, but I also learned about plenty of folks I’d never heard of—including a good number of blueswomen. And the poor chap had to crank out 100 portraits. You could hardly ask him to do more. Except that he did so anyway. By the end of Stout’s drawing marathon, he had produced 150 portraits, so maybe a sequel is in the cards. Talk about collecting ’em all!

The book’s cover features a young Muddy Waters, a.k.a. McKinley Morganfield (April 4, 1913-April 30, 1983). Instruments: guitar, vocals. A spiritual protégé of Son House and Robert Johnson, the prolific Morganfield got his nickname because he loved playing in the mud as a kid. Recommended tracks: “I Can’t Be Satisfied,” “Rollin’ and Tumblin’,” “Rollin’ Stone,” “Mannish Boy,” “She Moves Me,” “Hoochie Coochie Man,” ” I Just Want to Make Love to You,” “I’m Ready,” “Got My Mojo Working,” “You Shook Me.”

Lead Belly, a.k.a. Huddie Ledbetter (January 1888-December 6, 1949). Instruments: accordion, fiddle, 12-string guitar, mandolin, piano, violin, vocals. Ledbetter, who served several stints in prison, once received a pardon after writing a song appealing to the governor. Recommended tracks: “Black Betty,” “Gallis Pole,” “Boll Weevil,” “New Orleans (Rising Sun Blues),” “Where Did You Sleep Last Night?,” “The Bourgeois Blues.”

Big Maybelle, a.k.a. Maybelle Louise Smith (May 1, 1924-January 23, 1972). Instruments: piano, vocals. Won a Memphis talent contest at age eight, and went on to record several Billboard hits. Recommended tracks: “Gabbin’ Blues,” “Way Back Home,” “My Country Man,” “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On,” “St. Louis Blues,” “Blues Early Early.”

Blind Boy Fuller, a.k.a. Fulton Allen (July 10, 1907-February 13, 1941). Instruments: guitar, vocals. Began losing his sight during his mid-teens from ulcers due either due to snowblindness or to chemicals thrown in his face by an ex-girlfriend. Recommended tracks: “Rag, Mama, Rag,” “Truckin’ My Blues Away,” “Get Your Yas Yas Out,” “Step It Up and Go,” “Mamie,” “Rattlesnakin’ Daddy.”

Lucille Bogan, a.k.a. Lucille Anderson and Bessie Jackson (April 1, 1897-August 10, 1948). Instruments: accordion, vocals. Known for her bawdy lyrics about booze and sex. Recommended tracks: “Shave Em’ Dry” (explicit version), “B.D. Woman’s Blues” (B.D. stands for “bull dyke”), “Seaboard Blues,” “Troubled Mind,” “Superstitious Blues,” “Black Angel Blues.”

Slim Harpo, a.k.a. James Moore (January 11, 1924-January 31, 1970). Instruments: harmonica, vocals. Music was always a side job for Slim, whose tunes were nonetheless covered by, among others, the Kinks, the Rolling Stones, the Who, and the Yardbirds. Recommended tracks: “I’m a King Bee,” “I Got Love If You Want It,” “Rainin’ in My Heart,” “Baby Scratch My Back,” “Shake Your Hips.”

Robert Johnson, a.k.a. Robert Leroy Dodds (May 8, 1911-August 16, 1938). Instruments: guitar, vocals. Johnson was rumored to have sold his soul to the devil for tuning his guitar just so. The influential blues master has been covered by the likes of Cream, Fleetwood Mac, Led Zeppelin, and the Rolling Stones. Recommended tracks: “Crossroads Blues,” “Love in Vain,” “Have You Ever Been Lonely,” “Hellhound on My Trail,” “Stop Breakin’ Down Blues,” “From Four Until Late,” “Traveling Riverside Blues,” “Come On in My Kitchen.”

Mississippi Fred McDowell (January 12, 1904-July 3, 1972). Instruments: guitar, vocals. McDowell, who was actually born in Tennessee, divided his time between farming and music until he was “discovered” by folklorist Alan Lomax. Recommended tracks: “You Gottta Move,” “Baby Please Don’t Go,” “Good Morning Little School Girl,” “Jesus Is on the Mainline.”

Victoria Spivey (October 15, 1906-October 3, 1976). Instruments: organ, piano, ukulele, vocals. Spivey’s lyrics were sexually provocative and drug related; she retired from the music biz in 1951 to sing and play in church before returning to the stage in the 1960s, when she founded her own label, Spivey Records. Recommended tracks: “Dope Head Blues,” “TB Blues,” “Black Snake Blues.”

Clarence “Pine Top” Smith (June 11, 1904-March 15, 1929). Instruments: piano, vocals. Smith’s promising career ended abruptly when he was shot and killed during a dance hall ruckus. No photos of him exist, hence the shadowy face. Recommended track: “Pine Top’s Boogie Woogie.”

Big Joe Turner, a.k.a. Joseph Vernon Turner Jr. (May 18, 1911-November 24 1985). Instrument: vocals. Turner’s voice was so big he could rock a gin joint without a mic. He became a hit machine during the early ’50s with several No. 1 hits. Recommended tracks: “Roll ‘Em, Pete,” “Honey Hush,” “Shake, Rattle and Roll,” “Flip Flop and Fly,” “Cherry Red,” “Wee Baby Blues,” “Midnight Special.”

Ethel Waters (October 31, 1896-September 1, 1977). Instrument: vocals. A sought-after vaudeville performer and nightclub singer who then scored on Broadway and in Hollywood, Waters became the second-ever black actor to be nominated for an Oscar. Recommended tracks: “Heebie Jeebies,” “Am I Blue?,” “Down Home Blues,” “Shake That Thing,” “Maybe Not at All,” “Black Spatch Blues,” “Midnight Blues,” “Jazzin’ Baby Blues.”

Reverend Robert Wilkins (January 16, 1896-May 26, 1987). Instrument: guitar, vocals. In 1935, deeply upset by violence at a party he was playing, Wilkins quit secular music to become a minister and an herbalist. Recommended tracks: “That’s No Way to Get Along,” “Rolling Stone.”

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13 Cartoon Portraits of Legendary Blues Artists

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What’s the Deal With Oldsters and Hillary, Anyway?

by EfrainGilley Posted on April 17, 2016

Mother Jones

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It’s Sunday, and that’s time for some idle musing. Today’s idle musing is this: why is it that us oldsters tend to favor Hillary over Bernie? Obviously we have some substantive reasons, just as Bernie supporters have theirs. But it’s a funny thing. I pretty much agree with Bernie’s take on money in politics. I like his attitude toward Wall Street. I have reservations about his foreign policy, but I still suspect that he’d be less interventionist and more to my liking. And yet, I still lean toward Hillary. Partly this is also substantive—she’s better briefed, her proposals are more realistic, and I think she could get more done—but there’s no denying that a lot of it is mood affiliation.

For some reason this got me thinking about fight scenes in movies. Bear with me here. If you watch a movie from 50 years ago, the fight scenes will mostly strike you as ridiculous. The staging is weak, the sound effects are amateurish, and the choreography is slapdash. Things improved over the next couple of decades, but then they went overboard. Fight scenes began to devour blockbuster movies, with directors all trying to one up each other. But really, a fight is a fight. After a while, there’s little new you can do, and all the CGI in the world can’t hide that. Anyone who saw the most recent Star Trek movie knows what I’m talking about. The final fight scene was absurd, tedious, and completely unnecessary. But JJ Abrams put it in because he figured his audience demanded it. And I suppose they did. But those of us who have been watching movies since the 60s or 70s found it boring and predictable.

Now on to politics. To me, Bernie is like one of those fight scenes: I’ve seen it all before. On the Democratic side, primaries have specialized in having at least one bold truthteller like Bernie in every cycle since the 1960s. Sometimes they’re lefty truthtellers, sometimes they’re “hard truths” truthtellers, and sometimes they’re a bit of a mishmash. But the one thing they have in common is that they can afford to tell the truth—in the beginning, at least—because they’re mostly running as rebels who don’t really expect to win. And if you’re not seriously trying to win, there’s no downside to being entirely candid. Who cares if you’re going to lose a few important demographics in the process?

Since 1968, we’ve seen at least one of these in every contested Democratic primary. Off the top of my head, the list includes Eugene McCarthy, George McGovern, Mo Udall, Gary Hart, Paul Simon, Paul Tsongas, Bill Bradley, Howard Dean, and Dennis Kucinich. They all attracted a crowd of fans, some more than others, and generally speaking they were lionized by the press. None of them won except for McGovern, who went down to an epic defeat in the general election. (Probably any Democrat would have lost that year, but McGovern lost in a landslide.)

So this year I look at Bernie, and I see the same old thing: a bold truthteller who could afford not to play conventional politics because he was never really planning to win. He just wanted to get his issues on the table. The fact that he’s running so close is probably as much of a surprise to him as it is to everyone else.

But this is obviously something that’s far more salient to older voters than to younger ones. Bernie doesn’t seem fresh and courageous to us. He seems like the same guy we’ve seen every four years. They all have one or two issues they care about. They want those issues on the table, and running for president is a good way to do it. They usually drop out by spring. And generally speaking, most of them probably didn’t have the temperament to make good presidents.

Obviously your mileage might vary. Maybe Bernie is finally the one to do it, and I’m just too old and jaded to see it. Maybe his temperament is different, and he’d surprise us all by being a pretty good president. Maybe he’d get serious about rallying his troops to care about downballot elections, and win control of Congress. Maybe he’d really get a lot of the stuff done that he’s been talking about.

I doubt it. But then again, none of the previous truthtellers has ever made it to the White House, so who knows? Maybe eight years from now we’ll all be feeling the Bern.

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What’s the Deal With Oldsters and Hillary, Anyway?

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