Tag Archives: bauer

35 Years in Prison. 12 Years in Solitary. Now This Famed Puerto Rican Nationalist Will Be Set Free.

by AishaDuggan666 Posted on January 17, 2017

Mother Jones

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President Barack Obama on Tuesday commuted the remaining 20 years of the 55-year sentence Oscar López Rivera was serving after his 1981 conviction for “seditious conspiracy.” The 74-year-old Puerto Rican nationalist was accused of being affiliated with the FALN, a group fighting for the independence of Puerto Rico that was responsible for a series of bombings in the 1970s and 1980s.

In May 2014, Mother Jones‘ Shane Bauer wrote about López Rivera’s case:

In 1981, López was charged with armed robbery, possession of an unregistered firearm, and interstate transportation of a stolen vehicle, allegedly as part of a larger plot to challenge the United States’ role in Puerto Rico by force. The court determined that he was connected to the FALN. At his trial, one man testified that López taught him bomb-making skills.

In all, the FALN claimed responsibility for more than 120 bombings across the US between 1974 and 1983, leading to the death of six and the injury of dozens. But the basis for López’s conviction was specifically the more than two-dozen bombings claimed by the organization in the Chicago area, none of which resulted in injuries. A 1980 Chicago Tribune editorial observed that the bombs were “placed and timed as to damage property rather than persons” and that the FALN was “out to call attention to their cause rather than to shed blood.”

At least 16 other Puerto Rican nationalists were charged with seditious conspiracy and related offenses in the early 1980s. None were ultimately found to have connections to actual attacks, yet at the sentencing hearing, the judge said he regretted not being able to issue the death penalty. He handed out sentences up to 90 years, with López Rivera receiving 55 years. By contrast, the average sentence for homicide in 1992 (the closest year for which data is available) was less than 12.5 years.

During his 33 years in prison, López Rivera has served 12 years in solitary confinement in some of the highest security prisons in the country. His lawyer, Jan Susler, says he hasn’t been allowed to do an in-person media interview for 15 years. Nonmedia visits are restricted as well, she says. A delegation that included a New York senator, a New York assemblyman, and New York City Council members were denied authorization to visit him in prison.

Former President Bill Clinton offered López Rivera clemency in 1999 “against the protests of the FBI, the Federal Bureau of Prisons, the US attorney’s office, and even his wife,” Bauer wrote. Instead of leaving prison, López Rivera chose to remain incarcerated until his codefendant, Carlos Alberto Torres, was released. (Torres was granted parole in 2010.) López Rivera, who is now 74, will be released from a federal prison on May 17.

He was one of 209 people who had their sentences commuted by Obama just three days before Obama leaves office. Perhaps the highest-profile case was Chelsea Manning, the former Army private accused of leaking hundreds of thousands of US government files to WikiLeaks in 2010. Obama also pardoned 64 people on Tuesday.

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35 Years in Prison. 12 Years in Solitary. Now This Famed Puerto Rican Nationalist Will Be Set Free.

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Shane Bauer’s Four Months As a Private Prison Guard

by JarrodCerda Posted on June 28, 2016

Mother Jones

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What is life like in a medium-security private prison? MoJo’s Shane Bauer applied for a job at the Winn Correctional Center in Louisiana to find out. Winn is run by the Corrections Corporation of America, which earned over $150 million running 61 prisons across the country last year. Why is running prisons so profitable? After four months working at Winn, Bauer reports that one reason is simple: the pay for guards is abysmally low and the facility was chronically understaffed. This certainly helped CCA’s bottom line, but it also produced persistent violence that the tiny staff was barely able to control:

On my fifth week on the job, I’m asked to train a new cadet….”It’s pretty bad in here,” I tell him. “People get stabbed here all the time.” At least seven inmates have been stabbed in the last six weeks….Three days later, I see two inmates stab each other in Ash. A week after that, another inmate is stabbed and beaten by multiple people in Elm. People say he was cut more than 40 times.

….If I were not working at Winn and were reporting on the prison through more traditional means, I would never know how violent it is. While I work here, I keep track of every stabbing that I see or hear about from supervisors or eyewitnesses. During the first two months of 2015, at least 12 people are shanked. The company is required to report all serious assaults to the DOC. But DOC records show that for the first 10 months of 2015, CCA reported only five stabbings. (CCA says it reports all assaults and that the DOC may have classified incidents differently.)

Reported or not, by my seventh week as a guard the violence is getting out of control. The stabbings start to happen so frequently that, on February 16, the prison goes on indefinite lockdown. No inmates leave their tiers. The walk is empty. Crows gather and puddles of water form on the rec yards. More men in black are sent in by corporate. They march around the prison in military formation. Some wear face masks.

This is a long piece, and it’s not easy to summarize. Its power comes from the relentless, detailed buildup of Bauer’s record of daily life at Winn. Do yourself a favor and put aside some time to read it.

And if you also want to watch the video version, we have that too: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Parts 4-6 to come later in the week.

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Shane Bauer’s Four Months As a Private Prison Guard

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Listen: Reveal Takes You Inside Shane Bauer’s Immersion Reporting

by FletchePipkin Posted on June 25, 2016

Mother Jones

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For four months in late 2014 and early 2015, Mother Jones senior reporter Shane Bauer worked as a corrections officer at a Louisiana prison run by the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the country’s second-largest private prison company. Read his gripping firsthand account of his experience here.

Bauer’s investigation is also the subject of the latest episode of Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX. Listen to “The Man Inside” below.

Reveal can be heard on public radio stations across the country and on the Reveal podcast.

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Listen: Reveal Takes You Inside Shane Bauer’s Immersion Reporting

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Shane Bauer Talks About His Four Months Working in a Private Prison

by StacyCadejiqw Posted on June 23, 2016

Mother Jones

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In December 2014, Mother Jones senior reporter Shane Bauer started work as a corrections officer at a Louisiana prison run by the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the country’s second largest private-prison company. Here, he talks about what he saw during his four months on the job and what it taught him about life inside a for-profit prison. Read his full story here.

Mother Jones: How did you get the idea for this project?

Shane Bauer: The first time I thought about it was while talking to another reporter about writing about prisons. We were talking about Ted Conover’s Newjack, about his experience working as a guard at Sing Sing. I thought, “I should try that at a private prison.” There isn’t a lot of reporting on private prisons because they are not subject to the same public records laws as publicly run prisons and it’s pretty hard for journalists to get inside them. They’re a corner of the American prison system that we don’t know a lot about.

Why Mother Jones sent a reporter to work as a private prison guard

MJ: You got a job as a guard at the Corrections Corporation of America’s Winn Correctional Center in Louisiana. How hard was it to get the position?

SB: Not hard. I filled out an application online. I filled it out honestly with my real information. There was a list of prisons around the country that they needed people for. I clicked a handful of them, and within a couple weeks I was doing phone interviews and getting job offers. One reason I picked Winn was because it was in Louisiana. Louisiana has more prisoners per capita than anywhere in the world. It seemed like killing two birds with one stone, getting inside a Louisiana prison and a CCA prison. Winn was also the oldest medium-security private prison in the country.

MJ: When you got to Winn, what was your training like?

SB: I went through four weeks of training. We did some physical training, very little, and watched some videos. We were tear-gassed. Generally, somebody would get in front of the class and read from a book on policies like the use of force. A lot of it was spent sitting in the classroom doing nothing because there often weren’t teachers. There were whole days where the cadets would just sit and talk to each other. Maybe we’d have an hour or two of training. I really began learning the job once I started work.

MJ: You were assigned to a unit called Ash. What was your job there?

SB: Ash was a unit of eight dorms. Each dorm had up to 44 men in beds lined up right next to each other in one giant room. The inmates would go out to eat, and sometimes they would go out to a small yard for recreation. But most of the prisoners were in there almost the whole day. So there was a lot tension. A lot of people were frustrated at being stuck in there all day. I was a floor guard. It was just me and one other guard managing these 350 prisoners.

MJ: Shortly after you got to Winn, one prisoner told you that “Inmates run this bitch.” What did he mean by that?

SB: I think he meant that the prison administration didn’t have control over the prison. He and other inmates talked about the way Winn was run like it was a joke. I would ask prisoners who’d been to public state prisons how it compared and they would commonly say there’s was no structure there compared to other places.

MJ: What kinds of things did guards do to get by and make the best of the situation?

SB: Guards would rely on inmates to fill in the gaps since there weren’t enough guards to do all the things that we needed to do. Sometimes inmates would stand outside of a unit and warn us if higher-ups were coming. There was one corrections counselor who had a couple of inmates that she would use as bodyguards because she worked in an office where there weren’t security cameras. Sometimes we had to give out call-out passes—passes for prisoners to go places like school or the gym—and a lot times we would just give them to a prisoner to hand out.

MJ: How did Winn handle medical care and mental health care for prisoners?

SB: Prisoners regularly complained about medical care at Winn. I met a prisoner who had no legs and no fingers. He had lost them within the past year to gangrene. His medical records showed that he had made at least nine requests to see a doctor in that time. He would go to the infirmary and get sent back; the staff was suggesting that he was faking it. He said he showed the warden his feet, which were turning black and dripping with pus. But CCA had to pay to take a prisoner to the hospital, which costs a lot of money, especially when you consider it made $34 a day for each prisoner.

There was one full-time social worker for 1,500 inmates at Winn, and a part-time psychiatrist and part-time psychologist. The social worker said they typically would get to see any given inmate once a month. Another option available for prisoners with serious problems was suicide watch. If a prisoner said he was suicidal, he would get put on suicide watch, which essentially is a solitary cell.

MJ: Toward the end of your time at Winn, the state Department of Corrections (DOC) stepped in and temporarily took over the prison. Why’d that happen and how did things change when the state came in?

SB: Right about when I started working there, a prisoner escaped. Then there were a lot of stabbings and the state started paying attention to what was happening at Winn. Then there was another rash of stabbings. Some buses showed up one day with guards and wardens from public prisons around Louisiana, and they took over. The message seemed to be, “We’re gonna need to show you how to run this prison.” Everything felt different when they were there. The prisoners reacted really differently to them. Normally there was a constant testing of boundaries with the guards, but when these DOC guards came in, they’d say something and everyone did it.

MJ: Why did you quit your job as a guard?

SB: I had recently been offered a promotion. Shortly after that, my colleague James West came down to shoot some video for the story. One night he was filming the prison and he was spotted by a guard. A checkpoint was set up and he was arrested. When he got out about 24 hours later, we packed up and took off right away, and a few days later I called in and resigned.

MJ: After you left, you obtained some documents from the DOC that mentioned the concerns they had asked CCA to address at Winn. Did those echo what you had seen there?

SB: Yeah. The DOC outlined many things that I saw and wrote about—about there not being enough staff, either security staff or medical staff. There were also some things that surprised me: The state said CCA had charged inmates for state-supplied toilet paper and toothpaste and even charged them to use toenail clippers.

MJ: What happened at Winn after you left?

SB: A few weeks after I left, CCA said it would be giving up its contract for Winn. Then it was taken over by another company called LaSalle Corrections. A lot of the same prisoners and staff are still there.

MJ: A big part of your story is how being a prison guard affected you. What did your experience teach you about what it’s like to be a corrections officer?

SB: Even though I went there as a journalist and my main intention was to report on the prison, I got swept up in the mentality of being a guard. I felt in danger a lot of the time, so I was constantly trying to figure out how to manage prisoners. At first I tried to be on good terms with them. Later, I tried to show them they couldn’t push me around. I quickly felt like I was hardening.

As far as what it taught me about being a guard, it’s hard to generalize because you have guards in places like California who are unionized and make a lot more money and have more power in their facilities. Winn was the other extreme, where guards were making nine bucks an hour and didn’t have anything but a radio to protect themselves or break up fights. From what I experienced, it was a pretty crazy job, especially if you’re living off of $9 an hour.

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Shane Bauer Talks About His Four Months Working in a Private Prison

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Tech-Shuttle Giant Given the Boot in San Francisco

by RodgerZTDg Posted on April 1, 2016

Mother Jones

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Citing a history of disregard for traffic laws and acrimonious labor disputes, San Francisco’s Municipal Transportation Agency has declined to grant tech shuttle operator Bauer’s IT a permit to use public bus stops under the city’s controversial Commuter Shuttle Program. Bauer’s IT is one of San Francisco’s largest tech bus operators, accounting for 10 percent of the city’s commuter shuttle pickups. Bauer’s IT clients include major Bay Area tech companies such as Twitter, Yelp, Salesforce, and Cisco.

According to a “notice of permit denial” sent from the SFMTA to Bauer’s yesterday, the company repeatedly broke the law by sending large buses down “weight-restricted streets” and stopping at locations not designated for private buses. It also failed to inform the city of ongoing labor disputes with the International Brotherhood of the Teamsters, whose complaints of illegal union busting practices at the company are being heard by the National Labor Relations Board. The Commuter Shuttle Program requires participating companies to maintain “labor harmony.”

In 2013, tech shuttles, a.k.a. “Google buses,” became potent symbols of inequality and gentrification in the Bay Area after it emerged that the posh private vehicles were illegally using public bus stops to pick up workers. The following year, the city launched a pilot program that allowed the companies to use the stops legally for a nominal fee. That program becomes permanent next month, but requires participating companies to reapply for permits. Bauer’s IT could not be reached for comment.

“The SFMTA is enforcing what the City and County of San Francisco is famous for: Recognizing employees’ right to be represented and right to and fair wages and benefits,” said Rome Aloise, the director of Teamsters Joint Council 7, which represents drivers in Northern California. “Bauer’s seems to be just disregarding all of that.”

Does this mean the Twitterati will be tweeting from BART like the rest of us? Not exactly. Bauer’s IT has 15 days to file an appeal, and can then continue to use its stops until the city makes a final decision.

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Tech-Shuttle Giant Given the Boot in San Francisco

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Tech Shuttle Company Is Accused of Thwarting Efforts to Unionize Its Drivers

by Candace00O Posted on August 11, 2015

Mother Jones

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A recently filed federal complaint alleges that one of San Francisco’s biggest tech shuttle operators has attempted to thwart an effort to unionize its drivers. The complaint, filed by the San Francisco office of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) in late June, alleges that Bauer’s Intelligent Transportation has spied on pro-union employees, interfered with union organizers, and organized its own management-backed union.

With 450 employees and 225 vehicles, Bauer’s has a visible presence on the streets of San Francisco. About a third of its business comes from technology companies such as Twitter, Yelp, Cisco, Salesforce, and EA Games. In the mid-’00s it drove 55 commuter buses for Google, which now operates giant white double-decker buses on its own. Last year, Bauer’s played a key role in negotiating a controversial deal that allows private commuter shuttles to use public bus stops to pick up Silicon Valley workers. (One study found that areas near the tech bus stops have seen some of the highest rent increases in San Francisco, where the median rent now stands at a whopping $4,225 a month.)

Bauer’s drivers have been increasingly demanding to earn a living wage and form a union. After their efforts stepped up this spring, the company responded with a number of “unfair labor practices,” according to the NRLB complaint. The agency’s complaint is based on an independent investigation of allegations filed in March by the Teamsters, which has been trying organize Bauer’s workers. Among other allegations, the NRLB complaint states that a Bauer’s supervisor solicited employees to sign a petition indicating that they wished to be represented by an in-house union known as the Professional Commuter Drivers Union. This supervisor served as the PCDU’s chief union representative. A few days later, Bauer’s entered into a collective bargaining agreement with the PCDU.

Bauer’s, NLRB regional attorney Jill Coffman writes in the complaint, has “dominated and interfered with the formation and administration of” an outside union while “rendering unlawful assistance and support to” its own union. She alleges that such practices violate federal labor law. Bauer’s did not return a call requesting comment.

The seven-page NLRB complaint offers few additional details about the allegations. Yet according to the Teamsters and a Bauer’s driver who shuttles Cisco employees, the supervisor who headed the PCDU asked only a few workers if they wanted to join the union, and asked others to sign a blank page. “He pretty much just pushed me a blank sheet of paper and said, ‘Here, sign this and I will see if I can get you better benefits,'” recalls the driver, who asked not to be named. “The next thing you know, he’s got a supposedly full-fledged union. It was odd.”

The contract that the PCDU “negotiated” with Bauer’s capped driver wages at $22 an hour. In comparison, a contract recently signed between the Teamsters and shuttle drivers for Facebook guarantees drivers an hourly wage of $26.50 by 2017.

“The drivers need and deserve better wages, better benefits, and more respect,” says Doug Bloch, the political director for the Northern California chapter of the Teamsters, which is holding a protest in San Francisco’s Mission District today to call attention to Bauer’s alleged union-busting tactics. “What Bauer’s did is an insult to these workers.”

The NRLB complaint will be argued before a federal judge in September. If the allegations hold up, Bauer’s might find it harder to do business in San Francisco. In March, the city’s Board of Supervisors unanimously passed a resolution that urges the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Authority to consider shuttle operators’ “labor harmony” when weighing their applications to use bus stops. The members of the SFMTA, who are appointed by San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee, have not yet acted on the resolution. The agency did not return a call from Mother Jones.

The handling of the Bauer’s dispute may also turn tricky for Lee, whom local activists say is too cozy with tech companies. In 2012, the mayor signed a $9.3 million lease granting Bauer’s the use of a city-owned pier as a parking lot for its buses. In June, Lee hired Bauer’s to ferry the attendees of the annual meeting of the Conference of Mayors to Uber’s SoMa headquarters. Yet Bloch says Lee has generally been supportive of labor interests. “It doesn’t surprise me that Bauer’s IT is breaking labor law,” Bloch says. “What would surprise me is if the political leadership in San Francisco tolerates it.”

Protests against Bay Area tech shuttles were a nearly weekly occurrence early last year, when the buses were blockaded, barfed upon, and occasionally smashed by anti-gentrification activists. If the shuttles get a reputation for disrupting workers’ efforts to organize, perhaps we’ll see version 2.0 of the Google bus protests.

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Tech Shuttle Company Is Accused of Thwarting Efforts to Unionize Its Drivers

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Illegal Pot Farms Are Literally Sucking California Salmon Streams Dry

by PhilDrechsler Posted on March 27, 2015

Mother Jones

Outlet Creek watershed in Northern California’s Mendocino County. Scott Bauer

Northern California pot farmers are using up all of the water that normally supports key populations of the region’s federally protected salmon and steelhead trout.

That, at least, is the conclusion of a new study, published last week in the journal PLOS One, that examined four California watersheds where salmon and trout are known to spawn. In the three watersheds with intensive pot cultivation, illegal marijuana farms literally sucked up all of the water during the streams’ summer low-flow period, leaving nothing to support the fish.

Author Scott Bauer, a biologist with the state department of fish and wildlife, estimated the size and location of outdoor and greenhouse pot farms by looking at Google Earth images and accompanying drug enforcement officers on raids. He did not include “indoor” grows—marijuana grown under lamps in buildings.

After visiting 32 marijuana greenhouses in eight locations and averaging the results, Bauer extrapolated his findings to all greenhouses in the study area—virtually nothing else is grown in greenhouses in this part of the country. The sites contained marijuana plants at a density of about one per square meter, with each plant (taking waste and other factors into account) using about six gallons of water a day. Overall, he calculated, pot operations within the study yielded 112,000 plants, and consumed 673,000 gallons of water every day.

And that is water the area’s fish badly need. The Coho salmon population is listed as threatened under both state and federal Endangered Species Acts, and is designated as a key population to maintain or improve as part of the state’s recovery plan.

Bauer collected his data last year, at a time when California’s drought had already become its worst in more than 1,200 years. When I spoke to him at the time, he told me that pot farming had surpassed logging and development to become the single biggest threat to the area’s salmon. Now that that the drought is expected to extend into a fourth year, the same streams could run dry again this summer, and remain so for an even longer period of time.

Overall, the outdoor and greenhouse grows consume more than 60 million gallons of water a day during the growing season—50 percent more than is used by all the residents of San Francisco.

“Clearly, water demands for the existing level of marijuana cultivation in many Northern California watersheds are unsustainable and are likely contributing to the decline of sensitive aquatic species in the region,” Bauer’s study concludes. “Given the specter of climate change”—and the attendant rise of megadroughts—”the current scale of marijuana cultivation in Northern California could be catastrophic for aquatic species.”

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Illegal Pot Farms Are Literally Sucking California Salmon Streams Dry

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Dragons, Legos, and Solitary: Ai Weiwei’s Transformative Alcatraz Exhibition

by Rad7edzw Posted on October 11, 2014

Mother Jones

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There is a question that every prisoner ponders once the realization sets in that his freedom is gone: Can the mind be liberated when the body is not? It’s been a while since I’ve asked myself such a thing—I was released from an Iranian prison three years ago—but a Chinese dragon in a former prison factory at Alcatraz makes me think about it again. Its multicolored face is baring its teeth at me when I enter the cavernous room. In this space, prisoners washed military uniforms during World War II.

The dragon is the first of many installations in the art exhibition by Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, called @Large. The beast is a startling greeter—its whiskers are paper flames—but the impression softens as I look closer. The long body, shaped like a traditional Chinese dragon kite and suspended by strings from the ceiling, snakes gracefully throughout the open factory floor, illuminated by the soft afternoon light spilling in through a multitude of little windows. Bird-shaped kites are suspended throughout the room. It is quiet. This prison room feels like freedom.

There is more to it. Every segment of the dragon’s long body is painted with flowers from countries that seriously restrict the civil liberties of their citizens, such as Saudi Arabia and Ethiopia. Other parts of the dragon are adorned with quotes by prominent dissidents. One is from Ai Weiwei himself: “Every one of us is a potential convict.”

A man listens to Ai Weiwei’s sound installation “Stay Tuned.” Shane Bauer

That’s something this man surely never forgets. The themes of Ai Weiwei’s art have not been popular with the Chinese authorities. In 2011, he was arrested for alleged tax crimes and held for 81 days without charge. He hasn’t been allowed to leave China since. There are cameras mounted outside his studio in Beijing, to monitor him.

Ai directed the layout of the exhibition through video conferences with Cheryl Haines, director of the San Francisco based For-Site foundation, who initially came up with the idea of an exhibition designed specifically for Alcatraz. After she got Ai to agree, the National Park Service, which manages the island, decided to consult with the State Department. “Having a prominent Chinese dissident set up such a large exhibition was politically sensitive,” Marnie Berk de Guzman, For-Site’s Special Projects Director, told me—though State officials readily approved the project. They knew the exhibition would deal with themes of freedom, captivity, and human rights. What they did not know is that the United States would be among the many countries Ai would call out for cracking down on dissidents.

In @Large, Ai gives us the opportunity to reflect on the psychological differences between the watcher and the watched. From the dragon room, a side door leads up a set of clanky metal stairs that open onto the “gun gallery,” a long narrow hallway that guards once walked to monitor the inmates on the shop floor below. From the guards’ vantage point, the dragon that was so graceful and beautiful up close looks like a caged, threatening beast. The flowers and quotes on his body appear muted through the cracked, foggy windows. My attention is constantly drawn back to the most dangerous aspect—his wild, burning head.

“Refraction” Shane Bauer

Walking down the gallery, I catch glimpses of “Refraction,” a gloomy, five-ton structure that gives the impression of a giant bird wing. I cannot get up close: The only way to view the piece is through the cracked windows of the gun gallery. The installation obliquely references Tibet: Its “feathers” are made of reflective panels originally used in Tibetan solar cookers. Whomever we are to imagine confining it did not find it necessary to imprison the giant bird itself, only the appendage that gives the animal its freedom.

One installation, “Trace,” has 175 portraits laid out in a field of Lego bricks. Each image is the colorful, pixelated likeness of someone who has been imprisoned or exiled because of their beliefs, political actions, or affiliations. There are more faces from China than any other country. Among them is Gedhun Choekyi Nyima, named the 11th Panchen Lama by the Dalai Lama. After his selection at age six in 1995, he was detained by Chinese authorities and hasn’t been seen since. Scattered among the Iranian, Bahraini, and Vietnamese faces are a few American ones: Martin Luther King Jr., Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning. There is John Kiriakou, currently in prison for disclosing the name of a covert CIA officer who engaged in brutal Bush-era interrogation programs.

There is also Shakir Hamoodi, an Iraqi American imprisoned for violating sanctions by sending money to family and friends in Iraq during the Saddam Hussein era. He was convicted in 2012, nine years after Saddam’s fall. One of the largest faces is that of Shaker Aamer, a detainee who has been cleared for release by both the Bush and Obama administrations, but remains at Guantanamo 12 years after his arrest, still without charge or trial.

“Trace” features the faces of 175 political prisoners.

The large number of faces and names in “Trace” make it difficult to connect to each person, but in Alcatraz’s mess hall, there are people sitting at tables and writing messages to political prisoners. This installation, “Yours Truly,” offers free postcards decorated with national birds and flowers, each addressed to a specific prisoner. Ai understands that a prisoner’s greatest fear is being forgotten, and given that many of these postcards will certainly be intercepted before they arrive, the project may be intended to remind prison authorities that people are watching.

Alcatraz is an appropriate place for an exhibition about political imprisonment. While the island’s tourism literature focuses on hard-core criminals like Al Capone and the Birdman, it has also held hundreds of nonviolent political prisoners. Hutterite pacifists were put in solitary confinement here for refusing to serve in the military in 1918. World War I conscientious objector and anarchist Philip Grosser spent part of his year and a half on the island in “The Dungeon” where he subsisted on bread and water in complete darkness. Jackson Leonard was sent to Alcatraz in 1919 after distributing Industrial Workers of the World literature on an Army base. World War II veteran Robert George Thompson did time there in the early 1950s after joining the Communist Party USA.

This part of the island’s history is indirectly referenced in @Large. In the prison psych ward, opened exclusively for the exhibition, visitors can enter two “psychiatric observation cells,” small rooms lined with clinical looking green tiles where the mentally ill were kept in total isolation. There is nothing to see; the only thing to do is stand and listen to the traditional chants playing through hidden speakers. One is a Hopi song, a reminder of the 19 Hopis imprisoned here in 1895 for opposing the forced education of their children in government boarding schools.

The cells feel like an artifact of a bygone era, but prisons and jails around the country still routinely place the severely mentally ill in solitary cells, where they can languish for months or years. “It’s hard to imagine not going crazy in a room like that,” one of the @Large guides comments to me.

“Blossom” Shane Bauer

Down the hall is the “Blossom” installation. Thousands of tiny ceramic flowers, drained of color, evoke China’s Hundred Flowers campaign. In 1956, dissidents were crushed after a brief period of tolerance, banished to oblivion like these white heaps of flowers filling the sinks, bathtubs, and toilets of the psych ward.

There is one section of the prison the National Park Service did not initially offer Ai for his exhibition—the cell block. But he insisted on access, and NPS agreed.

Visitors enter the tiny cells—I can’t even fully extend my arms between the walls—and sit on a single metal stool at the center. In each one, I hear the music or poetry of dissident artists past or present. There is the screaming punk rock of Pussy Riot—”Virgin Mary, Mother of God, become a feminist, become a feminist, become a feminist!” There is the voice of Martin Luther King Jr. giving his “Beyond Vietnam” speech. There is Fela Kuti and Czech poets and singers from Tibet and Robben Island.

I sit in one of the cells and listen to the words of Ahmad Shamlu, an Iranian poet imprisoned by the Shah.

They sniff at your heart—
These are strange times, my dear
—and they flog love
By the side of the road by the barrier
Love must be hidden at home in the closet

In the background I can hear a guard shouting, clanging the cell doors shut repeatedly to show the tourists what it might sound like, had they been imprisoned here. Sitting in the tiny cell, facing the wall, it is not hard to imagine that the clamor is real. Looking at the vent, where the mournful poet’s voice comes in, it is not hard to imagine he is a neighbor, whispering to me secretly.

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Dragons, Legos, and Solitary: Ai Weiwei’s Transformative Alcatraz Exhibition

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"24: Live Another Day" Will Deal With US Drone Warfare

by KristinaRosenba Posted on March 10, 2014

Mother Jones

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Last Friday, Fox posted a new trailer for 24: Live Another Day, the upcoming limited event series that continues the famous Jack Bauer action saga (which wrapped its initial eight-season run in 2010). The show, starring Kiefer Sutherland as counterterrorism agent Bauer, came on the air just two months after 9/11, and frequently incorporated the political debates and context of the post-9/11 world. 24 got a reputation for right-wing Bush-era messaging (Bauer tortures a whole lot of people, and often extracts the world-saving information he needs very quickly), but also featured oilmen, shady business interests, and Republican politicians at the center of terrorist conspiracies.

Flash-forward to 2014, and you’ll find 24‘s political framing has adjusted accordingly with the times. In the new trailer, you’ll catch a brief shot of an anti-drone protest in London during the US president’s visit. “Drones DESTROY our Humanity,” and so forth, the placards read:

Fox/YouTube

“We have analogues for the Snowden affair and the drone issue is a backdrop,” executive producer Howard Gordon said earlier this year.

In Live Another Day, the drone-warrior president is James Heller (played by William Devane), who served as Secretary of Defense under two Republican presidents, and first appeared in season four. (Devane also played the President of the United States in The Dark Knight Rises.) During the fourth season of 24, Heller criticizes Michael Moore, and later signs off on the torture of his gay, anti-American son on suspicions that he’s in contact with Muslim extremists.

Watch the new 24: Live Another Day trailer here:

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"24: Live Another Day" Will Deal With US Drone Warfare

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Carbon tax revenues could dwarf fossil fuel losses

by Larry Daichea Posted on November 5, 2013

Carbon tax revenues could dwarf fossil fuel losses

By

Shutterstock

Fossil fuel companies stand to miss out on $9 trillion to $12 trillion in profits by the end of the century if carbon emissions are taxed at a high enough level to meet international climate goals. Cry us a river, right?

That’s because demand for coal, oil, and natural gas would fall as prices are pushed higher, leading companies to leave vast volumes in the ground, according to a new study.

On the flip side, how much revenue would be generated through taxes or the sale of carbon allowances? The study, published in the journal Climatic Change, found the fossil fuels that are mined and burned would generate carbon-tax or carbon-auction revenues of $21 trillion to $32 trillion during the same period. That means a net economic benefit of as much as $20 trillion.

“Implementing ambitious climate targets would certainly scale down fossil fuel consumption, so with reduced demand their prices would drop,” said Nico Bauer, lead author of the study and a scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. “The resulting profit loss would be overcompensated by revenues from auctioning emissions permits or taxing CO2.”

After crunching numbers with an energy-economy-climate model, Bauer said the researchers were surprised that “revenues from emissions pricing were found to be at least twice as high [as] the profit losses we estimate for the owners of fossil fuels.”

Although revenues from carbon pricing would exceed lost fossil fuel profits globally, the same would not be true in all countries. From the paper:

[R]egions with high energy demand like China would generate huge carbon rents that are much larger than the loss of fossil fuel rent. For other regions including the Middle East and North Africa showing the largest loss of fossil fuel rent the carbon rent is still sufficient to compensate. However, for a country like Russia the compensation is not feasible based on the domestically generated carbon rent.

The report authors point out that governments who levy carbon fees and taxes will get to decide how to spend the revenues. They could be funneled into green-energy projects and climate adaptation efforts, for example, or simply used to reduce income taxes.

“We know that fossil fuel owners will lose out on profits, but the big question is who will benefit from the new revenues generated by climate policy?” said coauthor Elmar Kriegler, also of the Potsdam Institute. “It will fall to policy makers and society at large to decide this.”


Source
Emissions pricing revenues could overcompensate profit losses of fossil fuel owners, Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research
Global fossil energy markets and climate change mitigation – an analysis with REMIND, Climatic Change

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

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Carbon tax revenues could dwarf fossil fuel losses

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