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The Charmed Second Act of David Petraeus

by FSZLazarots Posted on July 17, 2016

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

I ran into David Petraeus the other night. Or rather, I ran after him.

It’s been more than a year since I first tried to connect with the retired four-star general and ex-CIA director—and no luck yet. On a recent evening, as the sky was turning from a crisp ice blue into a host of Easter-egg hues, I missed him again. Led from a curtained “backstage” area where he had retreated after a midtown Manhattan event, Petraeus moved briskly to a staff-only room, then into a tightly packed elevator, and momentarily out onto the street before being quickly ushered into a waiting late-model, black Mercedes S550.

And then he was gone, whisked into the warm New York night, companions in tow.

For the previous hour, Petraeus had been in conversation with Peter Bergen, a journalist, CNN analyst, and vice president at New America, the think tank sponsoring the event. Looking fit and well-rested in a smart dark-blue suit, the former four-star offered palatable, pat, and—judging from the approving murmurs of the audience—popular answers to a host of questions about national security issues ranging from the fight against the Islamic State to domestic gun control.

While voicing support for the Second Amendment, for example, he spoke about implementing “common sense solutions to the availability of weapons,” specifically keeping guns out of the hands of “domestic abusers” and those on the no-fly list. Even as he expressed “great respect” for those who carried out acts of torture in the wake of 9/11, he denounced its use—except in the case of a “ticking time bomb.” In an era when victory hasn’t been a word much used in relation to the American military, he even predicted something close to it on the horizon. “I’ve said from the very beginning, even in the darkest days, the Islamic State would be defeated in Iraq,” he told the appreciative crowd.

I went to the event hoping to ask Petraeus a question or two, but Bergen never called on me during the Q&A portion of the evening. My attendance was not, however, a total loss.

Watching the retired general in action, I was reminded of the peculiarity of this peculiar era—an age of generals whose careers are made in winless wars; years in which such high-ranking, mission-unaccomplished officers rotate through revolving doors that lead not only to top posts with major weapons merchants, but also too-big-to-fail banks, top universities, cutting-edge tech companies, healthcare firms, and other corporate behemoths. Hardly a soul, it seems, cares that these generals and admirals have had leading roles in quagmire wars or even, in two prominent cases, saw their government service cease as a result of career-ending scandal. And Citizen David Petraeus is undoubtedly the epitome of this phenomenon.

Celebrated as the most cerebral of generals, the West Point grad and Princeton PhD rose to stardom during the Iraq War—credited with pacifying the restive city of Mosul before becoming one of the architects of the new Iraqi Army. Petraeus would then return to the United States where he revamped and revived the Army’s failed counterinsurgency doctrine from the Vietnam War, before being tapped to lead “The Surge” of US forces in Iraq—an effort to turn around the foundering conflict. Through it all, Petraeus waged one of the most deft self-promotion campaigns in recent memory, cultivating politicians, academics, and especially fawning journalists who reported on his running stamina, his penchant for push-ups, and even—I kid you not—how he woke a lieutenant from what was thought to be an irreversible coma by shouting the battle cry of his unit.

A series of biographers would lionize the general who, after achieving what to some looked like success in Iraq, went on to head US Central Command, overseeing the conflicts in both Iraq and Afghanistan. When the military career of his subordinate General Stanley McChrystal imploded, Petraeus was sent once more unto the breach to spearhead an Afghan War surge and win another quagmire war.

And win Petraeus did. Not in Afghanistan, of course. That war grinds on without end. But the Teflon general somehow emerged from it all with people talking about him as a future presidential contender. Looking back at Petraeus’ successes, one understands just what a feat this was. Statistics show that Petraeus never actually pacified Mosul, which has now been under the control of the Islamic State for years. The army Petraeus helped build in Iraq crumbled in the face of that same force which, in some cases, was even supported by Sunni fighters Petraeus had put on the US payroll to make The Surge appear successful.

Indeed, Petraeus had come to New America’s New York headquarters to answer one question in particular: “What will the next president’s national security challenges be?” Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, ISIS, Iraq, Afghanistan: precisely the set of groups he had fought, places he had fought in, or what had resulted from his supposed victories.

“What can you do with a general, when he stops being a general? Oh, what can you do with a general who retires?”

Irving Berlin first posed these questions in 1948, and Bing Crosby crooned them six years later in White Christmas, the lavish Hollywood musical that has become a holiday season staple.

These are not, however, questions which seem to have plagued David Petraeus. He retired from the Army in 2011 to take a job as director of the CIA, only to resign in disgrace a year later when it was revealed that he had leaked classified information to his biographer and one-time lover Paula Broadwell and then lied about it to the FBI. Thanks to a deal with federal prosecutors, Petraeus pled guilty to just a single misdemeanor and served no jail time, allowing him, as the New York Times reported last year, “to focus on his lucrative post-government career as a partner in a private equity firm and a worldwide speaker on national security issues.”

In the Bing and Berlin era, following back-to-back victories in world wars, things were different. Take George C. Marshall, a five-star general and the most important US military leader during World War II who is best remembered today for the post-war European recovery plan that bore his name. Fellow five-star general and later president Dwight Eisenhower recalled that, during the Second World War, Marshall “did not want to sit in Washington and be a chief of staff. I am sure he wanted a field command, but he wouldn’t even allow his chief President Franklin Roosevelt to know what he wanted, because he said, ‘I am here to serve and not to satisfy personal ambition.'” That mindset seemed to remain his guiding directive after he retired in 1945 and went on to serve as a special envoy to China, secretary of state, and secretary of defense.

Marshall reportedly refused a number of lucrative offers to write his memoirs, including the then-princely sum of a million dollars after taxes from Time and Life publisher Henry Luce. He did so on the grounds that it was unethical to profit from service to the United States or to benefit from the sacrifices of the men who had served under him, supposedly telling one publisher “that he had not spent his life serving the government in order to sell his life story to the Saturday Evening Post.” In his last years, he finally cooperated with a biographer and gave his archives to the George C. Marshall Research Foundation on “the condition that no monetary returns from a book or books based on his materials would go to him or his family but would be used for the research program of the Marshall Foundation.” Even his biographer was asked to “waive the right to any royalties from the biography.” Marshall also declined to serve on any corporate boards.

Marshall may have been a paragon of restraint and moral rectitude, but he wasn’t alone. As late as the years 1994-1998, according to an analysis by the Boston Globe, fewer than 50 percent of retiring three- and four-star officers went to work as consultants or defense executives. By 2004-2008, that number had jumped to 80 percent. An analysis by the Washington DC-based nonprofit, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, found that it was still at a lofty 70 percent for the years 2009-2011.

Celebrity generals like Petraeus and fellow former four-star generals Stanley McChrystal (whose military career was also consumed in the flames of scandal) and Ray Odierno (who retired amid controversy), as well as retired admiral and former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mike Mullen, don’t even need to enter the world of arms dealers and defense firms. These days, those jobs may increasingly be left to second-tier military luminaries like Marine Corps general James Cartwright, the former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, now on the board of directors at Raytheon, as well as former Vice Admiral and Director of Naval Intelligence Jack Dorsett, who joined Northrop Grumman.

If, however, you are one of the military’s top stars, the sky is increasingly the limit. You can, for instance, lead a consulting firm (McChrystal and Mullen) or advise or even join the boards of banks and civilian corporations like JPMorgan Chase (Odierno), Jet Blue (McChrystal), and General Motors (Mullen).

For his part, after putting his extramarital affair behind him, Petraeus became a partner at the private equity firm Kohlberg, Kravis, Roberts & Co. LP. (KKR), where he also serves as the chairman of the KKR Global Institute and, according to his bio, “oversees the institute’s thought leadership platform focused on geopolitical and macro-economic trends, as well as environmental, social, and governance issues.” His lieutenants include a former chairman of the Republican National Committee and campaign manager for President George W. Bush, as well as a former leading light at Morgan Stanley.

KKR’s portfolio boasts a bit of everything, from Alliant Insurance Services and Panasonic Healthcare to a host of Chinese firms (Rundong Automobile Group and Asia Dairy, among them). There are also defense firms under its umbrella, including TASC, the self-proclaimed “premier provider of advanced systems engineering and integration services across the Intelligence Community, Department of Defense, and civilian agencies of the federal government,” and Airbus Group’s defense electronics business which KKR recently bought for $1.2 billion.

KKR is, however, just where Petraeus’s post-military, post-CIA résumé begins.

“Nobody thinks of assigning him, when they stop wining and dining him,” wrote Irving Berlin 68 years ago.

How times do change. When it comes to Petraeus, the wining and dining is evidently unending—as when Financial Times columnist Edward Luce took him to the Four Seasons Restaurant earlier this year for a lunch of tuna tartare, poached salmon, and a bowl of mixed berries with cream.

At the elegant eatery, just a short walk from Petraeus’s Manhattan office, the former CIA chief left Luce momentarily forlorn. “When I inquire what keeps him busy nowadays his answer goes on for so long I half regret asking,” he wrote.

I evidently heard a version of the same well prepared lines when, parrying a question from journalist Fred Kaplan at the New America event I attended, Petraeus produced a wall of words explaining how busy he is. In the process, he shed light on just what it means to be a retired celebrity general from America’s winless wars. “I’ve got a day job with KKR. I teach once a week at the City University of New York—Honors College. I do a week per semester at USC University of Southern California. I do several days at Harvard. I’m on the speaking circuit. I do pro bono stuff like this. I’m the co-chairman of the Wilson Institute’s Global Advisory Council, the senior vice president of RUSI Royal United Services Institute, a research institution focused on military issues. I’m on three other think tank boards,” he said.

In an era when fellow leakers of government secrets—from National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Edward Snowden to CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou to Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning—have ended up in exile or prison, Petraeus’s post-leak life has obviously been quite another matter.

The experience of former NSA senior executive Thomas Drake who shared unclassified information about that agency’s wasteful ways with a reporter is more typical of what leakers should expect. Although the Justice Department eventually dropped the most serious charges against him—he pleaded guilty to a single misdemeanor—he lost his job and his pension, went bankrupt, and has spent years working at an Apple store after being prosecuted under the World War I-era Espionage Act. “My social contacts are gone, and I’m persona non grata,” he told Defense One last year. “I can’t find any work in government contracting or in the quasi-government space, those who defend whistleblowers won’t touch me.”

Petraeus, on the other hand, shared with his lover and biographer eight highly classified “black books” that the government says included “the identities of covert officers, war strategy, intelligence capabilities and mechanisms, diplomatic discussions, quotes and deliberative discussions from high-level National Security Council meetings, and defendant David Howell Petraeus’s discussions with the President.” Petraeus was prosecuted, pleaded guilty, and was sentenced to two years of probation and fined $100,000.

Yet it’s Petraeus who today moves in rarified circles and through hallowed halls, with memberships and posts at one influential institution after another. In addition to the positions he mentioned at New America, his CV includes: honorary visiting professor at Exeter University, co-chairman of the Task Force on North America at the Council on Foreign Relations, co-chairman of the Global Advisory Committee at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, member of the Concordia Summit’s Concordia Leadership Council, member of the board of trustees at the McCain Institute for International Leadership, member of the National Security Advisory Council of the US Global Leadership Coalition, and a seat on the board of directors at the Atlantic Council.

About a year ago, I tried to contact Petraeus through KKR as well as the Macaulay Honors College at the City University of New York, to get a comment on a story. I never received a reply.

I figured he was ducking me—or anyone asking potentially difficult questions—or that his gatekeepers didn’t think I was important enough to respond to. But perhaps he was simply too busy. To be honest, I didn’t realize just how crowded his schedule was. (Of course, FT’s Edward Luce reports that when he sent Petraeus an email invite, the retired general accepted within minutes, so maybe it’s because I wasn’t then holding out the prospect of a meal at the Four Seasons.)

I attended the New America event because I had yet more questions for Petraeus. But I wasn’t as fortunate as Fred Kaplan—author, by the way, of The Insurgents: David Petraeus and the Plot to Change the American Way of War—and wasn’t quite speedy or nimble enough to catch the former general before he slipped into the backseat of that luxurious Mercedes sedan.

Irving Berlin’s “What Can You Do With A General?” ends on a somber note that sounds better in Crosby’s dulcimer tones than it reads on the page: “It seems this country never has enjoyed, so many one- and two- and three- and four-star generals, unemployed.”

Today, a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff retiring after 38 years receives a pension of about $20,000 a month, not exactly a shabby unemployment check for the rest of your life, but one that many in the tight-knit fraternity of top officers are still eager to supplement. Take General Cartwright, who joined Raytheon in 2012 and, according to Morningstar, the investment research firm, receives close to $364,000 per year in compensation from that company while holding more than $1.2 million in its stock.

All of this left me with yet more questions for Petraeus (whose pension is reportedly worth more than $18,000 per month or $220,000 per year) about a mindset that seems light years distant from the one Marshall espoused during his retirement. I was curious, for instance, about his take on why the winning of wars isn’t a prerequisite for cashing in on one’s leadership in them, and why the personal and professional costs of scandal are so incredibly selective.

Today, it seems, a robust Rolodex with the right global roster, a marquee name, and a cultivated geopolitical brand covers a multitude of sins. And that’s precisely the type of firepower that Petraeus brings to the table.

After a year without a reply, I got in touch with KKR again. This time, through an intermediary, Petraeus provided me an answer to a new request for an interview. “Thank you for your interest, Nick, but he respectfully declines at this time,” I was told.

I’m hoping, however, that the retired general changes his mind. For the privilege of asking Petraeus various questions, I’d be more than happy to take him to lunch at the Four Seasons. With that tony power-lunch spot closing down soon as part of a plan to relocate, we’d need to act fast. Getting a table could be tough.

Luckily, I know just the name to drop.

Nick Turse is the managing editor of TomDispatch, a fellow at the Nation Institute, and a contributing writer for the Intercept. His latest book is Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead: War and Survival in South Sudan.

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The Charmed Second Act of David Petraeus

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How Science Could Help Prevent Police Shootings

by denesefetherston Posted on July 13, 2016

Mother Jones

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One morning in April 2015, Rayid Ghani was sitting among more than a dozen big-city police chiefs and officials in a fourth-floor conference room across the street from the White House. It was the latest in a series of meetings about curbing police abuses that the Obama administration had urgently called. The day before, a cellphone video had emerged showing a white South Carolina cop shooting an unarmed black man in the back, sparking another wave of Black Lives Matter protests and eventually prompting an FBI investigation. Ghani didn’t know much about law enforcement, having spent most of his career studying human behavior—things like grocery shopping, learning, and voting. But the Pakistani-born data scientist and University of Chicago professor had an idea for how to stop the next police shooting.

Back when he worked for the consulting company Accenture, Ghani had figured out how to guess the final price of an eBay auction with 96 percent accuracy. In 2012, he served on Obama’s reelection campaign, pinpointing supporters who were most likely to shell out donations. Ghani now believed he could teach machines to predict the likelihood that cops would abuse their power or break the law. It was, he thought, “low-hanging fruit.”

Experts have long understood that only a small fraction of cops are responsible for the bulk of police misconduct. In 1981, when research showed that 41 percent of Houston’s citizen complaints could be traced to 12 percent of the city’s cops, the US Civil Rights Commission encouraged every police department to find their “violence-prone officers.” Ever since, most major departments have set up a system to identify so-called bad apples. These systems typically use software to flag officers who have received a lot of citizen complaints or have frequently used force. But each department’s model is different and no one really knows how well any of them work. Some may overlook officers with many red flags, while others may target cops who haven’t broken any rules. What’s more, the police chiefs at the White House meeting had a hunch that the bad apples were gaming their systems.

Ghani saw a different problem: The departments simply weren’t using enough data. So he made the top cops gathered in Room 430 an offer. If they handed over all the data they’d collected on their officers, he’d find a better way to identify the bad cops.

The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department in North Carolina signed up, agreeing to give Ghani and his team 15 years’ worth of personnel records and other data, provided that its officers’ identities remained anonymous. Charlotte was a good test lab for Ghani’s project. It had also had two recent police shootings; the case against one officer ended in a mistrial, and the other officer was never charged.

Since 2001, Charlotte had flagged officers for review based on certain criteria, like if the cop had used physical force against a suspect three or more times over the past 90 days. Once an officer was flagged, an internal affairs team would decide whether to issue a warning or to notify his supervisor. But the criteria were built on “a gut feeling,” explains Chief Kerr Putney. “It was an educated guess, but it was a guess nonetheless. We didn’t have any science behind it.” When Ghani’s team interviewed cops and supervisors, almost everyone said the system failed to account for factors like what neighborhoods the officers patrolled or which shifts they worked.

The system also created a lot of false positives, dinging more than 1,100 cops out of a 2,000-person force. “The officers felt like we were accusing them when they didn’t do anything wrong,” Putney says. Out on the street, cops were concerned accidents or even justified uses of force might be seen as foul play. When Ghani’s team dove into the data, they discovered that nearly 90 percent of the officers who had been flagged were false positives. “It was a huge eureka moment,” Putney says.

Identifying who was truly a problem cop was an obvious priority, but Ghani also wanted to predict who was most likely to misbehave in the future. So his team started to mine more data—any available information on the stops, searches, and arrests made by every Charlotte officer since 2000. In the end they analyzed 300 data points, trying to find which ones could best predict an officer’s chances of acting badly.

Ghani’s first set of predictions was shaky; it still incorrectly flagged about 875 officers, though it did correctly identify 157 officers who wound up facing a complaint or internal investigation within the following year—making it 30 percent more accurate than Charlotte’s previous model.

It came as no surprise that Ghani’s team eventually found that one of the best predictors of future problems was a history of past problems—like using unjustified force or getting into car accidents, for example. But the team also confirmed something many experts and officers had long suspected but could never demonstrate: Officers subjected to concentrated bouts of on-the-job stress—handling multiple domestic-violence or suicide calls, or cases involving young children in danger, for example—were much more likely to have complaints lodged against them by community members. “That’s something we’ve known anecdotally, but we’ve never seen empirical evidence before,” explains Geoffrey Alpert, a criminologist at the University of South Carolina.

Ghani’s research is already spurring changes in Charlotte. His team found that when three or more officers responded to a domestic-violence call, they were much less likely to use force than when only two officers were called to the scene. Putney says that realization has led his department to rethink how it handles emotionally charged incidents. He is eager to see what Ghani’s research says about shift rotations as well. Often, the youngest and least experienced cops get stuck on night shifts, which tend to be the most stressful and violent, and “where they can become desensitized and calloused,” he says. Putney also hopes to use Ghani’s research as a guide for traits to look for when hiring new officers. He is circumspect, though, about the ability to accurately foresee a police officer’s behavior. Some variables will always be unpredictable, he says, like when things go wrong at 3 a.m. But with 300 data points, he adds, “maybe there’s some science behind this after all.”

Ghani agrees there are limitations to his big-data approach. Even the most accurate predictions won’t eliminate bad cops. Preventing abuses may require a wider look at how officers are recruited, trained, counseled, and disciplined—as well as addressing personal and systemic biases. Without that layer of human intervention and analysis, personnel decisions based on predictive data alone could ricochet through a police department, harming morale and possibly making things worse.

“This is the first step,” Alpert says. “It may not be a panacea, but we’ve got to start thinking differently.” Eventually, Ghani says, data from dashboard and body cameras will factor into his calculations, and his system will help dispatchers quickly decide which officer is best suited to respond to a certain type of call at any given moment. He hopes most large police departments will adopt prediction models in the next five years. Most of the police officials at that White House meeting have said they’d like to work with him, and his team is negotiating with the Los Angeles County sheriff and the police chief of Knoxville, Tennessee. “I don’t know if this will work at every department,” he says. “But it’s going to be better than what it is now.”

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How Science Could Help Prevent Police Shootings

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Monsters or Victims? Let the Viewer Decide.

by DinahRmfacmt Posted on July 11, 2016

Mother Jones

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In a trailer park outside St. Petersburg, Florida, where around 120 convicted sex offenders live and receive counseling, Tracy Hutchinson broke down on camera. Hutchinson, a convicted sex offender, had never told her story before, even in therapy. Now, she was revealing to Frida and Lasse Barkfors, a pair of Scandinavian filmmakers documenting the lives of the trailer park’s inhabitants, what her father had done to her: “We went down the hall to the bedroom, and he locked the door, and he said, ‘You know that you’re daddy’s girl, and I love you, and I just want to share this with you.”

Many years later, as an adult, Hutchinson sexually abused her son. He, in turn, abused a three-year-old child. Lasse, listening to her story from behind the camera, had tears in his eyes. Every few minutes, Frida gently asked a question. Otherwise, she just let Hutchinson talk.

“It was like a need in her almost, to tell her story, that no one had wanted to listen to before,” Frida says. “That we came in the park with an open mind and said that we just wanted to listen—was very unusual for them.”

The Barkfors’ documentary, Pervert Park, doesn’t flinch from the crimes of its subjects, but it refuses to define them solely by their offenses. The result is a provocative look at the lives of convicted sex offenders and the cycle of abuse—as well as at a counseling program that could offer a model for rehabilitation. (According to the film, less than 1 percent of the park’s residents have been convicted of another sex offense after completing the two-year program.)

“When we made the film, we were quite certain that no one wanted to see it,” Lasse says. That goes especially for American viewers, whom the pair expected to be particularly hostile to the notion of humanizing sex offenders. But Pervert Park will debut on PBS tonight (10 pm ET) after months collecting praise on the festival circuit. I caught up with the filmmakers to discuss how one tells such stories responsibly, and why it’s important that they be told.

Mother Jones: The idea for this film came from a newspaper article about Florida Justice Transitions. How did you pick it up from there?

Frida Barkfors: We started out believing we were going to make a film that was a little more anthropological about the place itself. We read this article about five years ago, and the park was described as this parallel society where the sex offenders didn’t want to reintegrate into society—and couldn’t. As soon as we got to the park, we realized that what’s stated in the article wasn’t really accurate. They did try really hard to reintegrate to society, and they had this housing program where they were trying to be contributing citizens.

MJ: What were your attitudes toward the sex offenders when you began?

Frida: We had completely bought into the mainstream media portrait and didn’t think there was much more to tell. Meeting the sex offenders was kind of a journey for us. In the beginning we were quite cautious. We wanted to stick together while we were shooting. But we got less and less scared, because we saw the people behind the crimes. It’s not like sex offenders are sex offenders only. The story’s much more complex. That provoked a lot of emotions and thought processes in us, and that’s what we wanted to share with the audience.

Lasse Barkfors: It’s also a very simple idea, in the end, to listen to someone who is seldom asked to speak. What happens if we see what they have to say? Is that useful for us?

MJ: You said you completely bought into the mainstream portrayal of sex offenders. And what would that be?

Frida: We see them as monsters controlled by their sexual lust, with a lack of morals. We see them as dangerous. But there’s a really fine line between the victim and the abuser, because there are so many abusers who are untreated victims. They were once these innocent victims. But they weren’t able to get treatment, so they acted out and became abusers themselves.

Lasse: Of course, the stories that always comes up in the media are the very harsh ones and the awful ones.

Frida: We see sex offenders as the worst of the worst. We talk mostly about these stories where they’re hiding in the bushes, waiting for a child to kidnap and molest and maybe even murder. But those incidents are extremely rare. We were trying to show the diversity of the sex offender label. From Patrick—who kidnapped a five-year-old girl in Mexico and raped her in the desert and left her there—to Jamie, who was looking for a 30-year-old sex worker and was caught in a sting when the prostitute wanted to include her 14-year-old daughter. It turned out to be a police officer. There are also stories of people in the park who have urinated in public and are now convicted sex offenders.

MJ: What are some of the biggest misconceptions about your work?

Frida: People say we made a film about pedophiles. In fact, there’s no pedophile featured in our film. Not even Patrick is a pedophile, because being a pedophile is a sexual orientation. Being a sex offender means you have abused someone sexually, but it doesn’t mean that you have a lust to be together with kids. There are many pedophiles who will never act out because they know the emotions they have, the lust they have, are wrong. Then there’s the combination of a pedophile and a sadist, and that’s really dangerous. Those are the cases we read about in the newspaper, and those are the cases that we base our laws on.

MJ: Compassion for sex offenders is central to the film. But relating to them, especially those convicted of really violent crimes, had to be a challenge. How did you accomplish that?

Frida: That’s the core question for us. How can we listen to these people without minimizing their crimes? What we realized is that you can actually have empathy for a person at the same time that you despise their crimes. We have this tendency to paint people in good colors and bad colors, but it’s more than that. These people need treatment. Some of them are still minimizing, and some of them are still excusing, and they’re not completely healed, but I feel that a lot of them are working on becoming better people. So it’s very complex.

MJ: Why did you not include the voices of the victims?

Frida: There are so many films that are made from the classical victim perspective. We wanted to give a voice to the people who are normally not heard. And there are victims in our film. You can be a victim and an abuser at the same time. I think we show very clearly—for instance, in the interview with Tracy—how it’s passed on throughout generations.

MJ: Still, I’m sure some viewers would feel that giving voice to the abusers silences the victims.

Frida: I was once like that, so I understand. I remember thinking, “I don’t want to listen to their story.” But we’re trying to help widen the debate. Making this film, we worked very closely with victim organizations, lawyers, and defenders of victims of sexual abuse, and also psychologists and therapists. They all say this is crucial for victims to heal, the abuser’s story being told. That was the purpose: We made the film because we thought that it was helpful for everyone.

Lasse: These people walk around with this their whole life without telling anyone, because it’s so shameful. I think a lot of them really need to talk about it in order to move on.

Frida: After a screening, people have come up to us and said, “I am a victim of sexual abuse, and thank you for making this film. I now understand my abuser much better than I used to.” They struggle with a lot of emotions, but if they can understand their abuser, it’s easier for them to heal.

MJ: I suppose it would help answer the question, “Why did this happen to me?”

Frida: Don’t get me wrong—the victims have no responsibility whatsoever. I completely understand why we as a society don’t want to talk about the offenders, because we think that we’re protecting the victims. But that’s counterproductive.

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Monsters or Victims? Let the Viewer Decide.

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Is There a Path to Peace Between Civilians and Police?

by Myrna Posted on July 8, 2016

Can American communities repair the broken interface between citizens and keepers of the peace? This article:   Is There a Path to Peace Between Civilians and Police? ; ; ;

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Is There a Path to Peace Between Civilians and Police?

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Republicans Talk a Better Game on the Economy Than Democrats

by ElisabethFulker Posted on July 5, 2016

Mother Jones

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Over the weekend Brad DeLong wrote a post about Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback and how his disastrous tax cuts have decimated the state’s economy. It prompted several of the usual comments, and DeLong highlights this one in particular:

The process Brownback has put the state on isn’t something he regrets. And obviously over the next several years, Kansas will recover in that it won’t get worse and will have growth that more or less tracks national growth. And at that point the state will declare Brownback’s policies to be a “success.”

This reminds me of something I’ve meant to point out for a while: economies always recover eventually.1 Conservatives take advantage of this fact by loudly and clearly insisting that their proposed tax cuts will supercharge economic growth. They know that eventually there will be growth, and when it happens they can then loudly and clearly insist that their tax cuts were responsible. Since they’ve been loudly and clearly saying this all along, ordinary citizens conclude that they’re right.

Democrats don’t really do this. When Barack Obama put together his various economic initiatives in 2009, for example, he was pretty circumspect about what they’d accomplish. Ditto for Bill Clinton in 1993. When they ran for reelection, both of them touted their economic achievements, but only in fairly broad terms. Obama didn’t insist that his stimulus bill was a magic bullet and Clinton didn’t claim that tax hikes and deficit reductions were always and everywhere the key to economic growth. Because of this, ordinary citizens never strongly associated the policies of either man with economic growth.2

Why is this? Stimulus programs and deficit reductions have about as much to do with economic growth as tax cuts: some, but not a lot. And none of them can truthfully claim to be the secret sauce for all economic woes at all times.

But that doesn’t bother Republicans. They’ve been focused like a laser beam on tax cuts as economic miracle workers for more than 30 years now. The fact that virtually no evidence supports this claim doesn’t matter. Democrats, conversely, can’t quite bring themselves to make the same unequivocal claim. Are they too embarrassed to just flatly lie about it? Too disorganized to agree on any one thing? Too muddled to make their points loudly and clearly? It is a mystery.

1Except maybe for Greece. We’ll see.

2Until much later, that is. Bill Clinton is now generally associated with the strong economy of the 90s, but it took a decade of weak economic growth to make him look so good.

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Republicans Talk a Better Game on the Economy Than Democrats

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Now there’s one less way for Big Coal to screw over Americans

by AdelineEdye6471 Posted on July 1, 2016

The spurn of the screw

Now there’s one less way for Big Coal to screw over Americans

By on Jul 1, 2016Share

The Obama administration took a small step on Thursday to prevent coal companies from fleecing taxpayers.

Until now, the biggest coal conglomerates were getting away with scamming the government by selling coal mined on federal land to their own subsidiaries for a discounted, below-market price. Since the government’s royalties from that coal are a percentage of the sale price, that meant the companies were paying lower royalties than they should have been. Forty-two percent of the coal produced in Wyoming’s Powder River Basin — the biggest coal-producing area in the U.S. right now — was being sold through these “captive transactions,” according to Public Citizen, a good government advocacy group.

On Thursday, the Interior Department issued a new rule that puts a stop to that practice.

“One of the things Cloud Peak [Energy] and other coal companies were doing is selling to an affiliate at the mine mouth and then selling it in the export market at a significantly higher price,” says Tyson Slocum, director of Public Citizen’s energy program. This new rule will allow the department to more accurately calculate the “market value” of coal, oil, and gas extracted on public land and make sure it’s getting paid fair royalties. Slocum estimates that this could bring in an additional $300 million per year in royalties.

This is important for two reasons: Corporations should not be stealing from the public, and every penny we undercharge fossil-fuel companies is an implicit subsidy for the dirty fuels that cause climate change. Coal companies are struggling, and instead of throwing them a lifeline that will help them stay in the business of worsening global warming, we should be letting them sink.

Crucially, unlike many other rules issued by federal agencies, this new rule will apply not just to future leases but also to ones that already exist. So even under a coal lease bought five years ago, a company will now have to pay fairer royalty rates going forward.

This is just the beginning of reforms needed to the federal fossil-fuel leasing system. A bigger issue is that coal, oil, and gas lease rates have failed to keep pace with the market, and on top of that they do not factor in the social costs of pollution and climate change. If they did those two things, the cost of fossil-fuel leases would be prohibitive. As it is, the leasing program is a big money-loser for the federal government. Greenpeace estimates that coal leasing alone costs taxpayers some $50 billion per year.

Ultimately, of course, we should be keeping fossil fuels in the ground — especially on land owned by the public. Hillary Clinton has pledged to move toward that goal, but she hasn’t specified a timeline. President Obama and Interior Secretary Sally Jewell have only promised to ensure that the public gets a fair price for fossil fuels extracted from public land, and to align the leasing programs with the administration’s goal of combatting climate change. It’s not clear what exactly either of those things mean. But in January, the Interior Department put a moratorium on new coal leases pending the results of a multi-year environmental review of the leasing program.

Climate activists have made fixing the broken fossil-fuel leasing system their top priority, and clearly more changes will occur, but no one knows how far they will go.

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Now there’s one less way for Big Coal to screw over Americans

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How Should We Talk About Racism?

by KristeeJehle Posted on June 26, 2016

Mother Jones

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Steve Randy Waldman picks up today on a brief Twitter disagreement from a few days ago. Here’s (part of) his response to my contention that racism was at the heart of Britain’s vote to leave the EU:

It may or may not be accurate to attribute the political behavior of large groups of people to racism, but it is not very useful. Those people got to be that way somehow. Presumably they, or eventually their progeny, can be un-got from being that way somehow. It is, I think, a political and moral error to content oneself with explanations that suggest no remedy at all, or that suggest prima facie problematic responses like ridiculing, ignoring, disenfranchising, or going to war with large groups of fellow citizens, unless no other explanations are colorable.

….It seems to me that the alleged “good guys” — the liberal, cosmopolitan class of which I myself am a part — have fallen into habits of ridiculing, demonizing, writing off, or, in our best moments, merely patronizing huge swathes of the polities to which we belong. They may do the same to us, but we are not toddlers, that is no excuse. In the United States, in Europe, we are allowing ourselves to disintegrate and arguing about who is to blame. Let’s all be better than that.

I don’t have a good answer to this, and I’ve struggled with it for some time. On the one hand, the truth is important. If I believe that racism is an important driver of a political movement (Brexit, Donald Trump), then I should say so. It’s dishonest to tap dance around it just because it’s uncomfortable or politically unhelpful.

At the same time, it usually is politically unhelpful. Accusations of racism tend to end conversations, not start them—and, as Waldman says, implicitly suggest that our problems are intractable. What’s more, there’s a good case to be made that liberals toss around charges of racism too cavalierly and should dial it back. In fact, you can go even further than that. Politically, liberals might very well be off never using the R-word again.

So: should we tell the truth as we see it even if it rarely leads to any useful outcome? Or adopt softer language that skirts the issue but has a better chance of prompting engagement from non-liberals? I don’t know. But speaking just for myself, I generally try not to ridicule or demonize “huge swathes” of the country. Instead, I prefer to put the blame where I mostly think it belongs. In the post Waldman is referring to, for example, I said this about Brexit:

At its core, it’s the last stand of old people who have been frightened to death by cynical right-wing media empires and the demagogues who enable them—all of whom have based their appeals on racism as overt as anything we’ve seen in decades. It’s loathsome beyond belief, and not something I thought I’d ever see in my lifetime. But that’s where we are.

People are people. To some extent, we’re all prisoners of the environments we were raised in and the trials we’ve been through over the course of our lives. That might call for empathy and understanding as much as it calls for censure. But one thing it doesn’t excuse is politicians and media personalities who very much know better but cynically appeal to racial sentiment anyway, either for ratings or for votes. Calling out these folks for appealing to racism—or even just tolerating it—is almost certainly useful. It might not happen fast, but eventually they can be embarrassed into cutting it out. It sure is taking a long time, though.

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How Should We Talk About Racism?

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Bernie Sanders lays out what Democrats should do next

by MohamedMullings Posted on June 23, 2016

Feelin’ the bern

Bernie Sanders lays out what Democrats should do next

By on Jun 23, 2016Share

The race for the Democratic nomination may be more or less over for Bernie Sanders. The natural question is: What does he do next? The Vermont senator insists that’s the wrong question, in an op-ed published in the Washington Post. Instead, it’s about “what the 12 million Americans who voted for a political revolution want.”

Those 12 million, according to Sanders, want to see his major platform points — a just economy, overturning Citizens United, criminal justice reform, and action on climate change — come to fruition. He writes on climate change:

If present trends continue, scientists tell us the planet will be 5 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit warmer by the end of the century — which means more droughts, floods, extreme weather disturbances, rising sea levels and acidification of the oceans. This is a planetary crisis of extraordinary magnitude.

What do we want? We want the United States to lead the world in pushing our energy system away from fossil fuel and toward energy efficiency and sustainable energy. We want a tax on carbon, the end of fracking and massive investment in wind, solar, geothermal and other sustainable technologies.

Sanders’ supporters last week pushed the Democratic National Committee to embrace many of these points in its party platform, including calls for a nationwide fracking ban and a carbon tax. While Sanders and Clinton mostly agree on the science and dangers of climate change, his rival never endorsed either of these proposals.

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Bernie Sanders lays out what Democrats should do next

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Trump Just Gave His Sharpest Anti-Clinton Speech Yet

by DKHUwe71121 Posted on June 22, 2016

Mother Jones

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Donald Trump escalated his attacks on Hillary Clinton during a lengthy speech in New York on Wednesday, calling the presumptive Democratic nominee a “world-class liar” and potentially “the most corrupt person ever to seek the presidency.”

Trump claimed Clinton had “perfected the politics of personal profit and even theft,” accusing her of taking money from banks, special interests, and “financial backers in Communist China” in return for influence. He slammed her for ignoring “radical Islam” and allowing American diplomats to be killed in Benghazi in 2012. “She lacks the temperament, the judgment, and the competence to lead,” he said.

A large chunk of Trump’s case against Clinton rested on items pulled from Clinton Cash, a book by conservative academic and Breitbart News Senior Editor-at-Large Peter Schweizer. The book alleges that Clinton used her position as secretary of state to funnel money to herself and the Clinton Foundation in return for friendly treatment for foreign governments including Russia, China, and Persian Gulf countries that Trump said “horribly abuse women and LGBT citizens.” Trump also claimed that Clinton’s use of private email server was an attempt to hide such corruption from public view.

Trump also blamed Clinton for toppling friendly governments in the Middle East and allowing the rise of ISIS by (unsuccessfully) supporting military action against the Syrian government. “In just four years, Secretary Clinton managed to almost single-handedly destabilize the entire Middle East,” Trump charged. “ISIS threatens us today because of the decisions Hillary Clinton has made.”

The presumptive GOP nominee made a direct plea to Bernie Sanders supporters, casting Clinton as a corrupt insider being challenged by another pro-working class, anti-Washington populist. The speech was filled with Sanders-like references to a “rigged system” and attacks on Clinton’s speeches to Wall Street firms and her support for major trade deals including NAFTA and the Trans-Pacific Partnership, both of which Trump said harm American workers and enrich large banks and corporations. “The insiders wrote the rules of the game to keep themselves in power and in the money,” Trump said. “That’s why we’re asking Bernie Sanders’ voters to join our movement, so together we can fix the system for all Americans.”

For all of the sharp attacks on Clinton, the speech was maybe Trump’s most measured public appearance of the campaign. Trump stuck to his prepared text and included the kind of standard-issue political platitudes—”everywhere I look, I see the possibilities of what our country could be”—that he rarely employs at his rallies and press conferences.

Yet the speech contained numerous falsehoods. Trump claimed again that the United States was the highest-taxed nation in the world; lied about opposing the war in Iraq before it started; claimed the government spends “hundreds of billions” on bringing refugees to America; said hundreds of immigrants have been convicted of terrorist activity; charged that Clinton would “end virtually all immigration enforcement;” and said that Clinton’s email server had been hacked by foreign governments.

The speech seemed to represent the dramatic shift that’s apparently taken place in the Trump campaign this week since Trump fired campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, who reportedly encouraged Trump’s penchant for offensive, off-the-cuff remarks and blocked attempts to expand Trump’s staff. Reporters noted an immediate change in the campaign’s tactics on Tuesday, with Trump’s staff sending out fundraising appeals and hitting back at comments by Clinton with “rapid response” email blasts to reporters rather than tweets by Trump himself. Both are considered standard campaign actions, but Trump hadn’t used either before this week.

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Trump Just Gave His Sharpest Anti-Clinton Speech Yet

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Eliminating One Constitutional Right Does Not Make All the Rest Fair Game

by JimMatheson0 Posted on June 19, 2016

Mother Jones

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Timothy Edgar—former national security counsel for the ACLU, former deputy for civil liberties in the George Bush administration, and the first-ever director of privacy and civil liberties under President Obama—says that using terrorist watchlists to ban gun sales doesn’t pose a civil liberties problem. After all, we already use these lists to prohibit people from boarding airplanes:

According to the Supreme Court, both the right to keep and bear arms and the right to travel are fundamental liberties. The right to travel is exercised far more frequently. While there were 23 million gun sales requiring a background check in 2015, there were almost 900 million travelers on domestic and international flights serving the United States in the same year.

….While using the terrorist watch list to prevent gun sales would inconvenience those who may be on the list by mistake, there is no reason to fetishize the 2nd Amendment over other rights. The no-fly list causes inconvenience and hardship, but not even the ACLU thinks it should be abolished because it understands the need to keep terrorists from boarding airplanes. Preventing terrorists from buying weapons is just as necessary.

This is a rather cavalier description of the ACLU’s stand on no-fly lists:

We filed a landmark challenge to the No Fly List in which a federal judge struck down the government’s redress process, ruling that it “falls far short of satisfying the requirements of due process” and is “wholly ineffective.”…A bloated, opaque watchlisting system is neither fair nor effective. A system in which innocent people languish on blacklists indefinitely, with their rights curtailed and their names sullied, is at odds with our Constitution and values.

“Due process” is the key phrase here: the US government should never be able to revoke fundamental liberties based on mere suspicion. This doesn’t necessarily mean that suspects are entitled to a full-on court hearing, but due process does mean something substantive, speedy, and fair. An appeal to the same agency that took away your rights in the first place doesn’t count in my book—especially when that agency is literally bound by no rules about what it does and doesn’t have to tell you about why you’ve been blacklisted. That’s how the no-fly list works, and the appeal process in Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s proposed ban on gun purchases would be at least as bad.

In any case, I have a question for Edgar and other proponents of both the no-fly list and the gun ban: what other fundamental liberties should the government be able to ignore in the name of fighting terrorism? This isn’t a frivolous question. If these two rights can be taken away, what’s the argument for not restricting the right to free speech of people on terror watchlists? Or fair trials? Or self-incrimination? Or freedom of religion? Or cruel and unusual punishment?

This kind of question is too often treated as nothing more than the juvenile hysteria of civil liberties purists who see fascism around every corner. But think about where we are. The right to travel freely has already been effectively eliminated. Eliminating the right to bear arms has a pretty good chance of passing Congress. George Bush plainly had no qualms about cruel and unusual punishment, and there’s no telling if he ever got close to allowing the torture of American citizens. Donald Trump gets loud cheers when he proposes substantial infringement on Muslim freedom of religion. Warrantless surveillance is now so normal it barely merits a yawn. And we hear endlessly these days about jihadist recruiting via social media, which suggests—to use Edgar’s phrasing— that preventing terrorists from using Facebook might be just as necessary as keeping them off airplanes.

We’re not close to fascism. But when a former counsel for the ACLU argues that taking away a constitutional right is OK because we’ve already taken away another one, it’s not very hard to see the slippery slope in action. By that logic, there’s literally no right that’s safe for anyone who’s ever been investigated for terrorist connections by the FBI. As tempting as it is for frustrated liberals to exploit a horrific massacre in order to pass something—anything—related to gun control, this is the wrong way to go about it.

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Eliminating One Constitutional Right Does Not Make All the Rest Fair Game

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