Tag Archives: major

No, There Really Isn’t Much We Can Do To Retaliate Against North Korea

by Ellie77Vgachfw Posted on December 21, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

A couple of days ago I wrote a post suggesting that there might not really be much we can do to retaliate against North Korea for the Sony hack. So I was curious to read “A Reply to Kim’s Cyberterrorism,” a Wall Street Journal editorial telling us what options we had. I figured that if anyone could make the best case for action, it was the Journal.

Unfortunately, they mostly just persuaded me that there really is very little we can do. After clearing their throats with a couple of suggestions that even they admit are mostly just symbolic, they get to the meat of things:

Earlier this year Rep. Ed Royce introduced the North Korea Sanctions Enforcement Act, which gives Treasury the power it needs to sanction banks facilitating North Korea’s finances. It passed the House easily in July but has since been locked up in Harry Reid’s Senate at the behest of the Obama Administration. Mr. Royce tells us he plans to reintroduce the bill as a first order of business in the new Congress. New Jersey Democrat Robert Menendez has introduced similar legislation in the Senate; a bill could be on Mr. Obama’s desk by the second week in January.

So….that’s it. And even this is weaker tea than the Journal suggests. For starters, the bill has a serious structural problem because it puts severe limits on the president’s power, which is why Obama hasn’t supported it in the past. It’s a bad idea in foreign relations for Congress to mandate sanctions that can then be lifted only by Congress. This makes it almost impossible for presidents to negotiate future agreements because they have no carrots to offer in return for good behavior.

But that could be fixed. What can’t be fixed is the fact that North Korea learned a lesson from our previous attempt at tightening economic sanctions in 2007, when we cut off the US links of Banco Delta Asia, a Macau-based bank suspected of doing business with North Korea. This in turn panicked other Macau banks into cutting off their relationships with North Korea, which severely restricted the regime’s access to dollars. As the Journal notes, this genuinely hurt North Korea, and the Bush administration agreed to resolve the BDA issue during the Six-Party nuclear talks later that year.

Unfortunately for us, sanctions like this would hurt North Korea a lot less now than they did back in 2007. Stephan Haggard explains:

Post-BDA, and since the ascent of Kim Jong-un in particular, North Korea has also sought to diversify its trade, investment and financial links. The KPA and its associates have developed relationships with financial entities that are not concerned with access to the U.S. market, both in China and outside it; Russia will be particularly interesting to watch in this regard but there is also the open field of the Middle East….While this legislation might raise the costs of proliferation activities if implemented, it is unlikely to staunch them completely and could simply forge new networks beyond the law’s reach.

Another question is whether the sanctions will have the broader strategic effect of moving the North Koreans toward serious negotiation of its nuclear program….The paradoxical feature of sanctions is that they rarely have the direct effect of forcing the target country to capitulate. The HR 1771 sanctions will have effect only when coupled with strong statements of a willingness to engage if North Korea showed signs of interest in doing so. The legislation provides plenty of sticks; the administration will have to continue to articulate the prospective carrots in a way that is credible. Strong sanctions legislation makes that difficult to do if the legislation places a series of binding constraints on the president’s discretion. Why negotiate with the U.S. if there is no return from doing so?

With changes, Royce’s sanctions bill might be an appropriate response to the Sony hack. However, it’s unlikely to have a severe effect on North Korea. Even worse, past history shows that a single-minded “get tough” attitude toward the DPRK can backfire badly, as it did on George Bush when his refusal to negotiate with Pyongyang in 2002 led in short order to the ejection of UN inspectors and the construction of plutonium bombs from a stockpile that had previously been kept under lock and key.

As the cliche goes, there are no good options here, just bad and less bad. I wouldn’t necessarily oppose a modified version of the sanctions bill, but it’s unlikely to have a major impact. It might even make things worse. If this is the best we can do, it’s pretty much an admission that there’s not really much we can do.

Originally posted here:  

No, There Really Isn’t Much We Can Do To Retaliate Against North Korea

Posted in Cyber, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on No, There Really Isn’t Much We Can Do To Retaliate Against North Korea

Executions Just Hit a 20-Year Low

by MargariLaurens Posted on December 18, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

There’s some encouraging news this week in the usually gloomy realm of criminal justice. According to a new report from the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC), there were fewer executions this year than in any year since 1994—and fewer new death sentences imposed than any year since 1974. That may be of little comfort to the family of Robert Wayne Holsey, a low-functioning man whose severely alcoholic court-appointed lawyer sealed his ultimate fate—Georgia executed him earlier this month—but the numbers are certainly dwindling. In 2012, states put 43 people to death. In 2013, the number was 39. This year, it’s down to 35.

Perhaps more encouraging for foes of capital punishment: Only 72 new death sentences were imposed this year (a measure the DPIC considers a more accurate indicator of the trend). That’s a 77 percent decline since 1996, as more and more states have offered juries the option of imposing a sentence of life without the possibility of parole.

Death Penalty Information Center

In addition, an increasingly smaller group of states accounts for the majority of executions. Seven states put prisoners to death this year (down from 20 just 15 years ago)‚ but just three of them—Florida, Missouri, and Texas—accounted for 80 percent of all the executions. The number of states that sanction the death penalty may be waning, too. In 2014, the governors of Colorado, Oregon, and Washington all imposed moratoria. And for what it’s worth, 2014 was the first year since 1997 that Texas didn’t lead the country in executions. (It tied with Missouri, at 10 apiece.)

Death Penalty Information Center

Aside from the continued decline in public support for capital punishment—just over half of Americans were for it in 2014, as opposed to nearly two-thirds in 2011—some new factors may have contributed to this year’s numbers. Botched executions in Ohio, Arizona, and Oklahoma shed light on the untested drug cocktails states are now using for lethal injections, after European drugmakers cut off their supplies. Following widespread press coverage of these gruesome execution attempts—some of which appeared to violate the Eighth Amendment’s protection from cruel and unusual punishment—Oklahoma and Ohio halted executions for the rest of the year. (In response to the mishaps, the Justice Department is expected to release a major report next year.)

We’ve also seen increased scrutiny this year of states’ willingness to execute the mentally ill or intellectually disabled. Earlier in the year, the Supreme Court ruled in Hall v. Florida that Florida’s fit-for-execution standard—merely having an IQ exceeding 70 was enough—violated standards of decency. And the case of Scott Panetti, a schizophrenic man that Texas is determined to execute, put that state’s low standards on international display. (A federal court has temporarily stayed Panetti’s execution, a move even prominent conservatives have supported.)

Major battles lie ahead for death penalty opponents. More than 3,000 people are still on death row and 30 executions have been scheduled for 2015. Fourteen states, including some the ones that botched their executions, have pursued legislation that would shroud many aspects of the execution process in secrecy—particularly the details about what’s in their lethal cocktails.

But momentum against the death penalty is strong. “Overall, the decline in the use of the death penalty has been going on for 15 years, and is likely to continue,” explains Richard Dieter, the executive director of the DPIC and an author of the new report. “For the public, the death penalty has already receded as a significant part of the criminal justice process.”

See the article here:

Executions Just Hit a 20-Year Low

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, Ultima, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Executions Just Hit a 20-Year Low

Obama’s latest green move: Banning drilling in Alaska’s Bristol Bay

by FinlayYgqh Posted on December 17, 2014

Salmon Chanted Evening

Obama’s latest green move: Banning drilling in Alaska’s Bristol Bay

By on 17 Dec 2014commentsShare

President Obama took another step today to build up his green legacy, just the latest in a recent string of pro-environment actions. He protected Alaska’s Bristol Bay, a major environmental and economic resource, by withdrawing the waters indefinitely from future oil and gas drilling. The Huffington Post’s Kate Sheppard reports:

Obama said in a video Tuesday that he had issued a memorandum withdrawing the region from all future oil and gas lease sales. The region, he said, “is a beautiful, natural wonder and it’s something that is too precious for us to be putting out to the highest bidder.” The region is the source of 40 percent of the wild-caught fish in the United States, and its fishing industry generates $2 billion each year.

The George W. Bush administration opened 5.6 million acres of the North Aleutian Basin for oil and gas leasing in 2007. In March 2010, Obama withdrew the area from offshore lease sales through 2017. Tuesday’s announcement extends those protections indefinitely.

The White House also noted that the bay is home to one of the world’s largest wild salmon runs, driving $100 million in tourism every year, and to many threatened and endangered species, including beluga and killer whales and the North Pacific right whale.

The move prompted excitement among environmental groups. “The administration’s decision to protect Bristol Bay is a huge win for both Bristol Bay fishermen and the region’s coastal communities,” Margaret Williams, managing director of the World Wildlife Fund’s Arctic program, told The Wall Street Journal.

Even Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R), usually of the “Drill, Baby, Drill” school of thinking, cautiously gave her nod of approval: “Given the lack of interest by industry and the public divide over allowing oil and gas exploration in this area, I am not objecting to this decision at this time,” she said in a statement. “I think we all recognize that these are some of our state’s richest fishing waters.”

The Department of the Interior is expected to announce the offshore areas where it will allow oil and gas drilling early next year.

Meanwhile, a decision on a massive proposed gold and copper mine, which potentially poses a bigger threat to Bristol Bay, is still outstanding. As The Wall Street Journal notes, “Tuesday’s announcement is separate from a forthcoming decision by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency regarding the extent to which it intends to allow mining activity at the Pebble Mine site onshore around Bristol Bay.”

Source:
Obama Bars Oil and Gas Development In Alaska’s Bristol Bay

, The Huffington Post.

Obama Blocks Oil and Natural Gas Drilling in Alaska’s Bristol Bay

, The Wall Street Journal.

Share

Please

enable JavaScript

to view the comments.

Find this article interesting?

Donate now to support our work.

Get stories like this in your inbox

AdvertisementAdvertisement

Link:

Obama’s latest green move: Banning drilling in Alaska’s Bristol Bay

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Obama’s latest green move: Banning drilling in Alaska’s Bristol Bay

Most Americans are clueless about how climate change will affect their health

by WoodrowMcCart Posted on December 16, 2014

Most Americans are clueless about how climate change will affect their health

By on 16 Dec 2014commentsShare

Americans aren’t thinking much about the effects climate change will have on their health, a new Yale study finds. But at least the White House is starting to.

Back in October, the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication surveyed 1,275 Americans about their views on global warming. Yesterday, the organization announced that very few of those they spoke to — only 3 in 10 — had thought a “moderate amount” or a “great deal” about how climate change will impact health. Most hadn’t considered the matter. Less than a fifth of all Americans could come up with a way in which climate change is affecting health, or could name which groups would be most vulnerable. (Of course, according to separate Yale survey, 19 percent of Americans don’t accept that climate change is happening at all.)

Even many respondents who recognized that climate change poses health threats didn’t understand which threats were likely to affect American communities in the next 10 years. For example:

Allergies? Correct answer: yes. Percent who said yes: 38%
Asthma? Correct answer: yes. Percent who said yes: 37%
Heat stroke? Correct answer: yes. Percent who said yes: 36%
The flu? Correct answer: no. Percent who said yes: 29%
Depression? Correct answer: yes. Percent who said yes: 26%
Ebola? Correct answer: no. Percent who said yes: 22%

Once the survey got them thinking about global warming and health, half of respondents said agencies like the CDC, FEMA, and NIH should be doing more to prepare for climate change … though only a third wanted to increase agencies’ funding to enable them to do so.

While these results are disappointing, they aren’t necessarily surprising: Climate change generally ranks among the least concerning issues for Americans, and its health effects, future and present, don’t get much play in the media.

But even if most Americans aren’t thinking about climate change, the Obama administration is trying to make sure that healthcare providers are. As part of its Climate Action Plan, the administration released a “climate resiliency guide” for the healthcare sector yesterday, detailing best practices. It makes a range of suggestions, from rebuilding hospitals to prepare for severe weather — making sure that backup electricity, water, and heat are available on-site — to having healthcare workers coordinate with urban planners on transportation to make sure that doctors and others can get to work during an emergency. Representatives of major healthcare organizations visited the White House yesterday to endorse the report and pledge to put its recommendations into practice.

Share

Please

enable JavaScript

to view the comments.

×

Get stories like this in your inbox

AdvertisementAdvertisement

Read more:

Most Americans are clueless about how climate change will affect their health

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LG, ONA, solar, solar panels, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Most Americans are clueless about how climate change will affect their health

The Spending Bill Includes a Huge Insurance Industry Giveaway Too

by Ajax Isaac Posted on December 11, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

You can add insurance industry subsidies to the list of giveaways being shoved into the massive, last-minute government spending bill Congress is trying to vote on to avert a government shutdown. (Update: The bill passed the House.) A seven-year extension of the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act (TRIA)—which is essentially a government promise to bail out insurance companies after a major terrorist attack—has become part of this appropriations measure. The insurance industry and some of its bigger corporate clients claim renewing the 9/11-inspired law is critical to keeping the industry alive. Critics, citing the industry’s own risk analysis, say it’s pretty much useless.

TRIA, which is set to expire December 31, was approved by Congress after the September 11 attacks. Before then, a major attack was considered such a far-off possibility that terrorism insurance was generally included in commercial policies without added cost. But the attacks were a catastrophe for the industry, costing more than $40 billion in today’s dollars—the greatest loss for a non-natural disaster on record. After those payouts, many companies either stopped offering terrorism coverage or made it enormously expensive, according to a Congressional Research Service report on the subject. In 2002, Congress passed TRIA, which requires insurers to offer terrorism coverage—and promises to bail them out if a future terrorist attack causes losses above a certain threshold. With this law, the government acts as an insurer for the insurers—but it doesn’t charge them a dime for the protection.

The TRIA renewal in the spending bill will shift more of the burden of covering losses due to terrorist attacks to the insurance industry relative to the previous law. The threshold for an industry bailout would double, from $100 million in damages to $200 million, and the portion of losses covered by the government would fall from 85 percent to 80 percent. The law does include a provision the government could use to get some of its bailout money back; it would allow the government to tax policyholders, but this is not mandatory.

Critics, including Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), have called TRIA a giveaway for the industry. Similar programs exist in Europe and Australia, but those programs bill insurance companies in advance for the protection, instead of giving it away for free and then possibly taxing policyholders after the fact. If the government did charge for TRIA coverage, it could collect about $570 million annually, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The Consumer Federation of America, citing the insurance industry’s own risk analysis, notes that only the owners of “high-risk” terrorist targets— large, commercial buildings in New York City, Washington, DC, San Francisco, and Chicago—and their insurers benefit from TRIA. Although terrorism insurance rates would increase if TRIA were repealed, the group says, few policyholders would see the difference.

If there were a terrorist attack on one of those large commercial buildings, the industry is probably equipped to handle the loss without a government backstop. In the first half of 2014, American property and casualty insurers (TRIA’s main industry beneficiaries) were sitting on a record surplus of $683.1 billion, according to an industry report—enough to cover 15 times the losses endured on September 11.

In a September 8 letter to Congress, 400 companies and trade associations, from AIG to United Airlines and Walt Disney, contended that TRIA maintained “economic stability in the face of ongoing terrorist threats,” and that without it insurance companies would be unable to provide adequate coverage. A few weeks later, the Insurance Information Institute, an industry-funded advocacy group, cited ISIS’s promise to attack the United States as a reason for extending the law.

More than 100 companies and trade associations lobbied Congress on TRIA. Looks like it was money well spent.

See original: 

The Spending Bill Includes a Huge Insurance Industry Giveaway Too

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The Spending Bill Includes a Huge Insurance Industry Giveaway Too

Back From the Dead: Soft Money Makes a Comeback in Congress

by KristopHeilman Posted on December 10, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Soft money—limitless donations pouring into the Democratic and Republican Parties from labor unions, big corporations, and Hollywood moguls—was once all the rage in Washington. When the trickle of soft money began in the late 1980s, it was intended to fund building additions, TV studios, and other infrastructure for Team Blue and Team Red. But by the mid-’90s, soft money had exploded—the DNC and RNC raised $263 million of it during the ’96 election cycle, up from $45 million in 1988. And by the time of Bill Clinton’s reelection, soft money wasn’t just funding brick-and-mortar projects—it was supporting campaign activities to elect candidates to office. And the parties went to great lengths to pocket more. Remember those infamous sleepovers in the Clinton White House for donors and fundraisers? All in the name of raising soft money. Soft money was at the core of the campaign finance scandal triggered by Clinton’s ’96 campaign, the brouhaha that spurred the 2002 McCain-Feingold law banning soft money.

Now, soft money is making a comeback of sorts. A provision added to the $1-trillion spending bill cobbled together by Congress this week to avert a government shutdown would increase by tenfold the amount of money wealthy donors could give to the national political parties. Those dollars would go to fund presidential conventions, physical building activities, and legal work by the parties—an echo of the old soft-money days.

Here’s how the new math breaks down. Right now, donations to the DNC, the RNC, and their campaign affiliates (the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the National Republican Congressional Committee, and so on) are limited to $32,400 per person per committee each year. If the provision becomes law, donors could give $324,000 a year—a tenfold increase—to the DNC or RNC, while also donating $453,600 a year to the other party committees. All told, that means a wealthy donor could give $777,600 a year to all these outfits, or more than $1.5 million across an entire election cycle. “This is a law for millionaires and billionaires, period,” says Fred Wertheimer, president of Democracy 21, a good-government group that backs limits on money in politics.

As the Washington Post notes, this move could nudge the center of gravity in the political-money world back toward the national parties, which have found themselves strapped for cash while independent super-PACs rake in seven-figure checks:

While there would be some restrictions on how parties could use those donations, the creation of new, wider lanes for money to travel into the parties would be a major boon, campaign finance experts said. The expanded avenues for giving would dramatically undercut some of the last remaining provisions of the landmark McCain-Feingold Act, which curtailed the ability of parties to raise huge, unregulated sums.

“It’s always hard to predict how much more money will actually be raised when contribution limits are modified like this,” said Michael Toner, a Republican election law attorney and former Federal Election Commission member. “But the opportunity is there for the national political parties to raise significantly more money. I think this could be a real shot in the arm for the national parties and it would be a further chipping away of the McCain-Feingold law.”

“Money is fungible in American politics,” Toner added. “Any change in the campaign finance law that allows additional funds to be raised by parties for specified purposes necessarily frees up funds to be spent electing candidates.”

The ability of parties to raise huge sums could help them retake power back from super PACs and politically active nonprofits, which have emerged as major players in national politics in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision in 2010.

Critics of the provision say it will transport national politics back to the scandal-ridden ’90s when soft money flowed freely. “This provision would open a door to a new avenue of corruption, and is one more indication that selling American democracy is a bipartisan affair,” says Josh Orton, political director of Progressives United, the advocacy group founded by former Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wisc.).

It’s unclear who inserted the provision into the spending bill. The office of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), an avid foe of campaign finance regulations, denied involvement. But the provision appears to stand a good chance of surviving. Despite vowing to block an earlier attempt by McConnell to cut down campaign money limits, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) told Politico that he will not block the current provision. “If President Obama signs this law into effect, assuming it passes, he will be joining with Senator Reid in owning this legislation and the national scandals that are bound to follow,” Wertheimer says.

This article:

Back From the Dead: Soft Money Makes a Comeback in Congress

Posted in Anchor, Citizen, FF, GE, Landmark, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Back From the Dead: Soft Money Makes a Comeback in Congress

The Horrifying Reason Why Your Fruit Is Unblemished

by FaithAEHxvuqw Posted on December 10, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Back in 2010, I visited a labor camp that houses some of the migrant workers who grow America’s fruit and vegetables. I found people living densely in shanty-like structures made of scrap metal and cinder block, surrounded by vast fields and long rows of greenhouses. Strangers in a strange land who didn’t speak the language, hundreds of miles from home, they lived at the mercy of labor contractors who, they claimed, made false promises and paid rock-bottom wages. Like all Big Ag-dominated areas, the place had a feeling of desolation: all monocropped fields, mostly devoid of people, and lots of billboards hawking the products of agrichemical giants Monsanto and Syngenta.

You might think I had made my way to Florida’s infamous tomato fields, or somewhere in the depths of the California’s migrant-dependent Central Valley. Those places remain obscure to most Americans, but the gross human exploitation they represent has at least been documented in a spate of excellent recent books, like Barry Estabrook’s Tomatoland, Tracy McMillan’s The American Way of Eating, and Seth Holmes Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies. But I was somewhere yet more remote and less well-known: Sinaloa, a largely rural state in Mexico’s northwestern hinterland.

If most Americans have heard of Sinaloa at all, it’s because of the state’s well-earned reputation as a center of Mexico’s bloody drug trade. But in addition to the eponymous drug cartel, Sinaloa also houses vast-scale, export-oriented agriculture: farms that churn out the tomatoes, melons, peppers, and other fresh produce that help fill US supermarket shelves. And the people who do the planting, tending, and harvesting tend to be from the indigenous regions of Mexico’s southern states, Oaxaca and Chiapas, where smallholder farming has been ground down by decades of free-trade policies pursued by the Mexican government, which left millions in search of gainful work to the north.

In my brief time there, I found Sinaloa overwhelming: a scary cauldron of labor exploitation, industrial agriculture, and drug violence. Now, Los Angeles Times reporter Richard Marosi and photographer Don Bartletti have documented the grim conditions faced by workers on Mexico’s export-focused mega farms in a long-form investigation, after 18 months of reporting in nine Mexican states, including, most prominently, Sinaloa. The Times plans to publish it in four parts; the first, here, is stunning.

Marosi found that Mexico’s mega-farms adhere to the strictest standards when it comes to food safety and cleanliness, driven by the demands of big US buyers. “In immaculate greenhouses, laborers are ordered to use hand sanitizers and schooled in how to pamper the produce,” Marosi writes. “They’re required to keep their fingernails carefully trimmed so the fruit will arrive unblemished in US supermarkets.”

While the produce is coddled, the workers face a different reality. Pay languishes at the equivalent of $8 to $12 a day. Marosi summarizes conditions that often approach slavery:

• Many farm laborers are essentially trapped for months at a time in rat-infested camps, often without beds and sometimes without functioning toilets or a reliable water supply.

• Some camp bosses illegally withhold wages to prevent workers from leaving during peak harvest periods.

• Laborers often go deep in debt paying inflated prices for necessities at company stores. Some are reduced to scavenging for food when their credit is cut off. It’s common for laborers to head home penniless at the end of a harvest.

• Those who seek to escape their debts and miserable living conditions have to contend with guards, barbed-wire fences and sometimes threats of violence from camp supervisors.

• Major US companies have done little to enforce social responsibility guidelines that call for basic worker protections such as clean housing and fair pay practices.

The piece includes excellent photography and is chockfull of stories straight from the mouths of farm workers. And it shines a bright light on a hugely important source of our food. The US now imports nearly a third of the fruit and vegetables we consume, and Mexico accounts for 36 percent of that foreign-grown cornucopia, far more than any other country. And we’re only growing more reliant on our southern neighbor—imports of Mexico-grown fresh produce have increased by an average of 11 percent per year between 2001 and 2011, the USDA reports, and now amount to around $8 billion. The Times investigations demonstrates, with an accumulation of detail that can’t be denied or ignored, that our easy bounty bobs on a sea of misery and exploitation.

Read original article: 

The Horrifying Reason Why Your Fruit Is Unblemished

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, Holmes, LAI, LG, ONA, Pines, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The Horrifying Reason Why Your Fruit Is Unblemished

Mitch McConnell Wants to Open a Giant Loophole for Superrich Donors. Harry Reid Has Vowed to Stop Him.

by BenedicShultz Posted on December 9, 2014

Mother Jones

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) is vowing to block any effort by his GOP counterpart, Mitch McConnell, to loosen the nation’s campaign finance limits as part of a bipartisan budget deal taking shape in Congress.

Last week, the Huffington Post reported that McConnell, who will take over as majority leader in January, wanted to slip into a major government funding bill a measure that would give presidential and congressional candidates more leeway to coordinate their campaign spending with political parties. Right now, candidates for federal office can coordinate some of their election spending with the parties—but only up to a certain amount. (The limit ranges from tens of thousands to several million dollars, depending on the size of the state’s voting-age population.) Beyond that threshold, parties and candidates can’t coordinate their spending plans, and the parties must spend their funds independently of the candidates they back.

The existing rule is intended to prevent donors from using political parties to skirt legal limits on donations to candidates. As it stands, donors can give up to $5,200 every two-year election cycle to each candidate for federal office. But McConnell’s measure, if enacted, would create a massive loophole in that rule, says Fred Wertheimer of Democracy 21, a group that supports limits on money in politics. If McConnell gets what he wants, rich donors who hit the $5,200 limit could simply route further donations to candidates by giving to political party committees—which may accept far larger donations and could work directly with the candidates to ensure the money was spent as the donors intended. “The practical effort here is to repeal the limits,” Wertheimer says.

McConnell has a broader plan here. Politico recently noted that McConnell is seeking to direct more big money to political parties, as opposed to outside groups such as super-PACs that in theory must remain independent of candidates. In a subsequent interview with Roll Call, McConnell suggested he might not force the issue, saying his proposal is “not on the agenda” but that the coordination limit he wants to eliminate is “an absurdity in the current law.”

That doesn’t mean the plan is dead. Should McConnell reverse course and attach this change to the budget bill, Reid’s office says the majority leader will block such a maneuver. “Reid strongly opposes and will fight against any efforts to include the McConnell measure,” an aide in Reid’s tells Mother Jones.

House and Senate members hashing out the budget bill were expected to release a version of the legislation as early as Monday evening.

Read original article:

Mitch McConnell Wants to Open a Giant Loophole for Superrich Donors. Harry Reid Has Vowed to Stop Him.

Posted in Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Pines, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Mitch McConnell Wants to Open a Giant Loophole for Superrich Donors. Harry Reid Has Vowed to Stop Him.

There Has Been a Fatal School Shooting Every 5 Weeks Since Sandy Hook

by BerniceFavenc Posted on December 9, 2014

Mother Jones

Classes were just about to begin on the morning of October 21, 2013, when 12-year-old Mason Davis heard shots ring out on the basketball court. A teacher lay sprawled on the ground as Davis started to run for the school building. Then he saw his friend and classmate, 12-year-old Jose Reyes. “Please don’t shoot me,” Davis said, “please don’t shoot me.” That’s when Reyes pointed the 9mm Ruger at him and pulled the trigger.

Davis, who was wounded in the abdomen, was lucky to survive the attack at Sparks Middle School in Nevada, as was another student who’d been shot in the shoulder. Forty-five year-old math teacher Michael Landsberry did not make it. Reyes, who reportedly had been bullied and suffered from mental health problems, also used the semiautomatic handgun he’d taken from his parents’ home that morning to put a bullet in his own head.

In the two years since the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut, no school shooting has claimed as many lives, nor ones as young, as on that terrible day. But fatal gun attacks at schools and on college campuses remain a fixture of American life. They have occurred once every five weeks on average since Sandy Hook, including two attacks—one in Santa Monica and another near Seattle—in which four or more victims were killed.

With an investigation drawing on data from dozens of news reports, Mother Jones has identified and analyzed 21 deadly school shootings in the past two years. The findings include:

A total of 32 victims were killed (not including shooters)
11 victims were injured
5 shooters were killed (including four who committed suicide, and one shot dead by police)
The school shootings occurred across 16 states
14 attacks occurred at K-12 schools, and 7 occurred on college or university campuses

During the same period, there have been dozens of other gun incidents on school grounds that caused injuries, as well as seven additional cases where someone committed suicide with a firearm, but no one else died. (See this report from the advocacy group Everytown for Gun Safety, which contains a broad list of firearm incidents at schools.) A handful of the cases we analyzed involved shooters who appeared to have mental health problems, a prominent factor in the mass shootings database we compiled for another investigation. (The attack last May near UC Santa Barbara is not included here because although college students were among the victims it did not take place on campus.) Several other cases appeared related to gang violence or domestic disputes. Though it’s not clear in all cases what type of firearms were used, in several the perpetrators wielded shotguns, semi-automatic handguns, and AR-15-style assault rifles.

A surveillance photo of the shooter entering the Santa Monica College library. Santa Monica Police/ZUMA

Gun violence has regularly been at the political forefront since Newtown. While Congress failed to pass a background check bill four months after the devastation, state lawmakers nationwide approved more than a hundred laws either strengthening or weakening restrictions on firearms in the first year after Sandy Hook alone. Gun rights activists have responded by provoking controversy with open-carry demonstrations, while on the gun-control side, major new players have emerged. Lockdown drills have become common at schools, and many have added armed personnel or even tested active-shooter detection systems that use technology deployed in war zones. In November, for the first time in 15 years, a state decided by popular vote to require universal background checks for gun buyers.

All the same, the toll has gone on, with hundreds of children shot to death, daily violence routinely claiming multiple victims, and mass shootings becoming three times more frequent.

Below is the dataset from the investigation. View it in its entirety by clicking here for the Google spreadsheet. Research was contributed by Mother Jones editorial fellow Bryan Schatz.

For more of Mother Jones’ reporting on guns in America, see all of our latest coverage here, and our award-winning special reports.

Read original article: 

There Has Been a Fatal School Shooting Every 5 Weeks Since Sandy Hook

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Pines, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on There Has Been a Fatal School Shooting Every 5 Weeks Since Sandy Hook

Is the Gates Foundation Still Investing in Private Prisons?

by KentMolloy Posted on December 8, 2014

Mother Jones

One year after Mother Jones reported on multi-million-dollar investments made on behalf of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation that appeared to contradict the foundation’s mission, the philanthropy’s trust will not say if one of its most controversial holdings is still on its books.

In its 2012 tax filing, the Gates Foundation Trust, which manages the foundation’s endowment, reported a $2.2 million investment in the GEO Group, a Florida-based prison company. In its most recent tax forms, the Gates Foundation Trust listed an investment in the GEO Group worth more than $2 million.

In recent years, the GEO Group has faced accusations of detainee abuse and substandard care in multiple states. In 2012, Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Office of Detention Oversight reported that GEO Group’s Adelanto facility near Los Angeles had committed “several egregious errors” in administering medical care to detainees. (GEO Group has repeatedly dismissed allegations of mistreatment.) More recently, a group of former immigrant detainees in Colorado sued the company for making them work around the prison for minimal pay, sometimes under the threat of solitary confinement. (The GEO Group said detainees were working under a “volunteer work program” and that its $1-per-day wages met federal standards.) The Gates Foundation Trust did not respond to requests for comment directed through a foundation spokesperson.

According to the Gates Foundation, Bill and Melinda Gates—the only members of the trust’s board—have defined areas that the trust will not invest in, “such as companies whose profit model is centrally tied to corporate activity that Bill and Melinda Gates find egregious.” Tobacco companies fall into that category.

The trust’s last reported investment in the GEO Group took the form of a $2,148,790 bank loan. (The Gates Foundation Trust did not issue the loan itself. The term “bank loan” refers to a type of corporate debt that companies with low credit ratings occasionally sell through a conventional bank to get extra cash.) The asset was reported in a tax form filed with the Internal Revenue Service this October, but is accurate only through October 2013.

Bank loans can yield higher returns for investors than stocks or bonds, but their ownership is harder to trace independently.

dc.embed.loadNote(‘//www.documentcloud.org/documents/1375145-2013-bmgft-form-990pf-public-disclosure/annotations/191763.js’);

In April, after demanding Gates divest from the GEO Group, supporters of a coalition of immigrant, Native American, and Latino rights groups rallied outside the foundation’s Seattle headquarters. The foundation eventually accepted more than 10,000 petitions from the activists and promised to submit their grievances to the trust.

“Bill Gates needs to be transparent about whether they’re still investing in GEO Group,” says Mariana Ruiz Firmat, managing director for Presente, which organized that protest. “It’s really problematic for the foundation, which claims to invest in communities of color. By investing in GEO Group now or in the past, that goes against communities of color.”

Christopher Petrella, a doctoral student at the University of California, Berkeley, who published a study this year demonstrating that private prisons are disproportionately filled with people of color, sees a similar contradiction between the trust’s investment in GEO Group and its declared mission of “improving the quality of life for individuals around the world.”

“In my estimation, such a contradiction is difficult to justify,” he said in an email.

In an interview with the Seattle Stranger at the time of the April protest, foundation spokesman Jonah Goldman said the staff were sympathetic to the outcry since “everybody at the foundation is deeply committed to social justice and human rights.” Yet, in an instance of what reporter Ansel Herz called “philanthro-splaining,” Goldman rationalized the foundation’s private-prison investments. “The foundation invests in life-saving technologies, in US schools, in making sure people living with AIDS in Africa are less likely to die,” Goldman said. “The trust invests in a lot of things to make sure we have the most money we can have to do that job.”

Last June, after our story ran, the trust pulled its investments in G4S, a United Kingdom-based private security group which operates a number of youth detention centers in the United States, and which had come under fire for maintaining Israeli detention facilities. At the time, a spokesman for the Gates family gave a vague explanation for why the trust had ended its investment: “Like other large foundations, the foundation trust evaluates its holdings regularly, both for performance and fit. As a result of this, the foundation trust no longer holds an investment in G4S.”

The foundation’s investments in the prison industry have been waning. In 2003, three years after the Gates Foundation was formed, tax returns show its trust held more than $23 million in bonds from Corrections Corporation of America and a $7 million bond from Wackenhut Corrections Corporation, GEO’s predecessor. By 2012, the trust had reduced its investment in the GEO Group by 70 percent and no longer retained any investments in CCA.

According to its tax forms, the Gates Foundation’s total assets were worth more than $40 billion in 2013, up from $36 billion at the beginning of the fiscal year. Most of this increase came from investment income.

The Gates Foundation first caught flack over its financial holdings in 2007, when the Los Angeles Times published a major investigation showing that the trust’s investments were actually undermining public health gains it was promoting. A Nigerian boy featured in the story had received Gates-funded polio and measles vaccinations yet suffered from a cough made worse by pollution from an oil refinery owned by the Italian company Eni. The Gates Foundation was one of the company’s investors.

Read article here – 

Is the Gates Foundation Still Investing in Private Prisons?

Posted in Anchor, Casio, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Pines, Radius, Ts Books, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Is the Gates Foundation Still Investing in Private Prisons?