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Watch Activists Dangle Off a Portland Bridge to Block Shell’s Arctic-Bound Ship

by EnidOconnor7039 Posted on July 30, 2015

Mother Jones

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Environmental activists have taken to kayak, chain, and even rocking chair to slow down Royal Dutch Shell’s plans to drill for oil in the Arctic this summer. For the past two days, they took their protest to a new extreme. Early Wednesday morning, around a dozen Greenpeace activists rappelled off a bridge over the Willamette River in Portland, Ore. to stop a Shell ship stationed there for repairs from returning to the Arctic. This morning, it appears they caused the ship to turn around after it tried to rejoin Shell’s fleet in the Arctic’s Chukchi Sea.

The ship, called the MSV Fennica, went all the way up to the Arctic only to find a 39-inch-long gash in its side. The damage was so serious, the ship had to travel all the way back to Portland for repairs. The Fennica is an icebreaker, but also carries Shell’s capping stack, needed to stop an underwater well leak; Shell can’t begin its exploring until the Fennica and its equipment is back and functioning in the Arctic.

In an effort to stop it from rejoining Shell’s fleet in the Chukchi Sea, and delay the oil giant’s drilling plans there, Greenpeace organized protestors to dangle from Portland’s St. John’s bridge and physically stop the ship from traveling down the Willamette River and back out to the Pacific. We reached out to Shell to confirm if the protestors have affected the Fennica’s schedule, but have not heard back.

Below, we collected some Twitter photos of the dramatic protest:

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Watch Activists Dangle Off a Portland Bridge to Block Shell’s Arctic-Bound Ship

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Pope hangs out with mayors, gets them to make climate pledges

by Carson Silverman Posted on July 21, 2015

Pope hangs out with mayors, gets them to make climate pledges

By on 21 Jul 2015commentsShare

Sixty mayors from around the world met with Pope Francis at the Vatican on Tuesday to discuss climate change. The leaders of American cities including New York, San Francisco, New Orleans, and Boston stood in line with officials from Stockholm, Madrid, and Vancouver to pledge, one at a time, to work to cut their cities’ emissions and to help the poor adapt as climate change takes its toll.

The conference was put together by the Vatican in the weeks after the pope released his encyclical on climate change. Its main aim was to draw attention to the potential for crafting a meaningful climate deal during U.N. negotiations in December. “I have a great hopes in the Paris summit,” the pope said in a speech on Tuesday. “I have great hopes that a fundamental agreement is reached. The United Nations needs to take a very strong stand on this.”

But the meeting of mayors was also a recognition that much of the work to fight climate change is taking place at the grassroots level, and that local officials are in a better place to harness that energy than national-level politicians. Cities also have the power to make a substantial difference in the fight against climate change: They’re responsible for 75 percent of global CO2 emissions.

A number of politicians from the United States spoke, including California Gov. Jerry Brown, whose state has taken some of the boldest steps to combat climate change in the country. In a speech, Brown denounced climate deniers who are spending “billions on trying to keep from office people such as yourselves and elect troglodytes and other deniers of the obvious science.”

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio and San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee also spoke, announcing new goals for their cities: NYC will cut its emissions 40 percent by 2030, and San Francisco will have its municipal vehicles running on renewable fuels by the end of the year.

In addition to climate change, the conference sought to address slavery, another human rights issue to which Pope Francis has tried to draw greater attention. Climate change and slavery are more related than they might at first appear, the pope said — they’re both issues that largely affect the world’s poor, and about which U.N. efforts can, in theory, make a difference.

Tony Chammany, mayor of Kochi, a city on India’s western coast, tied these ideas together with examples from his country. Rising seas are “going to pose a big threat to the very survival” of Kochi, he said. Meanwhile, as India experiences increasingly severe weather, many of the country’s poor farmers will leave their land. Some of their families will be “pushed into the dark dungeons of slavery,” Chammany said. India’s poor, he emphasized, will be hit particularly hard by a problem they did little to create.

The testimony, apparently, had an effect. Here’s a tweet from Minneapolis Mayor Betsy Hodges:

New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu, meanwhile, presented his city as a first-world cautionary tale: He observed that while New Orleans’ economy has benefitted from the oil and gas business, “that economic benefit comes at a cost” — the BP oil spill and Hurricane Katrina. “We became a warning to all others that neglect and environmental degradation has consequences,” Landrieu said.

Source:
Pope urges U.N. to take strong action on climate change

, Reuters.

NYC mayor denounces EU over immigration

, The Associated Press.

Mayors, at Vatican, Pledge Efforts Against Climate Change

, The New York Times.

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Pope hangs out with mayors, gets them to make climate pledges

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Fossil fuels are terrible investments, says top energy economist

by AbelMESLimmugw Posted on July 9, 2015

Fossil fuels are terrible investments, says top energy economist

By on 9 Jul 2015commentsShare

A lot of things are better when tapped at the source. Spring water. Maple syrup. Apple advice from the Genius Bar. So when the chief economist at the International Energy Agency warns that you might be making a bad energy investment, it’s worth listening up.

Speaking in Paris today at the largest climate conference before December’s flagship U.N. climate negotiations, Fatih Birol, also the agency’s incoming executive director, dealt some strong words to energy companies and groups invested in fossil fuels. In a nutshell: As climate policies change, fossil fuel investments are likely to tank.

The Guardian reports:

“Any energy company in the world, whatever they do – oil, gas, renewables, efficiency, coal – climate policies will impact their business,” said Birol. “So in order not to make the wrong investment decisions, in terms of making the investment decisions which may not bring the right returns, or in terms of missing investment opportunities, businesses may need to take climate policies and the impact for their businesses more seriously. Without solving the carbon [emissions] in the energy sector, we have no chance to solve the climate change problem.”

The World Bank and Bank of England have already warned of the serious risk climate action poses to trillions of dollars of fossil fuel investments and the G20 is investigating the risks. The think-tank Carbon Tracker has estimated that over $1tn (£0.6tn) of oil investments and $280bn of gas investments would be left uneconomic if the world’s governments succeed in their pledge to limit global warming to 2C.

Also known as stranded assets, these uneconomic investments arise when demand and price drop at the same time — exactly the effect predicted for fossil fuels as the world transitions to a low-carbon economy and regulatory environment.

The business case for fossil fuel divestment and clean energy and infrastructure investment has been made most recently by groups and publications like the New Climate Economy report, Risky Business (convened by billionaire environmentalist Tom Steyer, former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson), and the We Mean Business coalition. You wouldn’t invest in compact discs after witnessing the rise of the iPod, the argument goes. Why invest in fossil fuels when we’re on the edge of a clean energy revolution?

More, from The Guardian:

Professor Frank Geels, from the University of Manchester, told the Paris conference that many technological transitions involve “creative destruction”, with new businesses replacing old ones.

“But we have not focused enough on the destruction part. The fossil fuel companies are some of the most powerful companies in the world and it is going to be very difficult to persuade them to keep it in the ground, but not impossible,” he said. “In many transitions you need to compensate the losers, or they will fight tooth and nail.” Geels cited the example of the Dutch government paying for workers in closing coal mines to be retrained.

Persuasion, compensation, destruction. It’s true that turning the tide is no easy task, but as fossil fuel divestment momentum builds, it will only get easier.

And on the off-chance that you were hinting at creative destruction in “Wrecking Ball,” here’s to you, Miley.

Source:
Fossil fuel firms risk wasting billions by ignoring climate change, says IEA

, The Guardian.

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Want To Get Rich? Become a Water Lawyer in California

by AlissaQdkhqo Posted on June 20, 2015

Mother Jones

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

Want to get rich? Move to California, become a lawyer. Most important, specialize in water, because as the state’s drought drags on, every drop of coastal rain, every flake of Sierra snowpack, and every inch of reservoir water becomes both more valuable and more contested. Before long you’ll start counting rain drops—every one that fails to fall will ring cha-ching.

More MoJo coverage of the California Drought:


7 Key Facts About the Drought


Invasion of the Hedge Fund Almonds


California Is Literally Sinking Into the Ground


Bottled Water Comes From the Most Drought-Ridden Places in the Country


Weather-Sensitive Watering, and 4 Other Simple Fixes for California’s Drought


It Takes HOW Much Water to Make Greek Yogurt?!


California Has Cut Water to Some Farmers. What Exactly Does That Mean?

The latest windfall to California’s legal community came Friday, when the State Water Resources Control Board announced it was cutting certain historical water rights—held by some farmers, communities, and companies for more than a century. In a normal state with a normal drought, this wouldn’t be too much of an issue. But California water policies are so old (and so unsuited to the state’s desert ecosystem) that they might be outside the jurisdiction of the present-day water board. With barely a weekend for curtailment news to simmer, the summer air is already thick with lawsuit rumors.

“California has the most complex system of water rights in the world,” says Buzz Thompson, a legal expert in said system at Stanford University. The state’s problems trace back to its earliest days. In order to take the stress out of drafting up a constitution from scratch, California’s founders adopted English Common Law, and customized it with caveats to fit their needs. Unfortunately, they didn’t bother amending the Common Law rules on water allocations.

The English, and thus Californians today, used a system called riparian law: You are allowed to use a reasonable amount of any tributary, creek, stream, or river that abuts or bisects your land. This worked great in rainy England, veined with waterways. “That type of system of makes no sense in California,” says Thompson, “because there is a lot of land through which no river or stream passes.”

If you want water to run through your land in California, you have to dig a path for it yourself. The necessity of canals and pipes led to an irrigation-based water rights system called prior appropriation. Under this system, you are allocated a reasonable amount water from the source from whence you diverted, as long as you put it to good use.

Here’s where things get ridiculous. The system for establishing rights to those flows was—prior to 1914—absolutely bananas, leading to a lot of inappropriate water usage in a state that was, and remains, essentially a desert.

To lay claim to running water back then, all you had to do was post and record a notice of the diversion. In 1901, the mayor of San Francisco used this law to claim the Tuolumne River by posting a note on a tree. The state finally figured out its own water scarcity in 1914, when it passed a law requiring any new claims to submit an application to a state-controlled board (now known as the State Water Resources Control Board).

Literally kept in an old safe in the back room of an office building in Sacramento, these slips of paper determine how much water each rights-holder is due. More importantly, they determine the order in which the rights holder gets to drink. And that’s determined historically: First in line, first in law. “The whole system was created through action on the ground rather than someone making a legal regime and then codifying the system,” says Leon Szeptycki, the director of the Water in the West program at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment.

Setting up a first come, first serve water system in a desert is pretty insane. (For one thing, it creates an uneven patchwork of water haves and have-nots.) What’s crazier is that political pressures at the time meant the pre-1914 allocation and riparian rights got grandfathered right past the whole thing. That’s right: There are people in California whose right to water came from putting a piece of paper on a tree, and those rights are some of the most senior in the state. And they don’t just belong to people. Corporate farming conglomerates, sprawling rural irrigation districts, several cities, and even the state’s Department of Fish and Wildlife have pre-1914 water rights.

Which brings us to last Friday. This move restricts access to water rights holders whose claims date from 1903 to 1914. (The state had already curtailed all post-1914 rights). Thompson says the agency’s move is both expected and incredibly historic. Expected because without precipitation the state is forced to cut off water from senior rights holders. Historic because the State Water Resources Control Board is a fairly cautious agency that does not like being sued.

“The most important thing about the most recent curtailment order is it reflects the depth of our current drought,” he says. In response to Friday’s announcement, many of the pre-1914 rights holders announced plans to sue the water resource board because their rights predate the existence of the board. In fact, the State Water Resources Control Board’s charter states that it only controls permits that come after 1914.

On the other hand, the board’s charter does not prevent it from curtailing pre-1914 rights, neither riparian nor appropriated. Further, there are several state statutes giving the board the authority to police both reasonable uses of water and illegal diversions. “Those statutes as well as other legislative and legal decisions I think provide the board sufficient authority to issue the type of curtailment orders that they did,” says Thompson.

And as long as the drought continues, these curtailments will continue to reach back in time; all the way to the most senior rights holders, whose allotments trace back to the Gold Rush.

But even though Governor Brown teased an overhaul of the state’s allocation system earlier this year, legal experts doubt this is possible. That’s because California’s water rights knot is enshrined in the state’s constitution. Any challenges would probably have to be backed up at the federal level.

Caught between the calcified reality of the drought and the calcified words in the state’s constitution, the curtailments will probably continue—and the lawsuits will follow. And like we’ve said before, any explanation of California’s drought is always incomplete. Even if the state does win its case, enforcing the curtailments is an entirely different dilemma, with woefully outdated and outclassed methods of tracking water. These conflicts aren’t going away anytime soon. Which reminds me: Feel free to tell your kid to study water law too.

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Want To Get Rich? Become a Water Lawyer in California

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Finally, Conservatives Begin To Back Away From the Confederate Flag

by UlrichLompdh Posted on June 19, 2015

Mother Jones

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The death of nine innocent worshippers may achieve what decades of civil rights activism failed to do: Force South Carolina to remove the Confederate battle flag from grounds of its capitol building.

The Confederate battle flag flew over the capitol dome in Columbia, S.C., from 1962, when the legislature hoisted it as a symbol of defiance against integration, to 2000, when huge protests convinced state lawmakers to move it elsewhere. But it didn’t go far: The flag has flown over a Confederate soldiers’ memorial on the capitol grounds ever since.

The shooting in Charleston is leading to new calls to take down the Confederate flag for good, including one from the mayor of Columbia:

Now we’ve also seen some tentative hints that figures on the right may actually be willing to let that happen:

Nikki Haley

The South Carolina governor infamously called a non-issue during her re-election campaign last year because she “had not had one conversation with a single CEO about the Confederate flag” during calls with business leaders. She also rejected at least one previous call by the NAACP to remove the flag.

But during an interview on Friday with Reuters, Haley seemed open to re-examining the deal that moved the Confederate flag to its current spot

“If they want to have this conversation again, they will,” Haley said of the state legislature. “They had it 15 years ago. They came to a consensus, that’s where it was. I think they’ll have another conversation, and we’ll bring people together.”

Lindsey Graham

Many people, including us, blasted the South Carolina senator and Republican presidential candidate when he told CNN on Friday morning that the flag is “part of who we are” in his state. But he also said he was open to changing the capitol’s awkward compromise on the flag.

“It’s time for people in South Carolina to revisit that decision,” he said. “It would be fine with me.”

During the 2012 GOP primaries, Graham called the use of the flag at the Confederate War Memorial a “bipartisan” solution and advised candidates to avoid the topic altogether. “Any candidate who brought that up wouldn’t be doing themselves any favors,” he said to The Hill.

The National Review

Writers at the conservative magazine—which firmly backed the South’s mantra of states’ rights during the civil rights era—debated the use of the flag on Thursday. Executive Editor Reihan Salam came out firmly against it:

It could be that the Confederate battle flag has come to mean something entirely different in 2015 than it did in the mid-1950s, when it was closely tied to resistance to federal desegregation efforts. But is its value such that we ought to continue giving it quasi-official status, even when doing so alienates the descendants of enslaved southerners, who have just as much claim to deciding which symbols ought to represent southern heritage as the descendants of Confederate veterans? I don’t believe so.

Others were more skeptical: Ian Tuttle argued that “objections to the flag are not raised in good faith” but rather for political gain. But even he then acknowledged that the flag can cause serious harm and offense.

One can recognize, understand, and sympathize with the revulsion symbols of the Confederacy occasion in some quarters, particularly among black Americans — and a compromise should be possible. If reducing the visibility of these symbols would offer relief to those genuinely hurt, and would remove an object of contention keeping persons of different races from cooperating to advance true racial justice, that is something supporters of Confederate symbols should be able to do.

Charlie Baker

The pro-choice, pro-marriage equality Massachusetts governor is hardly an arch-conservative, but his experience on Thursday shows how the shock of the shooting may be acting on politicians. Baker told Boston’s WGBH early on Thursday afternoon that while he was against the flag personally, it was a “tradition” of South Carolina. “My view on stuff like this is that South Carolinians can make their own call,” he said.

Within hours, Baker was backtracking hard. “What were you thinking?” was the message he received from friends, he told the Boston Globe that evening. “I just want to be clear: I abhor the symbolism and the history of that flag as much as anybody, and I am more than cognizant of the fact that literally millions of Americans died over what it represents in the Civil War,” he said. “I think they should take the flag down.”

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Finally, Conservatives Begin To Back Away From the Confederate Flag

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Martin O’Malley Is Running for President. Here’s What You Need to Know

by SUOWinston Posted on May 30, 2015

Mother Jones

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The wait is over. Martin O’Malley is running for president. The former Maryland governor formally kicked off his quest for the Democratic presidential nomination on Saturday in Baltimore, the city he served as mayor for six years. O’Malley, who has been publicly weighing a bid for years, is aiming to present himself as a solidly progressive alternative to former secretary of state Hillary Clinton. But it’s going to be an uphill slog—in the most recent Quinnipiac poll, he received just 1 percent—56 points behind Clinton, and 14 points behind Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who was an independent until he entered the 2016 Democratic contest.

Here are five things you should read about O’Malley right now:

He’s the “best manager in government today,” according to a 2013 profile by Haley Sweetland Edwards at the Washington Monthly:

The truth is, what makes O’Malley stand out is not his experience, his gravitas, nor his familiarity to voters (Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden crush him in those regards). Nor is it exactly his policies or speeches (New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper, both rumored presidential aspirants, have cultivated similar CVs). Nor is it that he plays in a band. Nor is it even the Atlantic‘s breathless claim last year that he has “the best abs” in politics. (Beneath a photo of the fit governor participating in the Maryland Special Olympics’ annual Polar Bear Plunge, the author gushed, “What are they putting in the water in Maryland?”) Instead, what makes O’Malley unique as a politician is precisely the skill that was on display in that windowless conference room in downtown Annapolis: he is arguably the best manager working in government today.

That may not seem like a very flashy title—at first blush, “Best Manager” sounds more like a booby prize than a claim a politician might ride to the White House. But in an era where the very idea of government is under assault, a politician’s capacity to deliver on his or her promises, to actually make the bureaucracy work, is an underappreciated skill.

He pursued a tough-on-crime policing strategy as mayor of Baltimore, according to a recent Washington Post article:

It was as a crime-busting mayor some 15 years ago that O’Malley first gained national attention. Although he is positioning himself as a progressive alternative to Hillary Clinton, O’Malley also touts a police crackdown during his time as mayor that led to a stark reduction in drug violence and homicides as one of his major achievements.

Yet some civic leaders and community activists in Baltimore portray O’Malley’s policing policies in troubling terms. The say the “zero-tolerance” approach mistreated young black men even as it helped dramatically reduce crime, fueling a deep mistrust of law enforcement that flared anew last week when Freddie Gray died after suffering a spinal injury while in police custody.

He’s obsessed with the War of 1812 and discussed said obsession in an interview with the Daily Beast‘s Ben Jacobs last September, after dressing up in an 1812-vintage uniform and mounting a horse:

Win, lose, or draw, O’Malley said he is enthusiastic about the bicentennial and has read up on past commemorations to prepare. He recalled for The Daily Beast a 100-year-old Baltimore Sun editorial about the centennial in 1914 and searched excitedly through his iPad for it. PBS will broadcast the event nationwide on Saturday night, and it will feature what is planned to be the largest ever mass singing of the “Star-Spangled Banner” and an outdoor concert in Baltimore that will include a rock opera about the War of 1812, and O’Malley’s own band, which he referred to simply as “a small little warm-up band of Irish extraction.”

Though he was the model for the character of Baltimore Mayor Tommy Carcetti on the HBO series The Wire, he is not a huge fan of the show or its creator, David Simon, who described an awkward encounter with the governor last year on an Acela train:

This fellow was at the four-top table immediately behind me. I clocked him as we left New York, but as he is a busy man, and as most of our previous encounters have been a little edgy, I told myself to let well enough alone. I answered a few more emails, looked at some casting tapes on the laptop, checked the headlines. And still, with all of that done, we were only just south of Philadelphia.

I texted my son: “On the southbound Acela. Marty O’Malley sitting just behind me,” then joking, “Do I set it off?”

A moment later, a 20-year-old diplomatic prodigy fired back a reply: “Buy him a beer.”

…I stood up, noticed that Mr. O’Malley was sipping a Corona, and I walked to the cafe car to get another just like it. I came back, put it on the table next to its mate, and said, simply, “You’ve had a tough week.” My reference, of course, was to the governor’s dustup with the White House over the housing of juvenile immigrants in Maryland, which became something of a spitting contest by midweek.

Mr. O’Malley smiled, said thanks, and I went back to my seat to inform my son that the whole of the State Department could do no better than he. Several minutes later, the governor of my state called me out and smacked the seat next to him.

“Come on, Dave,” he said, “we’re getting to be old men at this point. Sit, talk.”

Writing for the Atlantic in December, Molly Ball dubbed O’Malley, “the most ignored candidate of 2016.” Another takeaway from the piece, which chronicled his trip to an Annapolis homeless-prevention center that provides job training, might be that he tries too hard:

“I love kale,” O’Malley told the chef, Linda Vogler, a middle-aged woman with blond bangs peeking out from a paper toque who was teaching a cooking class. “Kale’s the new superfood!”

“We’re learning quinoa next,” Vogler said.

“You’re going to teach what? Keen-wa?,” O’Malley asked, genuinely puzzled. “What’s keen-wa?”

“It looks like birdseed,” she replied, hurrying on with the lesson. As the class counted off the seconds it took to boil a tomato, O’Malley changed their “One Mississippi” chant to “One Maryland! Two Maryland!”

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Martin O’Malley Is Running for President. Here’s What You Need to Know

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Mayor: 6 Months Is "an Unacceptably Long Period of Time" to Investigate a Police Shooting

by JesseAunger Posted on May 29, 2015

Mother Jones

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When police officers shoot or kill unarmed civilians, it can take months, even years, for the incidents to be officially investigated and publicly explained. As Mother Jones recently reported, the cop who shot 12-year-old Tamir Rice in Cleveland had yet to be interviewed by investigators, more than six months since Rice’s death. The family of 37-year-old Tanisha Anderson, who died after being restrained by police last November, also in Cleveland, is still waiting for answers.

The case of Jerame Reid has gotten far less attention. Reid was a passenger in a car that was pulled over on December 30, 2014, in Bridgeton, New Jersey. As recorded by the police car’s dashboard camera, two officers approached the car and allegedly found a gun in the glove box. When the 36-year-old Reid tried to get out of the car with his hands apparently up and in front of his chest, the officers opened fire, and Reid died. The officers in the case—Roger Worley and Braheme Days—were placed on paid administrative leave pending the outcome of an investigation.

Nearly six months later, Reid’s family and his community are still waiting for answers. It’s not clear exactly where the investigation stands. Last weekend, a report in the New Jersey Star-Ledger suggested the case had been passed from the Cumberland County Prosecutor’s Office to the New Jersey Attorney General’s Office. A spokesman for the New Jersey AG told Mother Jones that the Cumberland County Prosecutor’s Office is still the lead agency in the investigation and declined further comment. A message sent to the Cumberland County Prosecutor’s Office wasn’t answered.

The wait has been too long, according to Bridgeton Mayor Albert Kelly. In an op-ed published earlier this week, Kelly lays out exactly why the wait in these cases is such a problem:

Six months may not seem like a long time if you’re in the Cumberland County Prosecutor’s Office handling multiple cases, nor would it seem a long time if your view is one taken from the perch of the Office of the Attorney General.

But it is an eternity if you’re the grieving widow and part of a grieving family wanting some sense of closure. It’s also a stunningly long time if you and your family are waiting around day after day to find out your fate and what the balance of the rest of your life might look like.

Beyond that, it may well be an unacceptably long period of time for an entire community waiting to find out what exactly happened to one of its own, for better or for ill, on a cold December night a few days after Christmas, at what began as a routine traffic stop.

The time involved, just like the questions involved, is no small thing because for anyone who cares—for anyone who knows how quickly things can go from zero to sixty in the blink of an eye at what was essentially a routine interaction between a police officer and a citizen—it’s about knowing where the lines are drawn and maybe where they got crossed.

Mayor Kelly’s letter expresses the growing impatience with the slow official responses to police killings that have long been the norm. As David Harris, a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh, explained to Mother Jones reporter Jaeah Lee, recent events have changed the way Americans look at these investigations. “One year ago, we probably did not take a lot of notice,” he says. “It’s only since Ferguson, and especially since North Charleston and Baltimore, that we are seeing cases being evaluated and moved more rapidly.”

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Mayor: 6 Months Is "an Unacceptably Long Period of Time" to Investigate a Police Shooting

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White Police Officer Is South Carolina’s Third Charged in Past Year for Killing an Unarmed Black Man

by DelbertHaskell Posted on April 8, 2015

Mother Jones

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Michael Slager, the North Charleston police officer who on Tuesday was charged with the murder of 50-year-old Walter Scott, is one of at least three white officers in South Carolina over the past year to be charged in the shooting death of an unarmed black man. The South Carolina cases, all of which are ongoing, seem to stand in contrast to proceedings around recent high-profile killings by police in Ferguson, Missouri, New York City, and Cleveland, including the swift reaction by authorities in North Charleston to harrowing footage of Scott’s killing that surfaced Tuesday. “I have watched the video and I was sickened by what I saw,” police chief Eddie Driggers told reporters at a press conference on Wednesday, not long after the city’s mayor announced Slager’s firing.

More MoJo coverage on police shootings:


Exactly How Often Do Police Shoot Unarmed Black Men?


The Cop Who Choked Eric Garner to Death Won’t Have to Pay a Dime in Damages


Philadelphia Cops Shoot and Kill People at 6 Times the Rate of the NYPD


Here’s What Happens to Police Officers Who Shoot Unarmed Black Men


Congress Is Finally Going to Make Local Law Enforcement Report How Many People They Kill


Hereâ&#128;&#153;s the Data That Shows Cops Kill Black People at a Higher Rate Than White People

But data shows that the response to Slager’s case is a rare exception. Between 2010 and 2014, according to Columbia, South Carolina’s the State newspaper, at least 209 suspects were shot at by police in South Carolina, including 79 people who died. In only three of the 209 cases were officers investigated for misuse of force, and none have been convicted. Among the suspects killed, 34 were black and 41 were white (in four cases the suspect’s race is unclear), and about half of all suspects shot were black, according to the data gathered by the State.

This mirrors what we know about the national landscape, although data on officer-involved shootings is far from comprehensive and broad patterns are difficult to discern. As Mother Jones has reported previously, officer-involved killings seldom lead to a charge, let alone a conviction. L. Chris Stewart, an attorney representing the Scott family, told the Los Angeles Times he believed that the video was the only reason Slager is facing charges.

There are key differences between the eyewitness video from Scott’s case in North Charleston and the one that captured Eric Garner’s death in New York, says Delores Jones-Brown, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. The video of Scott’s shooting “makes it almost impossible to claim that the victim was resisting arrest with violence,” she says, or to suggest that the victim’s general state of physical health caused his death, as police did in Garner’s case. The video makes clear that Scott was running away when he was gunned down, she says. “So, where is the threat that would justify such a violent police response?”

Here are the two other recent cases in South Carolina:

In what appears to be a coincidence of timing, on Tuesday a grand jury in North Augusta charged police officer Justin Craven for the February 2014 shooting of Earnest Satterwhite Sr., a 68-year-old black man who’d driven away after Craven tried to stop him for a traffic violation. A prosecutor had sought to charge Craven with voluntary manslaughter, but the grand jury reduced the charge to a misdemeanor: firing a gun at an occupied vehicle. According to a report from the Associated Press, Satterwhite had been arrested and convicted multiple times for traffic violations, including DUIs, but he had no record of violence nor physical altercations with police on his criminal record.

In December 2014, a grand jury indicted former Eutawville police chief Richard Combs for murder in the May 2011 shooting death of 54-year-old Bernard Bailey. Combs had issued Bailey’s daughter a traffic ticket, and when Bailey went to the town hall to contest it, he and Combs got into a physical altercation. Combs shot Bailey twice in the chest. The US Justice Department cleared Combs of criminal wrongdoing in 2013, but last August, after Eutawville agreed to pay a $400,000 wrongful-death settlement to Bailey’s family, a local prosecutor brought the murder case to the grand jury.

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White Police Officer Is South Carolina’s Third Charged in Past Year for Killing an Unarmed Black Man

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Here Are All the Athletes, Celebrities, and CEOs Joining the Indiana Backlash

by LandonNewby Posted on March 31, 2015

Mother Jones

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Miley Cyrus, Apple CEO Tim Cook, and former NBA star Charles Barkley are just a few of the high-profile figures condemning a law signed by Indiana Gov. Mike Pence on Thursday, which critics say will give businesses the option to discriminate against LGBT customers on religious grounds. Here’s a roundup of notable people and groups that have joined the rising backlash, including athletes, celebrities, leaders of Fortune 500 companies, and even city and state governments:

Athletes: A few days before Pence signed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, Jason Collins, the first openly gay active player in the NBA, tweeted his opposition, asking whether he would face discrimination when he visits Indiana for the NCAA’s Final Four. Barkley, who has urged the NCAA to pull the tournament out of the state, said in a statement, “Discrimination in any form is unacceptable to me.” The NCAA has indicated the games will go on as planned, but President Mark Emmert said the league was concerned about how the law might impact student-athletes, and that it would “closely examine” how the bill “might affect future events.” In a joint statement on Saturday, the NBA, WNBA, Indiana Pacers, and Indiana Fever said they would “ensure that all fans, players and employees feel welcome.”

Corporate leaders: Salesforce chief executive Marc Benioff tweeted on Thursday that the tech giant was canceling programs that would require customers or employees to travel to Indiana. The San Francisco-based company bought the Indianapolis-based ExactTarget for $2.5 billion last year. Angie’s List is putting a campus expansion project in Indianapolis on hold, while Yelp’s chief executive Jeremy Stoppelman said it would be “unconscionable” for the company to maintain or expand “a significant business presence in any state that encouraged discrimination.” Apple’s chief executive Tim Cook wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post opposing the legislation, saying that it “rationalizes injustice by pretending to defend something many of us hold so dear.” The chief executives of Gap and Levi’s have also since spoken out against the law in a joint statement.

Celebrities: Ashton Kutcher, Star Trek actor George Takei, Larry King, and columnist Dan Savage have all criticized the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, while Miley Cyrus went as far as calling Pence an “asshole” on Instagram. The band Wilco announced that they were canceling their May 7 show in Indianapolis because of the law, which they described as “thinly disguised legal discrimination.” Parks and Recreation actor Nick Offerman said Tuesday that he was scrapping a scheduled stop in the city as part of his 2015 summer tour.

You’re an asshole @govpenceIN â&#156;&#140;ï¸&#143;-1 cc: the only place that has more idiots that Instagram is in politics @braisoncwukong thank you for standing up for what is right! We need more strong heterosexual men fighting for equality in both men and women! Why are the macho afraid to love muchoooo?!?

A photo posted by Miley Cyrus (@mileycyrus) on Mar 26, 2015 at 1:06pm PDT

State and city governments: On Monday, Connecticut became the first state to join the boycott, with Gov. Dan Malloy signing an executive order prohibiting the use of state funds for travel to Indiana. Washington state soon followed, with Gov. Jay Inslee banning administrative trips there. San Francisco, Seattle, and Portland have made similar pledges, while Indianapolis Mayor Greg Ballard has called on Indiana’s general assembly to repeal the law or add protections for sexual orientation and gender identity.

Conventions: Gen Con, a gaming convention that brings an estimated $50 million to Indianapolis annually, has threatened to pull out of the state. “Legislation that could allow for refusal of service or discrimination against our attendees will have a direct negative impact on the state’s economy, and will factor into our decision-making on hosting the convention in the state of Indiana in future years,” chief executive Adrian Swartout wrote in a letter to Pence before the law was passed. On Monday, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees announced that it was pulling its women’s conference out of Indiana due to the “un-American law” that “sets Indiana and our nation back decades in the struggle for civil rights.” The Disciples of Christ, which has been based in Indianapolis for nearly 100 years, is also weighing the option of moving its biennial convention elsewhere.

Source article – 

Here Are All the Athletes, Celebrities, and CEOs Joining the Indiana Backlash

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How dry is California? So dry that taps might actually stop running

by LatriceNUR Posted on March 18, 2015

How dry is California? So dry that taps might actually stop running

By on 18 Mar 2015commentsShare

Could California really run dry? “It often seems impossible to imagine, but tap water shortages are a distinct possibility if mitigation efforts aren’t embraced and droughts become more frequent and intense in the coming years,” meteorologist Steve Bowen of reinsurance firm Aon Benfield told USA Today.

California’s rainy season is drawing to a close — without the rain its residents had been waiting for. Though some climatologists hoped this year’s El Niño system would make a difference, the state remains horribly parched. The Sierra Nevada snowpack, which normally melts through the summer providing nearly a third of the state’s water, is at its second lowest point on record. “It looks like we are on our way to the worst snowpack in history,” Michael Anderson, the state climatologist, told The New York Times, noting that things look “pretty grim.”

So as the state braces for a fourth year of drought, state regulators on Tuesday imposed new water restrictions, mostly aimed at reminding Californians of the degree of scarcity. For instance, as the AP reports: “Servers in bars, restaurants and cafeterias can’t bring out water with menus and silverware unless customers ask. … The rule is meant to raise conservation awareness more than save water.” The L.A. Times notes that regulators consider this latest round of actions “quite modest.” Some cities, like Los Angeles, already have local rules that are stricter than the new ones being issued by the state.

It’s becoming increasingly clear that the changing climate is in part to blame for the ongoing drought. “The normal cyclical conditions in California are different now from what they used to be,” Noah Diffenbaugh, a senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, told The New York Times. As the years go on and climate change moves forward, severe drought — even multi-decade “megadroughts” — could become the new norm.

No one knows what that might mean for the state’s 38 million residents — and its farmers, who lost $2.2 billion in 2014 alone because of the drought. State and local authorities are already going to extraordinary lengths to get water to residents. Cities and farmers are drilling deep into the ground to tap 20,000-year-old water reserves, dating from the last ice age. That prehistoric water is definitely a limited resource. Santa Barbara is considering using a desalination plant that was built in the 1990s to turn seawater into drinking water, even though the process is so expensive that the plant has never been used. The city’s mayor calls a “last resort.” As the drought continues and extraordinary weather becomes increasingly ordinary, Californians will have to come up with new answers to keep the taps flowing.

Meanwhile, state regulators warn that if local governments don’t step up with their own restrictions, new, stricter state regulations will follow those announced this week.

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How dry is California? So dry that taps might actually stop running

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