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Photos: Women Who Risked Everything to Expose Sexual Assault in the Military

by PeterOcutw Posted on September 8, 2014

Mother Jones

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Editor’s note: Mary F. Calvert won the 2013 Canon Female Photojournalist Award for this body of work and is showing it at the 2014 Visa Pour l’image in Perpignan, France. Calvert also just won the Alexia Foundation 2014 Women’s Initiative Grant to help fund her related project, Missing in Action: Homeless Female Veterans.

Women in the US military are being raped and sexually assaulted by their colleagues in record numbers. An estimated 26,000 rapes and sexual assaults took place in the military in 2012, the last year that statistic is available; only 1 in 7 victims reported their attacks, and just 1 in 10 of those cases went to trial.

According to mental-health experts, the effects of military sexual trauma (MST) include depression, substance abuse, paranoia, and feelings of isolation. Victims spend years drowning in shame and fear as the psychological damage silently eats away at their lives. Many frequently end up addicted to drugs and alcohol, homeless, or take their own lives.

In 2013, Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) and Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) introduced the Military Justice Improvement Act, which was designed to change the ways the military prosecutes sexual-violence crimes and restricts commanding officer’s power to set aside or overturn convictions for sexual violence. But in March 2014, the bill fell 5 votes short of the 60 required to avoid a filibuster.

In May, the Department of Defense Annual Report on Sexual Assault in the Military for fiscal year 2013 found that reports of sexual assault were up 50 percent. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel has implemented a variety of measures to combat sexual assault, including the examination of gender-responsive and appropriate military culture, a review of alcohol policies and sales, the evaluation and improvement of sexual-assault prevention and response training for commanders, and encouraging more male victims to report sexual assaults.

But the violence of rape and the ensuing emotional trauma are still compounded by what victims see as the futility of reporting the attacks to their commands. Take the case of Kate Weber, who says she was raped one week into an Air Force deployment to Germany when she was 18. After she reported the attack, she says she was stalked and harassed. “I just lost everything,” Weber says. “I know he was a repeat offender the moment he touched me. He was able to get away with it because the chain of command allowed it.”

US Army Spc. Natasha Schuette says she was sexually assaulted by her drill sergeant during basic training and subsequently suffered harassment by other drill sergeants after reporting the assault at Fort Jackson, South Carolina. Schuette’s assailant is serving four years in prison for assaulting her and four other trainees; she says she suffers from PTSD.

While stationed in Bahrain, Brittany Fintel says she was grabbed and pinned down on a bed by a superior. She says she reported the assault and was told she had an “adjustment disorder,” was taken off the ship, and eventually left the Navy due to PTSD. “They kick the victim out. The victim is more fucked up in the head than apparently the rapist,” she says, weeping at her home in San Diego. Her PTSD service dog, Indiana, is never far from her side.

Gary Noling stands in his daughter Carri’s bedroom in Alliance, Ohio, on the anniversary of her death. Noling says Carri Goodwin faced severe retaliation after reporting her rape to her Marine superiors. Five days after going home with a bad-conduct discharge, she died from drinking to excess. “It destroyed my family,” Noling says.

Melissa Bania holds her banner before hanging it on the foot bridge across from the entrance to Naval Station San Diego. Earlier that evening, military sexual-trauma survivors had gathered at Brittany Fintel’s San Diego home to make banners inscribed with their sexual-assault experiences in the Navy.

Jessica Hinves meets with fellow military rape survivors in Biloxi, Mississippi, while her son plays. Hinves was an Air Force fighter jet mechanic and says she was raped by a member of her squadron at Nellis Air Force Base. Her case was thrown out the day before the trial was to begin.

Connie Sue Foss says she was raped while in the Army. She bears scars from punching a window during a PTSD episode and holds a molar she lost from grinding her teeth at night.

Since the assault, Foss says hasn’t been able to hold down a job to care for herself and her daughter.

Kate Weber says she was raped one week into an Air Force deployment to Germany when she was 18 and now suffers from severe PTSD. Here, she carries the uniforms of a fellow military rape survivor whom she’s helping move.

Suzie Champoux mourns the death of her daughter, Army Sgt. Sophie Champoux, who committed suicide under suspicious circumstances after allegedly being repeatedly raped while in the military. Suzie places a picture of her daughter in a display case at her local Veterans of Foreign Wars chapter in Clermont, Florida.

Dr. Nancy Lutwak, a VA emergency room physician in New York, opened up a room just for female vets so they could have a safe place to share their experience of being raped in the military and the health problems they face due to the assaults.

Jennifer Norris says she was drugged and raped after joining the Air Force. In tech school, Norris says, she fought off the advances of other superiors. “It’s like being in a domestic-violence marriage that you can’t get divorced from,” she says. Norris reported the assaults, rape, and harassment and saw her attackers punished—but then says she endured a sustained campaign of retaliation by her peers at work. Now she suffers with PTSD and has become an advocate, counseling MST survivors in Maine.

Tiffany Berkland and Elisha Morrow were sexually harassed by the same man when in basic training after joining the Coast Guard. “He haunts your person by day and your dreams at night,” Morrow says. They did not report the harassment for fear of being kicked out but came forward when they met a third victim. When their case went to trial, they met a fourth young woman who had been raped recently by the same superior. Berkland and Morrow say they’re guilt-ridden for not coming forward sooner.

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) is fighting to take military rape cases outside the chain of command. A recent Senate vote for her proposed Military Justice Improvement Act fell five votes short.

Jennifer Norris testifies on Capitol Hill before a sparsely attended House Armed Services Committee hearing on sexual misconduct by basic training instructors at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio.

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Photos: Women Who Risked Everything to Expose Sexual Assault in the Military

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"I Pay Taxes Out My Ass But They Still Harrass Me": 11 Amazing Songs About Police Brutality

by HalleySapp Posted on August 20, 2014

Mother Jones

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Last Friday, just days after Michael Brown was killed by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, 29-year-old North Carolina rapper J. Cole uploaded the stirring tribute “Be Free” to his SoundCloud, dedicating it to “every young black man murdered in America.” The song promptly went viral.

Protests against the shooting, and police brutality more broadly, already had been gaining steam as the police launched a highly militarized crackdown, and Cole’s timely reaction—in visceral, heartfelt form—struck a chord among people who know what it’s like to be profiled or harassed by law enforcement. As Cole writes in a blog post introducing the track, “That coulda been me, easily. That could have been my best friend.”

Cole is hardly the only one speaking out: Artists as far and wide as Frank Ocean, Big Boi, Moby, John Legend, and Young Jeezy have taken to Twitter and the airwaves in recent days to express their dissent, and Cole is part of a long tradition of musicians who have done so in song. Here are eleven other amazing tracks on the topic of police brutality in America:

1. “Oxford Town,” by Bob Dylan: Dylan wrote this tune in 1962 in response to a magazine solicitation for songs about the admission of James Meredith into the University of Mississippi, its first black student. Covered here by Richie Havens, it makes terse observations about a racist police force that don’t seem too far off today: “Guns and clubs followed him down / All because his face was brown / Better get away from Oxford Town.”

2. “Doo Doo Doo Doo Doo (Heartbreaker),” by The Rolling Stones: “You’re a heartbreaker / With your .44,” Mick Jagger sings of the New York police in this symphonic 1973 double-ballad from the album Goats Head Soup.

3. “Who Got the Camera?” by Ice Cube: Released on the heels of the Los Angeles riots provoked by the beating of Rodney King, Ice Cube narrates the experience of being a black motorist harassed by law enforcement. “Police gettin badder,” he raps. But “if I had a camera, the shit wouldn’t matter.”

4. “Sound of Da Police,” by KRS-ONE: “Whoop, whoop! That’s the sound of the police!” goes the memorable hook off KRS-One’s 1993 debut solo album, Return of the Boom Bap. “After 400 years, I’ve got no choices,” he raps, noting the continuity between slavery and racist policing. “The overseer rode around the plantation,” he raps, while “the officer is off patrolling all the nation.”

5. “The Beast,” by The Fugees: “Warn the town, the beast is loose,” the Fugees sing over police sirens in this 1996 classic. Lauryn Hill, Pras Michel, and Wyclef Jean spit old-school rhymes from gritty “ghetto Gotham,” where “I pay taxes out my ass but they still harrass me.”

6. “American Skin (41 Shots),” by Bruce Springsteen: “41 shots,” goes the chorus to Springsteen’s 2000 tribute to 23-year-old Guinean immigrant Amadou Diallo, shot at that many times by four NYPD officers who killed him outside his Bronx apartment in February 1999. “Well, is it a gun? Is it a knife? / Is it a wallet? This is your life,” he sings, referencing the cops’ purported rationale for the barrage, which began when Diallo reached for his wallet. Backed by the E Street Band, Springsteen mournfully reminds us that “You can get killed just for living in your American skin.”

7. “Made You Die,” by Dead Prez, Yasiin Bey, and mikeflo: Dead Prez’s stic.man, consistently one of hip-hop’s sharpest social commentators, opens this Trayvon Martin tribute with his characteristic community-mindedness: “Now let’s put it all in perspective / Before the outrage burns out misdirected / What can we do so our community’s protected?” The three other MCs join in to flow on what Bey calls a “young black world in a struggle for a survival.”

8. “Don’t Die,” by Killer Mike: Killer Mike has long protested the corrosive effects of racist policing on black communities in his native Atlanta, where his own father was a cop. In this song off his 2012 release R.A.P. Music, Mike works through the nuances of that personal history, acknowledging that while police are often honest, working-class individuals, their institutional role can be insidious. “‘Fuck tha police’ is still all I gotta say,” he concludes, paying homage to the NWA hit from the dawn of gangsta rap.

9. “Stand Your Ground,” by Pharoahe Monch: Here Monch repurposes the name of the Florida law used to justify George Zimmerman’s killing of Trayvon Martin into a slogan for community organizers rallying in the killing’s aftermath. “Get involved, get involved, get involved,” the Queens rapper urges over roaring guitar riffs, soliciting support for the Martin family foundation in its effort to repeal the statutes.

10. “Amerika,” by Lil Wayne: Lil Wayne is a rapper far better known for punch lines than political analysis, but he leaves the puns behind (mostly) in this somber single from last summer. In the video, riot police stand glaring in front of a flag whose stars “are never shining.” Wayne’s “Amerika” is a blighted landscape of foreclosed homes and teargas for which he modifies the patriotic anthem: “My country ’tis of thee / Sweet land of kill ’em all and let ’em die.”

11. “Remove Ya,” by Ratking: In this dance-y, grime-influenced track, the young rap experimentalists reflect on their daily experiences with cops in today’s New York. The song is a upbeat call for community against adversity, featuring rapper Wiki playing off the well-circulated Nation recording of an NYPD officer’s stopping and frisking a guy (“for being a fucking mutt“): “I’m a mutt, you a mutt, yeah, we some mutts.” His companion Hak chimes in with memories of being arbitrarily stopped by an officer: “Hear the ‘whoop whoop whoop whoop, stop don’t move’ / ‘Hands on the hood, you gave me that look, wearing your hood.'”

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"I Pay Taxes Out My Ass But They Still Harrass Me": 11 Amazing Songs About Police Brutality

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The Toxic Algae Are Not Done With Toledo. Not By a Long Stretch.

by AnthonyArevalo Posted on August 6, 2014

Mother Jones

Last weekend, Toledo’s 400,000 residents were sent scrambling for bottled water because the stuff from the tap had gone toxic—so toxic that city officials warned people against bathing their children or washing their dishes in it. The likely cause: a toxic blue-green algae bloom floated over the city’s municipal water intake in Lake Erie. On Monday morning, the city called off the don’t-drink-the-water warning, claiming that levels of the contaminant in the water had fallen back to safe levels. Is their nightmare over?

I put the question to Jeffrey Reutter, director of the Stone Laboratory at Ohio State University and a researcher who monitors Lake Erie’s annual algae blooms. He said he could “almost guarantee” that the conditions that caused the crisis, i.e., a toxic bloom floating over the intake, would recur this summer. But it’s “pretty unlikely” that toxins will make it into the city’s drinking water. That’s because after the weekend’s fiasco, a whole crew of public agencies, from the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency to the US Environmental Protection Agency to the city of Toledo, have been scrambling to implement new procedures to keep the toxins out. “I think they have a pretty good plan in place,” he said. But “you can’t guarantee there won’t be a recurrence because you can’t predict “how bad the concentration of the toxins going into the plant from the lake is going to be.”

Reutter added that he “anticipated” that the new system for protecting Toledo’s would be more expensive than the current one. Back in January, the local paper The Blade reported that Toledo “has spent $3 million a year battling algae toxins in recent years, and spent $4 million in 2013.”

And those hard realities highlight a hard fact about our way of farming: It manages to displace the costs of dealing with its messes onto people who don’t directly benefit from it. The ties between Big Ag and Toledo’s rough weekend are easy to tease out. “The Maumee River drains more than four million acres of agricultural land and dumps it into Lake Erie at the Port of Toledo,” The Wall Street Journal reports. More than 80 percent of the Maumeee River watershed is devoted to agriculture, mainly the corn-soy duopoly that carpets the Midwest. Fertilizer and manure runoff from the region’s farms feed blue-green algae blooms in the southwest corner of Lake Erie, from which Toledo draws its water.

And those blooms don’t just tie up oxygen in water and push out aquatic life, creating dead zones. They also often contain the compound that triggered the water scare: microcystin, a toxin that can cause nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, severe headaches, fever, and even liver damage. Apparently, a particularly noxious chunk of algae floated over Toledo’s water intake equipment, causing the microcystin spike.

Back in early July, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the University of Michigan delivered their forecast for this year’s bloom on the western part of Erie: It would likely be much smaller than it was in 2011, when a record 40,000 metric tons of cyanobacteria (blue-green algae) accumulated, but likely much higher than the past decade’s average of 14,000 metric tons—the researchers forecast a 2014 bloom weighing in at 22,000 metric tons. The blooms don’t peak until September, which is why Reutter is convinced that the condition that created last weekend’s troubles will likely re-emerge.

Here’s a chart from the report:

Chart: NOAA and University of Michigan researchers

The bottom half of that chart tracks the flow of phosphorus, the component of fertilizer and manure that triggers freshwater algae blooms, into Lake Erie. Of course, farm runoff isn’t the only way phosphorus makes its way into the lake. Municipal sewage and industrial waste play a role, too. But reforms imposed by the Clean Water Act in 1972 minimized those sources, pulling Lake Erie from the brink of death.

The below chart, taken from a 2013 Ohio Lake Erie Phosphorus Task Force report, shows the sources of Lake Erie phosphorus over the past several decades. Under pressure from the Clean Water Act, pollution from “point” sources like wastewater treatment plants and factories have been severely curtailed. But the CWA doesn’t regulate “non-point” sources, mainly agriculture. “Harmful algal blooms were common in western Lake Erie between the 1960s and 1980s,” the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration notes. “After a lapse of nearly 20 years, blooms have been steadily increasing over the past decade.”

Chart: Ohio Lake Erie Phosphorus Task Force

Climate change plays a role, too—both because longer, warmer summers give algae more time to build up, and because warmer mean temperatures are also likely driving a steep increase of heavy rains in the Upper Midwest, which force more phosphorus off farm fields and into waterways. Changes in the way farmers apply fertilizers are also apparently making phosphorus more mobile as this 2012 article by Jessica Marshal for the Food and Environment Reporting Network shows.

Of course, western Ohio isn’t the only Corn Belt region encountering toxic algae. “A reported chemical spill on the Des Moines River above Saylorville Lake Wednesday turned out to be a blue-green algae bloom,” the Iowa Department of Natural Resources reported in late July. More recently, the Army Corps of Engineers issued an advisory against swimming in two beaches of Lake Red Rock, Iowa’s largest lake, “in response to the presence of a significant blue-green algae bloom which has the potential to impact the health of humans and their pets.”

The web site Toxic Algae News tracks blooms nationwide. Here’s its latest map. Red pins in a state mean harmful algal blooms recur annually in “many” lakes; orange pins mean they recur in one or two lakes.

And phosphorus isn’t the only fertilizer component that feeds algae blooms. Nitrogen does to saltwater what phosphorus does to freshwater—and every year, the Mississippi River carries titanic amounts of nitrogen into the Gulf of Mexico, more than half of which comes from corn and soy farms. These flows feed a vast algae bloom that creates an aquatic dead zone that can reach the size of New Jersey—blotting out a wild, abundant source of high-quality seafood, in order to grow crops that mainly go to feed livestock, cars, industrial cooking fats, and sweeteners. This year’s dead zone clocks in at 5,008 square miles—”area roughly the size of Connecticut and is three times larger than the 2015 goal established by a task force specifically created to address the problem,” the Mississippi River Collaborative announced Monday.

Such sacrifices are what economists call “externalities”—the costs of doing business that don’t show up on the bottom lines of farmers, or the companies that buy their goods for animal feed and ethanol, or the firms that sell them the seeds, pesticides, and fertilizers that facilitate mass monocropped plantings.

Residents of places like Toledo are left holding the bag. Many people there are questioning the safety of their water supply and turning to pricey bottled water instead, USA Today reports. And now, the city’s taxpayers (or some public entity) will likely be paying more than ever to keep algae toxins out of the tap water.

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The Toxic Algae Are Not Done With Toledo. Not By a Long Stretch.

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Making School Lunch Healthy Is Hard. Getting Kids to Love It Is Harder. This Lady Did Both.

by Rosella60F Posted on July 18, 2014

Mother Jones

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Striding past samples of Pop Tarts and pizza and cookies, Jessica Shelly made a beeline for a booth selling individually packaged sliced fruits and veggies. She picked up a pouch of sliced mangos and let out a yelp of delight. “This could be really fabulous,” she said. “I’m thinking yogurt. I’m thinking granola. I’m thinking make-your-own breakfast parfait!” She waved the peaches around in the air triumphantly. People began to give us odd looks.

Before meeting Shelly, I hadn’t known it was possible to muster quite this much enthusiasm for sliced peaches. Then again, someone with any less energy probably wouldn’t be able to do Shelly’s job: As the director of food services for Cincinnati’s public schools, she is wholly responsibly for providing nutritious breakfast, lunch, and snacks to 34,000 public school students, three-quarters of whom are on free or reduced-price meals.

Here in the exhibition hall at the annual conference of the School Nutrition Association (SNA), the group that represents the nation’s 55,000 school food professionals, Shelly wasn’t the only one with a tough job—all 6,500 attendees had their work cut out for them. They had to find food that would appeal to kids, otherwise it would go right from a child’s tray to the garbage can. The food must be easy to prepare; some school kitchens are too small to do anything more than heat up a prepared meal. It also has to be very, very cheap. Most of the nutrition directors told me that once they pay overhead costs, they are left with only a dollar or two per student.

This month, their job got harder still. A new set of federal nutritional standards—including a requirement that students must take a fruit or vegetable with lunch and a rule that 51 percent of a food’s grains must be whole—went into effect on July 1. Even stricter rules are coming: Later this year, the whole grain requirement will be raised to 100 percent, and the sodium limit will be reduced. (Read Mother Jones‘ Alex Park’s guide to the food companies that lobbied on the new rules here.)

The School Nutrition Association supports some of the changes that have already been implemented—the 51 percent whole grain rule, for instance, and the stipulation that only skim milk can be flavored. But it opposes others, such as the fruit or vegetable requirement, and the increase to 100 percent whole grains.

Patti Montague, the School Nutrition Association’s CEO, blamed the rules for a 1.2 million-student decline, since 2011, in daily cafeteria attendance. “It got to the point where we felt like we needed to do something,” she told me. “We’re looking to get some flexibility for our members.”

Some of the school food directors I talked to echoed Montague’s concerns. Yvette Burrows, from Picayune Memorial High School in Mississippi, worries that her students will turn their noses up at unfamiliar foods. “It’s not that we don’t try to get them to try it,” she said. But most of them end up not liking the healthy stuff they’re required to taste.” Earlier this year, when her kitchen switched its biscuit dough from white to whole grain, students were not pleased. “One white biscuit is not going to make them unhealthy,” she said.

But Shelly has found that with a little creativity, it’s possible to tempt kids to the lunchroom. Ohio tightened its nutrition standards several years ago, so Shelly has had some time to develop tricks. One winning strategy, she says, is to encourage kids to personalize their meals. She worked with her produce distributor to create affordable salad bars, where kids can load up on the veggies they like. She also installed spice stations—think ranch, lemon pepper, and hot chili—so that kids could decide how to season their food. One day a week, she invites teachers into the lunchrooms to model healthy eating. On these mentoring days, teachers eat free.

Another part of the job, she says, is marketing. She regularly asks students to score foods served in the cafeteria. When she changed the name of a sandwich from “chicken patty on a whole grain bun” to “oven baked chicken sandwich,” the students scored the sandwich three points higher on average. She also made lunchrooms more inviting, ditching the long tables for booths she picked up for cheap at restaurants that were going out of business. During a conference session she led, she underscored the importance of letting parents know that healthy food was available at school. “They don’t know,” she said. “They think we’re feeding them carnival food. They think I’m making mystery meat in the back kitchen with road kill.”

Her tactics seem to be working. While the rest of the nation’s lunchrooms have seen historic declines in attendance over the last few years, cafeterias in Shelly’s program have actually grown more popular—and turned a $2.7 million profit.

Similarly, Steve Marinelli, a school food director from a rural Vermont district where 43 percent of the students are on free or reduced lunch, told me his schools “had no problems whatsoever implementing the new changes.” He attributed the success to partnerships with nutrition-education nonprofits that offer taste tests of healthy foods in classrooms to help get students used to unfamiliar flavors. Marinelli believes that it takes time to change a child’s diet, and that schools shouldn’t be forced to implement the new changes too quickly. But “I think SNA has to fix their PR. They are so negative about these standards.”

Indeed, when I suggested to SNA’s Montague that maybe the students just needed more time to get used to the new foods—and maybe the cafeterias needed a few years to figure out how to make the healthier options appealing—she shook her head. “They don’t have enough money to wait for kids to get used to these new regulations,” she said. “Where is that money going to come from when the kids aren’t going to the lunchroom anymore?” And “even if you got all the money it wouldn’t solve all the problems,” she said. “Kids want what they have at home.”

The conference’s exhibition hall certainly reflected Montague’s belief. As I reported earlier this week, it was filled with new food formulations that follow the letter of the law, but offer little by way of nutrition: 51 percent whole grain funnel cakes and Rice Krispies Treats, for example.

A display of Pop Tarts in the conference’s exhibition hall Photo by Kiera Butler

I asked SNA spokeswoman Diane Pratt-Heavner whether the group had considered limiting junk food. “Exhibit floors in general reflect a vast array of company sizes and offerings,” she responded via email. “Exhibitors were required to only offer items that meet USDA regulations for Child Nutrition programs.”

Shelly isn’t giving up, though. The first time her cafeterias served chicken nuggets breaded with whole-wheat flour, the kids thought something must have gone terribly wrong in the kitchen. “They went back into the lunch line and said, ‘you burnt these,’ Shelly said. “Practically all the nuggets ended up in the garbage.” Undaunted, she scoured her suppliers for an alternative and finally she found a nugget with a lighter-colored breading. It also happened to contain whole-muscle meat instead of processed chicken parts.

“Some people think making kids eat healthy food is an impossible task,” she says. “I think it’s an opportunity.”

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Making School Lunch Healthy Is Hard. Getting Kids to Love It Is Harder. This Lady Did Both.

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This GOP Regulator Questioned Energy Companies—So They Spent Almost $500,000 to Defeat Him

by NickolasPaz Posted on July 15, 2014

Mother Jones

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Terry Dunn, a top Alabama utility regulator, is an EPA-bashing, fossil-fuel-boosting, dyed-in-the-wool Republican. Or so he thought. But last year, he tried to convince his colleagues on the three-member Alabama Public Service Commission to discuss lowering customer payments to Alabama Power, the state’s largest utility. Now he is the target of an unprecedented half-million dollar campaign, led by Alabama’s powerful coal lobby, to boot him out of office.

“I’ve been a delegate to the last three Republican presidential conventions,” Dunn says. “I’m about as Republican as my opponent—or more so. ‘Environmentalist’—in Alabama, that’s code to damage me. I’ve been fighting Environment Protection Agency regulation since the day I got into office.”

John Archibald, a political commentator for Al.com, agrees with Dunn’s self-assessment: “Dunn’s a good old boy. He asked hard questions, and kind of got punched for it.”

The energy industry’s chosen candidate is Chris “Chip” Beeker, a Republican challenging Dunn in the GOP primary. And there is no mistaking Beeker for an environmentalist: On his campaign website, Beeker claims the planet is cooling, not warming. “The so-called ‘climate change crisis’ is about as real as unicorns and little green men from Mars,” he says.

Beeker’s backers in Tuesday’s race include Drummond Co., a global coal giant headquartered in Birmingham, which has given him $50,000; R.E.M. Directional, a drilling company near Tuscaloosa that donated $20,000; and ENPAC, a political action committee connected to the Alabama Coal Association that gave him $38,000. Two trade groups, the Alabama Coal Association and Manufacture Alabama, have endorsed Beeker, and big-name Republicans, including former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, have hosted fundraisers for him.

Beeker was the leading vote-getter in the first round of the primary, which was held on June 3, taking 39 percent to Dunn’s 33 percent. A runoff, scheduled for Tuesday, will determine the winner, as there is no Democrat running for the seat.

Dunn’s troubles started in January 2013, when he proposed holding a formal meeting to examine Alabama Power’s rates. The utility, which has a monopoly on the Alabama grid, charges customers more and has larger profit margins than utilities in surrounding states.

“From that point on, Dunn was declared an environmental wacko—and there is a concerted effort to paint him that way,” Archibald says. “But he’s not a tree-hugger. Under normal circumstances, you’d consider him far to the right.”

Dunn had antagonized the coal industry before he called for the meeting, by pushing utilities to increase their use of natural gas, a cheaper alternative to coal, in order to bring down energy prices. But proposing talks about rate reductions escalated the dispute. Coal miners filed ethics complaints against Dunn’s staff, and critics slammed him as a Republican in Name Only and environmentalist. Dunn tells Mother Jones that a man who identified himself as a private investigator—Dunn never found out who employed him—followed his car home from a commission meeting and photographed his chief of staff at home.

Dunn’s colleagues issued fiery, public denunciations of his proposal to consider cutting rates. Twinkle Cavanaugh, the commission president, said talking about rate reductions would allow “environmental extremist groups” to “trot out their fancy San Francisco environmental lawyers and junk science hucksters to make what amounts to a legal, judicial case against coal production within our borders.” She said Dunn’s proposal was orchestrated by environmentalists “hiding behind a curtain like the Wizard of Oz.”

The commission eventually held an informal meeting and approved changes to Alabama Power’s rate formula that Dunn denounced as weak.

To call Dunn’s proposal an attack on coal is preposterous, Archibald says—Alabama Power isn’t strictly a coal utility, and it imports a lot of coal from out-of-state. “But it seemed to work in getting the industry riled up,” he says. Utilities, such as Alabama Power, can’t spend money in Public Service Commission races. But energy wholesalers, including the companies lined up against Dunn, face no such restriction.

Dunn tells E & E News that some donors who previously supported him have abandoned him out of fear of industry backlash. He has not exactly made things easy on them: In February, he called for a bill to ban coal, gas, and electricity companies from donating to Public Service Commission candidates in future elections. The bill failed.

Alabama Power did not reply to requests for comment, but a spokesman previously told AL.com that the company had not become involved in the race. Beeker did not reply to messages left with his campaign and Beeker Catfish & Cattle Farms. Twinkle Cavanaugh, Drummond Company, Manufacture Alabama, and the Alabama Coal Association did not reply to requests for comment.

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This GOP Regulator Questioned Energy Companies—So They Spent Almost $500,000 to Defeat Him

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Race and Republicans in Mississippi’s Senate Primary

by LaneGanttl Posted on June 25, 2014

Mother Jones

In yesterday’s primary election in Mississippi, incumbent Thad Cochran appealed to black voters in his race against Chris McDaniel. This is from a New York Times companion piece to their main reporting on the election:

The former mayor of Belzoni, an early focal point of the civil rights movement was not surprised by African-Americans’ enthusiasm for Mr. Cochran. The returns showed that Humphreys County, a predominantly African-American area, went for the senator, 811 to 214. “Cochran has been very responsive to the community, to the constituency and the state regardless of race,” he said.

….Race relations have improved over the last 45 years, and African-Americans made a coordinated effort to keep Mr. Cochran in office out of concern that his challenger, Chris McDaniel, a Tea Party favorite, would be less inclusive.

McDaniels is crying foul because he thinks Cochran won with the help of liberal Democratic voters—as he’s allowed to do in Mississippi’s open primary system. Ed Kilgore is unimpressed:

The kvetching from the Right last night sounded an awful lot like southern seggies during the civil rights era complaning about “The Bloc Vote”….For all the talk last night of “liberal Democrats” being allowed to determine a Republican primary, there’s actually no way to know the partisan or ideological identity of voters in a state with no party registration (as David Nir pointedly asked this morning, why hasn’t Chris McDaniel sponsored a bill to change that in his years in the state legislature?). So what these birds are really complaining about is black participation in a “white primary.” This is certainly not an argument consistent with broadening the appeal of the GOP or the conservative movement.

I don’t doubt for a second that race played a role here, but I think this is a mite unfair. In 2012, Mississippi blacks voted for Barack Obama over Mitt Romney by 96-4 percent. In 2008, they voted for Democrat Ronnie Musgrove over Republican Roger Wicker 92-8 percent and for Democrat Erik Fleming over Thad Cochran 94-6 percent. (Mississippi had two senate races that year.)

Cochran did nothing wrong in yesterday’s election, and if blacks showed up to support him because they disliked McDaniels’ racially-charged past, that’s democracy for you. Still, I think it’s pretty clear that most of these voters really were Democrats. Race may be an underlying motivation for the complaints from McDaniels’ supporters, but conservative dislike of Democrats voting in a Republican primary is also a motivation. (And, in my view, a legitimate one. I’m not a fan of open primaries.)

That said, if tea party types want to avoid accusations of racism, they should steer clear of things like loudly announcing an Election Day program to send teams of “poll watchers” to majority black precincts. Especially in a state with a history like Mississippi’s, it’s pretty hard to interpret that as anything other than a deliberate racial provocation.

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Race and Republicans in Mississippi’s Senate Primary

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Mississippi May Become the First State Since Roe v. Wade to Be Without a Single Abortion Provider

by HelaineAtchison Posted on April 28, 2014

Mother Jones

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Mississippi’s sole abortion clinic, the Jackson Women’s Health Organization, has been on the brink of closure since 2012, when state legislators passed a law specifically designed to shut it down. On Monday, abortion rights advocates will argue before a federal court in a final attempt to block the law and keep Mississippi from becoming the first state in 41 years—since Roe v. Wade—to be without a single legal abortion provider.

And the odds don’t look good.

The law, HB 1390, requires abortion providers to have admitting privileges at a local hospital or face criminal penalties. Obtaining admitting privileges, however, poses an impossible burden, since most of Mississippi’s providers travel to Jackson from out of state and local hospitals have all refused to be associated with abortion.

Abortion rights advocates have managed to keep the doors of the Jackson Women’s Health Organization open since 2012 through a series of court battles. In summer 2012, a judge blocked the law’s penalties from going into effect while providers begged local hospitals to give them admitting privileges. In April 2013, after all seven local hospitals turned the clinic’s doctors down, a federal judge blocked the relevant part of the law, saying that it would “result in a patchwork system where constitutional rights are available in some states but not others.”

But the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, which is hearing arguments from lawyers for the Jackson Women’s Health Organization, is likely the end of the line. Short of intervention from the US Supreme Court, a three-judge panel for the Fifth Circuit will have the final word on whether Mississippi’s law will take effect.

And the court has not been friendly to abortion rights in the past. The Fifth Circuit is the same venue where a three-judge panel upheld a very similar Texas law, made infamous by state Sen. Wendy Davis’s filibuster, in March. Appeals courts in the Fourth and Eighth Circuits have upheld admitting privilege laws, too.

In the years since HB 1390 passed, the Jackson Women’s Health Organization did not fail to get admitting privileges for lack of trying. (The health clinic already had a patient-transfer agreement with an area hospital for rare cases in which a patient required hospitalization.) As Mother Jones detailed in 2012:

The doctors’ applications have been rejected by every hospital they’ve approached. Two hospitals wouldn’t let them apply at all. Five others denied the applications for “administrative” reasons, before even completely reviewing the doctors’ qualifications. Their rejection letters cited their policies regarding abortion and “concern about disruption to the hospital’s business within the community.” The clinic wrote follow-up letters to make sure the hospitals understood that the doctors were only seeking privileges to comply with the new law and wouldn’t actually be providing abortions at the hospital, but no dice.

The problem isn’t just that hospitals don’t want to become targets for anti-abortion protests. Abortion clinics simply don’t admit enough women to hospitals to meet the usual requirements for admitting privileges.

“Women across the state will be plunged back into the dark days of back-alley procedures that Roe was supposed to end” if HB 1390 goes into effect, Julie Rikelman, the attorney for the Jackson Women’s Health Organization, said Monday. “The devastating impact of this unconstitutional law couldn’t be clearer.”

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Mississippi May Become the First State Since Roe v. Wade to Be Without a Single Abortion Provider

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BP claims mission accomplished in Gulf cleanup; Coast Guard begs to differ

by MayeskiLatouf679 Posted on April 18, 2014

BP claims mission accomplished in Gulf cleanup; Coast Guard begs to differ

By

Katherine Welles / Shutterstock

BP this week metaphorically hung a “mission accomplished” banner over the Gulf of Mexico ecosystems that it wrecked when the Deepwater Horizon oil well blew up and spewed 200 million gallons of oil in 2010. Funny thing, though: BP isn’t the commander of the cleanup operation. The Coast Guard is. And it’s calling bullshit.

Here’s what BP said in a press statement on Tuesday, nearly four years after the blowout: “The U.S. Coast Guard today ended patrols and operations on the final three shoreline miles in Louisiana, bringing to a close the extensive four-year active cleanup of the Gulf Coast following the Deepwater Horizon accident. These operations ended in Florida, Alabama and Mississippi in June 2013.”

Helpful though it may have seemed for BP to speak on behalf of the federal government, the Coast Guard took some umbrage. From The Washington Post:

Coast Guard Capt. Thomas Sparks, the federal on-scene coordinator of the Deepwater Horizon response, sought to stress that the switch to what he called a “middle response” process “does not end cleanup operations.”

“Our response posture has evolved to target re-oiling events on coastline segments that were previously cleaned,” said Sparks. “But let me be absolutely clear: This response is not over — not by a long shot.”

The Gulf Restoration Network tried to explain the semantics behind BP’s deceptive statement. “When oil washes up on shore, BP is no longer automatically obliged to go out there and clean up the mess,” spokesperson Raleigh Hoke said. “Now the onus is on the public, and state and federal governments to find the oil and then call BP in.”

We get why BP would wish that the cleanup were over. The efforts have already cost $14 billion — a fraction of the $42 billion that the company expects to pay out in fines, compensation claims, and other costs related to the Deepwater Horizon disaster. It’s a nightmare that we all wish were over — but wishes and rhetoric do not remove poisons from an ecosystem.


Source
Active Shoreline Cleanup Operations from Deepwater Horizon Accident End, BP
Is gulf cleanup over or not? BP and Coast Guard differ, The Washington Post

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

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No, We Should Not Arrest Climate Deniers

by KrystynaWroblew Posted on April 1, 2014

Mother Jones

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Should politicians and pundits who deny climate change be held criminally liable for the misinformation they spread? Gawker‘s Adam Weinstein—our friend and former colleague—thinks so, and has called for the arrest of outspoken deniers. “Those denialists should face jail,” Weinstein writes. “They should face fines. They should face lawsuits from the classes of people whose lives and livelihoods are most threatened by denialist tactics.”

Predictably, the denier crowd isn’t buying the argument. A post on the Heartland Institute’s website links Weinstein to “liberal fascism”: “Liberals who are that soaked in the ideology of catastrophic man-caused global warming are fascists. Full stop.” Even those normally on Weinstein’s climate-change-believing side are pouring scorn in the comments section: “I also want a unicorn. One that shoots rainbow-colored lasers out of its ass. Since, y’know, we’re talking about wish-fulfillment that will never, ever happen.”

So who’s right? Much as we like the spirit of Weinstein’s argument, ultimately, we disagree with its premise. Here’s why:

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No, We Should Not Arrest Climate Deniers

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Can we eat our way out of the invasive carp problem?

by NJQDenniswgtup Posted on March 25, 2014

Load of carp

Can we eat our way out of the invasive carp problem?

By

James

Humans did in the dodo; annihilated the Great Auk; likely mowed down the moa; and definitely pwned the passenger pigeon. What can we say? We were hungry.

But what if we used the power of our collective munchies to SOLVE problems, rather than cause them? As NPR reported yesterday, entrepreneurs along Midwestern waterways are trying to turn back the tide of invasive Asian carp by frying them in breadcrumbs — or at least by convincing someone else to.

Asian carp breed like rabbits and are about as popular on contemporary American dinner plates (though broiling Bugs gets plenty of media coverage, the nation isn’t exactly lapin it up). They slipped into our rivers in the ’70s and can now be found all along the Mississippi River watershed, throughout a dozen states. In some places, the fish’s density is as high as 13 tons per mile. Picture that load of carp.

The two species of invasive carp — silver and bighead — have been found within 50 miles of the Great Lakes (if they haven’t already made it there). If these big breeders-and-feeders get into the lakes, they could cause big problems by crowding out many of the other species there. And did we mention that Asian carp are known for leaping out of the water when frightened, like by a boat motor? The region’s spendy tourism and fishing industries could take a carp to the face, literally. (“Oh crap, they hurt!” says one expert.)

In the U.S., these fishy invaders are more likely to be processed for fertilizer and pet food than fancy hors d’oevres, though one Kentucky fisherman has suggested we split the difference and sell carp in school lunch programs. (Apparently, they’re rather bony, and don’t make for good sliders.)

But until the grade-schoolers start doing their part, our best hope may lie back in the direction from whence they came. One company in Kentucky is gutting and freezing whole carp to sell to China, where they are considered a delicacy. More than 500,000 pounds have already been successfully — and, we hope, tastily — repatriated.

This is not the first time someone has suggested battling voracious invaders with our own infamous voraciousness. And carbon-footprint-wise, it would be better if we could solve the carp problem within our own borders, which means Americans might need some palate-expanding. Well-known alien-eater Jackson Landers promises that carp taste just like cod or haddock (read: fry them) and sustainable sushi whiz Bun Lai pairs them with scallions and fish sauce (the name of the roll? Carpe Diem, of course).

Besides providing fertile territory for puns, invasive species do take a real toll on the economy. From Outside:

A decade ago, researchers estimated the annual cost of invasive species in America at $120 billion, which is more than the U.S. spends to maintain its roads. And that includes only measurable items — such as crop losses, the $1 billion municipalities spend each year to scrub zebra mussels out of their water pipes, and so on. Ecological costs are harder to quantify but staggering: Nearly half the species on the U.S. threatened and endangered species lists were put there by invaders.

Elsewhere, foreign palates are learning to crave the taste of invaders from America (the non-human kind). An invasion of New England slipper shells in France has at least one intrepid chef putting aside the escargot in favor of these sea snails, tastily re-branded as the “berlingot” or candy of the sea. If French culinary snobs can swallow enough sea candy to save their bays, I think I can manage an order of carp and chips. (Python and kudzu may be a thornier problem, but never underestimate the power of a nice beer batter.)

Amelia Urry is Grist’s intern. Follow her on Twitter.Find this article interesting? Donate now to support our work.Read more: Food

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Can we eat our way out of the invasive carp problem?

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