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Ask an Expert How to Avoid Exploitive Clothing Companies

by KelliTaxac Posted on January 6, 2014

Mother Jones

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“The supervisors said we would get less work if we slept with them.” That’s what a 19-year-old Indian woman told me this year, about her experience working in a factory that makes products for international clothing companies. She’s one of thousands of “sumangali girls” who take jobs at textile factories under false promises, believing that they will earn enough money for education or a dowry. After traveling to India to learn about the brutal conditions under which sumangali girls work—and getting chased by thugs in the process—it’s been hard for me to shop for clothes in Washington, DC, without feeling guilty. So what’s the solution?

At 11 AM EST on Tuesday, January 7th, I’ll be discussing this question with Sindhu Kavinamannil, a native of Southern India who investigates government contracts for labor violations and served as my translator during my reporting trip, and Elizabeth Cline, author of the 2012 book Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion. We’ll talk about the sumangali scheme, efforts by US clothing companies to reform their supply chains, and tips for American consumers who want to make sure that their clothes don’t support exploitation. Here’s our discussion:

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Ask an Expert How to Avoid Exploitive Clothing Companies

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Did ’60 Minutes’ Drop The Ball Again?

by JuliaPage Posted on January 6, 2014

Mother Jones

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This story originally appeared on The Huffington Post and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

A recent “60 Minutes” segment is drawing sharp criticism for its pessimistic take on the green technology sector, which questioned whether clean tech has become a “dirty word.”

“The Cleantech Crash,” which aired Jan. 5 and can be watched above, argues that renewable energy and other types of clean technology are a dying industry. Critics have called the segment a “hit job,” a “debacle,” an “about face” and even “Dumb & Dumber Part 3.”

One of the biggest issues with the segment, critics charge, is that it conflated the Silicon Valley clean tech venture capital scene with the Department of Energy’s loan guarantee program for renewable energy.

Climate Progress’ Joe Romm contends that CBS missed the point by focusing on the failure rate of private-sector startups and “failed to understand that the successes more than pay for the failures.” It’s worth noting that as many as three-quarters of all venture-backed businesses fail, the Wall Street Journal explained in 2012. Only three in 10 startups in the clean tech sector yield favorable returns for investors, according to a 2004 estimate.

The New York Times recently profiled the US solar industry in a front-page story, noting that companies are benefitting from a “solar power craze that is sweeping Wall Street.” Despite the recent US oil and gas boom, the country “has more than doubled electricity generation from wind and solar” in the past four years, notes the San Jose Mercury News’ Dana Hull.

“If 60 Minutes had taken just two minutes to call us, they could have gotten some of their facts straight,” Ken John, a vice president of the Solar Energy Industries Association, told the Washington Examiner. “In truth, America’s solar energy industry just closed the books on a record-shattering year in 2013.”

The “60 Minutes” segment also focused on the Department of Energy’s loan guarantee program, which has funneled billions of dollars into low-carbon and clean-energy projects since the passage of the Energy Policy Act of 2005. The goal of the program “is not to make money,” Romm notes, but to accelerate the deployment of clean energy technology, while dropping prices and creating jobs.

Jonathan Silver, the former head of the DOE’s loan guarantee program, testified before Congress in 2012 that the portion of grants given to ventures that later failed “represents less than 3% of the total portfolio.” He told Fortune in June that the program “has been a significant success.” “Markets will always have difficulty deploying innovative technologies at scale,” he explained. “Fundamentally, a program like this is necessary to address that market failure.”

Despite the successes of the program and analyses showing its cost-effectiveness for taxpayers, Sunday’s segment focused on two notable failures—automaker Fisker and solar panel manufacturer Solyndra. While interviewing former Energy Department undersecretary Steven Koonin, “60 Minutes” host Lesley Stahl rattled off seven other failures of the DOE program before declaring, “I’m exhausted.” Their focus on those outliers in the DOE program, however, was “both stale and overblown,” GigaOM’s Katie Fehrenbacher argues.

To CBS’ credit, it has been a rocky road for some venture capitalists in the clean technology sector, Fehrenbacher notes. There was a bubble, but “only in the venture capital, Silicon Valley ecosystem,” she explains. “60 Minutes” did itself a disservice by combining the “totally separate and different” stories of venture capital and federal support for green technology. One problem, according to Fehrenbacher is that clean tech is a “convoluted term,” that “can mean many things, and isn’t all that helpful as an organizing group.” The segment makes reference to the “general cleantech area,” while discussing biofuels, solar panels, electric vehicles, and other widely divergent industries.

Critics have also noted that the words “climate change,” “global warming,” “greenhouse gas emissions” or “carbon dioxide” were never uttered in the “60 Minutes” segment.

UPDATE 1:40 p.m.: “Simply put, 60 Minutes is flat wrong on the facts,” US Department of Energy spokesman Bill Gibbons said in an emailed statement. “The clean energy economy in America is real and we are increasingly competitive in this rapidly-expanding global industry. This is a race we can, must and will win.”

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Did ’60 Minutes’ Drop The Ball Again?

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Why Our Debate About Surveillance Doesn’t Go Far Enough

by SadyePereira Posted on January 6, 2014

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

In a 1950s civics textbook of mine, I can remember a Martian landing on Main Street, USA., to be instructed in the glories of our political system. You know, our tripartite government, checks and balances, miraculous set of rights, and vibrant democracy. There was, Americans then thought, much to be proud of, and so for that generation of children, many Martians were instructed in the American way of life. These days, I suspect, not so many.

Still, I wondered just what lessons might be offered to such a Martian crash-landing in Washington as 2014 begins. Certainly checks, balances, rights, and democracy wouldn’t top any New Year’s list. Since my childhood, in fact, that tripartite government has grown a fourth part, a national security state that is remarkably unchecked and unbalanced. In recent times, that labyrinthine structure of intelligence agencies morphing into war-fighting outfits, the US military (with its own secret military, the special operations forces, gestating inside it), and the Department of Homeland Security, a monster conglomeration of agencies that is an actual “defense department,” as well as a vast contingent of weapons makers, contractors, and profiteers bolstered by an army of lobbyists, has never stopped growing. It has won the undying fealty of Congress, embraced the power of the presidency, made itself into a jobs program for the American people, and been largely free to do as it pleased with almost unlimited taxpayer dollars.

The expansion of Washington’s national security state—let’s call it the NSS—to gargantuan proportions has historically met little opposition. In the wake of the Edward Snowden revelations, however, some resistance has arisen, especially when it comes to the “right” of one part of the NSS to turn the world into a listening post and gather, in particular, American communications of every sort. The debate about this—invariably framed within the boundaries of whether or not we should have more security or more privacy and how exactly to balance the two—has been reasonably vigorous. The problem is: it doesn’t begin to get at the real nature of the NSS or the problems it poses.

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Why Our Debate About Surveillance Doesn’t Go Far Enough

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Anatomy of a Smear Gone Very, Very Wrong

by donnajansen Posted on January 6, 2014

Mother Jones

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This note from the Daily Caller is perhaps the most awesome “correction” of the year the month the week:

An earlier version of this article reported claims made in a Princeton student newspaper article that appears to have been fabricated. Kirkpatrick denies the reporting from the Daily Princetonian and The Daily Caller has not been able to confirm it independently.

Reading this, you might think that a Princeton reporter turned out to have made up some facts, and after extensive investigation the Caller has ferreted this out and is letting its readers know. These disputed facts still might be true, mind you, but they can’t confirm them and the Kirkpatrick guy denies them.

Except for a few things:

The source is a spoof issue of the Princeton Daily News from 1990, which contains stories about Elvis, aliens, and the student government embezzling all the student fees and flying off to Rio.
The Caller has “not been able to confirm” its main charge because it didn’t happen.
And the best part: The Kirkpatrick in question is New York Times reporter David Kirkpatrick, who wrote a piece about Benghazi a few days ago that conservatives didn’t like. The Caller’s mistake was made in an attempt to smear Kirkpatrick by claiming that he posed nude for Playgirl 23 years ago.

This is the kind of thing that I’d normally ignore, but it’s just too breathtakingly half-witted to pass by. Does the Caller seriously think that even the part of the story that’s true—that Kirkpatrick streaked through campus as an undergrad—could possibly call his Benghazi reporting into question? This has to be the lamest smear ever, and you, my loyal readers, deserve to know about it. Dave Weigel has all the details if you want to bask in the entire glorious idiocy of the thing.

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Anatomy of a Smear Gone Very, Very Wrong

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Why the Arctic Is Drunk Right Now

by BeauDrewvd Posted on January 6, 2014

Mother Jones

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Perhaps the best analogy yet for the insane cold weather now afflicting the US came from science blogger Greg Laden, who created the viral image above. “Go home, Arctic,” it reads. “You’re drunk.”

When it comes to the reason why the United States is currently experiencing life-threatening cold—with temperatures in the negative-20s in the Upper Midwest, and wind chills much lower than that—that’s actually not so far from the truth. “It’s basically the jet stream on a drunken path going around the Northern Hemisphere,” explains Rutgers University climate scientist Jennifer Francis. In other words, we’re experiencing record-breaking cold temperatures because a wavy and elongated jet stream has allowed frigid Arctic air to travel much farther south than usual.

And according to Francis’ research—which has drawn increasing attention in the past few years—we’re seeing more of just this kind of jet stream behavior, thanks, at least in part, to the rapid warming of the Arctic.*

To understand how it works, it first helps to think of the jet stream as a river of air that flows from west to east in the Northern Hemisphere, bringing with it much of our weather. Its motion—sometimes in a relatively straight path, sometimes in a more loopy one—is driven by a difference in temperatures between the equator and the north pole. Southern temperatures are of course warmer, and because warm air takes up more space than cold air, this leads to taller columns of air in the atmosphere. “If you were sitting on top of a layer of atmosphere and you were in DC, looking northward, it would be like looking down a hill, because it’s warmer where you are,” explains Francis.

The jet stream then flows “downhill,” so to speak, in a northward direction. But it’s also bent by the rotation of the Earth, leading to its continual wavy, eastward motion.

As the Arctic rapidly heats up, however, there’s less of a temperature difference between the equator and the poles, and the downhill slope in the atmosphere is accordingly less steep. This creates a weaker jet stream, a jet stream that meanders more or, if you prefer the new analogy, staggers around drunkenly. “As the Arctic continues to warm, we expect the jet stream to take these wild swings northward and southward more often,” says Francis. “And when it does, that’s when we get these particularly wild temperature and precipitation patterns, and they tend to stay in place a long time.” (For a more thorough explanation, see here.)

That’s not to say the jet stream never staggered around drunkenly in the past. It did. But Francis thinks this is happening more often, and the result is all manner of weather extremes, including both cold snaps and also record heat. (Not every scientist agrees; for the debate over Francis’s work, see here.)

Thus, it is not at all nuts to draw a connection between extreme weather, including extreme winter weather, and climate change. In fact, what would be truly stunning would be if the dramatic warming of the Arctic were not affecting the weather.

* This sentence was updated to reflect Francis’s view that Arctic warming may not be the sole cause of these jet stream patterns.

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Why the Arctic Is Drunk Right Now

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Chart of the Day: American Cars Are Getting Older

by Anatoleia3 Posted on January 3, 2014

Mother Jones

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Americans are keeping their cars longer than ever before. In 2007, the average age of cars on the road was a little over 10 years. Today it’s a little over 11 years.

The proximate cause of this is the Great Recession. If you don’t have enough money to buy a new car, you’re going to keep your car longer. But I wonder how much is the result of cars being more reliable than in the past? My car is nearly 13 years old, and it basically still runs fine. A couple of decades ago, even a Toyota would have been getting a little long in the tooth at that age.

This mainly matters because it has an impact on what happens over the next few years as the recovery (hopefully) picks up steam. New car sales are a prime driver of economic recoveries, and if the aging of the US fleet is producing pent-up demand for new cars, this will help the economy. But if consumers are keeping their cars a little longer because they still run fine, then there might not be as much pent-up demand as we think.

We’ll have to wait and see, because current data is inconclusive. Automakers had a pretty good year in 2013, but they finished up with a tepid December. And the existing fleet continued to age in 2013 despite those strong sales. Considering the higher reliability of modern cars and the weakness of the recovery, I wouldn’t be surprised if car sales in 2014 are OK but not great, and the fleet continues to age a bit.

Originally posted here – 

Chart of the Day: American Cars Are Getting Older

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Movies, Movies Everywhere, But Not a Drop to Watch

by BrandiNic Posted on January 3, 2014

Mother Jones

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Netflix has developed an awesomely sophisticated stockpile of data about what kind of movies people want to watch. This sounds like a huge advantage for them—and it is—but Felix Salmon argues that it’s also a sign of weakness. Netflix has to mine this information because its streaming service has such a paltry collection of titles:

If you give Netflix a list of all the movies you want to watch, the proportion available for streaming is going to be so embarrassingly low that the company decided not to even give you that option any more….So Netflix has been forced to attempt a distant second-best: scouring its own limited library for the films it thinks you’ll like, rather than simply looking for the specific movies which it knows (because you told it) that you definitely want to watch. This, from a consumer perspective, is not an improvement.

I figure there are two basic kinds of customers here. The first has specific movies she wants to watch, and tries to find them. The second just wants to watch something decent, and will browse around looking for something that fits the bill. I gave up on Netflix streaming years ago because I’m the first kind of person, and I almost always came up blank when I searched for something specific. Netflix, as Salmon says, has pretty much gone all-in on the second type:

The original Netflix prediction algorithm — the one which guessed how much you’d like a movie based on your ratings of other movies — was an amazing piece of computer technology, precisely because it managed to find things you didn’t know that you’d love. More than once I would order a movie based on a high predicted rating, and despite the fact that I would never normally think to watch it — and every time it turned out to be great. The next generation of Netflix personalization, by contrast, ratchets the sophistication down a few dozen notches: at this point, it’s just saying “well, you watched one of these Period Pieces About Royalty Based on Real Life, here’s a bunch more”.

Netflix, then, no longer wants to show me the things I want to watch, and it doesn’t even particularly want to show me the stuff I didn’t know I’d love. Instead, it just wants to feed me more and more and more of the same, drawing mainly from a library of second-tier movies and TV shows.

Yep. What I wonder is what happens when Netflix eventually drops the disc-by-mail service that gave it its start. That’s inevitable, isn’t it? And when it happens, it will mean there’s really no place left to find a large selection of older movies to watch. The old brick-and-mortar stores will be gone, driven out of business by Netflix, and thanks to licensing wars, no streaming service will be available with a broad selection. People like me will actually be worse off than we were a decade ago.

Eventually that will change. I hope. But in the meantime, it’s slim pickings.

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Movies, Movies Everywhere, But Not a Drop to Watch

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Does More Marijuana Smoking Mean Lower Attendance at the Opera?

by 2KeaheySchoeffler461 Posted on January 3, 2014

Mother Jones

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David Brooks smoked marijuana in his youth, but then got bored with it and stopped. He says it never seemed like a very uplifting pastime, and this makes him nervous about about legalization:

I don’t have any problem with somebody who gets high from time to time, but I guess, on the whole, I think being stoned is not a particularly uplifting form of pleasure and should be discouraged more than encouraged.

We now have a couple states — Colorado and Washington — that have gone into the business of effectively encouraging drug use. By making weed legal, they are creating a situation in which the price will drop substantially. One RAND study suggests that prices could plummet by up to 90 percent, before taxes and such. As prices drop and legal fears go away, usage is bound to increase. This is simple economics, and it is confirmed by much research. Colorado and Washington, in other words, are producing more users.

….I’d say that in healthy societies government wants to subtly tip the scale to favor temperate, prudent, self-governing citizenship. In those societies, government subtly encourages the highest pleasures, like enjoying the arts or being in nature, and discourages lesser pleasures, like being stoned.

Brooks’ column is getting a lot of mockery in my Twitter feed, but for once I guess I can’t really join in. It’s not that I agree with Brooks—and I’ll concede that his comparison of pot smoking with “higher pleasures” is kind of silly. But for the most part, all his column does is express a fairly modest sense of unease about the fact that legalization will almost certainly increase pot smoking a fair amount. There’s really nothing wrong with being a little nervous about that. These new laws will increase marijuana use.

But the big thing Brooks misses is the question of whether this will increase overall intoxication. It might. Alternatively, marijuana might largely displace alcohol use, producing little or no net increase in intoxication but producing a safer society overall since pot tends to be less damaging than alcohol. In the lingo, this is a question of whether marijuana and alcohol are economic substitutes or economic complements, and the research on this point is inconclusive. One of the great benefits of legalization in Washington and Colorado is that it will finally start to give us some decent data on this. For various reasons, it won’t settle the question definitively, but two or three years from now we’ll certainly have a much better idea than we do today about the net effect of marijuana legalization.

And if it turns out that legalizing pot reduces alcohol use? Then Brooks should be happy. There will still be plenty of idiots getting drunk and stoned, but there won’t be any more than there are now. We’ll have an increase in personal freedom; a reduction in drug war costs; and no significant change in the number of people pursuing higher pleasures. It’s well worth finding out if this will be the case.

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Does More Marijuana Smoking Mean Lower Attendance at the Opera?

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We’re Still at War: Photo of the Day for January 3, 2014

by JoanSanderz Posted on January 3, 2014

Mother Jones

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An MV-22 Osprey flies over Helmand province, Afghanistan, Dec. 25, 2013. Commandant of the Marine Corps Gen. James F. Amos, his wife Bonnie, Sgt. Maj. of the Marine Corps Micheal P. Barrett and Sgt. Dakota Meyer traveled around Regional Command (Southwest) to visit troops for the holiday season. (U.S. Marine Corps Photo by Sgt. Tammy K. Hineline/Released)

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We’re Still at War: Photo of the Day for January 3, 2014

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How College Pricing Is Like Holiday Retail Sales

by StormyV37lwvv Posted on January 3, 2014

Mother Jones

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This story originally appeared on ProPublica.

You know all those seemingly great sales during the holidays? It turns out, they are often a “carefully engineered illusion.” A recent piece in the Wall Street Journal defines what it calls “retail theater,” noting that often the discounts being offered to bargain-conscious consumers are carefully planned out by retailers from the start:

The common assumption is that retailers stock up on goods and then mark down the ones that don’t sell, taking a hit to their profits. But that isn’t typically how it plays out. Instead, big retailers work backward with their suppliers to set starting prices that, after all the markdowns, will yield the profit margins they want.

The red cardigan sweater with the ruffled neck on sale for more than 40% off at $39.99 was never meant to sell at its $68 starting price. It was designed with the discount built in.

Some retailers that sell online even set their discounts depending on user information, as the Journal reported last year:

The Staples Inc. website displays different prices to people after estimating their locations. More than that, Staples appeared to consider the person’s distance from a rival brick-and-mortar store, either OfficeMax Inc. or Office Depot Inc. If rival stores were within 20 miles or so, Staples.com usually showed a discounted price.

Higher education may seem like a different world, but universities in many ways have been working from the same playbook.

Savvier college-bound consumers know that the so-called “sticker price” of tuition and fees at a given college or university isn’t what many–or even most–students pay.

Take American University, where 74 percent of full-time freshmen got a grant or scholarship–essentially, a discount off the list price–for the 2011-2012 school year. Or Drexel University, where that figure was 98 percent.

At nearly 200 schools, 100 percent of full-time freshmen got a scholarship, as DePaul University’s Jon Boeckenstedt points out.

A recent study of discounting at private non-profit colleges found that the average institutional grant has grown as a percentage of sticker price, hitting an all-time high of roughly 53 percent. But the report, released in May by the National Association of College and University Business Officers, also pointed out that while larger discounts are generally a good thing, students could still end up paying more depending on how much the sticker price is going up at the same time.

Like retailers, colleges and universities are increasingly getting more sophisticated about how they give out discounts, offering so-called “merit aid” to students they especially want to enroll.

Private universities have led the way in discounting, but as we’ve detailed, the practice has spread to public universities as well. Many state schools have moved toward the “high-tuition, high-aid” model by discounting for students with high test scores or for out-of-state students who will ultimately pay more than residents, even with a small discount.

Some colleges–mostly private colleges–will even price-match if students know to ask. (It’s not unlike your local Best Buy, really.)

The growing discount rates and the lack of transparency in the pricing of higher education have prompted some schools to try another approach. A few colleges and universities have opted for “tuition resets,” announcing they’re slashing sticker prices by as much as $10,000–while often reducing aid.

Call it the J.C. Penney strategy. The retailer tried to move away from high-low pricing and move to “everyday low prices,” only to find out the hard way that customers really, really love a discount.

Yet at least initially, some colleges such as Concordia University have gone the “tuition reset” route and have found that the lower rates (and the accompanying PR boost about the lower rates) got more student applications in the door, raising enrollments and ultimately, net tuition revenue. Whether that interest from consumers will keep up after the headlines fade remains to be seen.

It’s worth mentioning that one big difference between the pricing of higher education and other consumer goods is the ease of comparison shopping: When you’re shopping for a new TV set, it’s relatively easy to compare prices with a little research. It’s much harder to do that with colleges, especially when you have to narrow down your options to a manageable number and submit applications before knowing for sure how much each option will end up costing.

There are, of course, tools out there intended to make college costs more transparent. Colleges are required to post net price calculators to give prospective students–or, at least, those who put in the time to find the calculators online and enter in their personal information–a better sense of what a given school might cost them after discounts. But the calculators have their limitations: Some estimates are more accurate than others, depending on the complexity of the colleges’ calculators, which are not standardized. (In more recent news, lawmakers have introduced a law aimed at making the calculators more user-friendly.)

As it stands, it’s not always clear whether consumers actually win when colleges–or retailers–tinker with their pricing and discounts. What is clear is that when the system isn’t especially transparent, discounts can get people overexcited, whether they’re real savings or not.

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How College Pricing Is Like Holiday Retail Sales

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