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If Music Be the Food of Love, Play on, Rufus Wainright

by LatiaAddis Posted on June 25, 2016

Mother Jones

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Jacob Blickenstaff

Rufus Wainwright, the son of critically admired folk singers Loudon Wainwright III and Kate McGarrigle, grew up amid a bramble of musical siblings, aunts, in-laws, half-siblings and close family friends. (Wainright also has a daughter with Lorca Cohen, daughter of Leonard Cohen, whom he co-parents along with his husband.)

While maintaining the family legacy of incisive songwriting, Rufus has stood on his own as a genre-expanding songwriter, incorporating elements of classical music, opera, and the American songbook into visceral contemporary music, beginning with his self-titled debut in 1998.

He has made those influences more explicit during the last decade with 2007’s Rufus Does Judy at Carnegie Hall—a live, song-for-song re-creation of Judy Garland’s Live at Carnegie Hall album, and an opera, Prima Donna, which Wainwright composed and produced in 2009 and released as an album in 2015.

Earlier this year, Wainwright released another classical work, All My Loves, which presents nine Shakespeare sonnets in both dramatic recitations and composed arrangements. The eclectic treatment under producer/arranger Marius de Vries—who previously collaborated on Wainwright’s lush albums Want One and Want Two—involves a varied cast that includes soprano Anna Prohaska; pop singers Florence Welch (of Florence & the Machine) and sister Martha Wainwright; and the actors Helena Bonham Carter, Carrie Fischer, and William Shatner. I caught up with Wainright recently as he swung though New York to reprise Rufus Does Judy at Carnegie Hall. He is now touring in Canada and Europe.

Mother Jones: Shakespeare’s sonnets explore longing, betrayal, and lust and its consequences, themes that are present in your songs as well. Did you have a sense of that connection as you worked on this project?

Rufus Wainwright: I feel like the sonnets are the gift that keeps on giving. Certainly in terms of my life—anybody’s life—you go through death, childbirth and marriage, glory and defeat, and so on. The last 10 years for me have been all of that, so the sonnets have been there with me. I’ve been able to lean on them profoundly for many years, and they’ve given me a wider perspective of what’s going on, really, on the inside. If my songs can do that as well, then I’m a lucky guy.

MJ: You began working on musical settings for the sonnets some years ago, while your mother was fighting cancer.

RW: I wrote the music for the majority of them during her illness. It wasn’t planned out that way, just coincided. But I was happy to not have to write lyrics while that was going on in my life—it was so painful.

MJ: Part of the scholarly debate about the sonnets is whether they were autobiographical or written on behalf of someone else. Do you feel there are parallels in songwriting, the autobiographical vs the universal?

RW: I wouldn’t categorize my work as mysterious as the relationship between Shakespeare and his world, because that is one of the great mysteries: How could someone have written all that he did? Was it only one person? And why do we know so little about it? I don’t take that mantle, but I will say that I strive for what you do find in Shakespeare’s work—that there is a definite humanity and a definite character behind the writing in the sonnets, and it’s very real because it’s so deeply personal. I try to aspire to that in what I do.

MJ: Are there qualities in his material that you are trying to bring into your songwriting?

RW: I can’t really gauge that. I just keep chugging along and I hope that in doing work with the sonnets or the operas—or singing Judy Garland shows—that all gets in there. It’s not up to me to judge that, either; that’s for the public to do. But I want to deepen as an artist, and working with Shakespeare definitely points in that direction.

MJ: Sonnet 20, which addresses the “master-mistress of my passion,” is most discussed and interpreted in context of homosexuality, and the longing of one man for another. What’s your take on it?

RW: I think it is about attraction in general. That’s what is so brilliant about it. There’s no question that the writer projects a sort of startling situation in that because he’s a man he can’t quite do all that he wants to with this other man. But he focuses more on the effect of beauty—what it makes one do emotionally and how it breaks down the barrier between man and woman. That’s part of the subtlety that Shakespeare is the best at, ever, in any art form.

MJ: Something that perhaps was under-noticed on your earlier pop albums is how much classical music is a part of it. For example, the opening track of Want One, “Oh What A World,” takes directly from Ravel’s Bolero. When did you first start to integrate classical into your pop songwriting?

RW: My love of classical hit pretty early. I was 13 when it occurred, and that was really the only music I listened to for many, many years. I went to a conservatory, but I always knew I would be in the pop world, because A) it was more fun and B) you didn’t have to practice as much and you could go out more. But I immediately saw this opportunity to inject my material with these sounds that most members of my generation really didn’t know about, so it was a great way to differentiate myself from the pack. Now I’m paying back the favor a little bit.

MJ: Tell me about your collaborations with Marius de Vries.

RW: Marius is one of the great and most versatile musicians of our time. He’s really able to keep a keen eye on what’s going on in the pop world, but by the same token introduce all sorts of musical influences be they classical, ethnic music, or whatever—so he’s a great unifier. I really needed someone like that to do this album because I’m going out on so many limbs.

I let him go out and see what he can bring back, and oftentimes it’s great, and sometimes we know immediately it won’t work. We give each other a lot of leeway because we respect each other’s taste, and also sometimes our lack of taste, because we’re not afraid to do things a little out of the ordinary.

MJ: This new album takes a very eclectic approach, both in the performers involved and the musical settings.

RW: I feel that the sonnets can take it. They are so wildly varied and so sturdy in terms of their form and geometry and light, so it was fun to throw all these different musical styles at them and see what sticks. And of course they all stick if you do a good job at it, because they are limitless.

MJ: As a husband and father, have you had to temper your artistic ambitions?

RW: The only big change is that I have to rest a lot more now! I think my imagination and my passions are still firing away, but it’s really the body that starts to make up the rules. It’s not a major problem; it’s just when you get a little older you realize how much your body thanks you when you are good to it. I haven’t changed much.

MJ: Judy Garland was coming out of a rough time when she made those live recordings. Do you feel any affinities with her and where she was in her life at that time?

WR: Well, I have a lot of advantages: I’m not addicted to horrifying pills. I also have surrounded myself with far more caring and upright individuals. And I wasn’t abused as a child, so I’m doing okay!

MJ: Sorry, I wasn’t trying to put you in the same redemptive narrative box.

WR: I mean, I love Judy Garland! I worship at her altar in so many ways. But really when it comes to me getting on stage and performing that material, that’s when I call to the songwriters and the lyricists and musicians and really make it about that. If you try to unsettle her spirit and bring it into the room, it’s a double-edged sword. If you are going to try and do battle with her, you’re going to lose, so I make it about the music.

MJ: I wonder what the dynamic was, and still is, between you and your intensely musical family.

RW: I’m very blessed, mainly because even though my family is mostly in show business, it’s really centered around music. My parents were very successful in many ways, but they weren’t necessarily top of the charts. We were never wealthy because of music. We always had to work and we always had to struggle a little bit, and I think at the end of the day that’s been very good for me, because I have a sense of it being very ephemeral. I don’t have a sense of entitlement in terms of being some kind of spoiled brat. Musically I’m able to keep going, because it’s not about money and it’s not about success. It’s a challenge.

This profile is part of In Close Contact, an independently produced series highlighting leading creative musicians.

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If Music Be the Food of Love, Play on, Rufus Wainright

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The Corrections Corporation of America, by the Numbers

by ChristoperHaverf Posted on June 23, 2016

Mother Jones

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Read Mother Jones reporter Shane Bauer’s firsthand account of his four months spent working as a guard at a corporate-run prison in Louisiana.

The Corrections Corporation of America launched the era of private prisons in 1983, when it opened a immigration detention center in an former motel in Houston, Texas. Today the Nashville-based company houses more than 66,000 inmates, making it the country’s second-largest private prison company. In 2015, it reported $1.9 billion in revenue and made more than $221 million in net income—more than $3,300 for each prisoner in its care. More on CCA’s operations:

Where CCA operates

CCA runs 61 facilities across the United States.

These include 34 state prisons, 14 federal prisons, 9 immigration detention centers, and 4 jails.
It owns 50 of these sites.
38 hold men, 2 hold women, 20 hold both sexes, and 1 holds women and children.
17 are in Texas, 7 are in Tennessee, and 6 are in Arizona.

No vacancy

CCA and other prison companies have written “occupancy guarantees” into their contracts, requiring states to pay a fee if they cannot provide a certain number of inmates. Winn Correctional Center was guaranteed to be 96 percent full.

Who owns CCA?

CCA’S biggest investor: The Vanguard Group, the country’s second-largest money management firm, holds 14 percent of CCA stock, valued at $447 million as of late 2015.

Notable company figures:

Thurgood Marshall Jr.: CCA board member, lawyer, and son of the first African American Supreme Court justice.
Charles Overby: CCA board member and former CEO of the Freedom Forum, a foundation that promotes press freedoms.
C. Michael Jacobi: CCA board member and chairman of gunmaker Sturm Ruger.
Harley Lappin: CCA’s chief corrections officer and former director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons.

CCA stock price, 1997-2016

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Getting out of prisons

A divestment movement targeting private-prison companies has convinced some major investors to cash in their CCA stocks. Some recent divestments and their estimated values:

Pershing Square Capital Management: $196 million
Systematic Financial Management: $93 million
General Electric: $54 million

“Frankly, we’re delighted to have a greater share of investors who are thoughtful about our business, can tell the difference between rhetoric and reality.” —CCA spokesman commenting on the University of California’s decision to divest in 2015.

CCA in court

CCA told shareholders it faced $4.2 million in liabilities related to lawsuits in 2015, but it said no pending cases would seriously affect its bottom line.

CCA will not disclose details about the lawsuits it faces. But data on more than 1,200 cases obtained by Prison Legal News offers a snapshot of the types of civil cases commonly filed against the company by its prisoners and employees.

Subjects of lawsuits filed against CCA

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Prisoners filed 82 percent of the more than 1,000 federal civil cases naming CCA as a defendant between 2010 and 2015. Federal prisoner suits against CCA have fallen since they peaked in 2000, perhaps due to a 1996 federal law that made it more difficult for inmates to sue prisons.

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The Corrections Corporation of America, by the Numbers

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Why Is It So Hard for Inmates to Sue Prisons?

by KFMWilbert Posted on June 23, 2016

Mother Jones

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Read Mother Jones reporter Shane Bauer’s firsthand account of his four months spent working as a guard at a corporate-run prison in Louisiana.

It began with a complaint about salad.

Since he started serving time in the ’70s, Melvin Leroy Tyler has filed dozens of lawsuits advocating better conditions in Missouri prisons, earning himself the nickname King of the Writs. One newspaper dubbed him one of the “finest jailhouse lawyers this state has ever produced.” In 1994, Tyler filed a case a case about dangerous conditions at Farmington Correctional Center, including allegations of overcrowding and food contamination. But his complaints would become infamous for a passing mention that the prison cafeteria’s salad bar was only available to guards.

Read more: Reporter Shane Bauer’s four months as a private prison guard

Tyler’s salad bar protest was held up as exhibit A in the campaign to stem the supposed flood of frivolous prison lawsuits clogging up the nation’s courts. Jay Nixon, then Missouri’s attorney general (and now its governor), singled out Tyler and sneered that “these recreational litigators can be very creative when it comes to constitutional rights.” Other examples of outrageous cases cited by Nixon and 23 of his fellow AGs included an inmate’s $1 million suit “because his ice cream had melted,” and a demand for LA Gear or Reebok sneakers instead of prison-issued Converse.

Shutting down these lawsuits became a pillar of the tough-on-crime agenda then sweeping Capitol Hill. Under the Prison Litigation Reform Act (PLRA), passed with overwhelming bipartisan support in 1996, prisoners who seek to file federal civil rights cases must first jump through several hoops, like exhausting all internal grievance procedures and paying $350 to file a case.

Yet much of the evidence cited in support of the law was thin. As the bill was making its way through Congress, Jon O. Newman, a federal appeals judge, found that tales of ridiculous lawsuits “were at best highly misleading and, sometimes, simply false.” Tyler’s complaint had been ripped without context from a case that, Newman wrote, “concerned dangerously unhealthy prison conditions, not the lack of a salad bar.”

The law’s backers claimed it would protect inmates with legitimate complaints. Instead, it established a labyrinth of red tape. Between 1995 and 2012, as prison populations swelled 40 percent, the number of federal civil rights cases filed by prisoners dropped by more than 70 percent. About one-tenth of those cases resulted in an outcome favoring inmates, a slight decrease from the 1990s. If the PLRA was meant to filter out flimsy lawsuits, we should see more prisoners winning their cases, notes University of Michigan law professor Margo Schlanger. But now, she says, “each success is harder fought.”

Human Rights Watch has found that the law is often invoked to throw out cases on technicalities, even suits involving sexual assault, juveniles, or prisoners who are illiterate, deaf, or mentally ill. “This is a classic case of the fox guarding the henhouse,” says David Fathi, the director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Prison Project. “What we have done is dismantle the only oversight system that we had for prisons, which was litigation,” adds Schlanger.

Most inmates have little recourse but to represent themselves. The law further discourages lawyers from taking their suits by capping damages and recoverable costs. “There were never a whole lot of lawyers doing this in the first place,” says David Rudovsky, a civil rights attorney in Philadelphia. Suing prisons, he says, “is even more difficult than suing police officers.”

Now 73, Melvin Tyler lives in Missouri’s Jefferson City Correctional Center, a maximum-security prison located on No More Victims Road, where he is serving a 185-year sentence for rape, assault, and robbery. (He says he was wrongfully convicted; in 2009, the Innocence Project took up his case.) “I picked up a lot of enemies” due to the salad bar case, he tells me. “But if I hadn’t intervened, there would have been hundreds of people that would have died.”

The Prison Litigation Reform Act, Tyler explains, “destroys the ability of prisoners to seek and pursue legitimate claims.” The most unforgiving part of the law, he says, is its filing fee requirement. Sometimes the only way to fund a new lawsuit is to round up a bunch of guys to pool their money. Even though the Supreme Court unanimously shot down a prisoner’s challenge to part of the PRLA earlier this year, Tyler is working on a class-action suit questioning the constitutionality of the filing fee—one of more than 45 cases currently on his plate.

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Why Is It So Hard for Inmates to Sue Prisons?

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How I Got Arrested While Reporting on a Private Prison

by MilanBurges Posted on June 23, 2016

Mother Jones

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Read Mother Jones reporter Shane Bauer’s firsthand account of his four months spent working as a guard at a corporate-run prison in Louisiana.

One of the best parts of my job at Mother Jones is teaming up with colleagues to shoot and produce video for our investigations. In March 2015, I traveled to Louisiana to work with Shane Bauer, a reporter who was in his fourth month as a guard at Winn Correctional Center, a medium-security private prison operated by the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA).

It was Friday the 13th, around 7:45 p.m. The night was warm and overcast when I set out to collect “B-roll” of the prison, a 20-minute drive from Winnfield, the nearest town. Between the prison and the Kisatchie National Forest was a wide, unfenced field. I didn’t know it at the time, but it was prison property. I walked into this open field with a telephoto lens, intending to get a shot of Winn from about 1,000 feet away.

Why We Sent a Reporter to Work in a Private Prison

Then I stepped deep in mud. I used my iPhone flashlight to check out the muck. About two minutes later I saw searchlights coming from the direction of the prison. I walked back to my rental car parked on the side of the road. A powerful light swept the trees, emanating from a prison patrol vehicle that pulled up about 150 feet behind me. I called out “Hello? Hello?” and waited for an answer. When no one addressed me, I got into my car and drove away.

I wound my SUV back through the dark forest—and straight into several police cars and prison vehicles blocking the road outside Winn. I stepped out of the car and was surrounded by three sheriff’s deputies and five or six men dressed in black from head to toe. I saw their faces as they passed in and out of the light from their headlights and flashers. Shane had told me about them: They were members of the prison’s Special Operations Response Team (SORT), the tactical squad called in to restore order when things got out of hand.

I handed over my Australian driver’s license. In my panic, I told the cops I’d stopped to go to the bathroom beside the road. I quickly realized things were getting serious, and I told them I was a photographer working in the area.

Police body camera footage that I later obtained captured part of my arrest (and gloriously, for a videographer, from two angles). “What kind of pictures you got there?” asked the main arresting officer, Winn Parish deputy Kelly Fannin, a paunchy man with a white mustache.

“They’re my pictures,” I replied. I knew they probably couldn’t look at the images on my cameras or memory cards without a search warrant. I don’t remember acting this defiant at the time, but there it is, on video. Still, I wore a worried grin on my face and I sounded scared.

“Now, wait a minute. Let me explain something: What you took here don’t belong to you,” Fannin said, stabbing the air with his finger. “When you come here in this country, when you get around a prison, you don’t fuck around, okay?”

With my camera gear now strewn on the road by the SORT officers, my profession seemed obvious. But the cops and guards were amped up like I was a big catch. I heard them talking repeatedly about the threat of ISIS and the possibility that I was an actual terrorist. “An Australian with a Texas license plate in Louisiana runs some red flags,” Winn Parish Sheriff Cranford Jordan later joked to CNNMoney.

Fannin demanded my camera’s memory card. His temper was rising: “Let’s have it.”

“No, sir, I’m not going to show you that,” I said.

“I will take everything you’ve got!” he said.

I reached down to grab my camera from the pile of gear, setting off a bout of tussling and yelling. “Whoa, come here!” Fannin grabbed my arm in a stiff grip.

“You can’t take my camera,” I protested. “I know that.” The cops said they would get a search warrant. But, Fannin warned, “If you don’t want to give it to me, I will take it. It’s just that simple.”

“Do you want me to charge you for going on that property?” he continued. “And put you in jail tonight and show you what a jail is?”

“I mean, no sir, I do not want that,” I replied.

Going through my gear, the officers pulled out an aerial drone I’d brought along—a discovery that ratcheted up the tension even more. Never mind that it was broken and I was planning to return it to Amazon.

Deputy Tommy Chandler told me to “go ahead and turn and put your hands behind your back.”

“I’m cooperating,” I said.

“No, you ain’t,” he shot back.

After a Miranda warning, I was put in the back seat of a patrol car next to a police dog in a cage. The door slammed.

The deputies’ body cameras continued to roll after I was taken into custody. “We’ll just book him for trespassing,” one said. “I know what it was: He was out here looking for kangaroos!”

“Apparently they’ve got different laws over there in New South Wales, Australia,” an officer can be heard saying. “Welcome to the Free State of Winn!”

The footage also shows one of the prison’s SORT members scrolling through the contents of my camera, without a warrant, while the deputies looked on. The Winn Parish sheriff later said he was “not aware” of anyone searching my belongings; his office declined to comment further for this article. CCA’s spokesman said that the company was “not aware of the camera footage or what it contains.” Yet months later, Winn’s former assistant chief of security emailed Shane what looked like a photo of a screen showing an image of him. The image’s geolocation data suggested it had been created on the premises of the sheriff’s office. There’s only one place the original image of Shane could have come from: my memory card, which contained a video of him that I’d made shortly before my arrest.

I arrived at the Winnfield jail sometime around 10pm. I was charged with simple criminal trespass, a misdemeanor. (In Louisiana you can be charged with trespassing even if you didn’t know that you were on private land.) The computer system couldn’t compute the address on my Australian drivers’ license, which gave one guy plenty of time to brag about how he once made it with an Aussie girl with hairy armpits.

The Corrections Corporation of America, by the numbers

“Are kangaroos good for hunting?” the old jailer asked me. “Perhaps we’ll all have to go there when Hillary Clinton becomes president.” After I was made to strip and show my asshole (just to make sure I wasn’t carrying any contraband), I was put in handcuffs and leg shackles and made to wait in a small office surrounded by three or four guards.

I mostly observed my right to remain silent. But I also wanted to be a good cultural ambassador, so I told them kangaroos are eaten for meat and sometimes are regarded as pests that need to be shot. They seemed to like that.

Maybe it was the stress, or the adrenaline, or the accents, but I understood only every fourth or fifth word the cops and prison orderlies were saying to me. The bewilderment was mutual. I do know that I was threatened with an FBI investigation, immigration detention, and deportation. I asked to speak to a lawyer, but that never happened. I was allowed to call my editor, who started working like hell to get me out.

A couple of hours later, around midnight, my mugshot was snapped and my fingerprints were taken. My arrest records indicate that CCA said that night that it wanted trespassing charges filed against me. The jailer finally led me to a small cell separated from rest of the prisoners. The sheriff had told me earlier that, “They’d whoop you bad.” A 23-year-old named Alex was put in there with me, but he was too out of it to really talk, apart from telling me everything was gonna be okay. My standard-issue orange jumpsuit swam on me. “I wish I could keep it and wear it out in Brooklyn,” I thought.

The next morning, I felt grateful to be protected by prison bars. “Hey girl, hey girl,” someone shouted from the next cell. “You ever slept with a man? Do you want to?” It wasn’t an invitation; it was a threat.

This went on sporadically for hours. “No one’s letting us rape that girl’s hole.” I was scared I might do something to really out myself—I’m gay. I was hoping that just as being an Aussie threw a curve ball at the cops’ ability to identify a real terrorist, it also might scramble their gaydar.

Sheriff Jordan, a big man with a comb-over who liked to make jokes, came by to tell me the judge had denied me bail. It was Saturday, which meant it would be two days before I could get a hearing. Worse, it meant two nights of threats and snoring and unpredictable meals and gawking. I asked if I could call my parents. “Tell them we didn’t shoot you at dawn,” Jordan said.

I tried to start reading the the third volume of Game of Thrones, taken from the jail bookshelf. I wrote a letter. A prisoner sang a top 40 tune, but in a slow, sad baritone—”So baby now, take me into your loving arms, kiss me under the light of a thousand stars…” The prisoners and guards all began to call me “Australia.”

I started to resign myself to several days in this shithole, even though Jordan told me Mother Jones‘ lawyer had been “hollering” down the phone line, a fact that made him displeased.

Then suddenly, at about 4:30 p.m., I was shackled again and taken to be interrogated by two state police officers, a local deputy, and—you’ve got to be kidding me—a Homeland Security agent. These new guys already knew everything about me, and seemed bored that I was just a journalist. “Write all the exposés about CCA you like,” one told me. After about 45 minutes, I shuffled from the room with promises that the judge would soon set bond.

About five hours later, I heard that I’d made bail—for $10,000. “How cool are drones! I really want one!” said an officer, a professed camera buff, as he took stock of my equipment and processed me out of the jail. “Send me a copy of the article when it’s done.”

The old jailer came down to say good-bye. “I’m so sorry you had to see that,” he said. “Some of these places I wouldn’t put my dog in.” I thought about my cellmate Alex and wondered about the people who would never see the outside of Louisiana’s criminal justice system. I felt good to be walking free, unscathed.

Everyone shook my hand as I left to meet the bail bondsman, who turned out to be the son of the local lawyer hired to kick-start my defense, the fabulously named Bobby Culpepper. (Culpepper died suddenly several months later at age 74. My case was eventually concluded by a criminal defense lawyer named Marty Stroud.) The bondsman drove me to a gas station at the edge of Winnfield where Shane and his wife Sarah were waiting for me, tired yet relieved. We embraced, then we got the hell out of there.

News of my arrest broke not long after we left town, first in the local paper (the Winn Parish Enterprise called me a “renowned international journalist,” which I will treasure forever), then in CNNMoney, the Washington Post, and Gawker. I didn’t comment publicly, but the police account of was over-dramatized: The sheriff claimed I’d run from my vehicle toward the prison’s fence, which never happened. “You don’t go to a prison at night. You don’t violate the law when you’re doing a story,” Sheriff Jordan told CNNMoney. CCA issued a statement about Shane and me. It said that trespassing “is a security threat that we take very seriously” and noted that a drone “could be used to transport contraband or provide detailed imagery in a way that could create a security risk.”

Seven months later, I entered a no contest plea on a criminal trespass charge and paid a $500 fine. The alternative was to face down a maximum sentence of 30 days in prison and a trial that could have potentially compromised our investigation. The court then dismissed the conviction under a state law that allowed me to have my criminal record expunged.

I recall one prisoner yelling out to me during my night in orange: “You’re gonna get Winnfield on the news.”

We did. I’m really proud of our work.

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How I Got Arrested While Reporting on a Private Prison

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The Orlando Mass Shooter Checked Facebook for News of His Attack As He Killed

by ClintChinnery Posted on June 17, 2016

Mother Jones

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The massacre in Orlando stands as a grim case in many respects, not least the hateful targeting of the LGBT crowd at the Pulse nightclub, and the highest death toll from a mass shooting in modern US history. Equally dark is that the case builds on some disturbing trends related to the means and motives now seen in mass shootings. One is that the attacker struck with an assault rifle and high-capacity magazines—marking the sixth of nine mass shootings in just the past year alone to be carried out with firearms tantamount to weapons of war.

The other disturbing trend lies with how the perpetrator, Omar Mateen, used digital media. He searched online for inspiration from recent attackers before he struck. And then, as he was unleashing carnage inside the club, he sought to learn if the media was covering the killing in real time.

According to Republican Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, head of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security, Mateen “used Facebook before and during the attack to search for and post terrorism-related content.” Johnson detailed authorities’ knowledge of Mateen’s online activity in a letter sent Wednesday to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, in which Johnson called for the company to hand over data connected to the attacker.

As Mateen shot scores of people and held others hostage, according to Johnson’s letter, he searched online for ‘Pulse Orlando’ and ‘Shooting’ during the prolonged siege of the club. (Presumably he did so on a smartphone, though that isn’t detailed in the letter.) Meanwhile, just weeks before the massacre, Mateen researched the couple who pledged allegiance to the Islamic State and committed the massacre in San Bernardino last Decemeber—suggesting that he wanted to follow in their footsteps.

These behaviors underscore a growing concern among leaders in the field of threat assessment that digital technology has compounded the danger of future attacks. As I reported in a Mother Jones cover story last fall, there is emerging forensic evidence showing that social media has both exacerbated a copycat effect and become a prime tool for mass shooters seeking infamy.

Last August in Virginia, an enraged ex-television reporter carried out what was dubbed “the first social media murder”: He gunned down two of his former colleagues on live television while filming it with a camera of his own. He then posted the footage on Twitter and Facebook as he fled, shortly before dying in a police pursuit.

Less than 48 hours after the massacre in Orlando last Sunday, a 25-year-old man in France stabbed an off-duty police officer and his female companion to death, and then proceeded to film himself live on Facebook from inside the couple’s home. He declared his allegiance to the Islamic State and pondered what he might do with their terrified 3-year-old son, who was in the background. (The boy apparently remained physically unharmed after police raided the home and killed the attacker soon thereafter.)

“This is so much what we thought would happen, this increasing use of social media,” says Reid Meloy, a forensic psychologist and threat assessment expert who consults for the FBI and foreign security agencies. “I think we’re going to see more of this movement toward real-time broadcasting of these events, or individuals looking for the level of coverage of the events in real time.” Digital media offers a big platform for attackers to feed their pathological narcissism, he explains, “fulfilling their desire to be seen and to gain notoriety.”

Orlando epitomizes just how difficult it can be to untangle motive in a mass shooting, especially with so-called lone wolves (a term Meloy and others suggest is unhelpful to mitigating the copycat problem.) Was it a terrorist attack? A hate crime? The act of a disturbed person secretly struggling with his sexual identity? Quite possibly it was all of the above—and we may never really know, as security expert and author Peter Bergen wrote this week.

Many mass shooters display behaviors that fall along a spectrum of the criminal, clinical, and ideological, explains Meloy. Investigators are still piecing together a picture of Mateen’s background and his pathway to the Pulse nightclub. But while the term “terrorism” obviously applies to the massacre, Mateen’s stated allegiance to a violent extremist group—he’d also boasted about Al Qaeda and Hezbollah in the past—may have been more related to the clinical than the ideological.

Becoming a “school shooter” has long been a kind of apex for disturbed young men who gravitate toward going on a gun rampage. Many cases—attacks carried out as well as others averted—have included evidence of the perpetrators aspiring to “do a Columbine.” Now, we may be facing an even more grandiose and chilling phenomenon. “If they pledge to ISIS, in their minds it burnishes their reputations even more because they become a part of a larger and much more frightening movement,” says Meloy. “They also garner much more attention as soon as they pledge allegiance, whether during the fact or just before it.”

The ability of ISIS to exploit deep-seated grievance, rage, and self-loathing in potential recruits has been well documented. Though there still may be much that we don’t know about the Orlando and San Bernardino attackers, there are some astonishing parallels in the two young men: a history marked by personal rage and domestic violence, the abandonment of a young child to go on a suicidal mass-murder mission, and their taking up the ISIS banner shortly before striking.

With the San Bernardino massacre, the perpetrators’ abandonment of their baby struck many as the most incomprehensible detail. In Orlando, observes Meloy, it may well have become a new point of identification for a copycat. “You’ve got a young man who was willing to sacrifice his life and his role as a father—probably for a variety of disturbed reasons, possibly including self-loathing as a homosexual—to satisfy the hatreds and to seek the glory that he’s somehow searching for online, before and while the attack is occurring.”

“I’m truthfully far more interested in the posts from before,” Sen. Johnson said on NPR’s Morning Edition, “to see if there’s anything possible we could’ve learned to prevent this attack, as opposed to what a sick person, a deranged person was actually doing online while he was slaughtering our fellow citizens.”

Beyond the toxic brew of motive and any further details that may emerge about the attack planning, the whole world is now very familiar with Mateen’s selfies—including the next potential mass shooter. For threat assessment professionals, all of it is troubling new evidence as they continue to focus on stopping the next one.

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The Orlando Mass Shooter Checked Facebook for News of His Attack As He Killed

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Donald Trump Just Banned the Washington Post From Covering His Campaign

by RalfBarunga Posted on June 13, 2016

Mother Jones

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Donald Trump issued an edict on his Facebook page Monday afternoon: The Washington Post will no longer be credentialed to cover his campaign. “Based on the incredibly inaccurate coverage and reporting of the record setting Trump campaign,” Trump wrote, “we are hereby revoking the press credentials of the phony and dishonest Washington Post.”

Trump appeared to take issue with the Post‘s characterization of his response to this weekend’s Orlando shooting, in which he suggested that President Barack Obama had some involvement in the attacks, according to the Post. The paper now joins an extensive list of publications that have incurred Trump’s wrath—though this is the first time his campaign has publicly acknowledged a blanket ban on allowing a media outlet to cover his campaign. As I reported in March, Trump’s campaign has regularly denied press credentials to outlets including Buzzfeed, the Huffington Post, the Des Moines Register, Univision, National Review, and Mother Jones.

For a time, being denied credentials was more of a hassle than a true impediment for reporters seeking to cover Trump’s events. When I’ve been turned down for credentials in the past, I’ve waited in the general public line, which is sometimes hours long, and still been able to attend Trump’s events. Recently, however, the Trump campaign ejected a Politico reporter from an event in California after he entered the event with the general public.

Update: Shortly after Trump made his pronouncement on Facebook, Washington Post Executive Editor Marty Baron fired back.

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Donald Trump Just Banned the Washington Post From Covering His Campaign

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Trump to the Media: Stop Scrutinizing Me!

by AngelPQKQbialro Posted on May 31, 2016

Mother Jones

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A press conference called by Donald Trump to discuss his donations to veterans’ groups devolved into a lengthy bout of bickering between the presumptive Republican presidential nominee and members of the press over media treatment of his campaign.

While Trump has fought with the press throughout the campaign, repeatedly impugning individual reporters and banning many outlets, including Mother Jones, from his rallies, the press conference at Trump Tower on Tuesday was one of the sharpest clashes yet, as Trump insulted reporters to their faces and several journalists attempted to fight back. He again called the press corps “dishonest” and potentially libelous before singling out ABC’s Tom Llamas as a “sleaze” and mocking the looks of CNN reporter Jim Acosta. Reporters at the event returned fire, arguing with Trump that he seemed to be trying to dodge scrutiny of his donations and mistook questions for criticism. “Is this what it is going to be like covering you if you are president?” one exasperated reporter asked.

In January, Trump pledged to donate $1 million to unnamed veterans’ organizations. But that donation appeared not to have been made until after the Washington Post started asking questions about the money last week, prompting Trump to give $1 million to the Marine Corps-Law Enforcement Foundation. (Trump responded to that story by calling the reporter “a nasty guy.”) At Tuesday’s press conference, Trump came prepared with a long list of organizations he said received a total of $5.6 million thanks to a fundraising event he held in January.

Trump also continued his attacks on Judge Gonzalo Curiel, a federal judge in California who has ordered documents unsealed in a lawsuit against Trump University, a school that charged students as much as $35,000 for real estate courses that promised Trump-like success and wealth. The lawsuit alleges that the school defrauded its students. Trump called Curiel an “unfair judge” on Tuesday after having attacked him on Friday as a “Trump hater” and bringing up his Latino heritage as a reason for his alleged anti-Trump bias. The documents are due to be released today.

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Trump to the Media: Stop Scrutinizing Me!

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Today’s Dose of Liberal Heresy: Campaign Finance Reform Isn’t That Big a Deal

by CindyParkhill Posted on May 28, 2016

Mother Jones

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I was musing the other day about something or other, and for some reason it occurred to me that there are several subjects near and dear to progressive hearts that I flatly disagree with. I’m not talking about, say, charter schools, where there’s a robust, ongoing intra-liberal debate and both sides already have plenty of adherents. Nor am I talking about things like Wall Street regulation, where everyone (including me) thinks we need to do more but we disagree on technical issues (Bernie wants to break up big banks, I want to double capital requirements).

I’m thinking instead of things that seem to enjoy something like 90+ percent liberal support—and which I think are basically a waste of liberal time and energy. So if I write about them, a whole lot of people are going to be pissed off. Something like 90+ percent of my readership, I’d guess. Who needs the grief? After all, for the most part there’s usually not much harm in spending time and energy on these things (though there are exceptions).

But let’s give it a go anyway. Maybe this will be the first entry in a periodic series. Maybe I’ll discover that I’m not quite as alone on these issues as I think. Here’s my first entry.

Campaign Finance Reform

Liberals love campaign finance reform. Citizens United is our Roe v. Wade, and it’s become an even more central issue since Bernie Sanders began his presidential run last year. As near as I can tell, Bernie—along with most liberals—thinks it’s the key foundational issue of modern progressivism. Until we seriously reduce the amount of money in political campaigns, no real progressive reform is possible.

I’m pretty sure this is completely wrong. Here are seven reasons that have persuaded me of this over the years, with the most important reason left to the end:

  1. Half a century has produced nothing. Liberals groups have been putting serious effort into campaign finance reform for about 40 years now. The only result has been abject failure. Ban union donations, they create PACs. Ban hard money, you get soft money. Ban soft money, you get Super PACs. Etc. None of the reforms have worked, and even before Citizens United the Supreme Court had steadily made effective reform efforts harder and harder. What’s even worse, the public still isn’t with us. If you ask them vaguely if they think there’s too much money in politics, most will say yes. If you ask them if they really care, they shrug. After nearly half a century, maybe it’s time to ask why.
  2. Other countries spend less. Most other rich countries spend a lot less on political campaigns than we do. Are they less in thrall to moneyed interests because of this? Some are, some aren’t. I’ve never seen any convincing evidence that there’s much of a correlation.
  3. Billionaires are idiots. Seriously. The evidence of the last decade or so suggests that billionaires just aren’t very effective at using their riches to win elections. This is unsurprising: billionaires are egotists who tend to think that because they got rich doing X, they are also geniuses at Y and Z and on beyond zebra. But they aren’t. This stuff is a hobby for them, and mostly they’re just wasting their money.
  4. The small-dollar revolution. Starting with Howard Dean in 2004, the internet has produced an explosion of small-dollar donations, accounting for over a third of presidential fundraising in 2012 and 2016. This year, for example, Hillary Clinton has so far raised $288 million (including money raised by outside groups). Bernie Sanders has raised $208 million, all of it in small-dollar donations averaging $27. Ironically, at the same time that he’s made campaign finance reform a major issue, Bernie has demonstrated that small dollars can power a serious insurgency.
  5. Money really is speech. Obviously this is an opinion, and a really rare one on my side of the political spectrum. But why should political speech be restricted? My read of the First Amendment suggests that if there’s any single kind of speech that should enjoy the highest level of protection, it’s political speech.
  6. We may have maxed out anyway. There’s increasing evidence that in big-time contests (governors + national offices), we’ve basically reached the point of diminishing returns. At this point, if billionaires spend more money it just won’t do much good even if they’re smart about it. There are only so many minutes of TV time available and only so many persuadable voters. More important, voters have only so much bandwidth. Eventually they tune out, and it’s likely that we’ve now reached that point.

    In the interests of fairness, I’ll acknowledge that I might be wrong about this. It might turn out that there are clever ways to spend even more; billionaires might get smarter; and Citizens United has only just begun to affect spending. Maybe in a couple of decades I’ll be eating my words about this.

  7. Campaign spending hasn’t gone up much anyway. I told you I’d leave the most important reason for the end, and this is it. It’s easy to be shocked when you hear about skyrocketing billions of dollars being spent on political campaigns, but billions of dollars aren’t that much in a country the size of the United States. In 2012, Obama spent $1.1 billion vs. Mitt Romney’s $1.2 billion. That’s about 1 percent of total ad spending in the US. Hell, in the cell phone biz alone, AT&T spent $1.3 billion vs. Verizon’s $1.2 billion. If you want to look at campaign spending, you really need to size it to the growth in GDP over the past half century or so.

So here it is. These two charts show our skyrocketing spending on presidential campaigns as a percent of GDP. Data for the chart on the left comes from Mother Jones. The chart on the right comes from the Center for Responsive Politics. Total presidential spending is up about 18 percent since 2000. I supposed I’d like to see this reduced as much as the next guy, but it’s hard to see it as the core corrupter of American politics. It’s a symptom, but it’s really not the underlying disease. There really are problems with the influence of the rich on American politics, but campaigns are probably the place where it matters least, not most.

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Today’s Dose of Liberal Heresy: Campaign Finance Reform Isn’t That Big a Deal

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A Brief, Checkered History of Prom in America

by DamianDarden950 Posted on May 28, 2016

Mother Jones

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Do you remember how you were asked to your high school prom? (Or how you asked?) Maybe it was some cheesy romantic gesture. Or maybe it was a very informal conversation that took place near your locker between classes. Either way, it probably wasn’t documented and put online to become a viral hit. America’s prom tradition, instead of fizzling over the years, has only grown more sacred with time. From April to June, prom season reigns in high schools nationwide as juniors and seniors pair up, beautify, and ask older siblings to snag them some bottom-shelf booze to pass around at the after-party. But before party buses, $400 dresses, and hotel ballrooms were a thing, prom was just an annual dance that took place in the school gym under the watchful eye of teacher chaperones. With the season upon us, we decided to take a look back at the history of this peculiar institution.

1920s: The “democratic debutante ball” makes its high school debut. In theory, any student can attend a “promenade”—but teens of color are excluded thanks to Jim Crow and unequal access to education.

1930s: With the Depression in full swing, some Chicago principals cancel prom to ensure poor students aren’t “psychologically wounded.”

1950s: During the postwar boom, one advice book offers a warning: “Girls who try to usurp the right of boys to choose their own dates will ruin a good dating career.”

1960s: Despite the repeal of Jim Crow, white-only proms persist in the South.

1969: Jessica McClintock takes over dressmaker Gunne Sax and becomes America’s prom-dress queen, draping two decades of high school girls in “leg o’ mutton” styles—marked by puffy sleeves and corset bodices.

Sissy Spacek will forever be remembered as the telekinetic teen outcast in the movie Carrie, who gets drenched in pig’s blood at prom. MGM/Red Bank Films

1974: In Stephen King’s Carrie, a telekinetic outcast terrorizes her classmates at the prom. Sissy Spacek stars in the 1976 film.

1975: First daughter Susan Ford hosts prom at the White House. “I was told that we had to choose a band that didn’t have any kind of drug charge,” one organizer recalled later. “It was pretty hard.”

Susan Ford’s White House prom. Joseph H. Bailey/NGS/White House Historical Association

1979: Police in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, show up to protect the first openly gay couple in prom history. “Many students came over and congratulated us,” one of the boys said, despite threats to “tar and chicken feather” the pair.

1980: A Rhode Island senior sues his school after his principal rejects his request to bring a male prom date. A federal judge sides with the boy.

1980s: Hollywood goes gaga for prom flicks, with Valley Girl (1983), Footloose (1984), Back to the Future (1985), and Pretty in Pink (1986).

Jon Cryer and Molly Ringwald in 1986’s Pretty In Pink (left). Nicholas Cage and Deborah Foreman in 1983’s Valley Girl (right). Paramount Pictures, Valley 9000/Atlantic Releasing

1994: A biracial student in Wedowee, Alabama, sues her principal and school board after they threatened to cancel prom to keep interracial couples from attending.

1997: Actor Morgan Freeman offers to cover the cost of a prom in Charleston, Mississippi, so long as all races can attend. No such luck. The city’s proms remain segregated for 11 more years.

2009: Students at Fairfax High in Los Angeles pass over eight girls to select a gay senior boy as prom queen. “Tears were almost falling down my face,” a jubilant Sergio Garcia tells ABC News.

Amy Poehler, as the obsessive mother of popular girl Regina George (Rachel McAdams) in the 2004 hit Mean Girls, snaps a shot of her daughter. Paramount

2013: A group of girls from Georgia’s Wilcox County High holds an all-inclusive prom, eschewing the segregated affairs. The school makes it official in 2014. “The adults should have done this many, many moons ago,” notes the mother of one of the girls.

2016: #promposal is the hot Instagram meme: One student gets a cop to pull a girl over and hand her a “ticket”—his prom invite. Another takes his girlfriend to a gun range, with “yes” and “no” targets set to go.

I’ve got good aim

Others are more creative in design:

Thank you for the most legendary promposal in the 607â&#157;¤ï¸&#143;

A photo posted by Shayna Will (@shayna_will) on May 11, 2016 at 4:50pm PDT

I guess being pulled over isn’t always a bad thing

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A Brief, Checkered History of Prom in America

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What Americans Can Learn From Israel’s Forgotten War

by ChauLansford Posted on May 21, 2016

Mother Jones

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In 1999, a Canadian-Israeli teenager named Matti Friedman went to war as an Israeli soldier. He manned a small hilltop outpost called the Pumpkin, one of a string of Israeli bases that stretched across southern Lebanon and served as both a defensive buffer for the towns of northern Israel and a magnet for attacks by Hezbollah fighters. But while thousands of Israeli soldiers served at such outposts in that “security zone” during the 1980s and 1990s, Friedman says their war has been forgotten—not just in Israel but in the United States and other countries that would soon find themselves in similar conflicts.

“People lost friends, they lost limbs, they lost kids—and basically no one’s talked about it since it ended,” says Friedman, who is now a freelance journalist in Israel and the author of Pumpkinflowers, a newly released memoir of his time at the outpost. It’s both an instant-classic war diary—Friedman’s intensely self-aware writing captures all the flavors of boredom, humor, and occasional panic that marked life in Lebanon—and a brief, fascinating history of Israel’s occupation of southern Lebanon. The second part is necessary, he says, because Israeli society is allowing the conflict to simply fade away. He points out that the war in southern Lebanon hasn’t been given “a name or a military ribbon or a monument or a history.” Even his term for it, the “security zone war,” is one he coined himself.

“It left very deep personal memories for people but it left basically no collective memory,” Friedman says. “When I was doing research I was constantly trying to explain to people what war I meant.” Pumpkinflowers, he hopes, will convince Israelis—and others—to start “writing about it and thinking about it as a period that’s worth remembering.

Friedman recently spoke with Mother Jones about the book, which was published on May 3.

Mother Jones: Since Iraq and Afghanistan, there have been numerous memoirs published in the United States about war from the same perspective of yours, that of young soldiers and officers. Are similar books being written in Israel?

Matti Friedman: There isn’t a lot of war writing of this kind in Israel. We don’t have a lot of recent war memoirs. Probably the most famous war memoir in Israel written recently was actually about the war of independence in 1948. But the more recent wars—like the one in Lebanon and the West Bank and things like that—have produced very little of value.

MJ: Do you think there’s a reason for that?

MF: There’s a few things. A lot of the military service in the past 20 years or so hasn’t been a war like the Six Day War or the ’73 war. It’s not something that’s dramatic, and a lot of the guys like me come back to civilian life and the society basically gives you no indication that what happened to you was important. I think a lot of young Israelis think that the great history has already happened and now what we do is kind of bullshit. Except that the kind of war that we saw in Lebanon—which is mostly waiting around punctuated by moments of terror and this very hard-to-understand, very complicated political situation—that’s the way wars look now. So we have to find a way to write about them, because that’s the way it works in the 21st century.

MJ: Are there things in the news now, or in more recent conflicts, that remind you of Lebanon?

MF: I remember seeing pretty early in Iraq a video, a kind of jumpy militant video. You see American military vehicles traveling along the road with the logo in the corner of whatever militant faction it was and a martial soundtrack in the background, and then something explodes. That’s pure Lebanon. That’s right out of the Hezbollah textbook. One of the first effective videotaped attacks happened at Outpost Pumpkin in 1994.

When I started hearing about IEDs—people were losing their legs, vehicles were being hit by these kind of devices that were buried under the road or beside the road—that was Lebanon. That was the major threat in Lebanon. And, just in general, the experience of seeing a strong, technologically-savvy Western military on hostile territory, with kind of amorphous goals fighting an enemy that is, on paper, much, much weaker—but is also more determined and ends up being stronger in weird kinds of ways. It’s so clear to me that that was the laboratory where 21st century warfare was developed. That was the first war of the 21st century, and there’s a lot to learn from that period.

MJ: Such as?

MF: If you look at the Israeli experience in Lebanon, you understand that it’s a bad idea to get involved in an enterprise without a concrete plan of what you’re supposed to accomplish and how you’re supposed to get out—which I think Americans have understood anyway. But that was, for me, what we learned in Lebanon: that we went in and we just didn’t have a plan for getting out, and we ended up staying for years and years and years with goals that were very amorphous and ultimately unattainable.

MJ: A lot of reviews compared your book to Michael Herr’s Dispatches, which is a famous Vietnam memoir that helped inspire Apocalypse Now. What war books did you read while you wrote Pumpkinflowers?

MF: I was reading World War I writing. There was something about their cool attitude toward writing about this stuff. Their books are not exciting descriptions of combat. It’s not cinematic, it’s not influenced by television or by war movies. They couldn’t use obscenity, they couldn’t describe violence too much, they couldn’t talk about sex. They were limited in what they could write, and it makes their works better because it forces them to be oblique—and that ends up being a good way to write about this stuff. More than anything, I like the way that they were writing in the first person but they weren’t egotistical. Somehow they managed to write books in the first person that weren’t really about them—they were about their generation, they were about the experience as seen through their eyes. They weren’t picking at their own soul and making a big deal of themselves. That struck me as a good way to do it.

MJ: The last part of the book is about going to Lebanon in 2002 and your visit to the Pumpkin as a civilian. Have you ever had any contact with anyone who fought against you or other Israelis during the security zone war?

MF: No, although I am sure that there is someone like that living in Ottawa now, or somewhere in the states, and I would love to meet that person. And you know what? You never know. You never know who could read that book and write me an email. I could get a crazy Facebook message this evening that says, “Oh, you were near Nabatiyeh in 1998. That’s interesting, do you remember this?” And of course, I dream of things like that happening. That’s what I want to happen. We’ll see if it happens.

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What Americans Can Learn From Israel’s Forgotten War

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