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Why Can’t We Rein In This Ridiculous Military Spending?

by EarthaRosenbaum Posted on October 30, 2016

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

Through good times and bad, regardless of what’s actually happening in the world, one thing is certain: In the long run, the Pentagon budget won’t go down.

It’s not that the budget has never been reduced. At pivotal moments, like the end of World War II as well as the war’s end in Korea and Vietnam, there were indeed temporary downturns, as there was after the Cold War. More recently, the Budget Control Act of 2011 threw a monkey wrench into the Pentagon’s plans for funding that would go ever onward and upward by putting a cap on the money Congress could pony up for it. The remarkable thing, though, is not that such moments have occurred, but how modest and short-lived they’ve proved to be.

Take the current budget. It’s down slightly from its peak in 2011, when it reached the highest level since World War II, but this year’s budget for the Pentagon and related agencies is nothing to sneeze at. It comes in at roughly $600 billion—more than the peak year of the massive arms buildup initiated by President Ronald Reagan back in the 1980s. To put this figure in perspective: Despite troop levels in Iraq and Afghanistan dropping sharply over the past eight years, the Obama administration has still managed to spend more on the Pentagon than the Bush administration did during its two terms in office.

What accounts for the Department of Defense’s ability to keep a stranglehold on our tax dollars year after endless year?

Pillar one supporting that edifice: ideology. As long as most Americans accept the notion that it is the God-given mission and right of the United States to go anywhere on the planet and do more or less anything it cares to do with its military, you won’t see Pentagon spending brought under real control. Think of this as the military corollary to American exceptionalism—or just call it the doctrine of armed exceptionalism, if you will.

The second pillar supporting lavish military budgets (and this will hardly surprise you): the entrenched power of the arms lobby and its allies in the Pentagon and on Capitol Hill. The strategic placement of arms production facilities and military bases in key states and congressional districts has created an economic dependency that has saved many a flawed weapons system from being unceremoniously dumped in the trash bin of history.

Lockheed Martin, for instance, has put together a handy map of how its troubled F-35 fighter jet has created 125,000 jobs in 46 states. The actual figures are, in fact, considerably lower, but the principle holds: Having subcontractors in dozens of states makes it harder for members of Congress to consider cutting or slowing down even a failed or failing program. Take as an example the M-1 tank, which the Army actually wanted to stop buying. Its plans were thwarted by the Ohio congressional delegation, which led a fight to add more M-1s to the budget in order to keep the General Dynamics production line in Lima, Ohio, up and running. In a similar fashion, prodded by the Missouri delegation, Congress added two different versions of Boeing’s F-18 aircraft to the budget to keep funds flowing to that company’s St. Louis area plant.

The one-two punch of an environment in which the military can do no wrong while being outfitted for every global task imaginable, and what former Pentagon analyst Franklin “Chuck” Spinney has called “political engineering,” has been a tough combination to beat.

The overwhelming consensus in favor of a “cover the globe” military strategy has been broken from time to time by popular resistance to the idea of using war as a central tool of foreign policy. In such periods, getting Americans behind a program of feeding the military machine massive sums of money has generally required a heavy dose of fear.

For example, the last thing most Americans wanted after the devastation and hardship unleashed by World War II was to immediately put the country back on a war footing. The demobilization of millions of soldiers and a sharp cutback in weapons spending in the immediate postwar years rocked what President Dwight Eisenhower would later dub the “military-industrial complex.”

As Wayne Biddle has noted in his seminal book Barons of the Sky, the US aerospace industry produced an astonishing 300,000-plus military aircraft during World War II. Not surprisingly, major weapons producers struggled to survive in a peacetime environment in which government demand for their products threatened to be a tiny fraction of wartime levels.

Lockheed President Robert Gross was terrified by the potential impact of war’s end on his company’s business, as were many of his industry cohorts. “As long as I live,” he said, “I will never forget those short, appalling weeks” of the immediate postwar period. To be clear, Gross was appalled not by the war itself, but by the drop off in orders occasioned by its end. He elaborated in a 1947 letter to a friend: “We had one underlying element of comfort and reassurance during the war. We knew we’d get paid for anything we built. Now we are almost entirely on our own.”

The postwar doldrums in military spending that worried Gross so were reversed only after the American public had been fed a steady, fear-filled diet of anti-communism. NSC-68, a secret memorandum the National Security Council prepared for President Harry Truman in April 1950, created the template for a policy based on the global “containment” of communism and grounded in a plan to encircle the Soviet Union with US military forces, bases, and alliances. This would, of course, prove to be a strikingly expensive proposition. The concluding paragraphs of that memorandum underscored exactly that point, calling for a “sustained buildup of US political, economic, and military strength…to frustrate the Kremlin design of a world dominated by its will.”

Sen. Arthur Vandenberg put the thrust of this new Cold War policy in far simpler terms when he bluntly advised President Truman to “scare the hell out of the American people” to win support for a $400 million aid plan for Greece and Turkey. His suggestion would be put into effect not just for those two countries but to generate support for what President Eisenhower would later describe as “a permanent arms establishment of vast proportions.”

Industry leaders like Lockheed’s Gross were poised to take advantage of such planning. In a draft of a 1950 speech, Gross noted, giddily enough, that “for the first time in recorded history, one country has assumed global responsibility.” Meeting that responsibility would naturally mean using air transport to deliver “huge quantities of men, food, ammunition, tanks, gasoline, oil and thousands of other articles of war to a number of widely separated places on the face of the earth.” Lockheed, of course, stood ready to heed the call.

The next major challenge to armed exceptionalism, and to the further militarization of foreign policy, came after the disastrous Vietnam War, which drove many Americans to question the wisdom of a policy of permanent global interventionism. That phenomenon would be dubbed the “Vietnam syndrome” by interventionists, as if opposition to such a military policy were a disease, not a position. Still, that “syndrome” carried considerable, if ever decreasing, weight for a decade and a half, despite the Pentagon’s Reagan-inspired arms buildup of the 1980s.

With the 1991 Persian Gulf War, Washington decisively renewed its practice of responding to perceived foreign threats with large-scale military interventions. That quick victory over Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein’s forces in Kuwait was celebrated by many hawks as the end of the Vietnam-induced malaise. Amid victory parades and celebrations, President George H.W. Bush would enthusiastically exclaim, “And, by God, we’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all.”

However, perhaps the biggest threat since World War II to an “arms establishment of vast proportions” came with the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, also in 1991. How to mainline fear into the American public and justify Cold War levels of spending when that other superpower, the Soviet Union, the primary threat of the previous nearly half-century, had just evaporated and there was next to nothing threatening on the horizon? General Colin Powell, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, summed up the fears of that moment within the military and the arms complex when he said, “I’m running out of demons. I’m running out of villains. I’m down to Castro and Kim Il-sung.”

In reality, he underestimated the Pentagon’s ability to conjure up new threats. Military spending did indeed drop at the end of the Cold War, but the Pentagon helped staunch the bleeding relatively quickly before a “peace dividend” could be delivered to the American people. Instead, it put a firm floor under the fall by announcing what came to be known as the “rogue state” doctrine. Resources formerly aimed at the Soviet Union would now be focused on “regional hegemons” like Iraq and North Korea.

After the 9/11 attacks, the rogue-state doctrine morphed into the Global War on Terror (GWOT), which neoconservative pundits soon labeled “World War IV.” The heightened fear campaign that went with it, in turn, helped sow the seeds for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, which was promoted by visions of mushroom clouds rising over American cities and a drumbeat of Bush administration claims (all false) that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and ties to Al Qaeda. Some administration officials including Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld even suggested that Saddam was like Hitler, as if a modest-sized Middle Eastern state could somehow muster the resources to conquer the globe.

The administration’s propaganda campaign would be supplemented by the work of right-wing corporate-funded think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute. And no one should be surprised to learn that the military-industrial complex and its money, its lobbyists, and its interests were in the middle of it all. Take Lockheed Martin Vice President Bruce Jackson. In 1997, he became a director of the Project for the New American Century and so part of a gaggle of hawks including future Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, his future boss Donald Rumsfeld, and future Vice President Dick Cheney. In those years, PNAC would advocate the overthrow of Saddam Hussein as part of its project to turn the planet into an American military protectorate. Many of its members would, of course, enter the Bush administration in crucial roles and become architects of the GWOT and the invasion of Iraq.

The Afghan and Iraq wars would prove an absolute bonanza for contractors as the Pentagon budget soared. Traditional weapons suppliers like Lockheed Martin and Boeing prospered, as did private contractors like Dick Cheney’s former employer, Halliburton, which made billions providing logistical support to US troops in the field. Other major beneficiaries included firms like Blackwater and DynCorp, whose employees guarded US facilities and oil pipelines while training Afghan and Iraqi security forces. As much as $60 billion of the funds funneled to such contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan would be “wasted,” but not from the point of view of companies for which waste could generate as much profit as a job well done. So Halliburton and its cohorts weren’t complaining.

On entering the Oval Office, President Barack Obama would ditch the term “global war on terror” in favor of “countering violent extremism”—and then essentially settle for a no-name global war. He would shift gears from a strategy focused on large numbers of “boots on the ground” to an emphasis on drone strikes, the use of Special Operations forces, and massive transfers of arms to allies like Saudi Arabia. In the context of an increasingly militarized foreign policy, one might call Obama’s approach “politically sustainable warfare,” since it involved fewer (American) casualties and lower costs than Bush-style warfare, which peaked in Iraq at more than 160,000 troops and a comparable number of private contractors.

Recent terror attacks against Western targets—Brussels, Paris, Nice, San Bernardino, Orlando—have offered the national security state and the Obama administration the necessary fear factor that makes the case for higher Pentagon spending so palatable. This has been true despite the fact that more tanks, bombers, aircraft carriers, and nuclear weapons will be useless in preventing such attacks.

The majority of what the Pentagon spends, of course, has nothing to do with fighting terrorism. But whatever it has or hasn’t been called, the war against terror has proven to be a cash cow for the Pentagon and contractors like Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, and Raytheon.

The “war budget”—money meant for the Pentagon but not included in its regular budget—has been used to add on tens of billions of dollars more. It has proven to be an effective “slush fund” for weapons and activities that have nothing to do with immediate war fighting and has been the Pentagon’s preferred method for evading the caps on its budget imposed by the Budget Control Act. A Pentagon spokesman admitted as much recently by acknowledging that more than half the $58.8 billion war budget is being used to pay for nonwar costs.

The abuse of the war budget leaves ample room in the Pentagon’s main budget for items like the overpriced, underperforming F-35 combat aircraft, a plane that, at a price tag of $1.4 trillion over its lifetime, is on track to be the most expensive weapons program ever undertaken. That slush fund is also enabling the Pentagon to spend billions of dollars in seed money as a down payment on the department’s proposed $1 trillion plan to buy a new generation of nuclear-armed bombers, missiles, and submarines. Shutting it down could force the Pentagon to do what it likes least: live within an actual budget rather than continuing to push its top line ever upward.

Although rarely discussed because of the focus on Donald Trump’s abominable behavior and racist rhetoric, both candidates for president are in favor of increasing Pentagon spending. Trump’s “plan” (if one can call it that) hews closely to a blueprint developed by the Heritage Foundation that, if implemented, could increase Pentagon spending by a cumulative $900 billion over the next decade. The size of a possible buildup under Hillary Clinton is less clear, but she has also pledged to work toward lifting the caps on the Pentagon’s regular budget. If that were done, and the war fund continued to be stuffed with non-war-related items, the Pentagon and its contractors will be sitting pretty.

As long as fear, greed, and hubris are the dominant factors driving Pentagon spending (no matter who is in the White House), substantial and enduring budget reductions are essentially inconceivable. A wasteful practice may be eliminated here or an unnecessary weapons system cut there, but more fundamental change would require taking on the fear factor, the doctrine of armed exceptionalism, and the way the military-industrial complex is embedded in Washington.

Only such a culture shift would allow for a clear-eyed assessment of what constitutes “defense” and how much money would be needed to provide it. Unfortunately, the military-industrial complex that Eisenhower warned Americans about more than 50 years ago is alive and well, and gobbling up your tax dollars at an alarming rate.

William D. Hartung is the director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy. His latest book is Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex.

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Why Can’t We Rein In This Ridiculous Military Spending?

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In Which I Take a Second Look at Hillary Clinton’s Paid Speeches

by EileenRubinstei Posted on October 9, 2016

Mother Jones

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While we pass the time waiting for tonight’s debate, I’m going to talk through something else. Yesterday I wrote about one of the emails in the Podesta hack, and basically dismissed it. It was a review of the most potentially damaging statements from Hillary Clinton’s paid speeches, and none of them struck me as damaging at all. Since then, several people I respect have suggested that they really are problematic. So let’s go through the ones that are getting the most attention. There are eight.

1. Public and private positions: “I mean, politics is like sausage being made. It is unsavory, and it always has been that way, but we usually end up where we need to be. But if everybody’s watching, you know, all of the back room discussions and the deals, you know, then people get a little nervous, to say the least. So, you need both a public and a private position.”

I get how this can be spun to make it look like Clinton is advocating that politicians should lie publicly. But seriously? This is just Negotiation 101. You always have a public position—We will never compromise!—and a private one—What will it take for you guys to make a deal? Anyone over the age of five knows this is how all negotiation everywhere works. The faux outrage over this doesn’t impress me.

2. Oversimplification: “That was one of the reasons that I started traveling in February of ’09, so people could, you know, literally yell at me for the United States and our banking system causing this everywhere. Now, that’s an oversimplification we know, but it was the conventional wisdom. And I think that there’s a lot that could have been avoided in terms of both misunderstanding and really politicizing what happened with greater transparency, with greater openness on all sides.”

First, Clinton is acknowledging that it’s an oversimplification to say that the US banking system was solely responsible for the 2008 crash. Surely everyone understands now that this is true? European banks were heavily leveraged too, and were just as eager as US banks to lend too much money with too little oversight. They were also eager to play the derivatives game. What’s more, there was more to the housing bubble than just the banks. Clinton’s statement here seems unexceptional to me.

Second, she suggests that more transparency from the banks might have prevented “politicizing” the crisis. This probably merits a closer look than I originally gave it. Is she referring to Republican opposition to TARP? That would be reasonable. Or is she talking about taking a tough line against bank executives? That would be harder to excuse. Clinton would need to explain what she meant before we can really make any judgment about this.

3. Bankers know the banking system best: “Today, there’s more that can and should be done that really has to come from the industry itself.” AND: “There’s nothing magic about regulations, too much is bad, too little is bad. How do you get to the golden key, how do we figure out what works? And the people that know the industry better than anybody are the people who work in the industry.”

This doesn’t sound great, I admit. On the other hand, Clinton is talking to bankers. So naturally she’s talking about the role bankers can play in reforming financial regulation. Her wording may not thrill me, but it’s not as if she’s suggesting that the finance industry should be allowed to regulate itself. It’s hard to get too worked up about this.

4. Principled bankers: “When I was a Senator from New York, I represented and worked with so many talented principled people who made their living in finance. But even thought I represented them and did all I could to make sure they continued to prosper, I called for closing the carried interest loophole and addressing skyrocketing CEO pay. I also was calling in ’06, ’07 for doing something about the mortgage crisis, etc.”

This is a nothingburger. There are plenty of principled people in the finance industry, and there’s nothing wrong with saying so. And anyway, the gist of this excerpt is that even though she represented New York in the Senate, Clinton still called for regulating the finance industry because it was the right thing to do. This strikes me as entirely positive.

5. Bias against successful people: “But, you know, part of the problem with the political situation, too, is that there is such a bias against people who have led successful and/or complicated lives. You know, the divestment of assets, the stripping of all kinds of positions, the sale of stocks. It just becomes very onerous and unnecessary.”

This is actually a pretty common criticism of public service these days: we lose a lot of good people because we make it too onerous to serve. The disclosure forms are hundreds of pages long. The divestment rules are thorny. The Senate hearings are nasty and partisan. It takes months or more to get through the whole thing. Plenty of people agree that things have gotten out of hand on this front.

6. Simpson-Bowles: “But Simpson-Bowles — and I know you heard from Erskine earlier today — put forth the right framework. Namely, we have to restrain spending, we have to have adequate revenues, and we have to incentivize growth.”

A few people have tried to play this as an attack on Social Security, since the Simpson-Bowles plan included cuts to Social Security. This is ridiculous. Clinton is obviously taking about generalities: tackling the federal deficit by cutting spending and raising more revenue.

7. Open borders: “My dream is a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders, some time in the future with energy that is as green and sustainable as we can get it, powering growth and opportunity for every person in the hemisphere.”

I really have no idea what this is about, but I assume Clinton is talking about some possible far future scenario, and pandering a bit to her Brazilian audience. She’s never even remotely taken any actions that would push us toward a “hemispheric common market.” Meh.

8. Protectionism: “I think we have to have a concerted plan to increase trade….Governments can either make it easy or make it hard and we have to resist, protectionism, other kinds of barriers to market access and to trade.”

I guess the Bernie supporters will take this as some kind of huge betrayal, but I don’t. Clinton is opposed to protectionism. I’ve never thought otherwise, and I don’t think anyone else has either.

Out of all this, I have two questions. What did Clinton mean by “politicizing” the financial crisis? And what did she mean when she kinda sorta implied that we should listen more to bankers because they know the banking system the best?

That’s it. In other news, we learned that Clinton is pretty much the same person in private that she is in public. She’s moderate, pragmatic, and willing to work across the aisle. She dislikes protectionism and thinks we should try to cut the budget deficit in a balanced way. She doesn’t demonize Wall Street.

You may or may not like this, but it’s who Hillary Clinton has been forever. There are no surprises here. So while I may have skipped past a couple of small things too quickly on my first read, my overall opinion remains the same: There’s just nothing here that’s plausibly damaging, even when it’s run through the Donald Trump alternate universe pie hole. I guess we’ll find out tonight if I’m right.

POSTSCRIPT: It’s also worth noting that this is apparently the worst, most banker-sympathetic stuff they could find out of thousands of pages of speeches to bankers. If anything, this suggests that Clinton hasn’t privately said much of anything that’s especially friendly to Wall Street.

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In Which I Take a Second Look at Hillary Clinton’s Paid Speeches

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This Conservative Arizona Paper Never Endorsed a Democrat for President. Until Now.

by RobbinBravo Posted on September 28, 2016

Mother Jones

The Arizona Republic, once called the Arizona Republican, is a conservative newspaper that has never endorsed a Democrat in a general election for president. But on Tuesday, the paper broke its 120-year streak of supporting Republicans, giving Hillary Clinton its endorsement.

Trump, the paper said, “is not conservative and he is not qualified.”

The endorsement lauds many of Clinton’s qualities, including her years of public service, her temperament, and her experience, while pointing out that Trump lacks these same qualifications. “Clinton retains her composure under pressure,” the paper wrote. “She’s tough. She doesn’t back down. Trump responds to criticism with the petulance of verbal spit wads.”

The paper contrasted the two candidates on issues from immigration to treatment of women. On the latter, the paper noted Clinton’s focus on gender equality as secretary of state and compared that record to Trump’s view of women. “Trump’s long history of objectifying women and his demeaning comments about women during the campaign are not just good-old-boy gaffes,” the editors wrote. “They are evidence of deep character flaws. They are part of a pattern.”

The paper noted that Clinton made a mistake by using a private email server as secretary of state and said she should have erected a “firewall” between herself and the Clinton Foundation while at the State Department, “though there is no evidence of wrongdoing.” But against Trump’s flaws, the paper concluded, hers “pale in comparison.”

On Wednesday, Grant Woods, the former Republican attorney general of Arizona, also endorsed Clinton, calling her “one of the most qualified nominees to ever run for president” and Trump “the least qualified ever.”

The Arizona Republic is the latest conservative-leaning paper to break this year with its tradition of endorsing Republicans. The Dallas Morning News and the Cincinnati Inquirer both recently endorsed Clinton, while several other conservative papers have opted to endorse the libertarian candidate, Gary Johnson.

Thus far, no major papers have endorsed Trump over Clinton.

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This Conservative Arizona Paper Never Endorsed a Democrat for President. Until Now.

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Trump’s Huge Conflict of Interest With a Big Foreign Bank Keeps Getting Worse

by JaimeLockett Posted on September 28, 2016

Mother Jones

Deutsche Bank is in deep trouble. Its stock price has plummeted in recent days after the Justice Department demanded the gigantic German bank pay $14 billion to settle claims regarding its sale of bad mortgage-backed securities in the the run-up to the 2008 financial crisis. The bank’s shares fell to a new low on Tuesday over reports it might be seeking a bailout from the German government—which Deutsche Bank has denied. The crisis has exposed the fragile state of one of the world’s largest banks, but it also highlights a potential massive conflict of interest for Donald Trump.

In the past few years, Trump obtained $364 million in loans from Deutsche bank via four mortgages on three of his prized properties: Miami’s Doral National golf course, Chicago’s Trump International Hotel and Tower, and the newly opened Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C., a few blocks from the White House. A foreign entity holding so much of Trump’s debt—financial leverage that could affect the decision-making of a future commander in chief—has raised alarms among ethics watchdogs. But with Deutsche Bank floundering, the possible conflicts posed by Trump’s loans are compounding.

The financial health of Deutsche Bank is important for Trump’s corporate empire. Because of Trump’s history of failed projects and repeated bankruptcies, many of the world’s top banks have long stopped doing business with him. Deutsche Bank was one of the only major banks—perhaps the only—that would work with him, and their relationship has been rocky. Trump wore out his welcome with Deutsche Bank’s corporate banking arm in 2008, when he attempted to get out of paying $40 million he personally owed the bank after his company failed to make a payment deadline on a larger $640 million loan for his Chicago project. But Trump has maintained his relationship with Deutsche’s so-called “private bank”—an arm of the bank that caters to wealthy people and has more flexibility in its lending standards than the corporate side. The four loans Trump currently has with Deutsche Bank are each from the private bank, a Deutsche Bank official told Mother Jones.

Deutsche Bank has vowed to fight the US government over the hefty fine it is threatening to impose. The bank has said that it is prepared to pay no more than $2 or $3 billion and noted in a statement last week that it has “no intent to settle these potential civil claims anywhere near the number cited.” Settlement negotiations are expected to take months, raising the possibility that Trump might be in the White House when a final decision is made. In an unprecedented face-off between a foreign bank and an administration led by a man deeply in debt to that bank, how would Trump balance the public interest with his private interests? Could American taxpayers be assured that a Trump administration would aggressively seek the maximum penalty against a lender that played a role in tanking the economy in 2008? Or would Deutsche Bank receive special consideration or favorable terms because of its ties to—or leverage over—Trump?

The news media has paid attention to the the debt Trump, via partnerships, owes a Chinese bank. But Trump’s relationship with Deutsche Bank has yet to receive much scrutiny. And if Deutsche Bank continues to falter, there is the possibility that it may need to sell off loans, perhaps including the Trump loans. It’s hard to imagine a more staggering conflict of interest than a potential or sitting president’s debts being placed on the global market. What individuals or financial institutions here or abroad might buy them? Meanwhile, Trump has offered no firm explanation for how he would separate himself from his businesses—or his debts—if elected president.

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Trump’s Huge Conflict of Interest With a Big Foreign Bank Keeps Getting Worse

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Why One Scientist Went Public With Her Sexual Harassment Story

by JackMurrell231 Posted on September 26, 2016

Mother Jones

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In the past few years, sexual harassment in the sciences has become an increasingly visible problem. Disturbing allegations about the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Park Service, and the former head of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have all made headlines. So have a number of cases involving prominent university professors.

On the latest episode of the Inquiring Minds podcast, Kishore Hari talks to Sarah Ballard, an accomplished exoplanet researcher who was also a complainant in one of the most high-profile recent harassment controversies. Last year, Buzzfeed reported that Geoff Marcy, a renowned astronomer at the University of California-Berkeley, had faced sexual harassment accusations. A report produced by the university found that Marcy had “violated the relevant UC sexual harassment policies”; it cited allegations that he had inappropriately touched students. Initially, Marcy was placed on probation; he was instructed by the university to comply with its sexual harassment policies and to avoid physical contact with students (except to shake their hands).

But the Buzzfeed story sparked a national outcry, and many began demanding a more severe punishment. Marcy posted an apology on his website, though he denies some of the allegations in the report and says that his actions didn’t harm his students’ professional lives. He ultimately retired under pressure from faculty at the university.

On Inquiring Minds, Ballard depicts Marcy as a professor who praised her talent yet abused her trust. She first met him when she was an undergraduate student in one of his classes, but her excitement to work with one of the world’s foremost experts on exoplanets soon took a dark turn. On one occasion, Marcy told Ballard a detailed story about his sexual history. On another occasion, she says, he attempted to massage her neck after driving her home.

After that, Ballard agonized over whether to confront Marcy about his behavior, ultimately deciding to do so. As described in the Berkeley report, this prospect caused “great anxiety” for Ballard, “in part because she believed such a confrontation would effectively forfeit any opportunity of receiving a letter of recommendation” from Marcy. But it never came to that. Ballard says Marcy’s behavior suddenly changed and the harassment stopped. She later found out that a graduate student had confronted Marcy about unwelcome behavior Marcy had allegedly exhibited toward a different student.

Marcy didn’t deny Ballard’s allegations—though he does deny some of the other allegations in Berkeley’s report. (According to the Berkeley report, he told the university investigator that he didn’t recall touching Ballard in the car but that it was possible he did.) In an interview with Mother Jones, Marcy’s attorney, Elizabeth Grossman, argued that Marcy’s actions weren’t serious enough to justify the backlash he’s experienced. “There is not a single allegation of sexual assault against Marcy,” said Grossman. “There is not a single allegation of soliciting sex, of requesting sex in exchange for academic favor. There is not a single suggestion of his interfering with anyone’s ability to thrive on campus.”

Ballard, however, says she was deeply affected by her interactions with Marcy. “To have Marcy say, ‘You are talented, you are full of promise’— that is so compelling,” she explains. “And then to have all of the sudden the knowledge that…that message might not have been delivered in good faith: You feel like the rug has been pulled out under you. So does that mean that I’m not promising? Does that mean that all of it was a lie?…It was profoundly rattling to my nascent sense of self as an astronomer, as a scientist.”

Years later, when Ballard heard that allegations against Marcy were going to become public, she made the decision to come forward and identify herself as one of the victims. She hopes that by doing so, she’ll make things easier for other women.

“There was one principle which helped me to unravel the tangled knot of my feelings that I could always return to…and that was you have to be the woman you needed then,” says Ballard. “You couldn’t protect yourself then, but you can protect younger you today, and you can protect women who are 20 today.”

Ballard went on to receive a Ph.D. in astronomy and astrophysics from Harvard (she notes that Marcy wrote a recommendation letter that helped her get into the prestigious university). She now researches exoplanets at MIT. But across the country, many other women have left the sciences. That’s partly because of widespread sexual harassment, argues Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.). Indeed, a 2014 study found that roughly two-thirds of female scientists surveyed said they had experienced harassment while doing field research.

In January, Speier gave a speech on the floor of the US House of Representatives recounting the allegations against Timothy Slater, who taught astronomy at the University of Arizona and is now a professor at the University of Wyoming. Speier had obtained the results of a confidential 2005 investigation conducted by the University of Arizona. “Dr. Slater himself admitted that he gave an employee a vegetable-shaped vibrator and that he frequently commented to his employees and students about the appearance of women,” said Speier on the House floor. “My staff spoke with one female grad student who was required to attend a strip club in order to discuss her academic work with Dr. Slater. The woman has since left the field of astronomy.” After reading the report, “I was physically sickened,” Speier says on Inquiring Minds.

Slater declined to answer specific questions from Mother Jones about the allegations, though he did provide a letter his lawyers had sent to the University of Arizona threatening to sue the university for defamation and breach of privacy over the release of the report. In the letter, Slater’s attorneys said the university’s report “contains numerous false and misleading allegations, which Rep. Speier and the media has reported as fact.” Specifically, the attorneys state that Slater “never gave a vibrator” to “any graduate student, ever” and that Slater “denies that he ever pressured anyone to go to the strip club or that anyone ever complained about going to strip club.”

Speier proposes one solution to the problem of sexual harassment in the sciences. The federal government has the power under Title IX to fight harassment, she notes. Because so many universities, even private ones, rely on federal dollars, they could lose federal funding in the form of grants or student loans if they violate the law. Last week, she introduced legislation requiring universities to inform federal grant-making institutions when they determine a professor has engaged in sexual harassment.

Speier isn’t optimistic that the bill will pass in the current Congress, but she wants harassment victims to know they have an advocate on Capitol Hill. Her message to them? “They’ve been heard.”

Inquiring Minds is a podcast hosted by neuroscientist and musician Indre Viskontas and Kishore Hari, the director of the Bay Area Science Festival. To catch future shows right when they are released, subscribe to Inquiring Minds via iTunes or RSS. You can follow the show on Twitter at @inquiringshow and like us on Facebook.

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Why One Scientist Went Public With Her Sexual Harassment Story

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Friday Fundraising and Cat Blogging – 23 September 2016

by CharlineHoffmann Posted on September 23, 2016

Mother Jones

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About a month ago, I wrote about our latest experiment in how we pay for MoJo’s journalism—our first-ever attempt to ask our regular readers to sign up as sustaining donors with a tax-deductible gift that automatically renews every month. The day after our pledge drive went live, the Justice Department announced it would phase out private prison contracts in the wake of Shane Bauer’s first-hand investigation into those facilities. In response to that amazing news 1,061 donors signed up, donating $11,792 in just the first nine days.

In the five weeks since then, our results slowed down—but we expected that. In fact, a big part of the experiment was not just learning if we could raise the money, but figuring out how could we do it. We hoped we could do it without blanketing the site with ads or bombarding your inboxes with panicky emails.

So far, so good on that front. You’ve probably seen a fundraising ad or two over the last few days, but we’ve managed to avoid the sensational emails. With a week to go, we’re currently sitting around $21,500 raised from 1,785 donors—which is pretty generous when you consider that $21,000 each month turns into more than $250,000 a year from now. Still, our goal remains $30,000, and it’s going to be a nail-biter whether we can make that next $8,500 before next Friday’s deadline.

So here’s hoping you’ll help us get across the finish line and meet our $30,000 goal—which will turn into $360,000 by this time next year. You can do it by credit card here. If you prefer PayPal, you can give monthly here—just be sure to check the box next to your gift amount.

And now, without further ado, your reward in advance for contributing to Mother Jones: double catblogging. Enjoy!

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Friday Fundraising and Cat Blogging – 23 September 2016

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You don’t get Leonardo DiCaprio by being this thirsty, people.

by MerrillTerrell Posted on September 23, 2016

This week, cities mark World Car-Free Day, an annual event to promote biking, walking, mass transit, and other ways to get around sans motor vehicles (Solowheel, anyone?).

Technically, World Car-Free Day was Thursday, September 22, but participating cities are taking the “eh, close enough” approach to get their car-free kicks in on the weekend. Said cities include Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, Brussels, Bogotá, Jakarta, Copenhagen, and Paris, where nearly half the city center will be closed to vehicle traffic on Sunday.

But going car-free, municipally speaking, is becoming more of a regular trend than an annual affair: Mexico City closes 35 miles of city streets to cars every Sunday; the Oslo city government proposed a ban on private vehicles in the city center after 2019; and in Paris, the government is allowed to limit vehicles if air pollution rises above health-threatening levels.

But even if your city isn’t officially participating in World Car-Free Day, you can be the change you want to see in your own metropolis. And by that, we mean: Just leave your keys at home. Horrible, no good things happen in cars.

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You don’t get Leonardo DiCaprio by being this thirsty, people.

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Farmworkers demand ban on a toxic pesticide.

by SteviePillinger Posted on September 22, 2016

This week, cities mark World Car-Free Day, an annual event to promote biking, walking, mass transit, and other ways to get around sans motor vehicles (Solowheel, anyone?).

Technically, World Car-Free Day was Thursday, September 22, but participating cities are taking the “eh, close enough” approach to get their car-free kicks in on the weekend. Said cities include Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, Brussels, Bogotá, Jakarta, Copenhagen, and Paris, where nearly half the city center will be closed to vehicle traffic on Sunday.

But going car-free, municipally speaking, is becoming more of a regular trend than an annual affair: Mexico City closes 35 miles of city streets to cars every Sunday; the Oslo city government proposed a ban on private vehicles in the city center after 2019; and in Paris, the government is allowed to limit vehicles if air pollution rises above health-threatening levels.

But even if your city isn’t officially participating in World Car-Free Day, you can be the change you want to see in your own metropolis. And by that, we mean: Just leave your keys at home. Horrible, no good things happen in cars.

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Farmworkers demand ban on a toxic pesticide.

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Washington Post Admits the Hillary Clinton Email Mountain Is a Molehill After All

by NevaFulkerson78 Posted on September 9, 2016

Mother Jones

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The Washington Post writes today that the Hillary Clinton email story is “out of control”:

Judging by the amount of time NBC’s Matt Lauer spent pressing Hillary Clinton on her emails during Wednesday’s national security presidential forum, one would think that her homebrew server was one of the most important issues facing the country this election. It is not.

….Ironically, even as the email issue consumed so much precious airtime, several pieces of news reported Wednesday should have taken some steam out of the story. First is a memo FBI Director James B. Comey sent to his staff….Second is the emergence of an email exchange between Ms. Clinton and former secretary of state Colin Powell….Last is a finding that 30 Benghazi-related emails that were recovered during the FBI email investigation and recently attracted big headlines had nothing significant in them….The story has vastly exceeded the boundaries of the facts.

Imagine how history would judge today’s Americans if, looking back at this election, the record showed that voters empowered a dangerous man because of . . . a minor email scandal. There is no equivalence between Ms. Clinton’s wrongs and Mr. Trump’s manifest unfitness for office.

I’m not quite sure how to take this. On the one hand, hasn’t the Washington Post hyped the email story as much as anybody? On the other hand, even if they have, they still deserve credit for seeing the light.

The email story is one of the hardest kinds of stories for the press to handle appropriately. At the beginning of a story like this, it’s impossible to know if there’s something to it. Then the facts drip out slowly over the course of months as everyone chases leads. At some point it becomes clear that there’s no there there, but reasonable people can disagree on when that point is. Personally, I’d date it from sometime between October of last year, when Trey Gowdy’s committee was unable to find anything even marginally corrupt during an 11-hour inquisition of Clinton, and July of this year, when FBI director James Comey made it clear that she had done nothing remotely serious enough to warrant prosecution.

But that’s it. Since at least July we’ve basically known the contours of the entire affair. Clinton was foolish to use a single email account hosted on a personal server—which she’s acknowledged—but that’s it. Beyond that, it was an unclassified system and everyone treated it like one. The retroactively classified emails are more a spat between State and the intelligence community than anything else. Nor is there any evidence that Clinton was trying to evade FOIA by hosting her email on a private server. That would have been (a) deliberate and calculating deception on a Nixonian scale; (b) phenomenally stupid since nearly all of her emails were sent to state.gov addresses and were therefore accessible anyway; and (c) unusually half-assed since she retained the emails for years after she left office and turned them over as soon as State asked for them. Only an idiot would try to evade FOIA like this, and even her bitterest enemies don’t think Hillary Clinton is an idiot.

Emailgate has been investigated and reported to death. Unless some genuine bombshell drops, further leaks should be treated as obvious partisan attacks, not news, and further production of emails should be noted briefly on page A17. Let’s not turn this into another Whitewater.

And with that out of the way, can we now move on to the Clinton Foundation? It’s been investigated to death as well, and the only thing we’ve learned is that Doug Band needs to shut his pie hole a little more often. Aside from that, literally every shred of evidence points to (a) appropriate behavior from Hillary Clinton and her staff; (b) Bill Clinton leveraging his fame to raise money for charity; and (c) billions of dollars spent on worthy causes. Beyond that, you might find Bill’s personal moneymaking enterprises a little off-putting, but that’s all. So how about if we give the Foundation a rest too?

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Washington Post Admits the Hillary Clinton Email Mountain Is a Molehill After All

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Dakota Access pipeline’s private security unleashed attack dogs and sprayed mace on protesters.

by ITAVinceyt Posted on September 6, 2016

This weekend, tensions over the pipeline in North Dakota escalated into violence for the first time since protesters camped next to the western banks of the Missouri River weeks ago.

Anti-pipeline activists stormed a private construction site less than a mile from the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation on Saturday morning, chanting “water is life.”

Nataanii Means, a Navajo-Lakota-Omaha rapper from New Mexico, captured video of the scene.

All told, more than 30 protesters and bystanders were sprayed and six people were bitten by dogs, the Associated Press reports. Four private security guards and two attack dogs were also injured.

The clash came less than a day after Standing Rock filed a federal court request for an emergency restraining order to halt construction.

Researchers brought in to survey the construction site found “significant cultural and historical value,” in the ancient artifacts and burials in the area. One of those sites ended up destroyed before the standoff Saturday.

Standing Rock’s pending lawsuit against Army Corps of Engineers, which supervised Dakota Access’s permitting process, claims that the tribe wasn’t given time to determine whether construction would violate the National Historic Preservation Act.

If the tribe gets its injunction in court, it would delay the pipeline’s construction to allow for more thorough environmental reviews.

But there are dozens of constructions sites for the pipeline, and work hasn’t stopped yet. Neither have the protesters, who chained themselves to two sites on Tuesday.

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Dakota Access pipeline’s private security unleashed attack dogs and sprayed mace on protesters.

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