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Technological Innovation Doesn’t Have to Make Us Less Human

by AdelaidaR31 Posted on September 4, 2016

Mother Jones

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In a world where personal information is ubiquitous and accessible, shouldn’t you have the right to be forgotten? How should we deal with traces of our online selves? These are just two of many questions and issues explored in Sheila Jasanoff’s new book, The Ethics of Invention, which published this week. Jasanoff, a professor of science and technology studies at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, explores ethical issues that have been created by technological advances—from how we should deal with large-scale disasters such as Bhopal or Chernobyl to the more hidden conundrums of data collection, privacy, and our relationship with tech giants like Facebook and Google.

Jasanoff believes we don’t sufficiently acknowledge how much power we’ve handed over to technology, which, she writes, “rules us as much as laws do.” What we need, she says, is far more reflection on the role that tech plays in our lives now and what role we want it to play in the future. One of her hopes in writing this book was to explore the “need to strengthen our deliberative institutions to rethink things,” so that “people will recognize that this is a democratic obligation every bit as much as elections.” She sees that putting “a technology into place is like putting a political leader into place, and we should take political responsibility for the consequences of technology in the same way that we at least try to take political responsibility for who we elect.”

I talked to Jasanoff about the different ways we should approach tech, whether we can rightly predict what will happen in the future, and if there’s hope for us before we all become controlled by robots or a version of the rolling, chubby humans in Wall-E.

Mother Jones: You start your book by discussing a lot of the different ways people have approached and thought about technology, including theories around determinism. Why do you reject those ideas and say we have to recognize our human influence and values in technology and our agency over it?

Sheila Jasanoff: Well, first of all, I’m delighted to see that you’ve picked up one of the major messages of the book so clearly. The question why it’s important for us to come to grips with our own agency and our involvement in putting science and technology into our lives—it’s in a way obvious, because otherwise we take something that we human beings have created and raise it to a pedestal where we think that the technology determines for itself how humans’ future ought to evolve. I think that’s a risky proposition for many, many reasons. First of all, it makes us less careful about the harmful dimensions of technological design, which undoubtedly exist. But secondly, it also makes us less sensitive to the inequalities involved in allowing technologies to develop in particular ways, and this is something I think is really important to put front and center as we become more and more dependent on technology in every dimension of our lives.

MJ: Can you elaborate a little more on the inequalities that you just mentioned?

SJ: Let me begin with the best-known historical example, because that is tied up with these myths that need to be revisited and rethought: the idea of the Luddite. The Luddites were a group of people who have become proverbial as anti-technology because these were British weavers who, in the early days in the introduction of the mechanical loom, went about and broke the looms.

Historically, the idea that you take something novel and you break it has been seen as the ultimate rejection of Enlightenment values, of progress, of civilization—because how could you possibly move forward if you break technology? I think that that misses the point, that if you introduce any kind of technology, what you’re introducing is a new way of living and the consequences of that new way of living for people who were enmeshed in a different way of living need to be thought through.

So I think there’s a direct comparison between that and today’s GMO protests. This is the area in contemporary science and technology where there’s been the most concentrated protests, and one type of protest has been to go to field sites, where GMOs of all sorts have been experimentally planted, and local farmers and activists have gone there and ripped up these plants. And again, scientists and many policymakers see this as a form of Luddism. But that keeps us from recognizing that farming is a very complicated way of living…and by introducing a different kind of more industrialized, more standardized agriculture, we’re actually interfering with long-standing patterns. This may be better or this may be for the worse, but that is something that we need to debate. But to not debate it, to just decide that just because it is a technological new thing, therefore it has to be propagated as fast as possible, as widely as possible, that seems to be a mistake, in ethical terms and in terms of democratic politics as well.

MJ: It’s interesting that you bring up the GMO protests and the resistance to new technologies, because it seems as if some technologies are more acceptable than others. We seem to be more okay with mobile phones but we’re resistant to other things. Why are some technologies and inventions more accepted than others?

SJ: In general, people feel that technologies they perceive as liberating are easier to accept than ones that they feel are imposing controls on them, so something like the mobile phone, which allows you to do the same functionalities as an old landline did, only from different places and in different contexts, is seen as more liberating than the stay-in-one place phone. Whereas a technological development that actually is perceived as a form of control—so, for instance, GMOs that have been made sterile into the next season so that you can’t save the seeds as your parents and grandparents may have done for eons—that will come across to farmers as a kind of imposed technology and not a liberating technology.

W.W. Norton

But I would caution against thinking that acceptance itself should be seen as an indicator that this is a good thing. With data in particular, we may be okay with it, but it’s related to the argument about GMOs. Many people have said, “Look, Americans have accepted the introduction of GMOs into agriculture, and 300 million who are okay with it can’t be wrong, therefore why shouldn’t everybody in the world accept it?” I think that whether we’ve accepted it in a deliberative way, aware of all the problems, or whether we’ve accepted it because we just didn’t know, or nobody gave enough time to think. I’m trying to make people more alert that mere acceptance isn’t a good enough indicator that something is ethical. You actually need to stop and think. Acceptance on the basis of ignorance or deceit is not the same thing as the acceptance on the basis of ongoing vigorous democratic debate.

MJ: You said it’s hard to predict what will happen with technology. One interesting example where people have been trying to predict what’s going to happen—or what technology is going to cost society—is around automation and self-driving cars. Even some tech companies say this is the next frontier and people will lose jobs. What do you think about that debate?

SJ: It’s not just about self-driving cars, but it’s about robotics and automation in general. I think there are certain things people would recognize as having benefits. For instance, there’s a huge consensus that life-prolonging drugs are a good thing, but that debate has happened independently of the moral and philosophical debate about the kind of quality of life that we’re buying for individuals with these additional 10, 20, 30 years we might be giving them.

My view of the right kind of debate would be that we should not decouple them. We should not decouple the discussions of who the losers are and what will happen to them from who the winners are and whether it will be beneficial. I’m all in favor of being able to imagine new frontiers with the aid of technologies, but I want a more compassionate approach that also recognizes that every time you’re talking about new frontiers, there will be certain kinds of costs attached. There will be people who don’t quite understand how to handle email who will decide to have private servers and then not know how to excuse themselves when it may be something as simple-minded as they were a little too far along in their lives to really figure out how to go back and forth between two different accounts. I’ve known cases of high-up government officials who preferred to use their personal laptops instead of the highly secured ones that their jobs required of them. Not because they weren’t smart, not because they weren’t good public servants, but because they simply were a little less skillful than maybe their grandchildren would have been in this case.

MJ: This sounds as if technological development is actually very Darwinian. Is it?

SJ: I want a society in which we don’t throw things and people away with quite the abandon we do, especially people. This is why the idea of disruptive technologies is quite dangerous, because you ought to be asking ourselves, what exactly are we disrupting? We should be disrupting structures that are unjust, we should be disrupting structures that were put into place without us ever having bought into them. We seem to buy into the rush into progress or what is imagined to be progress, without asking the questions: So what happens to the fact that not everybody is going to agree to this form of progress, and not everyone is going to have access to this form of progress, and not everybody is going to think that they want to give up their present way of living for the sake of achieving this particular kind of progress?

MJ: We talked about responsibility and asking more questions in general. Where do you think responsibilities lie: the individual, or the government?

SJ: Or maybe neither. My profession is usually described as an educator, so I do think that institutions like mine have a huge responsibility, and over the years I’ve become more committed to that. We need to make new kinds of citizens who reflect on the way in which technology enables and empowers things in their lives in the same way that citizens are trained to think about how law, politics, and government play a role in their lives. Ultimately, I am kind of a sucker for democracy, so I do think that what kinds of citizens we have in our societies are more foundational than what kinds of governments we have, and that the responsibility for self-government is ultimately with us. But we also have learned through a couple thousand years of democracy that democracies are only as good as people’s capacity to reflect on those questions. Then you cycle back to educational institutions and what they’re teaching and how they’re training people to think about their own condition. So I would put an enormous amount of responsibility on all the institutions that are responsible for making our thinking public. Of course, government has its role to play as well, but not in the form of risk regulator, more in the form of a public space where the right kinds of deliberative possibilities are created and fostered.

MJ: How do you think technology or how we think about technology will progress in the next few years or decades? Are you optimistic? Are you worried?

SJ: I think that we’ve made a lot of really fundamental discoveries and I think that frontiers we didn’t think we were going to be able to crack are, in different ways, in view. I don’t think we’re quite at the threshold of immortality yet, but we have to ask ourselves what we want out of immortality. Does it mean that the generation that achieves immortality just sits there forever, and we never propagate anymore or there’s nothing new that ever happens to the world ever again? One has to allow oneself a little time to reflect on those kinds of things. I don’t see the technological frontier as receding. I don’t see science as stopping, nor would I want it to—it’s a kind of creativity that I’m totally in favor of. But I also think that with all of that comes a huge potential for scaling things up too fast or heedlessly, not even because we failed to predict it. Climate change is there as a reminder that we can get richer and safer societies that are also consuming more and more to the point where the stability of Earth’s systems is being challenged at potentially catastrophic levels. I don’t think we can stop that. Just the very same worries I have about prediction on the positive progressive side—I mean, predictions that say we’ll be great, we’ll be fine—also apply to predictions that are too catastrophic. I’m not sure we get those predictions right either.

What I’ve advocated is just a more humble and self-aware approach to the ways in which we use technology, a wider diffusion of responsibility. Scientists not saying, “Oh, all we’re doing is the science and the regulators will pick it up”; lawyers not saying, “Oh the scientists will tell us the facts and we will make the decisions on the basis of those facts.” But a more widely shared burden on the part of society to keep asking, “What are our collective values, what kind of world do we want to bequeath to our children, and to what extent are these particular technological developments helping us go in those directions? I think that corporations, every bit as much as governments, social movements, and universities—we all have a role to play in asking those questions. I don’t think anybody should have a monopoly on that responsibility.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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Technological Innovation Doesn’t Have to Make Us Less Human

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Federal Judge Says Texas Profs Must Allow Guns In Their Classrooms

by SharylBlevins Posted on August 23, 2016

Mother Jones

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Yesterday morning, a federal judge denied a request by three University of Texas-Austin professors who wanted to ban firearms in their classrooms despite a recently passed law authorizing concealed firearms on public college campuses.

The ruling came down just two days before classes are scheduled to start at UT campuses. US District Judge Lee Yeakel ruled that the lawsuit filed by professors Lisa Moore, Mia Carter, and Jennifer Lynn Glass is likely to fail and found that their request for a preliminary injunction was “an extraordinary remedy.”

“It appears to the court that neither the Texas Legislature nor the Board of Regents has overstepped its legitimate power to determine where a licensed individual may carry a concealed handgun in an academic setting,” the judge wrote.

The lawsuit, which claims the new campus-carry law forces state schools to impose “overly-solicitous, dangerously-experimental gun policies,” will continue to move through Yeakel’s court. The professors’ attorney told The Dallas Morning News that their legal team would “begin to pull together the evidence and facts for the trial and hope things go smoothly on campus in the meantime.” The plaintiffs are arguing that the law violates their First Amendment right to academic freedom because their classroom management could be influenced by fear of violent student retaliation.

The campus-carry law went into effect earlier this month on the anniversary of the 1966 clock tower massacre at the University of Texas-Austin. It makes it legal to carry concealed firearms at public universities, including in dorms and classrooms. The legislation allows private universities to opt out; all but one have done so. UT administrators have expressed wariness at the idea of guns on campus in the past. Last year, a UT-sponsored working group published a report that wrestled with ways to reconcile the law with campus safety. “Every member of the Working Group—including those who are gun owners and license holders—thinks it would be best if guns were not allowed in classrooms,” it concluded.

The Texas attorney general’s office has been largely unsympathetic to complaints about the new law. Earlier this month, Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a motion to dismiss the professors’ suit, warning the three plaintiffs that they could face disciplinary measures if they interfere with the campus-carry law. Paxton has also said a ban on firearms in dormitories would be a violation of the law.

“I am pleased, but not surprised, that the Court denied the request to block Texas’ campus carry law,” Paxton said in a statement. “There is simply no legal justification to deny licensed, law-abiding citizens on campus the same measure of personal protection they are entitled to elsewhere in Texas. The right to keep and bear arms is guaranteed for all Americans, including college students, and I will always stand ready to protect that right.”

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Federal Judge Says Texas Profs Must Allow Guns In Their Classrooms

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Understanding Louisiana’s big flood risks

by theacntnt1985-01 Posted on August 18, 2016

high water

Understanding Louisiana’s big flood risks

By on Aug 18, 2016Share

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

There is a lot of water in southern Louisiana right now. The region’s been lashed with rain for the past week — the water has inundated freeways, surged past levees, and left about 40,000 homes water-logged husks of their former selves. The rain has stopped, for now. And when the water finally drains, people will return to their homes, pick up what’s left, and start rebuilding.

But the climate science prognosis doesn’t look good. This is the eighth time in about a year that 500-year rainfall has hammered the United States, and climate change will make extreme weather events like this more common. That means, among other things, millions of dollars worth of property damage. Fixing everything up and managing the growing threat of climate-related destruction hinges on flood insurance — which relies on ever-evolving, incomplete maps to determine risk. But new models will make it possible to better predict floodplains as it becomes increasingly dangerous to live on the coast.

The system isn’t perfect, but for people living in flood-prone regions like southern Louisiana, it’s the best line of defense, says Rafael Lemaitre, a FEMA spokesperson. If you’re covered, FEMA will pay out as much as $250,000 to repair your home.

But there are problems with how those policies get parceled out. “So much of it starts with what you define as a floodplain,” says Craig Colten, a geographer at Louisiana State University. FEMA creates flood risk maps that delineate areas of the region with a certain likelihood of being flooded every year. (An area that has a 1 percent probability of being flooded every year is called a 100-year floodplain.) Then, they base insurance premiums on where residents fall in those areas — the higher the risk, the higher the price.

Those maps, it turns out, are only updated every decade or so, when FEMA looks back on which places have flooded in the past. “It’s going to be a while before the recent flooding is factored into the maps,” Colten says. And the way water moves on the land is changing all the time: More developed areas with roads and parking lots lead to more runoff, for example. Climate change, too, is dramatically increasing the risk of flooding.

What coastal communities really need is predictive flood maps: projections of flood risk based on modeling. Right now, pretty much all flood insurance comes from FEMA, which, again, updates its maps infrequently and also allows residents to comment and push back on the boundaries, effectively letting them determine their own flood risk. Insurance companies, which might have the capital to invest in models that incorporate climate change, have largely stayed out of the business since the 1920s — partly because it’s too risky, partly because government-subsidized rates are too low for private companies to compete with.

But that may change soon, says Jeff Waters, a flood modeler at Risk Management Solutions, which models catastrophe risk for insurance companies. In recent years, he says, computers have finally been able to handle the computationally draining task of modeling something as dynamic as flooding across the U.S. Better modeling could lead to better estimates of risk in certain places, which would allow companies to price policies accordingly and residents to really understand how risky their locations are. And as FEMA enacts some much-needed reforms (like phasing out government subsidies, for one), it may become easier for insurance companies to offer up flood policies, too.

Another way to manage deepening risks, Colten says, is to widen the pool of people who buy into flood insurance. Currently, only the people living in 100-year floodplain areas are really expected to buy insurance — they’re the ones most at risk, after all. But if the insurance pool included people from 500-year floodplains, say, the risk would spread out more thinly. This scheme would’ve worked well for the flooding happening now, Colten says, since the water traveled far beyond the 100-year floodplain.

And FEMA is going with another, more direct way of managing the increasing risks of climate change: encouraging more severe weather-resistant infrastructure. Some of the funds FEMA provides for a disaster go toward rebuilding cities and houses to stricter code and in areas that aren’t quite so risky — say, at higher elevations or further away from the ocean. “Instead of constantly rebuilding for the next disaster, it’s much smarter to use federal dollars to build safer and build back,” says Lemaitre. As climate change risks climb and insurance costs rise to reflect reality, the shoreline of Louisiana will change, too: fewer buildings on the coast, and a lot more houses on stilts.

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Understanding Louisiana’s big flood risks

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This Is What’s Missing From Journalism Right Now

by BernardoLuna Posted on August 17, 2016

Mother Jones

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This June, we published a big story—Shane Bauer’s account of his four-month stint as a guard in a private prison. That’s “big,” as in XXL: 35,000 words long, or 5 to 10 times the length of a typical feature, plus charts, graphs, and companion pieces, not to mention six videos and a radio documentary.

It was also big in impact. More than a million people read it, defying everything we’re told about the attention span of online audiences; tens of thousands shared it on social media. The Washington Post, CNN, and NPR’s Weekend Edition picked it up. Montel Williams went on a Twitter tear that ended with him nominating Shane for a Pulitzer Prize (though that’s not quite how it works). People got in touch to tell us about their loved ones’ time in prison or their own experience working as guards. Lawmakers and regulators reached out. And lots of people offered thoughts similar to this, from New Yorker TV critic Emily Nussbaum:

That’s a great sentiment, and we agree! But it also takes us to a deeper story about journalism and today’s media landscape. It starts with this: The most important ingredient in investigative reporting is not brilliance, writing flair, or deep familiarity with the subject (though those all help). It’s something much simpler—time.

Journalism often involves parachuting into a subject. We jump in, we learn as much as we can really fast, and we pass that on to our readers. That’s why journalists rely so much on quotes: We’re not usually experts at what we’re covering, so our job is to ask the right questions of the people who are.

But this kind of reporting doesn’t get you far when experts are biased, have vested interests (e.g., virtually anyone in politics), or simply don’t exist. On those kinds of stories, reporters do have to build up their own expertise. They need to immerse themselves in a topic, long enough for the accretion of detail to morph into insight.

There was a point when that kind of long game was a part, to some degree, of every newsroom. Reporters had beats so they could learn about an institution or a community over time. The good ones would accumulate a body of knowledge, and a b.s. detector to cut through the spin. The lucky ones would get to dive deep, chase a big lead, and spend months on a project. Sure, this was the exception, not the rule. But it was something news organizations knew they had to do to earn the public trust that would let them stay in business.

That started to change in the 1990s, when merger mania sucked many independently owned newspapers and TV stations into publicly traded corporations, with the resulting pressures to deliver big returns for shareholders. It kept going in the 2000s, when digital advertising sucked the profits out of news, and it got worse as hedge funds and private equity investors wrung extra “efficiencies” out of already diminished newsrooms. And it continues today, with venture capitalists and billionaire power players the latest to seek a payday—or political influence—by reshaping media in their image.

The first casualty with each of these rounds of retrenchment has been the long game. Veterans who’d built up the expertise to deliver insight were pushed out. Beat reporters were replaced by contractors on the hook for 5, 7, 10 posts a day. Those remaining were ordered to do “more with less” (or told, by cheery actors with robotic smiles, that artificial intelligence would soon do their jobs). (If you haven’t yet, let John Oliver depressingly, hilariously break it down for you.)

Stories that truly reveal something about the way power works are not going to happen in this framework. They take time (way more time than can be justified economically) and stability. They take reporters and editors who can trust their jobs will be there, even if money is tight or powerful folks are offended. They are driven by a desire for journalism to have impact, not just turn a profit.

Take our prison story. Shane started writing about criminal justice for Mother Jones four years ago, after he returned from being held hostage in Iran. (Let that sink in—how he used that horrible experience to help the rest of us understand what prison really is.) His first big piece, in 2012, was the result of spending several months investigating solitary confinement. Shortly afterward, he came on board as a staff reporter. That’s important: MoJo used to be a magazine written mostly by freelancers, but in recent years we’ve prioritized hiring full-time journalists, with the wraparound support of a real newsroom.

This stability and support is what made every one of our breakthrough investigations possible. It let our Washington bureau chief, David Corn, do the months of dogged reporting on Mitt Romney’s economic record that led to the 47 percent scoop in 2012. It enabled Josh Harkinson to dig into Trump’s white-supremacist fan base and discover the avowed racists among his delegates earlier this year. And it’s what has allowed us to do four years of in-depth reporting on mass shootings and the gun industry, investigations that have helped change the nature of that debate.

Shane’s prison project took more than 18 months. That included four months in the prison and more than a year of additional reporting, fact-checking, video production, and legal review, including work by more than a dozen other people on the MoJo staff. And that was the only way we could have gotten that story: By definition, incarceration is invisible to most people, and that’s doubly true for private prisons. Recordkeeping is spotty, public disclosure is limited, visits are difficult. The only people who can describe what really goes on inside are prisoners, guards, and officials, all of whom have a strong interest in spinning the story. To get at the truth, we had to take time, and go deep.

And we had to take considerable financial risk. Conservatively, counting just the biggest chunks of staff time that went into it, the prison story cost roughly $350,000. The banner ads that appeared on the article brought in $5,000, give or take. Had we been really in your face with ads, we could have doubled or tripled that figure—but it would have been a pain for you, and still only a drop in the bucket for us.

MoJo did have support from three foundations for our criminal justice reporting. That’s amazing—but foundation grants only go so far. They are typically limited in time (a few years, tops) and scope (focusing on a particular issue or initiative). And they are finite: All of our foundation support put together accounts for roughly 15 percent of MoJo’s annual revenue.

How else, then, to pay for this kind of work? If you’ve been reading our stuff for a while, you know what we believe the answer must be: support from readers. It makes up 70 percent of MoJo’s budget, and it’s what has kept us independent, strong, and able to withstand the pressure (including lawsuits from billionaires) to let go of controversial stories. And based on your response to Shane’s piece, a lot of you totally get it.

But in order to really keep investing in the long game, we—and, we hope, you—will have to do something different. We’ve talked about how fickle ad revenue is. But fundraising is pretty boom-and-bust too.

Typically, nonprofits like us run big pledge drives that seek, frankly, to scare you into giving—”donate right now, or this VERY BAD THING will happen!” It’s not an approach that respects your intelligence, it makes for a bad user experience (lots of emails and online ads), and it doesn’t really match up with the work you want us to do. Because that work is not something you can do in fits and starts. It’s not about responding to an immediate crisis (or for that matter seizing a short-term opportunity—let’s hire a bunch of people and fire them in six months). The real work is about putting reporters on the beat, day after day, month after month.

So starting now, we’re undertaking a new experiment—scary, but exciting—in how we pay for MoJo’s journalism. And we’ll try to make the case with facts and logic (just like our journalism), not sensationalism and panic.

Here’s the bottom line: If you want us to play the long game, the most powerful thing you can do is to do the same. In other words, become a sustaining donor with a tax-deductible gift that renews every month. We don’t have an endowment or reserve fund sitting around somewhere, or advertising profits we can squirrel away. Support from you is the only reason we can do the work.

If you join us as a sustaining donor, you’ll be part of making the next prison project, the next gun violence investigation, the next 47 percent story happen. You’ll keep reporters on the beat, fact-checking those in power. If that sounds right, you can start your monthly support here.

But if you’re the kind of person who likes to nerd out on the mechanics—or really wants a look at the books before deciding to invest—let’s break it down some more.

In the past, our three big fundraising pledge drives typically raised between $125,000 and $200,000 each. Last year, we did better: Readers dug deep and gave $260,000 to help us pay down the legal bills we faced after winning a lawsuit from a billionaire political donor. Then you rose to the challenge again in December and April, pitching in a combined $415,000. And in the month since Shane’s piece published, we’ve had an extra spike in donations and subscriptions.

But banking on raising money in these kinds of fits and starts is a huge risk—and there are clear limits to how much of it we think we can do without being incredibly pushy with emails and ads on the site. Plus there’s little room to grow—and grow, at a time of crisis in both journalism and our politics, we must.

Here’s the other approach. If, before the end of our next scheduled pledge drive in September, we can find just 2,000 readers who value our reporting enough to each pitch in $15 a month, we’ll generate $30,000 in new monthly revenue, or $360,000 over the course of the next 12 months. That’s enough to fund a big project like Shane’s—every single year. And we hope we can get there largely with the argument you’re reading right now, instead of blanketing the site with fundraising ads or filling your inbox with panicky emails.

Is that a fantasy? Well, right now, hundreds of thousands of people are sustaining donors to public radio and television. At MoJo, we currently have about 2,000 sustainers who give about $28,000 a month. But there are some 185,000 of you who subscribe to the magazine, 250,000 who subscribe to our email newsletters, 1.2 million who follow us on Facebook or Twitter, and between 9 million and 10 million of you who come to our website every month. If 0.02 percent of the people who visit the site by the end of September sign up as sustainers, we’ll meet our goal. We have no idea if it will work—and if it doesn’t, we’ll have to pull out all the stops to figure out something else—but everything we know says it’s the right way to go. And if it does work, we will have proven something really important about how to keep in-depth journalism alive.

Are you in? Start your tax-deductible, monthly gift today.

We promised no panic or sensationalism, and we’ll stick with that. But we can’t overstate how urgent this is: Reliable, monthly contributions represent our best shot—and, we believe, your best shot—at ensuring a stable foundation for the watchdog reporting our democracy desperately needs. If you join in, you’ll be part of a big experiment that others can emulate: As you’ve seen with our previous posts on the business of media, we’re committed to transparency and sharing what we learn with our peers.

So let’s see if we can do this thing. We’ll keep you updated here, and we’d love your thoughts on whether this is the right direction and how to refine our approach. Let us know in the comments, on Twitter and Facebook, or at fundraisingteam@motherjones.com.

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This Is What’s Missing From Journalism Right Now

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Let Us Investigate Hillary Clinton’s Latest Email Bombshell

by LashawnFKOP Posted on August 12, 2016

Mother Jones

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From today’s LA Times coverage of the Hillary Clinton campaign:

On a day in which Clinton was hoping to inflict considerable damage on Donald Trump — this time, by ripping into his economic agenda — her campaign was on the defensive, scurrying to clean up the latest damaging revelations in years-old messages that were sent by Clinton and her staff and released as the result of a lawsuit.

….The fresh batch of emails was pried from the State Department thanks to a lawsuit filed by the conservative advocacy group Judicial Watch. It revealed what appeared to be seedy dealings by Clinton’s team at the agency….The emails are not devastating, but they are damaging as Clinton struggles to boost her trustworthiness with voters.

I have developed a fairly regular habit of ignoring the latest Hillary “scandal” for a day or two, just to see how it’s going to play out. Nearly all of them turn out to be bogus, and it’s hardly worth the time to figure out how and why. So I just wait for other people to do it.

Even the ones that really are a problem are almost always overblown. Emailgate is a prime example. Yeah, it was bad judgment. Hillary screwed up, and if you think that’s reason enough not to vote for her, fine. But when you dig into the actual facts, there’s surprisingly little there. She had a private server. She turned over all her work emails when asked to. In an unprecedented judicial ruling, they were all released to the public and there was virtually nothing of interest there. Of the “classified” emails, most were retroactively classified (at a low level) in a dreary episode of interagency feuding; three were marked classified at the time but were marked improperly (and were trivial); and 110 were emails Hillary “should have known” were classified, but which dealt with a drone program that everyone on the planet already knew about.

So sure, it’s a screwup. But there’s not really that much to it. So what about the latest batch of emails. Do they really show “seedy dealings” by Team Hillary?

I dunno. One is from a Clinton Foundation executive asking a Hillary aide if she can set up a meeting for a big donor with someone at State. The Hillary aide says she’ll see what she can do, and then blows it off. In another, a foundation executive asks for help getting someone a job. He’s told that everyone already knows about the guy, and “Personnel has been sending him options.” In other words, he’s blown off. In yet another, it turns out that a Clinton aide spent some of her own time helping the foundation look for a new CEO.

So….what? People in Washington schmooze with people they know to help other people they know? Shocking, isn’t it? My guess is that the average aide to a cabinet member gets a dozen things like this a week. If all we can find here are two in four years—both of which were basically blown off—the real lesson isn’t that Hillary Clinton’s State Department was seedy. Just the opposite. It was almost pathologically honest.

Source:  

Let Us Investigate Hillary Clinton’s Latest Email Bombshell

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Clinton Admits She "May Have Short-Circuited" in Characterizing Emails

by FelipaHagelthor Posted on August 5, 2016

Mother Jones

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Hillary Clinton admitted Friday that she may have “short-circuited” when claiming in a recent television interview that the director of the FBI had stated that her public comments about her private email server were “truthful.”

Speaking at a conference of the National Association of Black Journalists and the National Association of Hispanic Journalists in Washington, DC, Clinton sought to smooth over an apparent contradiction between her statements and those of FBI Director James Comey regarding her handling of classified emails on her server. Clinton explained that what she meant in an interview with Fox News’ Chris Wallace was that Comey had said her statements to the FBI were truthful, and that what she said to the FBI was consistent with the statements she had made publicly.

“I may have short-circuited it and for that I, you know, will try to clarify because I think, you know, Chris Wallace and I were probably talking past each other because of course, he could only talk to what I had told the FBI and I appreciated that,” Clinton said. “But I do think, you know, having him say that my answers to the FBI were truthful and then I should quickly add, what I said was consistent with what I had said publicly. And that’s really sort of, in my view, trying to tie both ends together.”

Clinton has faced increasing criticism for not holding press conferences, unlike her publicity-hungry GOP rival Donald Trump. She took questions from reporters at Friday’s conference after laying out a number of policy proposals on criminal justice reform, federal spending in “underinvested” communities, and other issues. The reporters were quick to ask her about the subject where she’s faced the greatest scrutiny: her emails.

Clinton said the three classified emails she sent on her private server were not physically marked as such, so she didn’t know they were classified when she sent them.

Watch Clinton’s full speech and Q&A session below.

Link – 

Clinton Admits She "May Have Short-Circuited" in Characterizing Emails

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Now We Have a How-To Manual for Foreigners Who Want to Donate to US Political Campaigns

by QSSDelrubb Posted on August 3, 2016

Mother Jones

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In his 2010 State of the Union address, President Obama blasted the Supreme Court’s Citizen United decision. It would, he said, open the floodgates for special interests to spend vast amount on our elections, “including foreign corporations.” Justice Samuel Alito was outraged, mouthing “not true” while Obama spoke.

By chance, I was chatting about Citizens United and Alito last night. This morning, the Intercept has this:

A corporation owned by a Chinese couple made a major donation to Jeb Bush’s Super PAC Right to Rise USA — and it did so after receiving detailed advice from Charlie Spies, arguably the most important Republican campaign finance lawyer in American politics.

….Spies presented his advice in a memo, obtained by The Intercept, which he prepared for Right to Rise USA, where he served as treasurer and general counsel. “We conclude,” he wrote, “that a domestic subsidiary corporation may now directly contribute to a Super PAC in connection with a federal election.”

For campaign finance experts, Spies’s roadmap provides compelling evidence of a phenomenon many already suspected was well-entrenched. “Spies’s memo is an explicit how-to guide for foreign nationals to get money into U.S. elections through U.S.-based corporations that they own,” said Paul S. Ryan, deputy director of the campaign finance watchdog organization Campaign Legal Center. “It shows that although Obama was attacked in public for misleading Americans about Citizens United, in private people like Spies and others like him seemingly realized that Obama was right and set to work making his prediction a reality.”

There are still some hoops that rich foreigners have to jump through before they can donate to their favored candidate, but they’re not too onerous for anyone who’s serious. And as the authors note, money is fungible. Even if it technically comes out of the earnings of the US subsidiary, in the end it comes out of the pockets of its Chinese owners. Welcome to the brave new world the Supreme Court has given us.

Taken from:  

Now We Have a How-To Manual for Foreigners Who Want to Donate to US Political Campaigns

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The Sad But Lucrative End of Jet.com

by SamMotsinger Posted on August 3, 2016

Mother Jones

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This is from the Wall Street Journal:

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. is in talks to buy online discount retailer Jet.com Inc., according to people familiar with the matter, in what would mark a disappointing end for one of the most ambitious challengers to Amazon.com Inc.

….It isn’t clear how much Wal-Mart would pay, but a person familiar with the matter said Jet could be valued at up to $3 billion in private markets. Jet, barely a year old, has drawn more than $500 million in capital from the likes of venture firms New Enterprise Associates and Accel Partners.

Let me get this straight. Jet is one year old. Venture funds have invested “more than” $500 million (actually around $800 million). They will sell themselves to Walmart for about $3 billion. And this is a “disappointing end.”

I get it: they wanted to take over the world and they didn’t. That’s disappointing. At the same time, it appears that investors are going to quadruple their money in 12 months, give or take. And the founders are going to do even better. If they own, say, 20 percent of the company, they’ll walk away with $600 million for a year’s work.

Can I please sign up for a slice of this disappointment?

See more here: 

The Sad But Lucrative End of Jet.com

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The Growing Push to Arm College Kids

by MagaretFinney Posted on August 3, 2016

Mother Jones

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On Monday, 50 years to the day since the clock tower massacre at the University of Texas-Austin, a new Texas law made it legal to carry concealed guns at public universities, including in dorms and classrooms. The legislation allows private universities to opt out, and all but one have chosen to do so. The policy has been controversial to say the least; it prompted a lawsuit from three University of Texas professors, who claimed that the law forces state schools to impose “overly-solicitous, dangerously-experimental gun policies” and violates the First and Second Amendments.

Texas is now the eighth state to allow concealed carry on college campuses, with its law among the broadest in terms of where guns are allowed. Other states have passed so-called “campus carry” laws recently, and more could soon follow.

In Tennessee, a new law guarantees concealed-carry rights for full-time university employees. They must register their guns with campus or local law enforcement. In May, Republican Gov. Bill Haslam allowed the measure to pass into law without his signature. “I hope that as a state we will monitor the impact of this new law and listen to the feedback of higher education leaders responsible for operationalizing it,” Haslam said, as the state’s colleges and universities scrambled to prepare for the change.

A broader law may be in the works for Tennessee next year: Republican Rep. Andy Holt, who raffled off two AR-15s after the mass shooting in Orlando, said it was an “important next step” to let students be armed. “My intention is to eliminate all gun-free zones, whether it’s the legislature or a college campus,” he said.

Georgia considered a campus carry bill similar to the one in Texas this year; it passed both the state Senate and House but was vetoed by Republican Gov. Nathan Deal, who said the right to bear arms in “sensitive places” was not guaranteed by the Second Amendment or the Georgia Constitution. “From the early days of our nation and state, colleges have been treated as sanctuaries of learning where firearms have not been allowed,” Deal wrote. “To depart from such time-honored protections should require overwhelming justification. I do not find that such justification exists.”

Utah was the first state to approve campus carry, in 2004. The list has since grown to include Colorado, Idaho, Kansas, Mississippi, Oregon, Texas, and Wisconsin. As in Tennessee now, Arkansas has a law allowing university employees to carry licensed firearms, but not students. Additionally, eight states allow guns to be stored in vehicles on campus grounds, though they disallow carrying them more broadly on campuses: Florida, Georgia, Nebraska, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, South Carolina, and Tennessee.

The last two years in particular have brought a big push on this issue, though with little success. In 2014, five states introduced legislation to prohibit campus carry, none of which passed, and 14 states introduced legislation to allow concealed carry on campus. Two bills passed.

A driving force behind the push has been Students for Concealed Carry, an activist group born out of the 2007 Virginia Tech massacre that claims 43,000 members. The group reportedly was developed by members of The Leadership Institute, an organization focused on recruiting young conservatives that pushed hard for campus carry in Idaho. (In fact, Students for Concealed Carry was not particularly enthusiastic about Texas’ new campus-carry law—arguing that it was rife with too many exceptions.)

Supporters of campus carry argue that these laws make students and faculty safer from attacks like the one that devastated the University of Texas a half century ago. But while there is no evidence that ordinary civilians with guns stop mass shootings, other outcomes have started to materialize, including a professor who accidentally shot himself in the middle of class.

Read More – 

The Growing Push to Arm College Kids

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Hillary Clinton Is One of America’s Most Honest Politicians

by pwh63qn7 Posted on August 1, 2016

Mother Jones

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Jim Geraghty says that Hillary Clinton is a serial liar:

We know she lies when she’s cornered. Running from snipers in the Balkans, being “dead broke” upon leaving the White House, “all my grandparents” immigrated to America, her tale of trying to join the Marines, her claim she never received or sent any material that was classified on her private e-mail system, her claim to have started criticizing the Iraq War before Barack Obama did… she lies, and she lies, and she lies.

Seriously, Jim? I’ll give you the Balkans thing. That was a lie. But the others aren’t. The Clintons were in debt when they left the White House. Hillary’s great-grandparents were immigrants—she was off by a generation. Nobody knows if she ever tried to join the Marines, but there’s no evidence she didn’t. She didn’t knowingly send classified material on her private email system, and it’s hardly fair to judge her by the fact that some of her emails were retroactively classified. And her statement about the Iraq War was strained (she was talking about criticism after Obama joined the Senate), but it’s typical political exaggeration, not a lie.

Look: all politicians lie sometimes. That includes Hillary Clinton. But as the chart on the right shows, Hillary is one of the most honest politicians on the national stage. Here’s a similar conclusion from the New York Times.

I know it’s in their partisan self interest for conservatives to insist that Hillary is the world’s biggest liar. But she isn’t. Not by a long, long way. Republicans need to get the beam out of their own eye before they keep banging on about the mote in Hillary’s.

Taken from – 

Hillary Clinton Is One of America’s Most Honest Politicians

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