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My Glimpse Into the Zapatista Movement, Two Decades Later

by pela_elpol Posted on January 23, 2014

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

Growing up in a well-heeled suburban community, I absorbed our society’s distaste for dissent long before I was old enough to grasp just what was being dismissed. My understanding of so many people and concepts was tainted by this environment and the education that went with it: Che Guevara and the Black Panthers and Oscar Wilde and Noam Chomsky and Venezuela and Malcolm X and the Service Employees International Union and so, so many more. All of this is why, until recently, I knew almost nothing about the Mexican Zapatista movement except that the excessive number of “a”s looked vaguely suspicious to me. It’s also why I felt compelled to travel thousands of miles to a Zapatista “organizing school” in the heart of the Lacandon jungle in southeastern Mexico to try to sort out just what I’d been missing all these years.

Hurtling South

The fog is so thick that the revelers arrive like ghosts. Out of the mist they appear: men sporting wide-brimmed Zapata hats, women encased in the shaggy sheepskin skirts that are still common in the remote villages of Mexico. And then there are the outsiders like myself with our North Face jackets and camera bags, eyes wide with adventure. (“It’s like the Mexican Woodstock!” exclaims a student from the northern city of Tijuana.) The hill is lined with little restaurants selling tamales and arroz con leche and pozol, a ground-corn drink that can rip a foreigner’s stomach to shreds. There is no alcohol in sight. Sipping coffee as sugary as Alabama sweet tea, I realize that tonight will be my first sober New Year’s Eve since December 31, 1999, when I climbed into bed with my parents to await the Y2K Millennium bug and mourned that the whole world was going to end before I had even kissed a boy.

Thousands are clustered in this muddy field to mark the 20-year anniversary of January 1, 1994, when an army of impoverished farmers surged out of the jungle and launched the first post-modern revolution. Those forces, known as the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, were the armed wing of a much larger movement of indigenous peoples in the southeastern Mexican state of Chiapas, who were demanding full autonomy from their government and global liberation for all people.

As the news swept across that emerging communication system known as the Internet, the world momentarily held its breath. A popular uprising against government-backed globalization led by an all but forgotten people: it was an event that seemed unthinkable. The Berlin Wall had fallen. The market had triumphed. The treaties had been signed. And yet surging out of the jungles came a movement of people with no market value and the audacity to refuse to disappear.

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My Glimpse Into the Zapatista Movement, Two Decades Later

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No, 60 Minutes, Clean Tech is Not Dead

by RuthieHemmant Posted on January 22, 2014

Mother Jones

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This story originally appeared on Slate and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

On a recent episode of 60 Minutes, investigative reporter Lesley Stahl trained her eye on “The Cleantech Crash.” In the 14-minute segment, Stahl told the story of how the Obama administration and Silicon Valley venture capitalists (or, in Stahl’s phrasing, “the smart people who funded the Internet”), backed a bevy of alternative-energy startups, only to see the sector implode, leaving taxpayers holding the bag.

If this would-be exposé felt familiar, that’s because it was all over the media two years ago. Why 60 Minutes decided to drag it back into our living rooms in January 2014 is a mystery. By now, the Solyndra horse is so dead that even Fox News is tired of flogging it.

But there’s a more important reason you haven’t heard much about the “clean-tech crash” in the past couple of years: It turned out to be, in many ways, a myth. Yes, a lot of the alternative-energy startups that Silicon Valley investors flocked to five years ago have run into serious trouble. A few were among those that got government support. In the 60 Minutes segment, Stahl named nine failed or struggling companies in all—lumping in those that received government loans with some that didn’t—then declared herself “exhausted.” I guess it’s a good thing, then, that she didn’t try to name all the ones that succeeded: There are a lot more than nine of those.

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No, 60 Minutes, Clean Tech is Not Dead

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How to Use Public-Private Partnerships to Screw the Poor

by Cosetta Shallenberger Posted on January 20, 2014

Mother Jones

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The Atlanta Journal-Constitution is now behind an Iron Curtain-like paywall, which is too bad since apparently they ran a great story yesterday about Georgia’s practice of using private companies to collect fines and fees in the criminal justice system. I’ll farm out the job of summarizing the story to the Economist’s Jon Fasman:

It works like this: say you get a $200 speeding ticket, and you don’t have the money to pay it. You are placed on probation, and for a monthly supervisory fee you can pay the fine off in instalments over the course of your probation term. The devil, as ever, is in the details….Those supervisory fees vary markedly: in Cobb County, for instance, just north of Atlanta, the government charges a $22 monthly fee. Private companies charge $39, and often add extra costs on top of that to cover drug testing, electronic monitoring and even classes they decide offenders need.

….Even worse, people who fail to pay the fines imposed by these private companies can find warrants for their arrests sworn out and the period of their probation extended. I spoke with an attorney for a couple in Alabama who say they were threatened with Tasers and the removal of their children if they did not pay the company what they owed. In 2012 a court found that the fees levied by private-probation companies in Harpersville, Alabama, could turn a $200 fine and a year’s probation into $2,100 in fees and fines stretched over 41 months.

Isn’t that great? It’s the free market at work, all right. It reminds me of last year’s piece in the Washington Post about the privatization of the debt collection in Washington DC:

For decades, the District placed liens on properties when homeowners failed to pay their bills, then sold those liens at public auctions to mom-and-pop investors who drew a profit by charging owners interest on top of the tax debt until the money was repaid.

But under the watch of local leaders, the program has morphed into a predatory system of debt collection for well-financed, out-of-town companies that turned $500 delinquencies into $5,000 debts — then foreclosed on homes when families couldn’t pay, a Washington Post investigation found.

As the housing market soared, the investors scooped up liens in every corner of the city, then started charging homeowners thousands in legal fees and other costs that far exceeded their original tax bills, with rates for attorneys reaching $450 an hour.

You may remember this as the story of the 76-year-old man struggling with dementia who was thrown out on the street and had his house seized because of a mix-up over a $134 property tax bill. That in turn might remind you of all the stories you’ve heard about civil asset forfeiture, where local police agencies groundlessly extort property from people convicted of no crimes, and then use the money “for purchasing equipment and getting things you normally wouldn’t be able to get to fight crime.”

Makes you proud to be an American, doesn’t it?

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How to Use Public-Private Partnerships to Screw the Poor

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Reddit’s Gun Gang Takes Aim at MoJo With a Pink Assault Rifle

by YolandaFoust Posted on January 16, 2014

Mother Jones

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When we published our investigation of gun trafficking on Reddit—including the company’s endorsement of assault rifles emblazoned with its signature alien logo—the story promptly got yanked from Reddit’s popular /r/Politics subreddit. Apparently one of the /r/Politics moderators known as “TheRedditPope” deemed our story “off topic.”

Lots of Redditors on the /r/Guns subreddit, on the other hand, found the story to be sufficiently political. In response to it they let loose with much talk about liberal “gun grabbers,” the Second Amendment coming under siege and so forth. But perhaps the most enthusiastic response came from Redditor “WarFairy,” who decided to honor Mother Jones with its very own 3-D printable AR-15 lower receiver, featuring a “raspberry metallic” finish and the company’s phone number. Indeed, the Second Amendment may be in grave danger, but clearly the First is hanging tough.

The dudes of /r/Guns deserve a couple of points for creativity here, though probably no one will accuse them of being super classy.

“I would like to mass print these and hand them out to the kids on Halloween,” declared one commenter. (What a hilarious thing to joke about, especially given that kids and pink guns mix so well.)

“It looks like it has a boner,” said another.

“A glorious pink one,” replied WarFairy, who clarified that the feature in question was “actually a finger hook for use when using a magwell style grip while firing. Just a little design flair of mine.”

Another Redditor saw the feature from a different angle, likening it to female genitals, to which WarFairy replied: “Throbbing… moist… aluring… oh yes… imagine it… imagine running your fingers over it, listening to the whisper… P… Pull my trigger…”

The response to MoJo’s investigation also included multiple Redditors attempting to list guns for sale in the comments section of our story and then getting their buddies to vote up those comments (a vote-manipulation tactic that Reddit itself forbids). “Now motherjones has become an internet weapons market. TA DA!” one of them said.

Unfortunately, in their careful reading of our report, these folks missed a key distinction between Reddit and Mother Jones: Such postings are a violation of our Terms of Service, and thus have been deleted.

For more of the story behind our investigation, check out my conversation with WNYC’s Anna Sale.

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Reddit’s Gun Gang Takes Aim at MoJo With a Pink Assault Rifle

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Why Republicans Cannot Grasp That "Redskins" Is Offensive

by surfikdon Posted on January 15, 2014

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

Every once in a while a small controversy comes along that helps explain a big problem. This National Football League season has provided such a controversy. The name of Washington D.C.’s football team, the Redskins, is under fire. “Redskins” is an offensive term and therefore inappropriate for the team representing our nation’s capital. That’s kind of obvious, right?

Most Republicans don’t think so. They defend the name, as they do other Native American-based team names, such as the college football champion Florida State Seminoles, calling them tokens of “honor.” They claim that the names celebrate a “heritage” and “tradition” of “bravery” and “warrior-spirit,” and they publicly wonder: What’s the problem?

The Onion, that fine news source, captured it in one neat, snide sentence: “A new study… confirmed that the name of the Washington Redskins is only offensive if you take any amount of time whatsoever to think about its actual meaning.” So what’s keeping Republicans from thinking about it?

For one thing, Republicans tend to wear a set of blinders, crafted and actively maintained by the party’s functionaries and its media priesthood. They also suffer from mental roadblocks shared by American whites more generally, including a thin, often myth-based “knowledge” about Native Americans. Collectively, all of this blinds Republicans to what it’s like to be on the receiving end of power at home and abroad.

That said, the GOP’s power brokers know the party is facing a demographic time bomb, so why do they let their media minions form an offensive line to protect the Redskins name? Nationally, the Republicans’ short-term hopes and long-term survival may hinge on whether they can manage to make the party welcoming to non-whites. Yet they proudly wear these blinders, as I once did, continuing to “honor” American Indians–as they never would a team called the Whiteskins, the Brownskins, the Blackskins, or the Yellowskins. Here’s a little breakdown on why.

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Why Republicans Cannot Grasp That "Redskins" Is Offensive

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WATCH: Tina Fey and Amy Poehler Roast Celebrities at the 2014 Golden Globes

by CallieEomyavt Posted on January 13, 2014

Mother Jones

On Sunday, Tina Fey and Amy Poehler once again hosted the Golden Globe Awards. Their opening bit was—reliably—a good time. The pair spent those first ten minutes roasting nominated celebrities: “It’s the story of how George Clooney would rather float away into space and die than spend one more minute with a woman his own age,” Fey said, describing the Best Drama nominee Gravity.

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Amy Poehler & Tina Fey – Opening Monologue… by IdolxMuzic

And here they are hosting the Golden Globes last year:

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WATCH: Tina Fey and Amy Poehler Roast Celebrities at the 2014 Golden Globes

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The Time I Got Stranded in Antarctica

by gerdi Posted on January 10, 2014

Mother Jones

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This story originally appear in The Atlantic and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The flight should have been routine: a straight shot from Sjögren Glacier on the coast of Antarctica, over an ocean sound crusted with sea ice, back to the ship where we were based, 20 miles east. But as moments passed, a haze of fog and snow flurries closed in on the helicopter. Our pilot, Barry James, glided lower and lower over the sea ice; with no horizon on sight, the ice’s rippled, wind-pocked texture provided his only frame of reference for keeping the helicopter stable in the air. Even this lifeline began to dissolve into milky white, and James wisely chose to land the helo on the only non-white object in sight: a dark swath of stone and sand that had just come into view — the small corner of an island that was otherwise cloaked in glaciers. James spoke into his radio: “Five papa hotel”—the aircraft’s call letters—”this is Barry. I’ve landed. There’s too much snow and not enough visibility to continue.” And so began an unlikely adventure. We expected to wait 15 minutes for weather to improve. Instead, we waited for days.

The helo would become unflyable as icicles encrusted its delicate rotor. Our ship, the 6,000-ton icebreaker Nathaniel B. Palmer would curtail its scientific research as it attempted to reach us. Our experience illustrates the limits of what even massive resources can accomplish in the deep polar regions. It also sheds light on the drama that has unfolded off the coast of East Antarctica as crew members attempted to free the Russian ship Akademik Shokalskiy from the sea ice that trapped it for two weeks. Fifty two tourists and scientists were rescued by helicopter on January 1; but the ship remained wedged in ice with 22 crew on board for another six days before finally getting free earlier today. It represents the latest in a troubling trend: Tourist or fishing vessels getting in over their heads in Antarctica, exacting a heavy toll on already-stretched scientific research assets in the area. The Chinese research icebreaker that helped rescue the Shokalskiy’s passengers also became mired in ice for several days, and the US icebreaker, Polar Star, was dispatched from Australia on January 2 to aid both ships.

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The Time I Got Stranded in Antarctica

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Why the Next Major Hurricane Could Devastate Miami

by h0rt67bx11 Posted on December 23, 2013

Mother Jones

This story originally appeared on Grist, and is reproduced here as part of the ClimateDesk collaboration.

Note to self: The next time you take the Climate Change Tour of Miami with Nicole Hernandez Hammer, bring Dramamine.

I’m sitting in the back seat of a rental car as Hammer, the assistant director for research at the Florida Center for Environmental Studies, careens around the Magic City like Danica Patrick. One of her graduate students rides shotgun, navigating with her iPhone.

Our mission for the day is to survey parts of this city that will be flooded as climate change continues to drive up the level of the sea. Hammer, who studies the impacts of sea-level rise on infrastructure and communities, has kindly agreed to act as my tour guide and pilot. I’m just hoping I can keep my breakfast down.

Our first stop is Star Island, where celebs like Don Johnson, Gloria Estefan, and Shaquille O’Neal have owned homes over the years. For a cool $18-$35 million, the local realtors known as The Jills would be happy to set you up with your own walled-in villa where you can sit in your rooftop hot tub and listen to the waves lapping a little too close to your foundation.

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Why the Next Major Hurricane Could Devastate Miami

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Should We Fight Climate Change By Taxing Meat?

by IssacTenreajbyw Posted on December 21, 2013

Mother Jones

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This story originally appeared in the Guardian, and has been reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Meat should be taxed to encourage people to eat less of it, so reducing the production of global warming gases from sheep, cattle and goats, according to a group of scientists.

Several high-profile figures, from the chief of the UN’s climate science panel to the economist Lord Stern, have previously advocated eating less meat to tackle global warming.

The scientists’ analysis, published in the journal Nature Climate Change, takes the contentious step of suggesting methane emissions be cut by pushing up the price of meat through a tax or emissions trading scheme.

“Influencing human behaviour is one of the most challenging aspects of any large-scale policy, and it is unlikely that a large-scale dietary change will happen voluntarily without incentives,” they say. “Implementing a tax or emission trading scheme on livestock’s greenhouse gas emissions could be an economically sound policy that would modify consumer prices and affect consumption patterns.”

There are now 3.6 billion ruminants on the planet–mostly sheep, cattle and goats and, in much smaller numbers, buffalo – 50% more than half a century ago. Methane from their digestive systems is the single biggest human-related source of the greenhouse gas, which is more short-lived but around 30 times more potent than carbon dioxide in warming the planet.

Emissions from livestock account for 14.5% of all human-caused greenhouse gases, according to the UN. It estimates that this could be cut by nearly a third through better farming practices.

Pete Smith, a professor of soils and global change at the University of Aberdeen, and one of the authors of the report, said: “Our study showed that one of the most effective ways to cut methane is to reduce global populations of ruminant livestock, especially cattle.”

He said methane from livestock could only be reduced by addressing demand for meat at the same time.

The scientists say not enough attention has been paid to tackling greenhouse gases other than CO2, especially in the ongoing UN climate talks, which last convened in Warsaw in November.

The only way the world could avoid dangerous tipping points as temperatures rise would be by cutting methane emissions as well as CO2 emissions from sources such as energy and transport, they argue. Reducing livestock numbers, they point out, would also avoid CO2 emissions released when forests are cleared for cattle farms.

William Ripple, a professor in the College of Forestry at Oregon State University, and another of the authors, said: “We clearly need to reduce the burning of fossil fuels to cut CO2 emissions. But that addresses only part of the problem. We also need to reduce non-CO2 greenhouse gases to lessen the likelihood of us crossing this climatic threshold.”

The farming industry said the tax proposal was too simplistic. Nick Allen, sector director for Eblex, the organisation for beef and lamb producers in England, said: “To suggest a tax is a better way to cut emissions seems a simplistic and blunt suggestion that will inevitably see a rise in consumer prices.

“It is a very complex area. Simply reducing numbers of livestock–as a move like this would inevitably do–does not improve efficiency of the rumen process, which takes naturally growing grass that we cannot eat and turns it into a protein to feed a growing human population.”

Allen said reducing emissions was an important goal for the industry. He added: “Grazing livestock have helped shape and manage the countryside for hundreds of years. They bring significant environmental benefits that can significantly mitigate the negative effect of emissions. It is unfortunate that in recent years they have become an easy scapegoat for emissions, despite the fact that the livestock population is generally falling.”

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Should We Fight Climate Change By Taxing Meat?

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California Is Giving Tesla Another Huge Tax Break. Good Move.

by duhhumavug Posted on December 21, 2013

Mother Jones

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This story originally appear on Slate and is reproduced here as part of the ClimateDesk collaboration.

This is going to drive the Tesla-haters crazy. The luxury electric-car maker is getting a huge new tax break from California, SFGate reports. The state will let it off the hook for sales and use taxes on some $415 million in new equipment it’s purchasing in order to expand production of the Model S at its Bay Area factory. That amounts to a $34.7 million tax break to produce more of a vehicle whose sticker price starts above $70,000.

Tax breaks for the rich! Corporate giveaways! The working people forced to pay for tech titans’ fancy rides!

Well, sort of. But as SFGate‘s David R. Baker explains:

California is one of the few states to tax the purchase of manufacturing equipment, a policy that California business associations have spent years trying to change. But the state does grant exemptions for clean-tech companies as a way to encourage the industry’s growth. The exemptions are issued by the California Alternative Energy and Advanced Transportation Financing Authority, chaired by State Treasurer Bill Lockyer.

So, in fact, it isn’t Tesla per se that’s getting special treatment from the state. It’s the clean-tech industry in general, which California is very keen to promote for two reasons. One, it wants to establish itself as a leader in a sector that it believes will be a big driver of its economy in the decades to come. And two, it’s one of the few states in the country that’s actually, genuinely serious about reducing its greenhouse-gas emissions. Promoting clean energy is a crucial part of its strategy.

More broadly, whatever sense a tax on the purchase of manufacturing equipment might once have made for California, it’s patently counterproductive in the context of clean-tech startups in the 21st century. Add to that some of the highest income and sales taxes in the nation, and it’s no wonder California is worried about companies like Tesla picking up stakes and heading elsewhere. Businessweek notes that new manufacturing jobs in the state have risen less than 1 percent since 2010, compared with nearly 5 percent nationally. Gov. Jerry Brown has been chipping away at the tax already, and Tesla is just the latest example.

Nor is the deal likely to burden the state’s taxpayers. Tesla’s Model S is in huge demand, and the company has been scrambling since its launch to ramp up production. SFGate reports the new equipment will help Tesla boost production by some 35,000 vehicles a year from its current annual rate of 21,000. State analysts predict the added jobs and vehicle sales are expected to bring in more money to the state than the tax break will take away.

For all that, I think some criticism might still be justified if Tesla in the end simply remains a producer of luxury cars for the wealthiest consumers. But the company has insisted from the outset that its ultimate goal is to produce an all-electric car that middle-class buyers can afford. A Tesla spokeswoman told me last week the company is still on track to release its third-generation vehicle by 2016 or 2017. The price is widely expected to be about half that of the Model S—not cheap, but certainly headed in the right direction.

Meanwhile, the success of the Model S has kickstarted the industry as a whole and made California the epicenter of the electric-car world. That’s thanks in part to a similar tax break the state gave the company several years ago to manufacture its cars there in the first place. I’d say there are worse ways for a state to spend a few tens of millions. But if you’re still convinced that tax breaks to big manufacturers are unfair and wrong, you might want to train your ire on a state a little further north, which just offered an all-time record $8.7 billion in tax breaks to a company that manufactures perhaps the least-green transportation technology of all. The worst part: Boeing might just move out anyway.

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California Is Giving Tesla Another Huge Tax Break. Good Move.

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