Tag Archives: top stories

How Superbugs Hitch a Ride From Hog Farms Into Your Community

by MittieAvila Posted on September 13, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Factory-scale farms don’t just house hundreds of genetically similar animals in tight quarters over vast cesspools collecting their waste. They also house a variety of bacteria that live within those unfortunate beasts’ guts. And when you dose the animals daily with small amounts of antibiotics—a common practice—the bacteria strains in these vast germ reservoirs quite naturally develop the ability to withstand anti-bacterial treatments.

Antibiotic-resistant bacteria leave these facilities in two main ways. The obvious one is meat: As Food and Drug Administration data show, the pork chops, chicken parts, and ground beef you find on supermarket shelves routinely carry resistant bacteria strains. But there’s another, more subtle way: through the people who work on these operations.

Continue Reading »

Visit source: 

How Superbugs Hitch a Ride From Hog Farms Into Your Community

Posted in Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on How Superbugs Hitch a Ride From Hog Farms Into Your Community

"Support the Player and Be Quiet": What It’s Like to Be an NFL Wife

by AntoniettaHuie Posted on September 12, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Editor’s note: Tracy Treu worked at Mother Jones from 1998 to 2006 and is married to former Oakland Raiders center Adam Treu, who played 10 seasons in the NFL.

I’m so fed up by people blaming Janay Rice. We’re asking for incredible bravery, and we’re giving little compassion to this woman. Because it’s so easy to say: “Well, she’s the fool who married him. Why doesn’t she just leave?” There are just so many components to it that people aren’t aware of.

The NFL is a culture that values secrecy. When you’re with an NFL team, the message to you is clear: Don’t fuck anything up for your partner, and don’t fuck anything up for the team. Don’t be controversial. Don’t talk to the media. Stay out of the way. Support the player and be quiet.

I saw this firsthand. The Raiders didn’t formally sit us down—they’re not structured like that as an organization to sit the wives down and school them, and say, “This is what we ask of you.” But it is definitely passed down by the veteran wives in the league. The veteran wives will talk to the rookie wives. So will the administrative or coaching wives. It’s made very clear to you, and not in a hateful way, by any means: “Let’s work together for this one common goal: to win the Super Bowl.” That will mean, for the coaches’ families, that you’re not going to get fired and you’ll get to stay here for another year. And that might mean, for some of the marquee players, that they’re going to get a better contract.

They really don’t want anything to be a distraction from that goal. I remember getting a lot of grief for planning my first pregnancy poorly because I had our daughter during the season. You only have babies in the offseason. There are lots of informal rules like that.

And the media is the devil—the enemy. I had my husband come home and tell me, “Don’t ever talk to the media.” Guys would get teased; they’d rib each other if they were in the news, or if the wife got mentioned. There was a sportswriter for the Oakland Tribune whom I’d sometimes see at games, and Adam would be like, “What’d you say to him? Were you talking to him? Don’t talk to him.” And that’s not just Adam’s personal preference; that’s what he’d been told. I don’t know everything that was said in meetings, but that’s how it came down to me: “Did he call you? What did he say to you? What did he ask you? Don’t tell him anything.”

It’s motivated by this you-versus-the-world mentality. You know: People are going to try to take us down. People are going to try to distract us. Do not let anybody distract us from our singular goal. Looking through past notes and playbooks, a lot of coaches use a lot of war analogies and wartime quotes—they liken it to going to war. They use that to build camaraderie, and they want the wives to build camaraderie amongst each other to support the players.

Adam was the kind of player who was just hoping to make the team year to year. So it was like, don’t fuck this up for him in any way. “Don’t give them any reason to cut you,” he’d always say. But my husband was never a marquee player—he was the long snapper. So, you know, he was very anonymous. Ray Rice is in a premier position. He’s not a long snapper. He’s a running back.

And I’m sure that sort of thing was going through Janay’s mind: If I tell, and if I take away their best running back, and they lose on Sunday, that’s my fault. I did that. I set that ball in motion. This is what she was risking: embarrassing the Ravens, embarrassing her family, screwing his teammates out of their prized running back, losing money, losing security. Janay was under an incredible amount of pressure. She probably thought to be quiet was to make this go away. Because she needs it to go away.

Janay met Ray in high school. They have a daughter together. So we’re asking her to walk away from this, and it’s like, “How?” This is all she’s ever known. A lot of these wives don’t work. They can’t. They’re only living in a place for six months. Maybe the guy is playing on a new team every two or three years. He wants her home. You know, he’s not coming home and cooking himself dinner. When Adam played, I don’t think any of the wives worked. So what’s she going to leave and go do?

To be blunt, the money pads that a little bit. You get this paycheck coming in every week and you suck it up. I worked at Mother Jones when he played, and I needed that totally separate outlet. But many of these women move into town for six months during the season, and they do whatever they need to do to help their spouse win. (Which, you know, you really can’t do much. It’s not up to you.) Then they go back to wherever they’re from for the offseason. Then they repeat.

I don’t really think that’s changed much over the years. If a player has a partner, that partner needs to not be controversial. I don’t know if teams do research on players’ partners—I’d assume they do, but I don’t know. “Be seen and not heard.” That’s the assumption. Well, that and, “You’re just lucky to be here, so shut up.” He’s making great money, so you support him and shut your mouth. You’re put in a subservient position financially. He’s the star. Keep him happy.

And, in the end, why not just show up and shut up and be supportive? After all, Adam and I felt damn lucky to be in the NFL. He was a walk-on at Nebraska. Playing pro football was a dream. It made me incredibly happy to watch him play.

Most of the girlfriends and wives feel the same gratitude and happiness, and I encourage them to be supportive of the team. But that quiet support stops the second you are abused. Speak up. It’s not a secret worth keeping.

I wonder now what the Ravens will do for Janay and her daughter. And I wonder, with the league’s new, stiffer penalties for domestic violence, how many abused women will stay quiet—because that means the end of a career, the end of the insurance, the end of it all.

View article – 

"Support the Player and Be Quiet": What It’s Like to Be an NFL Wife

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Pines, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on "Support the Player and Be Quiet": What It’s Like to Be an NFL Wife

This Man Wrote Hundreds of Letters Warning Politicians Not to Lie. It Worked.

by SantoRoberzkzmv Posted on September 12, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

With less than two months until the 2014 elections, the political falsehoods are rolling in. Consider the Colorado Senate Race, between incumbent Democrat Mark Udall and his Republican challenger, Rep. Cory Gardner. Trying to brand himself as just as green as Udall (a longtime clean energy champion), Gardner recently ran an ad claiming that as a state senator in 2007, he “co-wrote the law to launch our state’s green energy industry.”

But when 9 News, Denver’s NBC affiliate, fact-checked the ad, it found the law Gardner was touting didn’t accomplish much at all to promote green initiatives. Asked for a statement, Gardner’s campaign responded, “Cory says that he co-wrote a law ‘to launch our state’s green energy industry,’ not that launched it.'” (The emphasis is Gardner’s.) In other words, the impression given by the ad is just wrong, as the Gardner campaign winkingly admits! “Folks, we honestly do not know if we have ever seen such a frank acknowledgement of purposeful deception from an American politician,” commented the local politics blog ColoradoPols. You can watch the 9 News segment here.

Gardner comes off, in this instance, as reminiscent of GOP pollster Neil Newhouse. While working for Mitt Romney in 2012, Newhouse infamously declared, “We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers.” Gardner’s cavalier response, like Newhouse’s brazen statement, raises the fear that despite a voluminous growth of fact-checking in the past half-decade, there’s really nothing the media can do to keep politicians honest. But is that really true?

Not according to Dartmouth political scientist Brendan Nyhan, who has focused much of his research on employing the tools of social science to figure out why fact-checking so often fails, and what can be done to make it work better. The cynical view on fact-checking is “too negative,” argues Nyhan on the latest installment of the Inquiring Minds podcast. “I think you have to think about what politics might look like without those fact-checkers, and I think it would look worse.”

Nyhan hasn’t just been studying the fact-check movement; he was there at its origins. In the early 2000s, he co-authored a site called Spinsanity.com, a nonpartisan fact-checking outlet. It was the beginning of a wave: In 2003, the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania launched Factcheck.org. But the real fact-checking movement kicked into gear in the late 2000s, with the launch of PolitiFact, by far the most widely known of these outlets, as well as the 2007 launch of the Washington Post fact-checker column, now written by Glenn Kessler.

Brendan Nyhan

As a result, in the last few years, a huge volume of claims have been given one-to-four Pinocchios by the Post, or declared “True,” “Pants on Fire,” or somewhere in between by PolitiFact. That includes the repeated debunking of the last half-decades’ mega lies: Birtherism, for instance, and claims about the Affordable Care Act creating “death panels.” So what does the evidence show about this endeavor?

First the good news: Overall, the fact-checkers have reinforced the idea that reality exists, and journalists are capable of discerning what it is. That may seem obvious, but it’s actually worth underscoring that we don’t live in a postmodern nightmare of subjectivity. “The fact-checkers, when they rate the same content, come to the same conclusion a very high percentage of the time,” says Nyhan. “So that’s a good indication that they are seeing the evidence and interpreting it in a consistent way.” For instance, Factcheck.org, PolitiFact, and the Post‘s Kessler all refuted Sarah Palin’s “death panel” claim; PolitiFact dubbed it the “lie of the year” in 2009.

That’s not to say that fact-checkers are themselves entirely unbiased. PolitiFact in particular has been repeatedly criticized for false equivalence in how it treats the left and the right. It’s just to say that they largely agree with one another, suggesting that facts are, for the most part, discernible.

The Backfire Effect

A far tougher issue, though, is whether minds change when fact-checkers make their pronouncements. On the level of individual psychology, repeated studies by Nyhan and others have shown that it is very hard to correct a misperception once it is out there in the media ether. We’ve previously reported on the so-called “backfire effect,” discovered by Nyhan and his colleague Jason Reifler of the University of Exeter. Again and again, they’ve found in experiments that trying to correct certain false claims that are highly politically charged—the claim that tax cuts increase government revenue, for instance—often just doesn’t work. Partisans can actually become stronger in their wrong beliefs upon encountering a refutation.

Consider the data, for instance, when Nyhan and Reifler attempted, in a classic study, to get partisans to change their minds about the tax cut claim (which they attributed to George W. Bush). In the experiment, participants were shown a fake newspaper article containing an actual George W. Bush quotation: “The tax relief stimulated economic vitality and growth and it has helped increase revenues to the Treasury.” In one version of the experiment, the article then contained a correction, refuting this claim; in another version it did not. It turned out that conservatives who read the correction believed Bush’s falsehood more strongly than did conservatives who never read the correction:

Backfire Effect: Conservatives became more likely to believe President Bush’s claim that tax cuts increase revenue after reading a correction explaining that it isn’t true. Brendan Nyhan.

And that’s just the beginning of the difficulties related to correcting errors and making the corrections stick in people’s heads. Nyhan also notes that much research suggests that negating a claim (“the Affordable Care Act doesn’t create death panels”) actually has the effect of reinforcing it in our minds (“there are death panels”). “We should be pretty cautious about how high our hopes are for changing people’s minds,” says Nyhan. “Once those myths are out there, it’s very hard to change people’s minds.”

Fact Checking as Deterrence

Such are some of the reasons to question the power of fact checking. So then why does Nyhan think a world with fact checking in it is way better than one without it? The answer is that it’s not so much about changing the minds of the partisans as it is about deterring the politicians. “They’re so often the vehicle for these myths,” says Nyhan. “If they know they’ll be called out publicly, they may not reinforce or disseminate these myths in the first place.”

So what about fact-checking as deterrence? Does it work? After all, no politician wants the campaign narrative to revolve around allegations that he or she is a liar, or detached from reality.

Mother Jones’ David Corn has made the case that in the 2012 election, politicians like Mitt Romney just weren’t deterred. And it may well be that on the national level, and especially on the presidential level, politicians get fact-checked so often, and fact-checkers try so hard to spread around the opprobrium, that ultimately it’s a wash.

However, on the local level, this stuff seems to really matter. Nyhan and Reifler provided data to support this idea in a 2013 New America Foundation study. During the 2012 election cycle, they sent letters to 392 state legislators who had PolitiFact affiliates in their states. The letters simply noted that the politicians’ statements might be fact-checked, and that there were reputational risks associated with getting a poor rating. “We sent them a lot of letters,” explains Nyhan. “Some of them became very sick of hearing from us in the mail, as we sent them letter after letter, reminding them just what a significant threat fact-checking could be to them.” Two other groups of legislators, of similar size, received either no letters or a “placebo” letter saying the authors were studying how accurate politicians are, but didn’t bring up reputational risks or fact checking.

.

The study found that the warning letters had a statistically significant effect: Legislators who received them were less likely to have their accuracy questioned by PolitiFact, or by other news sources found in a Lexis-Nexis search. Of course, it was also extremely unlikely for any legislator to be fact-checked at all. Thus, the risk declined from just under 3 percent down to 1 percent:

From Nyhan and Reifler, “The Effects of Fact-Checking Threat: Results from a field experiment in the states,” New American Foundation Research Paper, 2013.

To Nyhan, this suggests that fact-checking can serve as a deterrent, and can be a particularly big deal in local as opposed to national races—which means it matters in 2014. Indeed, in one case, fact-checking already appears to have significantly damaged a campaign. In Alaska, incumbent Democratic Senator Mark Begich ran an ad suggesting his opponent, former state attorney general Dan Sullivan, had not been tough enough on sex offenders, going on to state that one of them got out of prison early and went on to commit a horrific crime—a sexual assault and double murder. But PolitiFact rated the ad’s claims “pants on fire,” finding that Sullivan was not responsible for the suspect’s release. Begich’s campaign soon pulled it off the air.

In other words, the ad itself became an issue, and Begich has had to contend with a major backlash, as well as the black eye of having to pull an ad.

To Nyhan, that’s the whole point. Backfires and biases notwithstanding, there remains the potential for a prominent factual correction to cause a media furor, and, in some case, to damage a politician’s reputation. Partisans may stick with their candidate, but they’ll be sticking with a candidate who has been forced to play defense.

So facts work—kind of. Sometimes. Even if politicians try to avoid them.

“I think fact-checking has caused big important changes in how we cover the news now,” says Nyhan, “and it’s gotten especially the younger generation of reporters much more interested in going beyond that ‘he-said, she-said’ reporting.”

To listen to the full podcast episode with Brendan Nyhan, you can stream below:

This episode of Inquiring Minds, a podcast hosted by neuroscientist and musician Indre Viskontas and best-selling author Chris Mooney, also features a discussion of a new study suggesting that religious and non-religious individuals are equally moral, and new research on gender discrimination in job performance evaluations, particularly by men with traditional views of gender roles.

To catch future shows right when they are released, subscribe to Inquiring Minds via iTunes or RSS. We are also available on Stitcher. You can follow the show on Twitter at @inquiringshow and like us on Facebook. Inquiring Minds was also recently singled out as one of the “Best of 2013” on iTunes—you can learn more here.

See the original post: 

This Man Wrote Hundreds of Letters Warning Politicians Not to Lie. It Worked.

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, green energy, Jason, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, Ultima, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on This Man Wrote Hundreds of Letters Warning Politicians Not to Lie. It Worked.

How Obama Became the Oil President

by NoreenN58l Posted on September 12, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

Considering all the talk about global warming, peak oil, carbon divestment, and renewable energy, you’d think that oil consumption in the United States would be on a downward path. By now, we should certainly be witnessing real progress toward a post-petroleum economy. As it happens, the opposite is occurring. US oil consumption is on an upward trajectory, climbing by 400,000 barrels per day in 2013 alone—and, if current trends persist, it should rise again both this year and next.

In other words, oil is back. Big time. Signs of its resurgence abound. Despite what you may think, Americans, on average, are driving more miles every day, not fewer, filling ever more fuel tanks with ever more gasoline, and evidently feeling ever less bad about it. The stigma of buying new gas-guzzling SUVs, for instance, seems to have vanished; according to CNN Money, nearly one out of three vehicles sold today is an SUV. As a result of all this, America’s demand for oil grew more than China’s in 2013, the first time that’s happened since 1999.

Bill Mckibben: How Methane Wrecked Obama’s Fracking Gambit

Accompanying all this is a little noticed but crucial shift in White House rhetoric. While President Obama once spoke of the necessity of eliminating our reliance on petroleum as a major source of energy, he now brags about rising US oil output and touts his efforts to further boost production.

Just five years ago, few would have foreseen such a dramatic oil rebound. Many energy experts were then predicting an imminent “peak” in global oil production, followed by an irreversible decline in output. With supplies constantly shrinking, it was said, oil prices would skyrocket and consumers would turn to hybrid vehicles, electric cars, biofuels, and various transportation alternatives. New government policies would be devised to facilitate this shift, providing tax breaks and other incentives for making the switch to renewables.

At that time, a growing concern over climate change and the prospect of further warming due to increased emissions of carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels seemed to dim the long-term prospects for petroleum. After all, oil combustion is this country’s single largest source of carbon emissions. This, in turn, clearly meant that any significant attempt to reduce emissions—whether through a carbon tax, a carbon cap-and-trade program, or other such measures—would naturally have to incorporate significant impediments to oil use. President Obama entered the White House promising to enact such a measure, and the House of Representatives passed a modified cap-and-trade bill in 2009. (It failed in the Senate and so never became law.)

The 2008 financial crisis and global economic meltdown only put oil’s future in further doubt. Suddenly cash-conscious Americans began trading in their gas-guzzlers for smaller, more fuel-efficient cars, with the Obama administration adding its encouragement. When agreeing to the bailout of General Motors, for instance, the White House insisted that the reorganized company focus on the production of such vehicles. In a similar spirit, the administration’s $787 billion stimulus package favored investment in electric cars, biofuels, high-speed rail, and other petroleum alternatives.

The president’s comments at the time clearly reflected a belief that oil was an “old” form of energy facing inevitable decline. “The United States of America cannot afford to bet our long-term prosperity, our long-term security on a resource that will eventually run out, and even before it runs out will get more expensive to extract from the ground,” he declared in 2011. “We can’t afford it when the costs to our economy, our country, and our planet are so high.” Not only did the country need to lessen its dangerous reliance on imported oil, he insisted, but on oil altogether. “The only way for America’s energy supply to be truly secure is by permanently reducing our dependence on oil.”

Obama’s Turnaround on Oil

That was then and this is now, and Obama ain’t talking that way no more. Instead, he regularly boasts of America’s soaring oil output and points to all he’s done and is still doing to further increase domestic production. Thanks to the sort of heightened investment in domestic output his administration has sponsored, he told a cheering Congress in January, “more oil was produced at home than we buy from the rest of the world—the first time that’s happened in nearly twenty years.” Although still offering his usual bow to the dangers of climate change, Obama did not hesitate to promise to facilitate further gains in domestic output.

In accord with his wishes, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) announced on July 18th that it would reopen a large portion of the waters off the Eastern seaboard, an area stretching all the way from Florida to Delaware, to new oil and natural gas exploration. Under the BOEM plan, energy companies will be allowed to employ advanced seismic technology to locate promising reserves beneath the seabed in preparation for a round of offshore licensing scheduled for 2018. At that point, the companies can bid for and acquire actual drilling leases. Environmental organizations have condemned the plan, claiming the seismic tests often involve the use of sonic blasts that could prove harmful to endangered sea animals, including whales. The truth is, however, that those seismic tests, by opening future fossil fuel deposits to development and exploitation, are likely, in the long run, to hurt human beings at least as much.

Here are some of the other measures recently taken by the administration to boost domestic oil production, according to a recent White House factsheet:

* An increase in the sales of leases for oil and gas drilling on federal lands. In 2013, the Bureau of Land Management held 30 such sales—the most in a decade—offering 5.7 million acres for lease by industry.

* An increase in the speed with which permits are being issued for actual drilling on federal lands. What’s called “processing time” has, the White House boasts, been cut from 228 days in 2012 to 194 days in 2013.

* The opening up of an additional 59 million acres for oil and gas drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, the site of a disastrous BP oil spill in April 2010.

In other words, global warming be damned!

In a turnaround that has gotten next to no attention and remarkably little criticism, President Obama is now making a legacy record for himself that will put the “permanent reduction of our dependence on oil” in its grave. His administration is instead on a drill-baby-drill course to increase production in every way imaginable on US territory, including offshore areas that were long closed to drilling due to environmental concerns.

What explains this dramatic turnaround?

The Rekindled Allure of Oil

The most significant factor behind the renewed popularity of oil has been a revolution in drilling technology. In particular, this involves the use of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) to extract oil and natural gas from previously inaccessible shale formations. These techniques include the use of drills that can turn sideways after penetrating thin underground shale layers, along with high-pressure water cannons to fracture the surrounding rock and liberate pockets of oil and gas. Until the introduction of these techniques, the hydrocarbons trapped in the shale were prohibitively expensive to produce and so ignored both by industry and the many experts predicting that “peak oil” was in sight.

Most domestic shale “plays” (as they are called in the industry) contain both oil and natural gas. They were first exploited for their gas content because of the greater ease in extracting commercial volumes of that fossil fuel. But when the price of gas collapsed—in part because of a glut of shale gas—many drillers found that they could make more money by redeploying their rigs in oil-rich shales like the Bakken formation in North Dakota and Eagle Ford in West Texas. The result has been a sudden torrent of domestic crude that has brought gasoline prices down (with a resulting increase in gasoline consumption) and created boom-like conditions in several parts of the country.

Prior to the utilization of horizontal drilling and fracking technology, US crude production was indeed facing long-term decline. According to the Energy Information Administration (EIA) of the Department of Energy, domestic crude output fell from a peak of 9.6 million barrels per day in 1970 to a low of 5 million barrels in 2008. With the introduction of fracking, however, the numbers started to soar. Total US crude output jumped from 5.7 million barrels per day in 2011 to 7.5 million in 2013. Output in 2014 is projected to be 8.5 million barrels per day, which would represent a remarkable increase of 2.8 million barrels per day in just three years.

The increase is, by the way, the largest posted by any of the world’s oil producers from 2011-2013 and has generated multiple economic benefits for the country, along with significant environmental consequences. For one thing, it has kept gas prices relatively low. They are now averaging about $3.50 per gallon—a lot more than Americans were paying in the 1990s, but a lot less than most experts assumed would be the case in a post-peak-oil economy. This has, of course, spurred both those SUV sales and an increase in recreational driving. (“We were able to take a day-cation because of the lower gas prices,” said Beth Hughes, of a four-hour roundtrip drive with her husband to San Antonio, to visit the Alamo and do some shopping.)

The increased availability of relatively affordable oil has also spurred investment in ancillary industries like petrochemicals and plastics. Petroleum is the basic raw material, or “feedstock,” for a wide variety of subsidiary materials, including ethylene, propylene, and benzene, which in turn are used to make polyesters, plastics, and numerous consumer products. Many chemical firms have built new facilities to convert shale oil and shale gas into these commodities, a spur both to new jobs and greater tax revenues. In addition, with crude oil selling at around $100 per barrel, those extra 2.8 million barrels produced daily will add about $100 billion to the US economy in 2014, a substantial contribution to an otherwise tepid recovery.

Of course, the environmental downside to all this, already significant, could be staggering for the future. The use of hydro-fracking to release all that shale oil has resulted in the diversion of vast quantities of water to energy production, in the process regularly posing a threat to local water supplies. In some drought-affected areas, oil drilling is now competing with farming for access to ever-diminishing supplies of fresh water. The growing use of railroads to carry shale oil—an especially volatile hydrocarbon substance—has also led to several lethal explosions, triggered by accidents involving old and inadequately reinforced tank cars.

Of course, the greatest environmental fallout from the domestic oil boom will be a continuing deluge of carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere, further bolstering the greenhouse effect and ensuring higher world temperatures for years to come. While emissions from domestic coal use are likely to decline in the years ahead, in part due to new rules being formulated by the Environmental Protection Agency, the expected rise in emissions from oil and natural gas use will wipe out these gains, and so total US emissions are expected to be higher in 2040 than they are today, according to the EIA. As a result, we can expect little progress in international efforts to slow the advance of climate change and a steady increase in the frequency and intensity of storms, floods, fires, droughts, and heat waves.

As seen from Washington, however, the domestic oil rebound is largely a feel-good story and an essential part of an otherwise anemic economic recovery. Putting people back to work, Obama declared in May, “starts with helping businesses create more good jobs. One of the biggest factors in bringing jobs back to America has been our commitment to American energy over the last five years. When I took office, we set out to break our dependence on foreign oil. Today, America is closer to energy independence than we have been in decades.”

“A Stronger Hand”

For the president and many other politicians, increased oil output, however important as a source of economic vitality and job creation, is far more than that. It is also a source of power and prestige, guaranteed to give the United States greater leverage in international affairs.

As Tom Donilon, then the president’s senior adviser on national security, explained in April 2013, “America’s new energy posture allows us to engage from a position of greater strength. Increasing US energy supplies act as a cushion that helps reduce our vulnerability to global supply disruptions and price shocks. It also affords us a stronger hand in pursuing and implementing our international security goals.”

One area where American energy prowess has given us “a stronger hand,” he suggested, was in negotiations with Tehran over the Iranian nuclear program. Because the US is importing less oil, there is a larger pool of foreign oil on which our allies can draw for their needs, which has made it easier to impose tough sanctions on Iran’s petroleum exports—and so wring concessions from Iran’s leadership circle.

Another area where many Washington pundits and politicians believe increased oil and gas production has strengthened the president’s hand lies in the administration’s efforts to impose multilateral sanctions on Russia’s energy companies as a punishment for the Kremlin’s covert backing of anti-government rebels in eastern Ukraine. Although still dependent on Russia for a large share of their energy intake, America’s European allies are feeling somewhat less deferential to Moscow because of the growth in global supplies.

In other words, the striking spurt in domestic oil production has added a patriotic dimension to its already powerful allure.

Collective Schizophrenia

As polls show, most Americans acknowledge the reality of climate change and support efforts to reduce carbon emissions in order avert future climate-induced disasters. California and other states have even taken significant steps to reduce energy-related emissions and the Obama administration has, among other things, announced plans to improve the fuel efficiency of American cars and trucks.

In addition, the president and many in his administration clearly grasp the dangers of climate change—the increasing heat, drought, fiercer storms, rising sea levels, and other perils that, without serious curbs on the combustion of fossil fuels, will make the present look like a utopian moment in human history. Nevertheless, the numbers—from production to consumption—are anything but promising. According to the latest EIA projections, US carbon dioxide emissions from petroleum use will increase by eight million metric tons between 2013 and 2015; such emissions are then expected to level off, at about 2.2 billion tons per year, despite substantial increases in average vehicle fuel efficiency.

With emissions from natural gas expected to rise—the inevitable result of the shale gas boom—and coal emissions experiencing only a modest decline (some of which is offset by rising US exports of coal to be burned elsewhere), total domestic carbon emissions from energy use in 2040 are still predicted to be a devastating 6% higher than they are today. Can there be any question at this point of how this will help ensure the sorts of predicted global temperature increases, with all the ensuing side effects, that every expert knows will be devastating to the planet?

At a national level, such a situation—knowing one thing and doing something else—can only be described as some form of mass delusion or a collective version of schizophrenia. In one part of our collective brain, we are aware that petroleum use must decline sharply to prevent the sorts of global catastrophes that we are only used to seeing in science fiction movies; in another, we retain our affection for driving and gasoline use without giving much thought to the consequences. We have a global warming president presiding over a massive expansion of fossil fuel production. Think of this as a form of collective mental compartmentalization that should frighten us all—and yet from the president on down, it’s remarkable how few seem disturbed by it.

Obviously, this is an unsustainable condition. Eventually, excessive petroleum use will produce such frequent and severe climate effects that no president or energy executive would dare boast of increased petroleum output and none of us would even dream of filling up the gas tank to take a “day-cation” at a distant tourist site. Until we identify and begin treating this state of national schizophrenia, however, we will ensure that a time of mutual pain and hardship is ever more likely.

Michael T. Klare, a TomDispatch regular, is a professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College and the author, most recently, of The Race for What’s Left. A documentary movie version of his book Blood and Oil is available from the Media Education Foundation. To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com here.

Read original article: 

How Obama Became the Oil President

Posted in alo, Anchor, ATTRA, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Prepara, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta, Vernal | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on How Obama Became the Oil President

Liberals and Conservatives Join Together To Slam Obama For Sidestepping Congress on ISIS Fight

by MurrayL23rsipka Posted on September 12, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

In his speech Wednesday night, President Barack Obama said he would “welcome congressional support” for his expanded-but-limited plan to destroy ISIS, the terror organization wreaking havoc in Iraq and Syria. But Obama conspicuously did not say he would ask lawmakers to vote on whether to approve this military action. The White House insists that a previous congressional authorization approving military action against Al Qaeda and its affiliates allows Obama to go forward without seeking another explicit green light from Capitol Hill. And once again, the nation is witnessing another round in the decades-long tussle between the legislative branch and 1600 Pennsylvania over the limits of the president’s war-making power. Many lawmakers seem happy to give the president a pass because they’d rather not vote on the matter—especially in an election year. (As GOP Rep. Jack Kingston of Georgia candidly said, “A lot of people would like to stay on the sideline and say, ‘Just bomb the place and tell us about it later.’ It’s an election year. A lot of Democrats don’t know how it would play in their party, and Republicans don’t want to change anything. We like the path we’re on now. We can denounce it if it goes bad, and praise it if it goes well and ask what took him so long.”) But an odd-couple coalition is developing within Congress: liberal Dems and conservative Republicans who are demanding that the president seek a congressional okay before escalating attacks against ISIS.

“Congress must weigh in when it comes to confronting ISIL through military action,” Reps. Raul Grijalva (D-Ariz.) and Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), the chairs of the 70-member Congressional Progressive Caucus, said in a statement after Obama’s speech. “The voices of the American people must be heard during a full and robust debate in Congress on the use of military force.”

Continue Reading »

Source – 

Liberals and Conservatives Join Together To Slam Obama For Sidestepping Congress on ISIS Fight

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, GE, Green Light, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Liberals and Conservatives Join Together To Slam Obama For Sidestepping Congress on ISIS Fight

Stop Claiming Vaccine Denial Is a Liberal Disease

by SolCochran Posted on September 11, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

So who’s worse when it comes to ignoring and denying science, the political left or the political right?

For a long time, those wishing to claim that both sides are equally bad—we’re all biased, just in different directions—have relied upon two key issues in making their case: Vaccines and genetically modified foods, or GMOs. The suggestion is that these are basically the liberal equivalent of evolution denial or global warming denial. Skeptic magazine founding publisher Michael Shermer, for instance, prominently cited resistance to GMOs in a Scientific American article last year entitled “The Liberals’ War on Science.” As for vaccines? In a recent segment entitled “An Outbreak of Liberal Idiocy,” no less than The Daily Show suggested that vaccine denial is a left-wing scourge:

There’s just one problem: Commentators seem to just assume, without evidence, that anti-science beliefs on these two issues are predominantly a liberal phenomenon. But that assumption hasn’t been subjected to nearly enough scrutiny, especially in light of high profile vaccine-skeptic conservatives like Donald Trump and Michele Bachmann. The GMO issue is also politically suspicious: It is inherently conservative, in the purest sense of the word, to resist technological changes to the nature of food production (or anything else, for that matter).

And sure enough, the evidence just doesn’t support the idea that vaccine denial is some special left-wing fixation—and it’s barely any kinder to received wisdom on the issue of GMOs. I will demonstrate as much below, but first, let’s remember why this matters.

It is very clear that there are certain major issues where there is only one correct scientific answer, and political conservatives are much more likely to deny that answer than are liberals or moderates. Conservatives have also been shown to trust scientists less than liberals or moderates do. So no wonder they also reject their most important (if sometimes inconvenient) conclusions more often.

Here are the top two hits (but by no means the only examples) of conservative science denial, followed by some hard data on public attitudes about vaccines and GMOs:

Climate change. Here, the undeniable reality is that humans are causing global warming, and polls have repeatedly shown that it is political conservatives and Republicans who deny this fact about the world. According to recent data from the Yale and George Mason projects on climate change communication, for instance, 75 percent of liberal Democrats, but only 22 percent of conservative Republicans, accept the reality that humans are causing climate change—an over 50-point difference! Myriad other polls and studies have found something similar.

Pew Research Center.

Evolution. Here, the undeniable reality is that humans share a common ancestry with the rest of life on Earth, and that the diversity of life that we witness all around us is the result of an evolutionary process. And here again, those on the right deny this reality much more than do those on the left (although notably, the gap is not as wide as it is on the climate issue). According to a late 2013 Pew study, 67 percent of Democrats, but only 43 percent of Republicans, agree that “humans and other living things have evolved over time.” That’s a 24-point difference. Indeed, based on these data, 48 percent of Republicans (compared to just 27 percent of Democrats) think “humans and other living things have existed in their present form since the beginning of time,” meaning that the GOP today is very nearly a majority creationist party.

That’s a seriously big deal, given that Young Earth Creationism embraces many other kinds of science denial besides the mere rejection of evolution. Rejection of the age of the Earth, for instance, and accordingly, of large swaths of physics and geology. It is a deeply anti-science ideology that extends far beyond one’s views about any particular scientific issue.

So it is very natural to ask whether there is really anything parallel to this rejectionism on the modern American left, and to try to adduce examples. However, the vaccine and GMO examples don’t cut it. To show as much, let’s examine them in turn.

Vaccines. Here, the undeniable reality is that childhood vaccines are safe and do not cause autism. So do liberals deny this fact more frequently than conservatives?

Recent research suggests the answer to that question is “no.” In a 2013 paper published in PLOS One, for instance, Stephan Lewandowsky and his colleagues surveyed a representative sample of 1001 Americans about their ideological beliefs and their views on contentious science topics. That included vaccines, where they used a five item questionnaire to assess people’s views, including items like “I believe that vaccines are a safe and reliable way to help avert the spread of preventable diseases” and “I believe that vaccines have negative side effects that outweigh the benefits of vaccination for children.”

The study did not find that people on the left were more likely to oppose or distrust vaccines. Rather, it found a highly nuanced result. The researchers examined two related but distinct contributors to right-wing ideology: self-identification as a political conservative and support for the free market. It found that while the former was related to somewhat more vaccine support, the latter was related to somewhat more vaccine opposition. According to Lewandowsky, the two opposing forces “virtually cancel overall.”

Other studies have found similar results. In a 2009 paper, Yale’s Dan Kahan and his colleagues found that the conservative ideological values of “hierarchy” and “individualism” were both linked to greater opposition to the HPV vaccine in particular. In a paper from earlier this year, meanwhile, Kahan found that the idea of a link between the political left and the belief that vaccines in general are dangerous “lacks any factual basis.” In fact, if anything, he found a small increase in belief in vaccine risks as one moved to the right of the political spectrum.

If you’d prefer to examine the patterns of vaccine-preventable disease outbreaks, meanwhile, those also seem politically diverse. We are having a horrible year for measles, for instance, with 18 outbreaks and 592 cases, more than double the total in any previous year since 2001. And the 21 states that have seen cases and outbreaks run the political gamut; they include California and Massachusetts, but also Alabama, Tennessee, Texas, and Ohio (home to a large outbreak in the Amish community, a group of people that can hardly be called “liberal”). Last year, meanwhile, there was a measles outbreak clustered around a Texas megachurch.

Mennonite girls at a health clinic offering vaccinations following a large measles outbreak this year in the Amish community in Ohio. Tom E. Puskar/AP

When it comes to the right and vaccines, there’s also evidence like this:

So in sum, the evidence that vaccine opposition is somehow specially tied to left-wing beliefs is just lacking. Rather, the largest factor here, according to Lewandowsky’s research, is conspiratorial beliefs, which are hard to categorize as either left wing or right wing in nature.

Genetically modified foods. Now let’s move on to the GMO issue. Here, it is less obvious what a clear-cut anti-science belief would actually be, but perhaps the most obvious case is the belief that genetically modified foods are harmful if consumed by humans. This position has been rejected by the board of American Association for the Advancement of Science, which assures us that “crop improvement by the modern molecular techniques of biotechnology is safe.” So do liberals disproportionately believe wrong things about genetically modified foods?

Lewandowsky’s paper also examined GM beliefs, once again using a five point scale that included items like “I believe that genetically engineered foods have already damaged the environment” and “Genetic modification of foods is a safe and reliable technology.” And the researchers found that “opposition to GM foods was not associated with worldview constructs.”

“This result is striking,” the researchers went on to say, “in light of reports in the media that have linked opposition to GM foods with the political Left.”

Is this dude a left winger? justasc/Shutterstock

Lewandowsky et al aren’t the only ones. For instance, an independent analysis of data from the General Social Survey by the Discover magazine blogger Razib Khan also found no real left-right difference in views about GMOs.

Still, given just how striking these results are, and how contrary to what people assume, I sought to verify them by examining yet another poll. So with much help from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research at the University of Connecticut, which supplied an abundance of data, I looked into the details behind a January 2013 CBS News poll that asked a variety of questions about GMOs using a representative national sample of 1,052 Americans.

For the most part, the results support Lewandowsky and Khan. GMO concern appears largely spread across the spectrum in this poll, and while it is somewhat stronger among Democrats (and, as we’ll see, especially strong on the far left), it is also very strong among Republicans and independents. For instance, the poll found that all three groups overwhelmingly support the labeling of foods containing GM ingredients (an idea the American Association for the Advancement of Science rejects): 90 percent of Republicans, 94 percent of Democrats, and 95 percent of independents were in favor.

Getting closer to a purely scientific issue, respondents were asked, “How concerned are you about genetically modified or genetically engineered food—Very concerned, somewhat concerned, not too concerned or not at all concerned?” Seventy-one percent of Republicans, 80 percent of Democrats, and 75 percent of independents said they were either “very” or “somewhat” concerned.

What’s more, those who did profess this level of concern then went on to answer a second question, in which they were asked more precisely what they were worried about. Twenty-five percent of concerned Republicans, 29 percent of concerned Democrats, and 25 percent of concerned independents answered “not safe to eat.” Meanwhile, 33 percent of concerned Republicans, 39 percent of concerned Democrats, and 37 percent of concerned independents answered “cause health problems.” (These are the clear-cut science deniers.)

So while there might be slightly more concern about GM foods among Democrats, overall concern is broad and appears substantially non-ideological in nature—which makes sense if you think about the concerns as being motivated by people’s fears of consuming something that is supposedly icky or unnatural. Indeed, when asked in another survey question whether they would eat “genetically modified or genetically engineered fish,” 74 percent of Republicans, 73 percent of Democrats, and 71 percent of independents said “no.”

However, there is one important qualification. Although Democrats, Republicans, and independents do not look all that different on GMOs, it turns out that if you split Democrats and Republicans up into different ideological groups, you can discern more left-right differentiation on the issue (even as worries remain spread across the spectrum). The CBS News poll did just that. In addition to their party affiliation, people were also asked whether they self-identified as “very liberal,” “somewhat liberal,” “moderate,” “somewhat conservative,” and “very conservative.” When you break it down this way, 92 percent of “very liberal” respondents were either “somewhat” or “very” concerned about GMOs, compared with only 71 percent of “very conservative” respondents. (Those who were “somewhat liberal,” “moderate,” and “somewhat conservative” look pretty similar; their percentages are 79, 75, and 74, respectively.)

However, it is important to note that people who are “very liberal” are also the smallest ideological group in the survey by far (6 percent). There were more than twice as many “very conservative” respondents (13 percent), and since the survey was nationally representative, we should expect something similar for the United States as a whole.

Such, then, are the data. They do not support for the idea that vaccine denial is a special left-wing cause. As for GMOs, while resistance may be strongest on the far left, worries on this issue are quite prominent across the spectrum as well.

In neither case are these beliefs a mirror image, on the left, of climate change or evolution denial. And as for other issues that are sometimes cited as examples of left-wing science denial, such as fracking and nuclear power? Those examples are problematic, too (see here for my thinking on these subjects).

In the end, maybe the best way to think about the politics of science denial is this: There are two major, separate types of science denial out there. One is clearly right wing and is driven by conservative activists, think tanks, media outlets like Fox News, and politicians. It is widely adhered to in the conservative movement, and it is highly politically relevant because conservatives (and Republicans) take their views on these issues as motivation to try to affect policy. This describes the situation on climate change, and on the teaching of evolution (and numerous other topics, like contraception the relationship between abortion and health).

This type of science denial, institutionalized within a major party and its activist base, has little parallel on the modern American left or within the Democratic Party. However, there’s another kind of science denial, which may have many important consequences but is not driven by any one party. Its various fixations may at times appear more left wing, but are found across the political spectrum. Denialism about vaccines and GMOs fits more neatly into this latter category.

That’s not to exonerate any kind of science denial. Nor is it to deny that there are liberals or leftists out there who hold unscientific beliefs—the polls above clearly capture such people. Nonetheless, it is to say that modern conservative science denial remains a unique phenomenon.

So why, then, do people so readily assume that vaccine and GMO denial are fundamentally left-wing causes? I suspect because those of us who live in liberal, largely bi-coastal cities meet vastly more liberals than conservatives; and thus, we are far more likely to actually encounter liberal or left-wing people who hold these beliefs.

However, unlike pollsters, we aren’t sampling the whole country in a statistically reliable way through our experiences. Science, though, is all about putting aside beliefs and anecdotes in the face of data.

See the article here:

Stop Claiming Vaccine Denial Is a Liberal Disease

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, oven, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Stop Claiming Vaccine Denial Is a Liberal Disease

This Legendary Accounting Firm Just Ran the Numbers on Climate Change

by JeseniaYnh Posted on September 10, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

With every year that passes, we’re getting further away from averting a human-caused climate disaster. That’s the key message in this year’s “Low Carbon Economy Index,” a report released by the accounting giant PricewaterhouseCoopers.

The report highlights an “unmistakable trend”: The world’s major economies are increasingly failing to do what’s needed to to limit global warming to 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit above preindustrial levels. That was the target agreed to by countries attending the United Nations’ 2009 climate summit; it represents an effort to avoid some of the most disastrous consequences of runaway warming, including food security threats, coastal inundation, extreme weather events, ecosystem shifts, and widespread species extinction.

To curtail climate change, individual countries have made a variety of pledges to reduce their share of emissions, but taken together, those promises simply aren’t enough. According to the PricewaterhouseCoopers report, “the gap between what we are doing and what we need to do has again grown, for the sixth year running.” The report adds that at current rates, we’re headed towards 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit of warming by the end of the century—twice the agreed upon rate. Here’s a breakdown of the paper’s major findings.

The chart above compares our current efforts to cut “carbon intensity”—measured by calculating the amount of carbon dioxide emitted per million dollars of economic activity—with what’s actually needed to rein in climate change. According to the report, the global economy needs to “decarbonize” by 6.2 percent every year until the end of the century to limit warming to 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit. But carbon intensity fell by only 1.2 percent in 2013.

The report also found that the world is going to blow a hole in its carbon budget—the amount we can burn to keep the world from overheating beyond 3.6 degrees:

The report singles out countries that have done better than others when it comes to cutting carbon intensity. Australia, for example, tops the list of countries that have reduced the amount of carbon dioxide emitted per unit of GDP, mainly due to lower energy demands in a growing economy. But huge countries like the United States, Germany, and India are still adding carbon intensity, year-on-year:

Overall, PricewaterhouseCoopers paints a bleak picture of a world that’s rapidly running out of time; the required effort to curb global emissions will continue to grow each year. “The timeline is also unforgiving. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and others have estimated that global emissions will need to peak around 2020 to meet a 2°C 3.6 degrees F budget,” the report says. “This means that emissions from the developed economies need to be consistently falling, and emissions from major developing countries will also have to start declining from 2020 onwards.” G20 nations, for example, will need to cut their annual energy-related emissions by one-third by 2030, and by just over half by 2050. The pressure will be on the world’s governments to come up with a solution to this enormous challenge at the much-anticipated climate talks in Paris next year.

Link to original – 

This Legendary Accounting Firm Just Ran the Numbers on Climate Change

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, Hagen, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on This Legendary Accounting Firm Just Ran the Numbers on Climate Change

Controversial Former College President Mansplains Alleged Rape Victim

by PARTomaskgfaeb Posted on September 10, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Two weeks ago, Stephen Trachtenberg, the former president of George Washington University, made headlines when he appeared on NPR’s The Diane Rehm Show to discuss sexual assault on college campuses and said that women had “to be trained not to drink in excess” so they could defend themselves against men who “misbehave.” Critics accused him of placing the burden on victims and equating sexual assault with misbehavior, claims that Trachtenberg contended did not represent his views.

In the midst of this controversy, a woman who says she was raped when she was a George Washington student in the early 2000s and was “extremely traumatized” by how the university handled her case confronted Trachtenberg via email to share her experience and denounce his remarks. In an email response, Trachtenberg, now a professor at the school, said her story “surely entitles you to your anger” and implored her to “tell me exactly what I said that you think I need to be ashamed of.” The exchange was obtained by Mother Jones.

Following the NPR show, the woman—who asked not to be named—emailed Trachtenberg about her case and said:

…Your recent remarks on the Diane Rehm show disgust me. Shame on you. Shame on the message that you have just sent to millions of women, millions of daughters, and millions of us survivors. I hope you can take the time to reflect on your statements and understand the impact of your words.

In interviews with Mother Jones, the woman recounted what happened to her. She said she was raped on campus by a fellow student, in the middle of the day, with no alcohol or drugs involved. She didn’t immediately report the assault, but after she began to experience depression and symptoms of PTSD, she decided to take a leave of absence. According to documents she provided to Mother Jones, a counselor recorded the account of her rape and an associate dean examined her records in order to approve the leave. “No one ever talked to me about my options,” she said. “No one suggested reporting to the police or going through the student judicial process.” Maralee Csellar, a George Washington spokeswoman, said she can’t comment on the case due to privacy laws.

After the woman returned to school, she filed a case against the alleged rapist with student judicial services. But she said she was not provided a victim’s advocate or any other support, and was “blindsided” by the legal defense mounted by the alleged assailant. She had an emotional breakdown and was unable to finish the trial. After that “extremely” traumatizing experience, she said she was not interested in going to the police.

Replying to the woman, Trachtenberg wrote:

Yours is a dramatic story of a dreadful experience and it surely entitles you to your anger. I like to think that today the university would serve you better. Your frustration with what happened seems sound. That said there are limitations to what the university can do. We can regret that but it cannot be denied. I believe that cases like yours need to be dealt with by the state. They have police and prosecutors and courts that have an expertise which exceeds that of the university. Rape by a student is no less rape than that by any other citizen and all need to be treated like crimes and adjudicated as such. My remarks on the Diane Rehm show are what they are. They do not define all that I think about the matter but they stand for a portion of my view that educating women–men too–about the dangers of drinking would make them safer. Being sober make one less vulnerable. And helps with driving too. Similarly I think it empowers women to know something about self defense if attacked. So go back and think about what I said beyond the strong memories of your personal experience and tell me exactly what I said that you think I need to be ashamed of. Educated empowered women strike me as a good idea.

In an email to Mother Jones, Trachtenberg—who noted that he does not speak on behalf of the university—writes, “This is a tragic story that seems to go back about a decade. I tried to be as responsive as I could to this abused woman when she wrote but to some agendas there is no reply.” He added, “My heart goes out to her.”

More than 75 schools are being investigated by the US Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights to determine whether they botched sexual-assault investigations. George Washington is not one of those schools. Still, in January 2014, a victim complained to the student newspaper, the GW Hatchet, about the school’s response to her accusation of sexual assault, noting, “It was this constant battle with GW.” Csellar said that the university issued new sexual-violence policies last year and is “committed to fully supporting survivors of such acts and treating appropriately those who are found to have committed them.”

Trachtenberg insists that his original comments have been misconstrued and that he’s being unfairly maligned. “I thought I was speaking good and prudent truth on behalf of women when I was on the Diane Rehm Show,” he writes. “I said don’t blame the victims and I proposed two modest and hardly radical ideas.” He later adds, “Because my effort to candidly address part of a problem fell short of perfection and neglected to deal with all aspects of the rape culture agenda I was abused.”

“Look what happened to me, look at my case,” the woman told Mother Jones. “I’m sure this is happening to other people. With the attitude of people like this, whom we put our trust in, no wonder.”

From: 

Controversial Former College President Mansplains Alleged Rape Victim

Posted in Anchor, Citizen, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Safer, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Controversial Former College President Mansplains Alleged Rape Victim

These Women Are the NRA’s Worst Nightmare

by WilliamWby Posted on September 9, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>
A march across the Brooklyn Bridge, June 2014. John Minchillo/AP

Kelly Bernado woke to the headlines after working her late shift as an ER nurse in Seattle, and she cried through the day and into the next, the shooting at her own son’s high school a year before haunting her all over again. In Houston the morning after it happened, Kellye Burke was on her way to pick up a Christmas tree, her six-year-old son nestled in his car seat, when she saw the large LED road sign publicizing a gun show and felt the urge to scream. In Brooklyn, Kim Russell felt a surge of adrenaline when she heard the news; after choking back the nausea, she began agonizing about what her first-grader would hear at school. She’d never told her daughter about the time when a robber shot her friend to death and wounded her, then pressed the cold muzzle against her forehead as she begged for her life.

At home in an Indianapolis suburb the morning following the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary, Shannon Watts, a 41-year-old former public relations executive and mother of five, created a Facebook page calling for a march on the nation’s capital: “Change will require action by angry Americans outside of Washington, D.C. Join us—we will need strength in numbers against a resourceful, powerful and intransigent gun lobby.” The seed for Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America—today a national organization backed by nearly 200,000 members and millions of dollars—had been planted. “I started this page because, as a mom, I can no longer sit on the sidelines. I am too sad and too angry,” Watts wrote. “Don’t let anyone tell you we can’t talk about this tragedy now—they said the same after Virginia Tech, Gabby Giffords, and Aurora. The time is now.”

Three days later, five women convened in Brooklyn for a Skype call with Watts and formed the group’s first chapter. They felt that what happened in Newtown was like another 9/11. None of the women had experience as political activists, but they did remember Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD), the pioneering grassroots movement of the 1980s that rewrote laws and battled cultural resignation about alcohol-related traffic deaths. They also realized they had an asset that MADD organizers could only have dreamed of: social media. As word of a new effort to confront gun violence sprang up in Facebook feeds, offers flooded in to help launch more chapters, from Virginia and Texas to Kentucky and Colorado.

Kim Russell, Lucia McBath, and Erica Lafferty during the NRA’s 2014 annual meeting. Everytown for Gun Safety

Today, Moms Demand Action has teams on the ground in all 50 states, elbowing their way into policy hearings and working to motivate “gun sense voters” fed up with the carnage. In less than two years, the organization has compelled more than a half-dozen national restaurant chains, internet companies, and retailers to take a stand against lax gun laws, and has joined forces with one of the nation’s most deep-pocketed political operators to hold elected leaders to account. Many groups have taken on the nation’s 30,000 annual firearm deaths—and this latest effort bears resemblance to the Million Mom March in the wake of the 1999 Columbine shooting, whose organizers also sought to be “a MADD for guns.” But no group has risen so far, so fast, influencing laws, rattling major corporations, and provoking vicious responses from hardcore gun rights activists. With its ambition to turn out a million voters for the November midterms, Moms Demand Action may be emerging as a potent threat to the National Rifle Association’s three-decade-long stranglehold on gun politics.

If stricter national gun laws seemed imminent in the aftermath of Sandy Hook, just four months later the popular narrative was that any chance for change had been deep-sixed. A majority in the US Senate approved universal background checks for gun buyers, but the bill fell a few votes short of the 60 needed to overcome a Republican filibuster. Once again, the NRA had won.

But Moms Demand Action took the fight to another arena—public opinion, with a special focus on brand-conscious corporate America. After Sandy Hook, Second Amendment activists had stepped up a tradition of openly carrying firearms into Starbucks stores (“open carry” is legal to varying degrees in all but a few states), so in May 2013, Moms launched a campaign urging members to “#SkipStarbucks” on Saturdays and post pictures of themselves having coffee elsewhere. Watts and Kate Beck, a Moms leader in Starbucks’ hometown of Seattle, published a scathing op-ed on CNN.com calling out the company’s inaction and citing an accidental shooting at a Starbucks in Florida and a rally at another in South Dakota that drew 60 armed activists. “As mothers,” they said, “we wonder why the company is willing to put children and families in so much danger. Nobody needs to be armed to get a cup of coffee.”

When CEO Howard Schultz announced in mid-September that firearms were no longer welcome on Starbucks’ premises, he declined to discuss the steady pressure applied by Moms, whose 54 Facebook posts over three and a half months had reached more than 5.5 million people and spawned a 40,000-signature petition.

Not long after, dozens of men carrying semi-automatic rifles descended on a Dallas restaurant where four Moms members were having lunch. The women took pictures and turned it into a national news story. It was “a public relations disaster” for the open-carry activists, says veteran Republican strategist and gun owner Mark McKinnon. “Lesson learned? Moms trump guns.”

Social media had helped set off a tectonic shift. “Now there’s this passionate community of people who can instantly be in touch in a very public and affirming way,” says Kristin Goss, a political scientist and author of Disarmed: The Missing Movement for Gun Control in America. “That’s a very new thing for this cause.” Second Amendment activists have long relied on gun shows, stores, and ranges to rally their faithful, she says, “but for supporters of gun regulations, what’s that space—the emergency room? It’s Facebook.”

Shannon Watts. Chang W. Lee/New York Times/Redux

But a few high-profile victories and rapid growth had brought an age-old problem: Moms Demand Action struggled to raise enough money to sustain a corps of national and regional leaders. In summer 2013, Watts met with Mark Glaze, head of Michael Bloomberg’s Mayors Against Illegal Guns, in Montana. They talked at length as they rode a mountain gondola beneath the expansive vistas near Big Sky, forging a plan to build the furthest-reaching operation yet to go toe-to-toe with the NRA. Bloomberg’s group had what Moms needed—not just big funds, but also an expert policy shop and a sprawling political network—but it lacked what Moms had in spades: grassroots firepower and an appealing image. As one political operative who has worked on the guns issue put it, “If you were desperately trying to rebrand your organization because everybody hates you for taking their cigarettes and sodas and guns, wouldn’t you leap at the moms?”

As the nation prepared to light anniversary candles for the 20 children and six educators of Sandy Hook in December, the two groups announced their combined operation: Everytown for Gun Safety, backed by a whopping $50 million from Bloomberg, who vowed to double the NRA’s political spending in 2014. “We were the perfect solution to each other’s problems,” Glaze, who was Everytown’s executive director until this June, told me. Momentum toward reform could have vanished after the background check bill went nowhere, he notes, “as often happens when you sort of lose with your big moment and your advocates in the field fade away. We were determined not to let that happen.”

There seemed a snowball’s chance that Congress would take on guns again, but Moms had other plans. Starting in January it campaigned against Facebook—where people regularly advertise guns for sale and can easily circumvent background checks for buyers—soon prompting the site to introduce better protections for minors and crack down on potentially illegal sales. In the spring, when Texas open-carry activists showed up armed at national restaurant chains in Dallas and San Antonio, Moms responded with a volley of press appearances, petition drives, photo memes, and hashtags. Guys flaunting loaded assault rifles at Chipotle? Time for #BurritosNotBullets. At Chili’s? #RibsNotRifles. At Sonic, America’s Drive-In? #ShakesNotShotguns. It took less than two weeks for Chili’s and Sonic to officially reject firearms at their eateries; in Chipotle’s case, just 48 hours in the crosshairs was enough.

More MoJo reporting on the Open Carry movement


Fearing Rising Backlash, NRA Urges Gun Activists to Stand Down


Spitting, Stalking, Rape Threats: How Gun Extremists Target Women


Gun Activists With Assault Rifles Harass Marine Vet on Memorial Day


Target Gets Drawn Into Gun Rights Battle


Target Remains in Crosshairs of Texas Gun Fight


Gun Activists Flaunting Assault Rifles Get Booted From Chili’s and Sonic

Moms made Target the next battleground, gathering images posted by open-carry activists who’d toted their AR-15s in the toy aisles and declared the retailer “very 2A friendly.” With Moms’ hashtag activism plugged into Everytown’s political machinery and mailing list of 1.5 million names, Target headquarters in Minneapolis got hit with 11,000 phone calls and 390,000 petition signatures within a month. Moms also called out Target’s new strategic partner The Honest Company (the baby products line from young mom Jessica Alba), staged “stroller jams” at Target stores in Texas and Virginia, and protested outside the company’s annual shareholder meeting.

Just before July Fourth, the nation’s fourth-largest retailer announced that firearms were no longer welcome in its 1,789 stores.

Last week, Moms launched a six-figure ad campaign targeting Kroger over its gun policy, and on Monday, Panera Bread—which approached Moms months ago to discuss the issue—announced that it does not want firearms brought into its stores.

Forcing corporations to take a stand against gun activists is no small feat, says Glaze, an experienced Washington lobbyist. “Changes to the culture are more important than legal changes in some ways,” he says. “This sends a message that having guns everywhere makes people uncomfortable, which goes directly against the gun lobby’s agenda—to normalize having them everywhere.”

“As each fresh shooting Horror is met by the same inaction in Congress, a roiling frustration may be awakening an army of moms who see themselves as outsiders armed only with their clout as voters and agitators.” So wrote a reporter for Time magazine—in May 2000, on the eve of the Million Mom March on Washington. The parallels between that grassroots movement and today’s are striking. The Columbine massacre in April 1999 had gripped the nation, but it was a rampage at a Jewish community center in Los Angeles four months later that set off the movement, after Donna Dees-Thomases—a 42-year-old mom and part-time corporate publicist living in New Jersey—saw news footage of a daisy chain of children being led away from the building. “Think about what those kids saw,” Dees-Thomases said in the Los Angeles Times about the attack that left five seriously wounded, including three kindergarten-age boys. (All the victims survived, though the gunman killed a mail carrier elsewhere before the rampage ended.) “I thought, ‘Why haven’t we done anything?'”

The method then was email, internet newsgroups, and an 800 number listed in newspaper ads; soon the Million Mom March had chapters all over the country. They campaigned for “common sense gun laws,” and their march on Washington, which drew roughly three-quarters of a million people, included a stroller parade. They soon merged with the long-established Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence and fought to shape policy at the state and local levels as well.

But where the Million Mom March was limited by its focus on legislation, its agenda soon eclipsed by the election of George W. Bush, and then 9/11, Moms Demand Action has gone a different route. “They’ve been incredibly creative with campaigns that don’t rely upon elected officials, and finding alternative pathways to influence,” says Goss, the political scientist. They also have the opportunity of heightened public awareness: A spate of mass shootings beginning with Virginia Tech in 2007, Goss says, has given rise to “a critical mass” of survivors and family members devoted to keeping gun violence at the forefront.

And Moms has actively recruited them. “One of the real lessons of MADD is that people understand tragedy on a human scale,” says Chuck Hurley, its CEO from 2005 to 2010. “Everybody could understand Candy Lightner and her daughter being killed,” he says, referring to the organization’s founder and her 13-year-old, who was struck by a drunk driver in 1980. “There’s no way people can understand 30,000 firearm deaths. The bigger the number, the less real it is.”

“I think we’re absolutely key,” Lucia McBath told me in April, outside the packed Indianapolis hotel conference room where a delegation from Moms and Everytown was holding a press conference against the backdrop of the NRA annual convention just a few blocks away. McBath, whose teenage son, Jordan Davis, was gunned down in 2012 in a dispute over loud music by a man citing Florida’s broad self-defense laws, speaks softly but emphatically. “Mothers know how to get things done,” she continued, explaining that they can motivate each other and connect with families in a way no one else can. “A lot of mothers are suffering in this country over the nature of the violence.”

McBath has been astonished by the outpouring of support in the wake of her son’s death. “I feel like I have a whole nation praying for our family, and I’m deeply humbled by that.” A fundamental shift on guns is inevitable, she says. “With the tobacco industry—how many years and how much effort did that take? Or gay rights? To change the culture you have to change the mindset, and that takes time. I know we will succeed.”

Erica Lafferty was 27 when her mother, Sandy Hook principal Dawn Hochsprung, was slain confronting Adam Lanza. She took up the cause just three months later. “I could literally hear her voice in my head,” Lafferty told me in Indianapolis. “‘Child, get out of bed and do something productive.'” After a year of speaking out and lobbying Congress with Mayors Against Illegal Guns, she met Watts—”she just gives me this mom hug”—and it struck her: Had the roles been reversed, had she been killed and her mother become an activist, “she absolutely would not be doing what I’m doing,” focusing on politicians in Washington. “She’d be doing what Shannon is doing, gathering all of these moms.”

Confronting child gun deaths—especially those stemming from negligent storage or use of firearms, which go unprosecuted in many states—is an obvious imperative for Moms. “It’s hugely important to our organization,” Watts told me. The strategic promise is also clear: In the early 1980s, most Americans saw drunk-driving deaths as “a problem you had to live with,” according to Hurley. Among MADD’s crowning achievements was to redefine them as crimes. MADD put relentless pressure not just on political leaders but also on the liquor industry—in no small part by turning a spotlight on kids who had been killed.

Last Christmas Eve in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, a man who’d been “messing with” a 9 mm handgun unintentionally shot and killed his two-month-old daughter as she slept in her glider. The coroner ruled the death a homicide, yet local law enforcement officials said they were undecided about pursuing criminal charges. Typically that might’ve been the end of it, but Moms Demand Action voiced outrage via social media and the local press. Within two weeks the DA announced plans to prosecute. (He said no outside group influenced his decision.)

“While we fully support the father being held accountable for this crime, we also acknowledge the horrific grief this family is experiencing,” Moms Demand Action said after the charges were announced. “We hope their tragedy can serve as an example that encourages others to be more responsible with their firearms.” The father later pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter and reckless endangerment, which could have brought up to 15 years in prison. He got six years’ probation and no jail time.

Moms also drew attention to a case in February in North Carolina, where a three-year-old boy wounded his 17-month-old sister after finding a handgun that their father—who wrote a parenting advice column in a local paper—had left unsecured. (The infant recovered.) “The parents have been punished more than any criminal-justice system can do to them,” a captain from the county sheriff’s department said soon after the shooting. After Moms swung into action, the father was charged with failure to secure his firearm to protect a minor; his case is pending.

“All too often DAs are loath to get involved, saying a family has suffered enough,” Watts says, “especially in states where laws are inadequate.” But just as MADD battled to tighten drunk-driving standards and stiffen penalties, Moms is pushing to toughen negligence and child-access prevention laws. One study found that 43 percent of homes with guns and kids have at least one unsecured firearm, and in 2013 at least 52 children killed themselves or others after coming across loaded guns, a Mother Jones investigation showed. “This idea of ‘accidental’ gun deaths, when something is truly negligence, has to be remedied,” Watts says.

Moms Demand Action has also campaigned aggressively for laws to disarm domestic abusers—legislation categorically opposed by the NRA until it quietly began moderating its stance this past year. Every year more than a million women are physically assaulted by an intimate partner, and when a gun is present, the likelihood of their being murdered goes up more than fivefold. Women regularly are shot to death even after obtaining court protection orders against their abusers, according to a New York Times investigation last year. The phenomenon was on grim display again in July, when a man who’d had multiple restraining orders against him shot to death six of his ex-wife’s family members in Texas, including four children. Thanks in part to Moms’ lobbying, six states have moved on the issue in 2014, including Wisconsin and Louisiana, where bills were signed by conservative governors Scott Walker and Bobby Jindal.

Moms has also chipped away at the status quo by battling state laws that allow people to pack heat in schools or bars and by working with cities to require “social responsibility” measures (such as preventing their products from appearing in video games) from gun manufacturers bidding for lucrative police department contracts.

Universal background checks for gun buyers these are not, acknowledges Mark Glaze. But what’s one of the first things you have to do if you want to sustain a movement? “You have to rack up some victories.”

It’s no coincidence that from the start Moms Demand Action has been armed with effective slogans and well-orchestrated campaigns against corporations: Watts has deep experience—from the other side. Before she decided to become a stay-at-home mom in 2008 when her youngest kids started middle school, she spent a decade as a PR executive for large firms, including Monsanto, where part of her role was to defend their controversial GMO products. She also handled crisis communications for corporations at FleishmanHillard; prior to that she’d been an aide to a Democratic Missouri governor and a speechwriter in the state Legislature.

All of which her detractors have tried to use against her. “Shannon Watts may be a liar, but she’s a professional liar,” the editor of BearingArms.com scoffed recently about her résumé. Opponents have also invoked her career to declare that she’s not a real grassroots mom and denounced her as a “Democratic Party operative.” And that’s the tame stuff. As Moms’ clout has increased, gun rights activists have aggressively targeted its members and leaders, calling them “Bloomberg’s whores,” “thugs with jugs,” and far worse. Watts has been at the receiving end of menacing phone calls and violent images posted online. She gets emails from people threatening to rape and murder her and her children. “They call me every horrific name you’ve ever heard, and say they hope that if I die it gets televised so they can watch,” she told me. (Watts has alerted the FBI to specific threats and has noted publicly that her home is protected by dogs and an alarm system.)

For decades the gun rights movement has relied on aggressive rhetoric—an overbearing government is coming to take your guns—and during the Obama presidency the NRA’s leadership has doubled down on stoking anger among its members. But in its most exaggerated form, and directed at a group of sympathetic women, that rage has created a public relations nightmare for the gun lobby—particularly in Texas, where Moms Demand Action has 7,000 active members and counting. In late April, as I first reported in Mother Jones, a veteran NRA board member in Houston confronted the leader of Open Carry Texas, warning that the backlash from flaunting semi-automatic rifles in public was jeopardizing the gun lobby’s longtime control of “a massive number of votes” in the Statehouse. The head of Open Carry Texas retorted that the NRA was siding with the “ultraliberal gun-control bullies” of Moms Demand Action. Some members of Open Carry Texas used disturbing intimidation tactics, including hounding a Marine veteran through city streets with assault rifles, shooting up a naked female mannequin, and publicizing a woman’s personal information online and exposing her to vicious harassment.

By June, the NRA’s lobbying wing made an extraordinary move, denouncing the Texas activists’ demonstrations as “foolishness” and “downright weird.” But when the enraged activists cut up their membership cards, the NRA beat a fast retreat and apologized.

Whipping up gun rights die-hards in recent years may have helped it sway lawmakers and elections. But in the process, the century-and-a-half-old NRA, once known for championing marksmanship, hunting, and gun safety, has all but ceded that legacy. And while most of its members, polls show, favor gun safety measures such as broader background checks, closing loopholes, and securing guns from the mentally ill, the leadership has stuck to its hardline position.

Key to Moms’ message is that being a socially responsible gun owner has nothing to do with being anti-gun. In fact, some of the leadership is deeply experienced with firearms. As an ER nurse in Seattle, Moms regional leader Kelly Bernado has cared for patients physically shattered by gun violence—but as a police officer in the 1990s, she often rolled up on armed suspects and faced split-second decisions with her weapon drawn. “I find the people who carry weapons and think they can be some sort of hero in these situations absolutely ridiculous,” she told me. (Though she came “very, very close” in one domestic-violence situation, Bernado never fired on anyone during her career.)

Kellye Burke, who grew up in rural Texas in a family tradition of gun ownership dating back to frontier days, says it was the notorious “good guys with guns” speech from the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre one week after Sandy Hook that drove her to action. “It just personified the sickness and the callousness that has overtaken our country,” she says. “The fact that they’re still not acknowledging that this is an actual problem—it’s just zero accountability and zero responsibility. And that trickles all the way down to the individual gun person who thinks, ‘I can do whatever I want and basically screw everybody else.'”

The ripple effect that certain gun deaths now have across social media—from Trayvon Martin in Florida to two-year-old Caroline Sparks in Kentucky to college kids in Santa Barbara—echoes their comprehensive toll. Thirty-thousand Americans die from guns every year, but assume that even just five people are severely affected by each person’s death and now the damage afflicts 150,000 more Americans annually. Over 10 years, that’s a total of 1.8 million people. Now add the number of gunshot victims each year who survive—one Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate suggests at least 64,000, not including accidents—and the overall number of Americans directly affected by shootings each decade climbs to 5 million.

“Newtown concentrated the horror in one place,” as Judith Palfrey, former president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, told me at the one-year anniversary. Still, polls show that few Americans vote based on gun policy. The most ambitious goal of Everytown, with Moms Demand Action as the vanguard, is to alter that calculus—and they may just have a chance. “Moms are an important and powerful constituency that can uniquely tap into the emotion of the electorate,” says GOP strategist McKinnon. “At the very least they can get a hearing. Whether or not they can actually mobilize voters, we don’t know yet.”

Leaders of the movement preach patience as well as tenacity. “The NRA has been in this for a very long time, so I don’t only see this through the lens of 2014,” says Howard Wolfson, a top political adviser to Bloomberg. “This is not a one-time electoral effort.”

The leading new gun reform groups share the same essential goals, though there are differences on how to achieve them. Americans for Responsible Solutions, the super-PAC and lobbying shop started by former congresswoman and mass-shooting survivor Gabrielle Giffords and her husband, Mark Kelly, is throwing millions of dollars this year behind 11 Senate and House candidates who back stricter gun laws. However, the group won’t target Democrats such as Sens. Mark Pryor of Arkansas or Mark Begich of Alaska, who voted against the background check bill.

Support for allies “is obviously very helpful,” Wolfson told me, “but there are two sides to this coin. From our perspective, we also want to make sure the people who oppose gun safety pay an electoral price.” In July, Everytown rolled out a 10-point questionnaire for congressional candidates on gun safety priorities; the plan is to reward supporters and go after those who don’t measure up—even if, says Wolfson, that means endangering the slim Democratic majority in the Senate. It’s a page straight from the NRA playbook.

“This is about building a foundation,” Watts says, “and it can’t be built on whether you have Democrats or Republicans in office. Many Democrats have shown that they are just as in the pocket of the NRA as their Republican counterparts. This has to transcend political labels.”

As Watts sees it, that’s the only way to defeat the ingrained “nothing happened, nothing will” narrative that so frustrates her and the women who’ve joined her. “It’s such a ridiculous idea that because something doesn’t pass in weeks or months that all hope is lost.”

For more of Mother Jones’ reporting on guns in America, see all of our latest coverage here, and our award-winning special reports.

Taken from:

These Women Are the NRA’s Worst Nightmare

Posted in Crown, FF, GE, LAI, ONA, PUR, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on These Women Are the NRA’s Worst Nightmare

10 Shots From an Incredible New Trove of Depression and World War II Photos

by Tabitha92B Posted on September 6, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Between 1935 and 1944, the Farm Security Agency-Office of War Information dispatched photographers to all ends of the United States to document life during hard times and wartime. Many of their photos, taken by now-legendary photographers like Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans, have become iconic representations of America during the Depression and World War II. But most of the hundreds of thousands of negatives, collected in what became known as “The File,” were never seen by the public.

No longer. Yale University’s Photogrammar has just made more than 170,000 of the FSA-OWI photos easily accessible online. You can browse and search by photographer, location, date, or subject. Even a quick visit to the site turns up surprising, searing photos that feel like they should be in history books, on the cover of old LIFE magazines, or hanging in art galleries. Here are 10 that caught my eye as I looked through the massive collection—including one taken less than a block from the Mother Jones office in downtown San Francisco.

Riveter at a military aircraft factory. Fort Worth, Texas, 1942 Howard R. Hollem/FSA-OWI Collection

“Wife of Negro sharecropper.” Lee County, Mississippi, 1935 Arthur Rothstein/FSA-OWI Collection

“Backyard slum scene” with the US Capitol in the background. Washington, D.C., 1935 Carl Mydans/FSA-OWI Collection

Deserted mining town. Zinc, Arkansas, 1935 Ben Shahn/FSA-OWI Collection

“Longshoremen’s lunch hour.” San Francisco, California, 1937 Dorothea Lange/FSA-OWI Collection

Japanese-American women interned at the Tule Lake Relocation Center. Newell, California, 1942 Unknown photographer/FSA-OWI Collection

“A shore patrol man and military policeman at the Greyhound bus terminal.” Indianapolis, Indiana, 1943. Esther Bubley/FSA-OWI Collection

A third-grader plays Adolf Hitler in a school production. New York, New York, 1942. Marjory Collins/FSA-OWI Collection

Army tank driver. Ft. Knox, Kentucky, 1942. Alfred T. Palmer/FSA-OWI Collection

“Monday morning, December 8, 1941, after Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.” San Francisco, California, 1941 John Collier/FSA-OWI Collection

The same intersection today Dave Gilson/Mother Jones

Credit – 

10 Shots From an Incredible New Trove of Depression and World War II Photos

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on 10 Shots From an Incredible New Trove of Depression and World War II Photos