Tag Archives: top stories

Mystery Lung Fungus: Are You at Risk?

by Magdalynamez Posted on August 12, 2013

Mother Jones

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Karen Deeming was a healthy 48-year-old living in Los Banos, California, and working on her master’s degree in anthropology and archaeology. Then, in late 2012, a few weeks after returning from a dig in Mariposa, California, Karen began to feel sick. A chest x-ray turned up bilteral pneumonia and masses in her lungs.

What followed was eight months of debilitating illness. And she’s not better yet.

If you suspect that Karen had lung cancer, you’re wrong. She had something else—and she isn’t alone. Cases of her illness are on the rise: In 1998, there were 2,000. In 2011, there were around 23,000.

To find out what Karen’s illness is—and whether you’re at risk—watch the video above.

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Mystery Lung Fungus: Are You at Risk?

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Ditching the Redskins, Once and for All

by Sheeritwern Posted on August 9, 2013

Mother Jones

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Over at Slate yesterday, editor David Plotz wrote about the site’s decision to never again refer to Washington’s professional football team as the Redskins. In explaining the change, Plotz argued that although the franchise’s (racist) first owner, George Preston Marshall, likely chose the name in an effort “to invoke Indian bravery and toughness, not to impugn Indians,” ultimately “the world changes, and all of a sudden a well-intentioned symbol is an embarrassment.”

It is an absolute embarrassment—for the NFL, for the nation’s capital, and for nanny-underpayer/owner Dan Snyder, who has stubbornly vowed never to change the team’s name, even in the face of common decency and a federal trademark suit.

And so, in an admittedly small gesture, Mother Jones is also tweaking our house style guide, joining Slate and a group of other publications, from The New Republic to Washington City Paper. From here on out, we will refer to the team online and in print as “Washington” or “Washington’s pro football team” or, if we get sassy, “the Washington Redacted.”

For those of you who come to Mother Jones for your breaking NFL news…never mind, I can’t even.

There is a chance, however, that the term will end up back on our pages. We certainly won’t strike it from a quote. And if we end up writing a post or two about how Snyder still hasn’t changed the name, despite increasing scrutiny, we reserve the right to use it again—if only to highlight how incredibly out-of-touch and backward the Washington football team’s owner truly is.

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Ditching the Redskins, Once and for All

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Do Chicken Plant Chemicals Mask Salmonella?

by John Grit Posted on August 9, 2013

Mother Jones

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Remember that proposed US Department of Agriculture plan to speed up kill lines at factory-scale poultry slaughterhouses, and cut way back on the number of USDA inspectors to oversee them?

Part of the proposed plan involves allowing the poultry companies to ramp up the antimicrobial sprays they aim at bird carcasses as they zoom along the kill line—a chemical fix to the problem of the various pathogens, often antibiotic-resistant, that are commonly found on chicken, including salmonella and campylobacter. A recent Washington Post story by Kimberly Kindy delivers an ominous taste of what this chemical deluge could mean for both the safety of the chicken you eat and that of the workers who prep it for you.

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Do Chicken Plant Chemicals Mask Salmonella?

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Stephen Colbert Dances With Henry Kissinger

by Margherit Posted on August 7, 2013

Mother Jones

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Stephen Colbert—Comedy Central host, ex-presidential candidate, and fierce critic of President Obama’s targeted killing policy—was recently snubbed by Daft Punk. The French electro-pop duo was supposed to perform on The Colbert Report for “StePhest Colbchella ‘013,” but was forced to cancel due to contractual obligations with Comedy Central’s sister network MTV.

So on Tuesday’s show, Colbert spent much of the program taking lighthearted swipes at the electronic music stars and debuted a comedic dance-party clip set to Daft Punk’s hit song “Get Lucky.” In the video, Colbert gleefully dances with Matt Damon, Jeff Bridges, Bryan Cranston, Hugh Laurie, and… Henry Kissinger:

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At the 2:44 mark, Colbert enters Kissinger’s office and proceeds to groove around his desk. Kissinger’s segment ends with the former secretary of state and national security advisor picking up the phone and calmly calling “security” on the dancing comedian.

The video is, of course, all in good fun, and many American political figures (some of whom have appeared on The Colbert Report) are criticized for US foreign policy decisions. But Kissinger’s reputation is unique, and now is a good time to revisit why. Here are just some of the reasons why Colbert and Co. should have thought twice before making Kissinger seem like an aging teddy bear in a five-minute dance video:

Various human rights groups and journalists, including Amnesty International and the late Christopher Hitchens, have highlighted Henry Kissinger’s alleged complicity in major human rights violations and war crimes around the globe, in Chile (murder and subversion of democracy), Bangladesh (genocide), and East Timor (yet more genocide), to name a few. Perhaps his most notorious alleged act was taking part in the sabotage—on behalf of the Nixon presidential campaign—of the 1968 Vietnam War peace talks (secret diplomacy that quite possibly constituted a violation of the Logan Act). Subsequently, the Vietnam War was prolonged well into the Nixon years, allowing the US ample opportunity to do things like carpet-bomb eastern Cambodia.

Kissinger’s lesser offenses include venting about “self-serving” Jewish “bastards” who were trying to escape persecution and cultural eradication in the Soviet Union. (Kissinger is Jewish, and his family fled from Nazi Germany in the late 1930s.)

The Nobel Peace Prize-winning statesman has previously appeared on The Colbert Report, including in this clip with Eliot Spitzer and guitarist Peter Frampton. Comedy Central did not respond to a request for comment regarding Kissinger’s multiple appearances, and Colbert’s personal publicist could not be reached for comment. I will update this post if that changes.

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Stephen Colbert Dances With Henry Kissinger

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Tesla Motors Earns $26 Million in the Second Quarter—Thanks to the Government

by tf942pe Posted on August 7, 2013

Mother Jones

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Editor’s note: This story has been updated to reflect Tesla’s Q2 results.

Tesla Motors surprised Wall Street this afternoon, announcing second-quarter profits of $26 million on $405 million in revenue. Since it reported its first modest profit in May, the electric-car company cofounded by billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk already had seen its share price more than double, and you can expect it to soar even higher when the markets open tomorrow. Many analysts, after all, were expecting Tesla to take a hit. But so far, the company’s profits have relied on government subsidies and initiatives.

Tesla’s own accomplishments are impressive. The company, founded in 2004, is selling its all-electric cars as fast as it can produce them, even though the baseline price for a Model S sedan is nearly $70,000. Car and Driver says the Model S is possibly the best car it has ever tested. Musk has built a successful company after years of scraping by low on funds while sinking money into researching and developing amazing cars.

In January 2010, as Tesla was developing the Model S, it received a $465 million dollar loan from the Department of Energy (DOE). That’s not to mention other, less direct subsidies, like the millions of dollars in subsidies in Japan that helped Panasonic develop the lithium-ion batteries that are at the heart of every Tesla car. Tesla’s modest first-quarter profit relied on $68 million from zero-emission-vehicle (ZEV) credits it sold to other, less environmentally friendly car companies under a California emissions mandate. There’s also the $7,500 federal tax break for people who buy electric vehicles, which makes its pricey cars more affordable.

As for today’s results. Tesla earned $51 million on ZEV credits, without which it would not have been able to report a profit.

Tesla is a model for how government support can help bring ambitious new technologies to market. But you won’t hear Elon Musk saying that. To the contrary, he has tweeted about how he thinks we’d be better off passing a carbon tax instead of the hefty loan that floated Tesla at a key moment. Musk claims the DOE loan was merely an “accelerant” for Tesla. The company was “bailed in, not bailed out,” Musk quipped during an interview with Popular Mechanics last year.

Could Tesla have made it this far without government support? And will the company—not to mention Musk’s other enterprises, SpaceX and SolarCity—stand alone in the future? Let’s take a look at Tesla’s climb to success.

1. Starting in 2004, Tesla drums up millions in private cash so it can build an electric car from scratch. Musk leads several private financing rounds, and dumps in a substantial chunk of his own cash.

2. By 2008, Tesla has spent years designing its first car, the Roadster, but still has nothing to sell to customers. The car is taking years longer to bring to market, and costing a lot more, than Tesla execs had predicted. Tesla slashes its workforce. Musk takes over as CEO and eventually pushes hard for the federal loan, which Tesla receives in January 2010.

3. The loan helps Tesla get the Model S to market. The car gets (mostly) rave reviews, setting the stage for a successful IPO in June 2010, when Tesla raises $226 million selling stock to the public.

4. The IPO and brisk sales of the Model S (made more affordable by that $7,500 federal tax credit) allow Tesla to pay off its loan years early. In May 2013, thanks to $68 million in revenues from selling California clean-air credits to rival car makers, Tesla posts its first profit, a modest $11 million.

5. Profitability sends Tesla’s stock price soaring. Today’s earnings report may boost it even further.

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Tesla Motors Earns $26 Million in the Second Quarter—Thanks to the Government

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Keystone Light: The Keystone XL Alternative You’ve Never Heard of Is Probably Going to Be Built

by Margurite Axley Posted on August 7, 2013

Mother Jones

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Last week, the controversial Keystone XL pipeline, which would transport oil from the Alberta tar sands to the Gulf of Mexico, hit another snag: The State Department’s Office of the Inspector General said that it is investigating a possible conflict-of-interest issue in the project’s environmental impact study. The inspector general is probing whether the company that produced the environmental impact study, Energy Resource Management (ERM), failed to disclose its past working relationship with TransCanada, the company building the pipeline. But while Keystone XL languishes, a rival pipeline plan is speeding through the approval process.

One of TransCanada’s rivals, Enbridge Inc., has quietly been moving ahead with a slightly smaller pipeline project that could be piping 660,000 barrels of crude per day to the gulf by 2015. (The Keystone line would carry 700,000 barrels per day.) For environmentalists hoping that blocking the Keystone pipeline would choke the carbon-intensive development of the Canadian tar sands, the Enbridge Eastern Gulf pipeline would be a disaster.

The 774-mile pipeline would run from Patoka, Illinois, to St. James, Louisiana, alleviating a pipeline bottleneck in the Midwest, where the shale oil from North Dakota’s Bakken formation meets the flow from Alberta’s oil sands, overwhelming the capacity of the current pipelines. And although 200 miles of pipe destined for Keystone XL sits collecting dust in North Dakota with no shipping date in sight, the bulk of the Eastern Gulf project is already built—almost three quarters of it will be repurposed natural gas line. Without the public outcry that has bogged down Keystone, the project has flown along smoothly under the radar.

There’s reason to be concerned: Enbridge was behind the largest overland pipeline spill in US history. In 2010 an Enbridge pipeline loosed more than 1.1 million gallons of crude oil into the Kalamazoo River and its surrounding wetlands. The spill is still being cleaned up, with the bill rising to over $1 billion, and the Environmental Protection Agency estimates that there may be as much as 100,000 gallons of oil still lingering on the bottom of the river.

The Eastern Gulf line is only one piece of a larger plan. As Inside Climate News reported earlier this summer, Enbridge is building a 5,000-mile network of pipelines that would far overshadow the potential impact of the Keystone line. And TransCanada has new plans in the works in case President Obama blocks the Keystone project. Earlier this month, the company announced its plan for a new venture that would link eastern and western Canada, providing an outlet for Alberta’s booming oil sands producers. And the Canadian ambassador to the United States has vowed to ship crude to US refineries on trains if the pipelines aren’t approved.

The recent news about the latest hitches for the Keystone XL pipeline may have cheered its opponents. But they’re going to have to start thinking a lot bigger if they want to block further tar sands oil development entirely.

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Keystone Light: The Keystone XL Alternative You’ve Never Heard of Is Probably Going to Be Built

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QUANTUM LEAP: The US Special Ops Project to Exploit Your Twitter Account

by Guadalupe Williams Posted on August 7, 2013

Mother Jones

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“Quantum Leap” was the name of a popular TV show from the early nineties about a quantum physicist who jumps through time inhabiting different bodies with each leap. It is also the name the US Special Operations Command’s DC-area branch gave to an unusual project investigating how to combat crime by exploiting social media. An unclassified document, dated September 2012 obtained by Steven Aftergood’s Secrecy News, reveals that this special ops division met with at least a dozen data mining companies in the last year in an effort to utilize sophisticated tech tools to the exploit the personal information Americans publicly post on the web. The US Special Operations Command now claims that the project has been disbanded—but the report describes QUANTUM LEAP as a success.

The goal of QUANTUM LEAP, according to the report, was to conduct multiple experiments over a period of six months to explore how open source applications could be used to combat a range of crimes, including human and drug trafficking and terrorism. The first experiment, assisting with a money laundering case, involved approximately 50 government and industry participants. “Overall the experiment was successful in identifying strategies and techniques for exploiting open sources of information, particularly social media,” the report notes.

The most heavily used tool in this experiment, according to the report, was Raptor X—which included a plugin called “Social Bubble” that allowed special ops to summon “data via the Twitter API to display Twitter users, their geographic location, posted Tweets and related metadata in the Raptor X geospatial display.” Other tools created by industry partners included one that could “index the internet…as well as collect large quantities of data from the deep web,” and another that performed “real time and automated analysis of publicly available data in all media channels, especially the social media, in many languages.” All in all, during the financial crime scenario alone, the the DC special ops divisions identified more than 200 open-source tools that could be useful.

“This report suggests that a lot can be accomplished…before even taking advantage of clandestine collection capabilities,” says Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists’ Project on Government Secrecy. “And the prominent role played by industry is striking. Private firms are the ones providing the tools and tactics to the military for data mining open sources.”

Ken McGraw, a spokesman for U.S. Special Operations Command, said in a statement that “We cannot confirm the validity of any of the information listed in the After Action Report. The only information we have received so far is the program is no longer in existence and the people who worked on the program are no longer there.”

But Aftergood notes that based on the report, “the initial results were promising. They produced useful leads. So either the initial results did not pan out, or else the subsequent work was moved elsewhere.”

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QUANTUM LEAP: The US Special Ops Project to Exploit Your Twitter Account

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This Sinkhole Sucked Down 11 Barges Like They Were Rubber Duckies

by maciek123 Posted on August 7, 2013

Mother Jones

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Virlie Langlinais was at her Louisiana home on Lake Peigneur when she saw the swirling vortex. “It was like watching a science fiction movie with tug boats and rigs and everything going on,” she recalls from the comfort of her friend’s porch some three decades later, a faint breeze licking off the water below. “Like watching a little ducky in a bathtub going down the drain.” Now she and her husband, Noicy, live in fear that it might happen again.

Lake Peigneur, the site of one of the state’s most spectacular industrial disasters in 1980, kept coming up in my conversations with residents of Bayou Corne, the Cajun community in south Louisiana that has been evacuated for more than a year due to a massive, mining-induced sinkhole that now spans 24 acres—and is still growing. Last week, the state filed suit against Texas Brine and Occidental Chemical Company for damages relating to the disaster. (Read my story on Bayou Corne, which appears in the September/October issue of Mother Jones, here.) So on a sticky Sunday morning in June, I crossed over the Atchafalaya spillway to see the place for myself.

In November 1980, in the process of generating revenue for (of all things) an environmental cleanup fund, a Texaco oil rig accidentally punctured the top of a salt mine situated beneath the lake. The water above emptied into the mine, creating a whirlpool that sucked 11 barges into the caverns below, turned the lake from freshwater to saline, and caused the Delcambre Canal to flow backwards. Three days later, 9 of the 11 barges “popped up like iron corks,” the Associated Press reported; the other 2 were never found. Miraculously, all 55 workers who were inside the mine at the time of the accident managed to escape.

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This Sinkhole Sucked Down 11 Barges Like They Were Rubber Duckies

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In Which I Actually Endorse One Use of GMOs

by Edbre23ne Posted on August 7, 2013

Mother Jones

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In a July 27 feature article that set the interwebs aflame, New York Times reporter Amy Harmon told the tale of a bacterial pathogen that’s stalking the globe’s citrus trees, and a Florida orange juice company’s effort to find a solution to the problem through genetic engineering.

An invasive insect called the Asian citrus psyllids carries the bacteria, known as Candidatus Liberibacter, from tree to tree, and it causes oranges and other citrus fruits to turn green and rot. “Citrus greening,” as the condition has become known, has emerged as a pest nearly wherever citrus is grown globally. Harmon reported that an “emerging scientific consensus” holds that only genetic engineering can defeat it.

Meanwhile, Michael Pollan, a prominent food industry and agribusiness critic, tweeted this:

The “2 many industry talking pts” bit earned him an outpouring of bile from GMO industry defenders (see here and here, as well as responses to Pollans’s tweet). But after digging a bit into the citrus-greening problem, I think Pollan’s pithy construction essentially nailed it. Harmon’s story does contain some unchallenged industry talking points, yet it is also an important contribution, because citrus greening might just be one of the few areas wherein GM technology might be legitimately useful.

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In Which I Actually Endorse One Use of GMOs

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5 Terrible Acts of Voter Discrimination the Voting Rights Act Prevented—But Won’t Anymore

by marsxxzaa Posted on August 6, 2013

Mother Jones

President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 into law 48 years ago today. But this June, the conservative justices on the Supreme Court struck down a major section of the law, freeing jurisdictions with a history of racial discrimination to change their voting laws without federal permission. For decades, Section 5 of the VRA required a number of jurisdictions, mostly in the South, to seek the feds’ approval—called preclearance, in legal parlance—before modifying voting rules. The Supreme Court’s decision gutted Section 5, paving the way for new discriminatory laws.

Since the high court ruling, North Carolina has passed what critics have called the worst voter-ID law in the country, Texas pushed ahead with a voter-ID law and redistricting plan that the VRA blocked last year, and Attorney General Eric Holder has vowed to continue to challenge discriminatory voting laws despite the Supreme Court ruling. Florida’s Republican Governor Rick Scott announced this week that he would renew his efforts to purge “non-citizens” from the voter rolls, a messy, inaccurate practice that the Justice Department says violates the VRA and unfairly targets black and Hispanic voters.

In honor of the VRA’s anniversary, here are five recent and egregious examples of of minority discrimination that were blocked by Section 5, the part of the law the Supreme Court eviscerated in June:

In 2001, the all-white board of aldermen in the town of Kilmichael, Miss. (pop. 830), canceled town elections after an unprecedented number of black candidates made it onto the ballot. When the DOJ forced an election and the town finally voted, it elected its first black mayor and three black aldermen.
During a 2004 city council primary in Bayou La Batre, Ala., a Vietnamese-American candidate, Phuong Thanh Huynh, ran against white incumbent Jackie Ladnier. Ladnier and his supporters challenged about 50 Asian-American voters at the polls. Their reason? If they couldn’t speak English well, they might not be citizens. The DOJ intervened, and Huynh became the first Asian-American on the city council.
Texas is perfect example of the continued need for the VRA. The state has been repeatedly blocked from implementing both local and statewide changes that blatantly disenfranchise minority voters, from redistricting schemes to the elimination of polling places and early voting in minority districts. A report from Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund found that the between 1982 and 2006 Texas was second only to Mississippi in the number of DOJ objections under Section 5. One example: In 2007, officials in Waller County, home to the historically black Prairie View A&M University, enacted strict voter registration rules (without federal approval) that allowed them to reject voter registration applications, mostly from PVAMU students, for minor errors or omissions. After the Justice Department sued the county, a local judge told the Houston Chronicle that registrars “were maybe being a little picky with some of the things they were rejecting for.”
In 2008, Alaska submitted for federal preclearance a plan that would have required some Native Alaskan voters to travel by air or boat to cast a ballot. The state withdrew its submission after it was challenged by the DOJ.
After the 2010 census indicated that blacks had become the majority of the voting-age population in Georgia’s Augusta-Richmond, a consolidated city and county, the state legislature passed a bill that rescheduled voting from November, which had a traditionally high black voter turnout, to July, which had a low turnout overall, but especially for blacks. The change only affected Augusta-Richmond, and, not surprisingly, was rejected under Section 5.

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5 Terrible Acts of Voter Discrimination the Voting Rights Act Prevented—But Won’t Anymore

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