Tag Archives: top stories

Republicans Want to Ban Abortions After 20 Weeks. Here’s How One Group Is Fighting Back

by RupertxMcmillan Posted on June 14, 2013

Mother Jones

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

The Center for Reproductive Rights, a New York-based nonprofit, is at the center of the key legal battles over abortion and contraception.

CRR filed the lawsuit that forced the Obama administration to drop its effort to restrict access to Plan B One-Step—a brand of what is popularly known as the morning-after pill—this week, making emergency contraception available over-the-counter to everyone. The group is also leading the legal fight against bans on abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy, which a dozen states have passed in the last three years. And next week, the Supreme Court is expected to announce whether or not it will hear Oklahoma’s appeal of court decisions CRR won blocking both a mandatory sonogram law and a ban on medication abortion in that state.

CRR’s president and CEO, Nancy Northup, was in Washington this week to talk to legislators about what’s happening in the states and to promote her group’s proposal for a Bill of Reproductive Rights. Launched last year, the effort calls on federal legislators to pass protections for abortion and other reproductive health care at the federal level. The GOP-led House, however, was moving in the opposite direction this week, with the judiciary committee debating Rep. Trent Franks’ (R-Ariz.) bill to ban abortions after 20 weeks nationwide. Mother Jones spoke to Northup during her visit.

Mother Jones: The DOJ’s latest offer is that the FDA will make Plan B One-Step available over-the-counter for everyone, but the appeals court’s ruling last week said that it needed to make all types of two-pill EC available. So the administration’s response didn’t actually answer the court’s ruling. What’s next?

Northup: We’re going to back to the court saying, “Enough with the gamesmanship.” It’s safe and effective. All these pills are safe and effective for use by all ages and they should all be over the counter. And that the generic option, which is less expensive, should be available. They’re $10-20 cheaper.

Mother Jones: Another issue CRR has been involved in is the 20-week abortion bans in the states. You recently won a lawsuit against Arizona’s in court. But at this point, 12 states have passed this type of law. What’s next on that front?

Northup: There are some states with no providers who offer abortions up to 20 weeks. So we’re not challenging those, because we have no standing to challenge them. That again shows how much of a political and messaging campaign this is by people who want to restrict access. Why are they are passing 20 week bans in states where doctors don’t even provide those services? Everywhere that they have been challenged, they have been, to date, enjoined. In Georgia there’s a preliminary injunction in place. Arizona has an injunction after the 9th Circuit decision. Idaho’s decision came down that it was unconstitutional. What we’re now looking at is fighting the 12-week ban in Arkansas, and we will be filing in North Dakota against the six-week ban. We challenge them where it’s meaningful to challenge them.

Continue Reading »

See more here: 

Republicans Want to Ban Abortions After 20 Weeks. Here’s How One Group Is Fighting Back

Posted in FF, GE, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Republicans Want to Ban Abortions After 20 Weeks. Here’s How One Group Is Fighting Back

How The National Guard Is Using “Man of Steel” To Recruit You

by Judith Kimbers Posted on June 14, 2013

Mother Jones

Man of Steel (Warner Bros., 143 minutes) is a commendable, if patently flawed, summer blockbuster. The highly anticipated Superman reboot, starring Henry Cavill and Amy Adams, merges the strengths and styles of its director Zack Snyder and its producer Christopher Nolan with mixed results. But the parts of the film that are exhilarating roundly compensate for the many parts of the film that are boring as all hell (dulled passion, bland dialogue, blander interactions).

Putting all that aside, one of the most fascinating things about this movie is how blatantly littered with product placement it is—roughly $160 million in product placement and promotions went into its makers’ coffers. Man of Steel has over 100 global marketing partners, surpassing Universal’s 2012 animated flick The Lorax, which reportedly had 70 partners. So if you have forgotten recently to eat at IHOP or shop at Sears, this film will remind you to do so in big letters.

But the film also doubles as advertisement for an employer arguably more noble than IHOP: The National Guard of the United States.

Here’s behind-the-scenes footage released in May by the National Guard regarding their work with Snyder and Warner Bros.

Continue Reading »

From: 

How The National Guard Is Using “Man of Steel” To Recruit You

Posted in alo, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on How The National Guard Is Using “Man of Steel” To Recruit You

If the Economy Is Back, Why Are Wages Still So Low?

by Christinef76 Posted on June 14, 2013

Mother Jones

Five years after the Great Recession began, the US economy appears to be rebounding a bit. But two recent bits of evidence suggest that the impact of the recession on ordinary workers may have been even worse than we thought—and that the impact of future recessions might be worse too.

First off, a new paper by a trio of researchers confirms some old news: Adjusted for inflation, wages began stagnating for both men and women 10 years ago. Men’s wages have actually decreased slightly since 2000, while women’s wages, which had been rising steadily for decades, flattened out nearly to zero. But it could have been worse. Economists have long known that there’s a floor to wages because employers don’t like to reduce nominal wages. If you make $10 per hour, they won’t cut your wage to $9 per hour. They’ll just hold it at $10 and let inflation eat it away. This phenomenon is called wage stickiness.

But in “Wage Adjustment in the Great Recession,” these researchers have found that wage stickiness, which is driven mostly by social convention, not economic law, might be dying out. During the Great Recession, employers were increasingly willing to cut nominal wages. Among hourly workers, the usual number who experience wage cuts is around 15 percent. That had risen to 25 percent by 2011. Among nonhourly workers, the number rose from about 25 percent to nearly 35 percent. Increasingly, it seems, wage stickiness isn’t acting as a barrier against wage losses.

So what does this mean in the real world? Economist Jared Bernstein points us to the chart below. It shows growth in nominal wages, growth in benefits, and growth in total compensation (wages plus benefits). The news is grim. Total compensation (the gray line) grew at about 3 to 4 percent per year during most of the aughts. Since the Great Recession hit, that’s dropped to 1 to 2 percent. This is less than the inflation rate, which means that even when you account for benefits, real compensation has been declining since 2008.

Bottom line: Wage stickiness is disappearing, and with it a social convention that prevented wages from dropping too harshly even during recessions. As a result, wages are getting cut in bad times and never catching back up in good times. This is the world we live in today.

Read article here: 

If the Economy Is Back, Why Are Wages Still So Low?

Posted in FF, GE, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on If the Economy Is Back, Why Are Wages Still So Low?

Your Hormones Tell You How To Vote

by Zeniarwpzz Posted on June 14, 2013

Mother Jones

Today we’re witnessing an explosion of research on the biological factors that may underlie our political views. This new body of science is, slowly but surely, upending the old “I vote Democrat because Mom and Dad did” view of where our ideologies come from, and substituting an explanation based on genes, personalities, and emotions.

But to draw a seamless connection between a person’s genes and his or her political orientation poses a formidable scientific challenge. What’s more, there’s a crucial biological step that, thus far, has been largely missing. Genes, after all, are simply the code or template that our cells use to make proteins. So what are those proteins doing in the body to create political leanings?

Today’s political psychologists and biologists are homing in on a possible answer: Genetic differences may influence the body’s production of hormones (such as testosterone) and neurotransmitters (such as dopamine). These chemical messengers flow through the bloodstream and in between nerve cells, shaping our patterns of attention, response, emotions, and much else. Such patterns, the thinking goes, then come together to create our values and personalities; and these, along with input from our surroundings, impel our political ideologies and behaviors.

“The variation between people in hormone levels is just tremendous, and I don’t think we really appreciate that,” explains John Hibbing, a political scientist at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln who has been a pioneer in studying the biology of ideology.

This is a very new field, but already researchers have homed in on some hormones and neurotransmitters that may be involved in politics:

Cortisol: This stress hormone may also influence us politically, according to recent research by Hibbing and his collaborators. “You can see people’s cortisol levels go up dramatically when you stress them out,” Hibbing says—for instance, by requiring them to prepare to give a speech that is going to be videotaped. “We are finding there are relationships between cortisol and not voting. Those people who don’t vote are the people who tend to have fairly high cortisol levels. Because politics is pretty stressful.”

Testosterone. “There is genetic variance in how much testosterone someone has at birth, and there are certain things that can enhance or diminish that,” explains Brown University political scientist Rose McDermott, a prominent researcher on the science of ideology who authored a recent book chapter on hormones and politics. “One of those things that enhance that is muscle mass—if you build muscle mass, you enhance” your testosterone levels.

What might this have to do with politics? While direct research linking testosterone to ideology is lacking, researchers have recently published data tying muscle mass to political preferences. One study shows that rich men with large biceps are more opposed to wealth redistribution than rich men with small biceps. Another study finds that weightlifting ability correlates with support for, er, a more muscular foreign policy. Plus, get this: Men with wider faces (an indicator of testosterone levels) have been found to be more willing to outwardly express prejudicial beliefs than their thin-faced counterparts.

Oxytocin: Often dubbed the “love hormone” because of its role in forging ties between lovers (and parents and children), oxytocin may also have a role in politics. Paul Zak, a neuroeconomist at Claremont Graduate University, describes research in which a nasal spray containing oxytocin made research subjects more generous in sharing money to with one another. But before you jump to the conclusion that oxytocin simply fuels generosity, consider another study, in which the hormone seemed to promote cooperation with your in-group or tribe, but quite the opposite with an outside group or tribe that threatens you. Clearly there are strong political implications here—and not entirely cuddly ones.


The Science of Why We Don’t Believe Science


The Science of Why Comment Trolls Suck


The Surprising Brain Differences Between Democrats and Republicans


The More Republicans Know About Politics, the More They Believe Conspiracy Theories


There’s No Such Thing As the Liberal War on Science

Dopamine: This neurotransmitter shapes our need for pleasure, rewards, and novel sensations. Indeed, “sensation seeking” has been associated with particular dopamine receptors in the brain whose numbers vary, for genetic reasons, from individual to individual. A particular variant of the gene that codes for these receptors has, in turn, been associated with political liberalism; one study found that people who had the key gene variant in question were more likely to be political liberals.

None of which is to say that researchers can definitively say how any of the four chemicals discussed here—cortisol, testosterone, oxytocin, and dopamine—may affect us politically. Nor are they the only candidate hormones or neurotransmitters that may do so. “I think it would be a mistake to kind of lead people to believe that in the near future this is going to be tied up with a ribbon,” says Hibbing.

For Hibbing that’s good news, because studying political hormones could help lay to rest the concern that the new biology-of-politics research is focused on simplistic genetic explanations for why we think as we do. “It moves us a little bit away from the nature-nurture debate, because clearly, the nature of your endocrine system and how it’s released, it’s influenced by genetics, but also by your experiences in your early life,” he says. Our hormones pulse and cascade, in part, in response to what happens to us—and what has happened to us. And over time, a pattern of response can be laid down. Nobody disputes that—but what scientists are now saying is that the pattern itself may influence our political leanings.

View original – 

Your Hormones Tell You How To Vote

Posted in alo, FF, GE, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Your Hormones Tell You How To Vote

Blumenthal: “I’m Not Going to Doom Immigration Reform”

by DorothyUn Posted on June 13, 2013

Mother Jones

Lawmakers and the families of Newtown victims held a midday press conference on Capitol Hill Thursday—the day before the six-month anniversary of the Newtown shooting—part of a renewed, day-long effort to revive the Senate’s failed gun background check legislation. Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat and key advocate for the victims during the gun debate, vowed to defeat the “schoolyard bullies” of the National Rifle Association in that effort, but he was less certain about whether to inject gun control into the ongoing immigration reform debate.

Blumenthal has proposed two gun-related amendments to the immigration bill being considered in the Senate. One would deny immigrants on visa waivers from buying guns; the other would require the US attorney general to alert the Department of Homeland Security when undocumented immigrants attempt to buy guns or when non-citizens attempt mass gun purchases. When the Senate judiciary committee considered the immigration bill, Blumenthal chose not to push for a vote the gun amendments. But he has considered filing them now that the immigration bill is on the Senate floor. Doing so would trigger a major fight, with NRAish senators likely to go ballistic.

“I’m not going to doom or cripple immigration reform efforts to raise those amendments,” Blumenthal told Mother Jones after Thursday’s conference, echoing similar comments he made earlier this week. But, he added, “The issue of gun violence belongs in the debate.” In other words, Blumenthal won’t doom immigration reform—but he might.

Last week, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) called Blumenthal’s amendments “problematic” because they would sidetrack progress on immigration reform with a gun debate. Democrats, unwilling to let immigration talks implode over controversial amendments, are also eyeing the amendments with caution.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), who controls the amendment process, is in discussions with Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), the minority leader, to determine which measures will get a vote. McConnell told Mother Jones Thursday that there is “nothing new” yet on which amendments will get floor time. Blumenthal said he is still discussing his amendments with Senate leadership and other colleagues to determine if they would be receptive.

At the press conference, Democrats claimed a renewed fight over background checks is possible. Reid said that he would reintroduce a background check bill in the Senate once he secures 60 votes in order to overcome a filibuster, claiming he has made progress with a couple Republicans. “The writing is on the wall,” Reid said. “Background checks will pass the United States Senate, it’s just a matter of time.”

Link to article: 

Blumenthal: “I’m Not Going to Doom Immigration Reform”

Posted in Citizen, FF, GE, ONA, PUR, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Blumenthal: “I’m Not Going to Doom Immigration Reform”

House Passes Bill That Could Lead to Another Financial Crash—But Reformers Claim Victory

by Claudette Posted on June 13, 2013

Mother Jones

On Wednesday evening, the House passed a bipartisan bill that would allow US banks to avoid new financial regulations by operating overseas. But financial reformers are seizing on a silver lining: most Democrats voted against the bill—something one financial reformer calls a “miracle”—signaling a tougher-than-expected road ahead for similar efforts to scale back new rules on banks that crashed the economy a few years ago, and making the bill’s passage in the Democratic-controlled Senate less likely.

“In our defeatist, Eeyore sort of way, we won today,” says Bart Naylor, a financial policy advocate at the consumer group Public Citizen.

“I’m pretty psyched about the vote,” says Marcus Stanley, policy director at Americans for Financial Reform, a group of national and state organizations that advocate for Main Street-friendly financial rules. “A majority of Democrats voted against a pro-Wall Street bill… even though it was co-sponsored by Democrats… that was heavily lobbied by Wall Street and everyone had predicted would win by a landslide.”

The bill in question, the clunkily titled Swap Jurisdiction Certainty Act, was introduced earlier this year by Reps. Scott Garrett (R-N.J.), Mike Conaway (R-Tex.), John Carney (D-Del.), and David Scott (D-Ga.). It would exempt foreign arms of US banks from the new regulations on derivatives (which are financial products with values derived from from underlying variables, such as crop prices or interest rates) that are required by the Dodd-Frank Act, the big post-crisis Wall Street reform law.

When Garrett introduced the bill, he described it as an effort to stem government overreach, saying, “Our job creators—millions being crushed by overly burdensome Washington rules and regulations—deserve to be on a fair, level playing field with the international community.” But financial reformers say the legislation would just encourage banks to move risky activities to their less regulated overseas subsidiaries. And since the derivatives market is global, if, for example, JPMorgan Chase’s London office made some bad bets, the trading loss would immediately poison JPMorgan’s US-based offices, and the broader US economy could come tumbling down again.

The House financial services committee passed the bill a few weeks ago, with just 11 Democrats and no Republicans on the 61-member committee voting against it. But Wall Street reformers and their allies in Congress, including Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), rallied the troops, and changed some minds. On Wednesday, 122 out of 195 Democrats voted against the bill, while only 2 Republicans voted against. It passed 301 to 124.

This is a “huge comeback for Maxine Waters,” and financial reformers, says Jeff Connaughton, former investment banker, lobbyist, and author of The Payoff: Why Wall Street Always Wins. Past moves to weaken financial regulation have often had strong bipartisan support. But it’s now clear that “there is a large constituency in Congress who want to defend financial reform efforts,” Stanley says. The fact that most of the Democratic caucus was willing to buck Wall Street’s wishes and oppose this bill could help stiffen the spines of regulators, reformers argue. The vote “sends an important message that people are just not going to roll over for Wall Street trying to gut this stuff,” Stanley adds.

Reformers hope that Democratic disapproval of this bill could imperil other attacks on rules governing US banks’ foreign operations. Wall Street is currently lobbying regulators to weaken their rules governing how Dodd-Frank regulations would apply to US banks overseas (yes, the very rules Garrett’s bill would gut); some worry that the financial industry is also trying to roll back regulations on foreign operations through a giant free trade deal now being negotiated; and Europe, too, is calling US regulators’ proposed overseas rules too aggressive.

If US banks overseas are allowed to run wild and unregulated, they will concentrate business in less-regulated foreign markets, Naylor says. That’s bad news: Almost every major financial scandal involving derivatives has involved trades conducted through a foreign entity. Sooner or later, Naylor says, “Either a spreadsheet error or a rogue trader will bring down an investment firm. American taxpayers then face the Hobson’s Choice of… bailing out the bank…or watching the destruction.”

Read article here:

House Passes Bill That Could Lead to Another Financial Crash—But Reformers Claim Victory

Posted in Citizen, FF, GE, ONA, Pines, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on House Passes Bill That Could Lead to Another Financial Crash—But Reformers Claim Victory

How Climate Change Makes Wildfires Worse

by Michael Rinchen Posted on June 13, 2013

Mother Jones

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

Last year, Colorado suffered from a record-breaking wildfire season: More than 4000 fires resulted in six deaths, the destruction of 648 buildings, and a half a billion dollars in property damage. Still reeling, Coloradans are once again fleeing in their thousands from a string of drought-fueled fires. El Paso County Sheriff Terry Maketa said on Wednesday that the Black Forest Fire, northeast of Colorado Springs, had already destroyed between 80 and 100 homes. Three other fires, including one in neighboring Fremont County fire, also broke out this week.

So what role is climate change playing in the worsening wildfires? Here’s what we’ve learned:

Is climate change making wildfires worse?

Big wildfires like Colorado’s thrive in dry air, low humidity, and high winds; climate change is going to make those conditions more frequent over the next century. We know because it’s already happening: A University of Arizona report from 2006 found that large forest fires have occurred more often in the Western United States since the mid-1980s as spring temperatures increased, snow melted earlier, and summers got hotter, leaving more and drier fuels for fires to devour.

Thomas Tidwell, the head of the United States Forest Service, told a Senate committee on energy and natural resources recently that the fire season now lasts two months longer and destroys twice as much land as it did four decades ago. Fires now, he said, burn the same amount of land faster.

How many more fires are we talking about?

We can expect “as much as a fourfold increase in parts of the Sierra Nevada and California,” in fire activity across the rest of this century, says Matthew Hurteau, assistant professor of ecosystem science and management at Pennsylvania State University. It’s a trend likely to continue: A 2012 study in Ecosphere, the peer-reviewed journal of the Ecological Society of America, found a high level of agreement that climate change will fundamentally alter fire patterns across vast swaths of the globe by 2100: While some areas around the equator will see fewer fires, there will be striking increases in high altitude boreal fires in the Northern Hemisphere. Fire will even reach a thawing Arctic, which will be more capable of growing plants to burn.

Break it down for me. What’s driving the change?

Fires are much more likely to occur during periods of extreme heat. The draft National Climate Assessment report, prepared by more than 240 authors, says, “There is strong evidence to indicate that human influence on the climate has already roughly doubled the probability of extreme heat events like the record-breaking summer of 2011 in Texas and Oklahoma.”

Droughts are another major driver. Right now, nearly half the West remains locked in the worst drought in 60 years. The vast majority of Colorado—more than 70 percent—is experiencing “severe” or “exceptional” drought right now, setting the background to the current fires. Low levels of winter snow and spring rains in the Western states don’t bode well for this year’s fire season, either. “The forest is much more flammable,” Hurteau says. Heat sucks the moisture out of forests, making them more susceptible to ignitions from lightning. And there’ll be many more hot days to contend with: Research has shown that ratio could increase to about 20-to-1 by mid-century and 50-to-1 by 2100.

This is further complicated by the role of climate change on the Gulf jet stream, which government scientists said earlier this year failed to deliver moist air from the Gulf of Mexico northward like it normally does, denying much of the continental US of much-needed rains. Drought and subsequent wildfires may also be driven by weather systems thousands of miles away: A 2012 study also links a warming Arctic, and its affect on great global currents of air and water, with increased instances of extreme weather, including drought and heatwaves in the US.

There could be another nasty cycle at work here, too: US forests currently absorb about 16 percent of all carbon dioxide emitted by fossil fuel burning in the US. By destroying trees, wildfires not only release carbon dioxide, they potentially alter their ability to absorb carbon, in turn meddling with amount of carbon in the atmosphere that leads to global warming…and more wildfires.

81firegal/Photobucket/James West

Rising temperatures I get. But isn’t climate change meant to produce wetter conditions?

That’s true. As the air gets warmer, it can hold more water. But “we’re alternating between periods of extreme wetness and extreme dryness,” says Lee Frelich, director of the University of Minnesota Center for Forest Ecology. A warming world may produce a higher average precipitation and a higher average humidity, but fires perversely enjoy this, says Frelich: It means they can feast upon even more forest fuel once conditions snap back to dry and hot.

What about wind?

We do know with great certainty that when the wind is higher, fire behavior changes, whipping up embers through the forest canopy that can jump highways and even lakes. That’s certainly the case in the current Colorado fires, with the National Weather Service warning of gusts of up to 35 miles per hour.

But is there a link between climate change and windy weather? A Canadian study from 2009 found that projected increased fire correlated with a slight increase in wind speeds, but the exact climate connection isn’t known yet. We do know that intense storms will become more frequent due to climate change—and that increased likelihood of storms with high winds means more fallen branches. Fire ecologists call this debris “slash fuel.” Add some “ladder fuels”—understory plants that grow in the shade—and you have an easy pathway for fires to leap up into the forest canopy, where they gain momentum. Frelich says Minnesota is still seeing the effects of built-up fuel from a deadly 1999 derecho, a fierce wind storm that blows in a straight line across a landscape accompanying bands of thunderstorms and rain.

Couldn’t we prevent all these mega-fires by getting rid of the smaller ones earlier?

You might think that tackling fires before they roar out of control is the best way to prevent death and destruction. Last year, the US Forest Service briefly flirted with an “aggressive initial attack” plan. But evidence suggests the early intervention approach may actually produce bigger fires: By burning out dry undergrowth, small fires can actually help prevent large and deadlier blazes. Fighting every little fire might also put more firefighters at risk and deplete strained budgets.

Are we making it worse by building more houses in fire-prone areas?

Development doesn’t necessarily make fires worse, but it does put humans right in the path of destruction. I-News, an investigative journalism group in the Rocky Mountains, last year discovered that, “In the past two decades, a quarter million people have moved into Colorado’s red zones—the parts of the state at risk for the most dangerous wildfires… 1.1 million Coloradans live in more than half a million homes in red zones across the state.” The Forest Service’s Tidwell also told the Senate yesterday that more than 40 percent of US forests are in need of hazard reduction, but that’s a tall order in the era of sequestration.

I’ve also heard about beetle outbreaks making fires worse?

While the science is still being debated, the fear is that dry, beetle-ravaged trees combust more quickly than their non-infested counterparts. Over the last decade, higher temperatures caused by climate change have allowed the pine beetle and the spruce bark beetle to survive the winter, causing the biggest outbreak in the last 125 years, killing pine forests across extensive areas of western US and Canada. The beetles are also venturing to higher altitudes where trees are more susceptible to the infestations. Since 1996, spruce beetle has affected 1.2 million acres in Colorado and Wyoming. In Colorado, mountain pine beetle attacked more than 750,000 acres in 2011.

Jump to original:

How Climate Change Makes Wildfires Worse

Posted in FF, GE, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta, Wiley | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on How Climate Change Makes Wildfires Worse

Secret Money Is Now Swaying State Judicial Elections

by 07ld5ksl Posted on June 13, 2013

Mother Jones

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

The “banjo ad” supporting North Carolina Supreme Court Justice Paul Newby.

Sam Ervin IV must have been feeling pretty good about his chances of winning a seat on the North Carolina Supreme Court last fall.

He had name recognition—his grandfather was the legendary senator who led the Watergate investigation—and a poll released less than a week before Election Day showed him leading his opponent, incumbent Justice Paul Newby by 6 points, 38-32.

But on the Friday before the election, “Justice for All NC”—an independent political committee whose funding came mostly from out of state—dropped a TV ad depicting a scowling Ervin and asking: “Sam Ervin. Can we trust him to be a fair judge?”

Ervin lost the race by 4 points, 52 percent to 48 percent.

“As far as I know,” says Ervin, “there had never been an attack ad in a North Carolina judicial race.”

North Carolina’s supreme court election was arguably decided by groups like Justice for All—secretive nonprofits, unaffiliated with a candidate, whose money came from out of state.

Continue Reading »

Credit – 

Secret Money Is Now Swaying State Judicial Elections

Posted in FF, GE, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Secret Money Is Now Swaying State Judicial Elections

The Private Intelligence Boom, By the Numbers

by BakenKesselring341 Posted on June 13, 2013

Mother Jones

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

Edward Snowden revealed to the world the startling breadth of the National Security Agency’s surveillance efforts, but his story also highlighted another facet of today’s intelligence world: the increasingly privatized national security sector, in which a high-school dropout could bring in six figures while gaining access to state secrets. Over the last decade, firms like Booz Allen Hamilton, where Snowden worked for three months, have gobbled up nearly sixty cents out of every dollar the government spends on intelligence. A majority of top-secret security clearances now go to private contractors who provide services to the government at stepped up rates.

“I like to call Booz Allen the shadow intelligence community,” Joan Dempsey, a vice president at the firm, said in 2004, as captured in Tim Shorrock’s book, Spies for Hire. No kidding. Here’s a look at our mushrooming intelligence contracting sector:

OUR PRIVATE INTELLIGENCE APPARATUS, BY THE NUMBERS

12,000: Number of Booz Allen Hamilton employees with top-secret clearances.

483,263: Number of contractors with top-secret clearances.

1.4 million: Number of public and private employees, total, with top-secret security clearances, as of FY 2012.

7th: Where employees with top-secret clearances would rank, by population, if they were a single American city.

1: Occupations, out of 35 analyzed by the Project On Government Oversight, in which privatization yielded statistically significant savings—groundskeepers.

4.4 million: Number of private contractors serving the federal government in 1999.

7.6 million: Number of private contractors serving the federal government 2005.

1.8 million: Number of federal civil servants in 1999.

1.8 million: Number of federal civil servants in 2005.

70: Percentage of classified intelligence budget that goes to private contracts (as of 2007).

90: Percentage of intelligence contracts that are classified.

1,931: Number of private firms working on counter-terrorism, intelligence, or homeland security, according to the Washington Post.

$1.3 billion: Booz Allen Hamilton’s revenue from intelligence work during its most recent fiscal year, according to the New York Times.

23: Percentage of the firm’s overall revenue.

98: Percentage of the firm’s work that focuses on government contracts

Charts by Jaeah Lee

See more here – 

The Private Intelligence Boom, By the Numbers

Posted in alo, FF, GE, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The Private Intelligence Boom, By the Numbers

What Really Drives a Whistleblower Like Edward Snowden?

by bvds34dfsg Posted on June 13, 2013

Mother Jones

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

After Edward Snowden went public as the man who leaked the NSA’s secret surveillance system to the country via a 12 minute video interview with the Guardian, questions immediately sprang up around his motivation for whistleblowing, his personal life, and whether his background is what he claims it to be.

Why is suspicion and distrust the natural reaction? Because a lot rests on whether Snowden is telling the truth, yes, but also because most of us (perhaps nearly everyone but whistleblowers themselves) have trouble understanding exactly what motivates a whistleblower. As University of Maryland political psychology professor C. Frederick Alford notes, humans are tribal beings, and even though society considers whistleblowers brave in theory, in practice there tends to be a sense of discomfort with those who break from the tribe.

Alford has spent over a decade asking why some people reveal government secrets in the name of public good, while most don’t; asking what makes Edward Snowden Edward Snowden, and not one of the many other Booz Allen analysts who presumably saw the same information that Snowden did but kept quiet about it. Alford’s 2001 book, Whistleblowers: Broken Lives and Organizational Power, examines the psychology of whistleblowing based on the extensive time he spent with people who’ve done it—some to much fanfare, others to very little. He says he’s received a phone call or an email from a whistleblower about every month since the book came out 12 years ago, and in many cases has kept up with those who reach out for years. He spoke with Mother Jones about the Edward Snowden-Daniel Ellsberg parallel, why whistleblowers tend to have big egos, and what Snowden might face in the coming weeks and months.

Mother Jones: Based on what we know about Edward Snowden so far, does he remind you of other whistleblowers you’ve spent time with or studied over the years?

C. Frederick Alford: Daniel Ellsberg, overwhelmingly. I don’t think Bradley Manning: Bradley Manning committed a data dump. He just released tons of information and I don’t think he understood all the information he was releasing. I don’t think anyone could have understood it all.

Ellsberg, who worked at the RAND Corporation at the time and had this contract to analyze the Vietnam War, but realized at a point long before the war had ended that the government knew they were never going to win it, and realized that this information should be part of the public debate, and decided in a very self-conscious way to make this information part of the public debate. Snowden reminded me so much of Ellsberg. Not in his personality, but in the reflective way he decided to be.

If we take the Guardian at its word, and we take Snowden at his word, he released information that would not endanger active agents or reveal the location of CIA stations. So I think Ellsberg is an obvious comparison. And I think the significance of all this is going to end up being comparable to the significance of the Pentagon papers.

Continue Reading »

Original post: 

What Really Drives a Whistleblower Like Edward Snowden?

Posted in FF, GE, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on What Really Drives a Whistleblower Like Edward Snowden?