Tag Archives: violence

And Now For Something Completely Different

by Lyle03Xmgl Posted on June 26, 2015

Mother Jones

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A new1 study from Swift, Stone, and Parker has identified the top four components of a successful online fundraising appeal. Here they are:

The end of a quarterly fundraising cycle.
Clear comparisons to the opposition’s fundraising results.
Over the top doomsaying.
Cats.

Lucky for me, I’ve got all those things, so I figured I’d take a crack at it.

Check out National Review’s current fundraising drive. One reader just gave $250! This guy coughed up $100! They’ve even got a wine club to suck in new contributors. And a cruise!

These guys are killing us. Without your help, the heirs of William F. Buckley will dominate the political magazine market for years to come. And you know what that means: More articles about how the only real racism is anti-white racism. More pseudo-science about how the globe is probably cooling, not warming. More hagiographies of Marco Rubio. More whining about how white people can’t use the N-word. More blog posts about Jonah Goldberg’s dog.

Maybe you think this doesn’t matter to you? Think again. This week features “Reagan’s Supply-Side Genius,” and it doesn’t matter if you try to ignore it. Your crazy uncle is going to be regaling you about it for hours this Thanksgiving unless you figure out how to fight back.

This blog is your ticket. We need contributions to help us fight back against the avalanche of right wing babble. Right. Now.

This is our final push. My cats are down to their last bowl of kibble. The fell hordes of NR are already cackling at their imminent victory. Soon we won’t be able to afford the very pixels that make up this blog. I know you don’t want that. So please, make a generous contribution today. The first $10 will go to cat food.2 The rest will go to fighting the dark hordes. And Jonah’s dog.

OK, I’m joking around here. But we really are closing out our fiscal year next week and Mother Jones can use all the help we can get. If you can afford to pitch in, please do—so I never have to write a fundraising appeal like this and actually mean it.

Make a tax-deductible gift by credit card here.

Or via PayPal here.

1: See the Annals of Improbably Convenient Results, v. 83, p. 101.
2: Just kidding. The cats already have a bottomless supply. Your full donation will go towards MoJo’s hard-hitting journalism that gets people talking. Like our groundbreaking package, “The True Costs of Gun Violence in America,” that President Obama alluded to in the wake of Charleston.

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And Now For Something Completely Different

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Could This Bill Prevent Another "Gamergate"?

by BobbyeHeinz Posted on June 4, 2015

Mother Jones

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The United States government has a pretty poor track record when it comes to tackling violent online threats: Between 2010 and 2013, federal prosecutors pursued only 10 of some 2.5 million estimated cases of cyber-stalking, according to Rep. Katherine Clark (D-Mass.). With new legislation introduced on Wednesday, Clark aims to step up the fight against trolls and protect victims of internet threats, particularly women. The Prioritizing Online Threats Enforcement Act would beef up the Department of Justice’s capacity to enforce laws against online harassment and fund more investigations of cyber-crimes.

As my colleague Tim Murphy has reported, Clark first started looking for ways to curb internet harassment after learning that her district was home to Brianna Wu, a video game developer targeted with a flood of rape and death threats from “Gamergate” trolls. Since September, Wu has reportedly received 105 death threats after tweeting her opposition to Gamergate, an online movement that led to the harassment of women involved with video gaming. “All I am asking is for law enforcement to go and get a case together and prosecute,” Wu told Wicked Local. “Because law enforcement has basically treated online threats as if they don’t matter, they have unintentionally created this climate.”

“It’s not okay to tell women to change their behavior, withhold their opinions, and stay off the internet altogether, just to avoid severe threats,” Clark told members of Congress on Wednesday. “By not taking these cases seriously, we send a clear message that when women express opinions online, they are asking for it.”

Women are significantly more likely to face internet bullying than men. In one study by researchers from the University of Maryland, fake online accounts with feminine usernames faced 27 times more sexually explicit or threatening messages in a chat room than accounts with masculine usernames did. Over the past several months, women across the country, from actress Ashley Judd to feminist commentator Anita Sarkeesian, have raised the alarm about this type of abuse.

The federal government has the authority to prosecute individuals who send violent threats over the internet thanks to the Violence Against Women Act. But just one day before Clark’s appeal to Congress, the Supreme Court on Monday may have made it more difficult for prosecutors to go after trolls. In a 7-2 decision, the justices reversed the earlier conviction of a man in Pennsylvania who had used intensely violent language against his estranged wife, including saying he wanted to see her “head on a stick,” despite the fact that she testified that his postings made her feel “extremely afraid for her life.”

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Could This Bill Prevent Another "Gamergate"?

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SCOTUS Delivers Good News for Abusive Trolls

by ZenaidaNeblett Posted on June 1, 2015

Mother Jones

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Trolls and libertarians rejoice. In a highly watched case that explored the tough question of what distinguishes protected free speech from illegal threats, the Supreme Court on Monday made it harder for the government to prosecute individuals who are making threatening statements toward others.

The court voided the conviction of Anthony Elonis, who was found guilty of issuing unlawful threats over Facebook with rants that referred to killing his estranged wife. Elonis argued that his posts, which were presented as rap lyrics, were a form of expression protected by the First Amendment. He was convicted in federal district court in Pennsylvania under the “reasonable person” standard: Would a reasonable person consider Elonis’ posts threatening?

In a 7-2 decision, Chief Justice John Roberts ruled that the reasonable person test wasn’t sufficient for a criminal conviction like this one. Avoiding touchy First Amendment questions, the court determined that Elonis’ posts should have been evaluated under a tougher standard that takes his mental state into account. That is, did he intend to follow through on his threats or did he know that his words would be seen as a threat?

“Elonis’s conviction was premised solely on how his posts would be viewed by a reasonable person, a standard…inconsistent with the conventional criminal conduct requirement of ‘awareness of some wrongdoing,'” Roberts wrote. He noted that a criminal conviction could only be supported “if the defendant transmits a communication for the purpose of issuing a threat or with knowledge that the communication will be viewed as a threat.”

The case presented a difficult First Amendment question pitting freedom of expression against the freedom to not be threatened with violence. But the justices ducked the matter. The ruling was predicated on a statutory interpretation.

Elonis was sentenced to 44 months in prison for threatening to harm and even kill his estranged wife in Facebook posts—threats that left his wife afraid for her safety. Elonis fought the charges, arguing that he could not be imprisoned because he never intended to hurt his wife. A criminal conviction for someone who had no intent to harm, he contended, violated the Constitution’s guarantee of freedom of speech. But the trial court disagreed and instructed the jury to use the reasonable-person standard.

The federal government argued that the reasonable person test is the best way to determine whether a statement is a threat. Its lawyers maintained that even if there is no intent to harm, such threats can severely disrupt the lives of those people targeted.

Civil liberties groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union, supported Elonis, fearing an encroachment on free-speech rights. Advocates for victims of domestic violence, though, argued that victims of domestic abuse “suffer the devastating psychological and economic effects of threats of violence, which their abusers deliver more and more often via social media,” according to an amicus brief. This brief, filed by the National Network to End Domestic Violence and a number of state-based anti-domestic-violence groups, argued that threats are often a precursor to actual violence.

The Elonis case was argued before the court in early December and the justices took a full six months to decide the case. Roberts was joined by Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, and the court’s liberal wing. Justice Samuel Alito joined in part and dissented in part. Justice Clarence Thomas dissented.

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SCOTUS Delivers Good News for Abusive Trolls

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How the Aurora Mass Shooting Cost More Than $100 Million

by mlodyseo7 Posted on April 29, 2015

Mother Jones

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What Does Gun Violence Really Cost?


16 Charts That Show the Shocking Cost of Gun Violence in America


This Is What It’s Like to Survive a Gunshot


Methodology: the Data Behind Our Investigation


Watch: The Total Cost of Gun Violenceâ&#128;&#148;in 90 Seconds

“We focus on the proceedings. We focus on the death penalty. We focus on the perpetrator. But we don’t focus on the people affected.”

That was how Sandy Phillips, whose daughter Jessica Ghawi was among the 12 people murdered in a movie theater in July 2012, described the American public’s perception as the trial of mass shooter James Holmes got underway on Monday in Aurora, Colorado. It’s a fair point given the inordinate attention that such killers crave, and tend to get, from the media. Yet as Phillips also noted, “that ripple effect of how many people are affected by one act by one person, one animal, is incredibly large.”

She’s right—not just in terms of the trauma and suffering borne by the victims (an additional 58 wounded and 12 others injured in the chaos), their families, and their communities, but also in terms of the literal cost. The price tag for what was one of the worst mass murders in US history is in fact stunningly high: well over $100 million, according to our groundbreaking investigation into the costs of gun violence published earlier this month.

For a quick explanation of the data behind the large sums our country pays for this problem, watch the following 90-second video, with more details on the Aurora tally continuing just below:

The economic impact of Aurora: For starters, long before the attorneys gave opening statements this week, legal proceedings for Holmes had already topped $5.5 million back in February, including expenses related to the unusually large pool of 9,000 prospective jurors called for the case. Add to that the total costs for each of the 12 victims killed: At an average of about $6 million each, that’s another $72 million. For the 58 who survived gunshots and were hospitalized, with an average total cost for each working out to about $583,000, add another $33 million. (Costs for some of the gunshot survivors may have varied widely, of course.) And these figures don’t even begin to account for what the city of Aurora, the state of Colorado, and the federal government have since spent on security and prevention related to the attack.

Indeed, a mass shooting like the one in Aurora doesn’t just have an outsize psychological impact but also a financial one. And these days, fiscal conservatives may want to note, we’re paying that price more often.

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How the Aurora Mass Shooting Cost More Than $100 Million

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These Baltimore Teens Aren’t Waiting Around for Someone Else to Fix Their City

by AntoineCarper Posted on April 28, 2015

Mother Jones

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Since protests sprang up across Baltimore in the wake of Freddie Gray’s death last week and turned increasingly violent on Monday night, cleanup crews and residents—including kids—have been working to repair the city. But long before the protests for Gray there were teens like Diamond Sampson, a Baltimore high school student who three years ago started working with a group of peers on the Inner Harbor Project, an effort to defuse tension between Baltimore’s youth and its police.

Sampson says she’s felt disheartened by the violence, but she sympathizes with the anger and frustration. Part of why the peaceful protests first spiraled out of control on Saturday, she says, is that some people walking by them shouted, “Black lives didn’t matter”—a detail that she feels the media overlooked.

Sampson was one of the first teens to be recruited by Inner Harbor Project founder Celia Neustadt, who grew up in Baltimore and was one of four white students in her own high school class. After going on to graduate from Pomona College, Neustadt returned to the city to start the initiative, with Sampson as her first recruit. Since then, dozens of Baltimore teens have joined and helped conduct “trainings” for the Baltimore Police Department’s Inner Harbor unit. They’ve often walked the harbor—a tourism destination and popular hangout for inner-city teens—as self-declared “peace ambassadors,” wearing matching blue T-shirts and watching out for trouble: If a cop and a teen start arguing, they move in to help mediate. The group now has formal partnerships with local businesses and the police.

The current unrest pains Neustadt: “I know kids who saw the protests as an opportunity to, as my kids say, ‘act a fool.’ They thought this was an opportunity to take out anger on the city without consequences. Our work is front and center right now. There are so many young people in this city with nothing to lose.”

In the days to come, the Inner Harbor Project’s members are planning to use their social networks to try to stop agitators and recruit future youth ambassadors. In conversations with friends, Sampson says there’s been talk about human rights for black teens and even a new civil rights movement. Whether or not that takes shape, she adds, “there’s something going on, greater than our generation can realize.”

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These Baltimore Teens Aren’t Waiting Around for Someone Else to Fix Their City

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The True Cost of Gun Violence: Our Methodology

by JoannaBonner Posted on April 15, 2015

Mother Jones

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Direct costs

Police
This is an estimate of the money that police departments spend to respond to and investigate gun-related crimes. It includes police salaries, benefits, and equipment, as well as overhead costs to the police department. Miller based this calculation on the amount of time police spent on initial response and follow-up (based on this sample survey) and the amount of money police departments spend on average per officer (including fringe benefits, equipment, supervision, etc.) using data from the 2006 Census of Governments.


The True Cost of Gun Violence in America


16 Charts That Show the Shocking Cost of Gun Violence in America


This Is What It’s Really Like to Survive a Gunshot


The True Cost of Gun Violence: Our Methodology

Emergency transport
This is the cost of the labor and equipment involved in transporting victims of gun violence to the hospital. Miller calculated the likelihood that each type of victim (fatal or injured) would reach the hospital via emergency transport using data from a national sample of emergency room visits. The cost of transport was based on a GAO survey from 2010, which was then updated to 2012 dollars. The median cost of emergency transport for an individual injury or fatality was $452.

Medical
This is the cost of treating victims of gun violence in the hospital and post-discharge. It includes the hospital service and insurance claims processing fees paid by Medicare, Medicaid, private insurance, and the victims themselves. Hospital costs are based on a database of 40 to 50 million healthcare claims from the Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project, insurance costs come from data collected by the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and post-discharge costs are based on medical expense data collected by the Department of Health and Human Services and the National Council on Compensation Insurance.

Mental health
This refers to the cost of counseling for victims of gun violence and their families. It includes the services paid by Medicare, Medicaid, private insurance, and the victims themselves. The number of people seeking mental health services per gun violence incident (death or injury) and the cost for these services are based on Ted Miller and Mark Cohen’s 1998 survey of 168 mental health counselors—including psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, and pastoral counselors—which found that for every murder victim, 1.5 to 2.4 people sought mental health treatment.

Legal services and adjudication
This is the cost of legal and adjudication services for perpetrators of homicide and aggravated assault, including salary of the judges and public defenders, and other overhead costs of operating a courthouse. These costs are based on a 2010 study by Kathryn McCollister et al, which examined Bureau of Justice Statistics and FBI data to calculate local, state, and federal government expenditures on legal services for homicides and aggravated assaults. Miller’s estimate assumes that legal and adjudication costs do not apply to unintentional deaths or injuries, legal interventions, or suicides.

Incarceration
This is the estimated amount of money needed to incarcerate perpetrators (convicted in 2012) of homicides or aggravated assaults over the course of their sentences. These estimates are based on a 2010 study by Kathryn McCollister et al, which examined Bureau of Justice Statistics and FBI data to calculate local, state, and federal government expenditures on incarceration of perpetrators of firearm homicides and assaults. Here again Miller assumes that incarceration costs do not apply to unintentional deaths or injuries, legal interventions, or suicides.

Indirect costs

Work costs for victims and perpetrators
This refers to the potential wages and household productivity that were lost due to a death or injury. Miller estimated lost wages of victims and imprisoned perpetrators using expected earnings data from the Current Population Survey (US Census), data on the duration of temporary disabilities from the Annual Survey on Workplace Injuries (Bureau of Labor Statistics), and workers compensation data on the probability of permanent disabilities by the type of injury. Lost household productivity is estimated using a 2009 study based on the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ American Time Use Survey. In both estimates, Miller assumes that victims and perpetrators make the same amount of money and are as productive as the typical American in their gender and age group.

Costs to the employer
This refers to the costs other than benefits that an employer incurs when a worker leaves employment permanently or temporarily because of injury. It captures costs of workplace disruption, rehiring and retraining, overtime to meet production schedules, and investigation and reporting of on-the-job incidents. This number is based on estimates of employer costs by injury severity used by both the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and the Consumer Product Safety Commission.

Losses in quality of life
This is an estimate of the financial value of the pain, suffering, and fear that accompany a death or injury. Miller concludes that a life is worth about $6.2 million, which is a violence-specific average based on the amounts awarded by juries in wrongful injury and death cases. It includes lost wages and household production.

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The True Cost of Gun Violence: Our Methodology

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Watch: How One Woman Survived a Shooting Against All Odds

by Malorie98X Posted on April 15, 2015

Mother Jones

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What does gun violence in America really cost? Read our full special investigation here.

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Watch: How One Woman Survived a Shooting Against All Odds

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Run The Jewels’ Surprising New Video Tackles Police Brutality

by AdelaidRolston Posted on April 3, 2015

Mother Jones

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Three men silently stalk an abandoned neighborhood. A train whistle sounds in the distance and suddenly, we see another man. He is panting, exhausted, dirty. Sun shines through open windows as he tries to catch his breath. Slowly, he looks up, and appears to have an epiphany. Music starts to play as the story starts to unfold: A white cop and a black man are caught in an equally matched, endless struggle against one another.

The latest music video from the hip-hop duo Run the Jewels presents a new perspective on racially-based police brutality. “Close Your Eyes (And Count To Fuck),” features former Rage Against The Machine singer Zack De La Rocha, who joins Run The Jewels members El-P and Killer Mike in the beginning of the video. The song pairs an infectious beat with catchy, politically charged rhymes.

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Run The Jewels’ Surprising New Video Tackles Police Brutality

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The People Who Pick Your Organic Strawberries Have Had It With Rat-Infested Camps

by JoannWreford Posted on March 25, 2015

Mother Jones

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When most of us think of Mexican food, we visualize tacos, burritos, and chiles rellenos. But we should probably add cucumbers, squash, melons, and berries to the list—more or less the whole supermarket produce aisle, in fact. The United States imports more than a quarter of the fresh fruit and nearly a third of the vegetables we consume. And a huge portion of that foreign-grown bounty—69 percent of vegetables and 37 percent of fruit—comes from our neighbor to the south.

Not surprisingly, as I’ve shown before, labor conditions on Mexico’s large export-oriented farms tend to be dismal: subpar housing, inadequate sanitation, poverty wages, and often, labor arrangements that approach slavery. But this week, workers in Baja California, a major ag-producing state just south of California, are standing up. Here’s the Los Angeles Times: “Thousands of laborers in the San Quintín Valley 200 miles south of San Diego went on strike Tuesday, leaving the fields and greenhouses full of produce that is now on the verge of rotting.”

In addition to the work stoppage, striking workers shut down 55 miles of the Trans-Peninsular Highway, a key thoroughfare for moving goods from Baja California to points north, the Mexico City newspaper La Jornada (in Spanish) reported after the strike started on March 17.

The blockade has been lifted, at least temporarily. But the “road remains hard to traverse as rogue groups stop and, at times, attack truck drivers,” the LA Times reports. And the strike itself continues. The uprising is starting to affect US supply chains. An executive for the organic-produce titan Del Cabo Produce, which grows vegetables south of the San Quintín Valley but needs to traverse it to reach its US customers, told the Times that the clash is “creating a lot of logistical problems…We’re having to cut orders.” And “Costco reported that organic strawberries are in short supply because about 80% of the production this time of year comes from Baja California,” the Times added. The US trade publication Produce News downplayed the strike’s impact, calling it “minor.”

Meanwhile, the strike’s organizers plan to launch a campaign to get US consumers to boycott products grown in the region, mainly tomatoes, cucumbers, and strawberries, inspired by the successful ’70s-era actions of the California-based United Farm Workers, headed by Cesar Chavez, La Jornada reported Tuesday. And current UFW president Arturo Rodriguez has issued a statement of solidarity with the San Quintín strikers.

Such cross-border organizing is critical, because the people who work on Mexico’s export-focused farms tend to be from the same places as the people who work on the vast California and Florida operations that supply the bulk of our domestically grown produce: the largely indigenous states of southern Mexico. And the final market for the crops they tend and harvest is also the same: US supermarkets and restaurants.

In a stunning four-part series last year, LA Times reporter Richard Marosi documented the harsh conditions that prevail on the Mexican farms that churn out our food. He found:

Many farm laborers are essentially trapped for months at a time in rat-infested camps, often without beds and sometimes without functioning toilets or a reliable water supply.
Some camp bosses illegally withhold wages to prevent workers from leaving during peak harvest periods.
Laborers often go deep in debt paying inflated prices for necessities at company stores. Some are reduced to scavenging for food when their credit is cut off. It’s common for laborers to head home penniless at the end of a harvest.
Those who seek to escape their debts and miserable living conditions have to contend with guards, barbed-wire fences, and sometimes threats of violence from camp supervisors.
Major US companies have done little to enforce social responsibility guidelines that call for basic worker protections such as clean housing and fair pay practices.

As for their counterparts to the north, migrant-reliant US farms tend to treat workers harshly as well, as the excellent 2014 documentary Food Chains demonstrates. The trailer, below, is a good crash course on what it’s like to be at the bottom of the US food system. In honor of National Farm Worker Awareness Week, the producers are making it available for $0.99 on iTunes. And here‘s an interview with the film’s director, Sanjay Rawal, by Mother Jones‘ Maddie Oatman.

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The People Who Pick Your Organic Strawberries Have Had It With Rat-Infested Camps

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This Democratic Congresswoman Wants the FBI to Take on Gamergate

by BiancaEmmer Posted on March 12, 2015

Mother Jones

Congress’ next target: the often-vitriolic online movement known as Gamergate. On Tuesday Rep. Katherine Clark (D-Mass.), backed by the National Organization for Women and the Human Rights Campaign, asked her House colleagues to join her in demanding tighter enforcement of cyber-stalking and online harassment laws.

The Violence Against Women Act gives the federal government the authority to prosecute individuals who send violent threats over the internet, but actual convictions are hard to come by—the Department of Justice has prosecuted just 10 people for cyberstalking between 2010 and 2013. (In a long reported piece for Pacific Standard last year, the writer Amanda Hess detailed the near-impossibility of getting any level of law enforcement to investigate online threats.) “If we step up prosecuting these cases and enforce the federal laws that are already on the books, cyber-stalking—and the severity and quantity of threats that are made— we hope will be reduced,” Clark tells Mother Jones.

The Massachusetts Democrat, who replaced now-Sen. Ed Markey in a 2013 special election, began looking for ways to take on internet harassment after discovering last fall that Brianna Wu, a video game developer who has become a target of so-called “GamerGate” trolls, lived in her district. Wu has received more than three dozen death threats over the last five months—including one, posted to YouTube, in which a knife-wielding man bragged about getting in a car crash on the way to Wu’s house to kill her. Clark got in touch with Wu, and then with the FBI. (Wu had committed the grave sin of suggesting that tech could be a more hospitable place for women.)

In many cases, Clark found that social media networks and private sites were ambivalent about addressing the threats delivered via their platforms too. “When Brianna Wu had to pull out of a gaming conference called PAX East just last month, the folks who were running the site for that said that a bomb threat did not violate their user policy,” Clark says. Her proposal wouldn’t have any effect on how private companies police their users, although she hopes companies—and trolls— will take harassment more seriously once law enforcement does. “What we’re hoping to do is change the culture around accepting these threats of death, of dismemberment, of great physical harm, as mere hoaxes, and really start to think of them in the violence they’re perpetrating and the economic harm that they’re doing,” she adds.

As Clark sees it, cracking down on harassment isn’t just about public safety and peace-of-mind—it’s about dollars and cents. “We are hearing from women that they are losing wages, they are losing opportunities, speaking engagements, they are incurring legal fees, and having to hire online protective services at their own cost,” she says. “Now that so much of our commerce is done online and a presence on social media is required for many professions, we really see this as an economic toll for women as well as a personal one.”

Right on cue, Clark herself became a magnet for abuse after publishing an op-ed on the subject on Wednesday. (Angry Twitter users told the congresswoman to drink bleach and expressed their desire to attack her, among other things.) But as a member of Congress, she knows she can get an audience with law enforcement if she ever feels truly threatened. “We’re really hoping that that is going to be available for anybody who is using the internet,” she says.

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This Democratic Congresswoman Wants the FBI to Take on Gamergate

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