Libros
Mother Jones
Elizabeth Warren is off to a running start in her new leadership role with the Senate Democratic caucus. She called out Walmart for its terrible labor practices. She wrote an op-ed this week warning the president against appointing Wall Street insiders to the Federal Reserve. And Tuesday morning, she called on financial institutions to prove that they can protect customer data from cybercriminals.
Over the past year, cyber attackers have stolen roughly 500 million records from financial institutions, according to federal law enforcement officials. In a joint letter also signed by Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), Warren asked 16 firms—including Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley—for detailed information about cyber attacks they experienced over the past year and how they plan to prevent future breaches.
“The increasing number of cyberattacks and data breaches is unprecedented and poses a clear and present danger to our nation’s economic security,” the lawmakers wrote in the letter. “Each successive cyberattack and data breach not only results in hefty costs and liabilities for businesses, but exposes consumers to identity theft and other fraud, as well as a host of other cyber-crimes.”
Warren and Cummings requested the firms provide information on the number of customers that may have been affected by breaches, data security measures the companies have taken in response, the value of the fraudulent transactions connected with the cyber attacks, and who is suspected to have carried them out. The letters also request that IT security officers at each firm brief the lawmakers on how they are protecting their data from cybervillains.
The lawmakers hope to use the information the firms provide to inform new federal cybersecurity legislation. Current cybersecurity law is unclear about when companies are required to notify the government about a data hack. Warren has previously called on Congress to give the Federal Trade Commission more power to regulate data breaches.
The American financial sector is one of the most targeted in the world, according to the FBI and Secret Service officials. The hackers who stole data from JPMorgan Chase earlier this year—compromising information from 76 million households—also targeted 13 other financial institutions, Bloomberg reported last month.
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Elizabeth Warren to Banks: Prove You Can Protect Customer Data From Hackers
Mother Jones
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Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton isn’t a fan of the Supreme Court’s recent penchant for eroding campaign finance law. At an event in Portland, Oregon, earlier this week Clinton joked that, if the conservative majority on the Supreme Court continues on its current path, all elections would soon be decided by a handful of wealthy benefactors.
“With the rate the Supreme Court is going, there will only be three or four people in the whole country that have to finance our entire political system by the time they are done,” she said, according to CNN, after being asked about the public perception of Congress. “Understand,” she added, “that you can be a liberal, you can be a conservative, but you want to vote for someone who understands, respects, and cherishes the Democratic process.”
Clinton’s critique of the Supreme Court was a clear reference to the justices’ ruling last week on McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission. In that 5-4 decision, the court’s conservative justices tossed out the rules on aggregate limits—a total cap on the amount a donor can contribute to federal campaigns or political committees during a two-year window. While there are still limitations on donations to individual candidates, the big-time spenders are now free to cast a wide net and send money to as many candidates as they please. That decision builds off Citizens United, the marquee campaign-finance case of Chief Justice John Roberts’ tenure, that began when an outside group created an anti-Clinton film during the 2008 campaign.
She may dislike the new rules, but Clinton has certainly benefited from the loosened campaign finance regulations that allow wealthy donors to inject ever more money into the political system. Clinton is, at least publicly, still weighing whether to run for president. “I am thinking about it,” Clinton said during a talk in San Francisco on Tuesday, “but I am going to continue to think about it for a while.” While Clinton waits to make up her mind, a vast infrastructure of super PACs has sprung up to prepare the way for her likely run. There’s Ready for Hillary, a group that’s hauled in just shy of $6 million over the past year to build a network of on-the-ground activists when Clinton launches her campaign. Priorities USA, a super PAC that originated to boost President Obama’s reelection, is preparing to blitzing the airwaves with pro-Clinton ads. That group is poised to be the outlet for Democratic donors who want to channel millions to Clinton’s cause beyond the normal restrictions. And Correct the Record, a branch of the super PAC American Bridge, is drawing funds from major donors like Steve Bing and Susie Tompkins Buell to run an opposition research and rapid response operation.
This vast shadow campaign has corralled the biggest names in Democratic fundraising into Clinton’s corner far in advance of the next presidential election. As my colleague Andy Kroll described it, Democratic politics is stuck in the Hillary Clinton Cash Freeze. Other Democrats who might want to try their hand at running for president have been shut out before they can even contemplate 2016. Hillary might not be a fan of the Supreme Court’s decisions to eviscerate campaign finance rules, but her supporters have no qualms with embracing the new wild west of money-in-politics to pave the way for her next presidential run.
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Hillary Clinton Blasts the Supreme Court for Ruining Campaign Finance
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On Thursday, the House finally passed the farm bill, which provides funding for agriculture and nutrition programs—but only after Republicans stripped out all provisions concerning the $80 billion-a-year food stamp program.
The massive, five-year farm bill failed to pass the House in late June because conservative Republicans thought that the bill’s envisioned cuts to the food stamp program ($21 billion over 10 years) wasn’t enough, and Democrats thought it was far too much. The GOP devised a plan to pick up more votes by dividing the legislation, aiming to give the farm provisions a better chance of passage by splitting them from the controversial food stamp provisions. Meanwhile, GOP leaders hoped to garner more conservative votes for the nutrition bill by turning it into a vehicle to make further cuts to food stamps.
So far, their plan is working. The farm bill sans food stamps passed on a party-line vote of 216 to 208, with only 12 Republicans voting against. (Next, Republicans will draft up a separate food stamp bill.)
The President of New York City’s Food Bank, Margarette Purvis, slammed the split bill as an attack on the needy, saying it would leave “the fates of 47 million Americans in limbo. This is a sad statement of the priorities of the leadership of this House of Representatives,” she continued. “We need Congress to pass a farm bill that reduces hunger, not one that puts billions of meals at risk for the most vulnerable among us—especially when need remains so high.”
Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) echoed this Thursday. “A vote for this bill is a vote to end nutrition in America,” she said.
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More Mother Jones coverage of gay rights and marriage equality
Supreme Court Rules on DOMA and Prop 8: A Great Day to Be Gay
Here Are the 7 Worst Things Antonin Scalia Has Said or Written About Homosexuality
Which Politicians Supported Gay Marriage and When?
What the Gay-Marriage Ruling Means for Immigration Reform
VIDEO: The 5 Most Comically Bad Anti-Gay Ads, Ever
Mac McClelland on Gay Rights in Uganda
Gay by Choice? The Science of Sexual Identity
In a 5-4 ruling Wednesday, the Supreme Court struck down the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), the 1996 law preventing the federal government from recognizing same-sex marriage. The majority opinion, written by Justice Anthony Kennedy, said that the law was tantamount to the “deprivation of the equal liberty of persons that is protected by the Fifth Amendment.”
There is a striking aspect to Kennedy’s surprisingly passionate opinion: He focuses directly on the children of same-sex couples. DOMA, he writes, “humiliates tens of thousands of children now being raised by same-sex couples. The law in question makes it even more difficult for the children to understand the integrity and closeness of their own family and its concord with other families in their community and in their daily lives.”
In a sense, this turns on its head one of the main bogeymen used by activists opposed to marriage equality: that gay marriage will somehow harm children and disrupt families. To the contrary, Kennedy argues that striking down DOMA will give dignity to same-sex families and help end the suffering of children caused by the current the law.
Just ahead of the decision, the American Spectator’s John Guardiano toed the conservative line, arguing in a post that same-sex marriage is “part and parcel of an overaching effort to undermine and deprecate traditional marriage and the traditional family.” (He noted the rise in single-parent homes and the problems caused by fatherlessness, and yet also admitted that rising divorce rates preceded any whiff of a marriage equality movement.)
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Justice Kennedy: DOMA Had to Go Because It "Humiliates Tens of Thousands of Children"
Mother Jones
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Yesterday I wrote a post about a study showing that even when unemployment was high, native-born Americans weren’t willing to take jobs picking crops. “Most Americans just aren’t willing to do backbreaking agricultural labor for a bit above minimum wage,” I said, “and if the wage rate were much higher the farms would no longer be competitive.”
I got some pushback on this this. First, from reader BE:
Competitive against whom? If immigrant labor weren’t available and Americans weren’t willing to work that hard for that wage, the competitive landscape would change. Some crops might become less competitive relative to other crops and food prices might rise a bit (not much, though: according to the USDA, all farm and agribusiness wages account for less than 3% of food costs), but since farms would be competing against other farms, the change wouldn’t make farms uncompetitive against each other.
That’s a good point, though that 3 percent figure is an average that includes processed food. It’s higher for fresh food, and higher for some crops than for others. That said, raising the wage of field workers wouldn’t raise overall food prices very much. Food from other countries would become more competitive than it is now, but maybe not by very much.
Next up is reader DS, who makes the same point plus another one:
Farm laborers in Australia make much more than American ones. And yet they still have a functional agricultural sector. It turns out that allowing companies to import an unlimited number of foreign workers desperate to work at a wage of epsilon will create shitty working conditions and low wages!
Labor costs as a percentage of consumer cost of most fruits and veggies are pretty tiny. Even for fruits like raspberries, they’re on the order of 15-20%, and for most crops they’re much lower. You could double or triple labor prices and, even if all the costs are passed off to consumers and there are no productivity boosts, there still wouldn’t be particularly large increases in produce prices.
This is not a subject that I’ve spent a lot of time on, so I’m mostly passing this along without comment.
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The aftermath of the San Bruno explosion, photographed 10 days after a pipeline ruptured and ignited.
It looks like Pacific Gas & Electric’s shareholders are going to have to spend $2.25 billion on safety improvements because of a 2010 natural-gas pipeline explosion in the San Francisco exurb of San Bruno.
That was the record-breaking penalty proposed this week by staff of the California Public Utilities Commission. The agency’s five commissioners will have the final say on the proposal, and PG&E will have an opportunity to try to barter down that price tag. The company says it has already spent more than $1 billion on improvements since the fatal accident.
The penalty is being characterized by the agency and media reports as a “fine,” but while fines are typically paid into general government coffers, this $2.25 billion would be invested fully in improving the safety of PG&E’s infrastructure. And the money would need to come out of shareholder profits; it couldn’t be gouged from customers by hiking their bills.
The explosion on Sept. 9, 2010, killed eight people in San Bruno’s Crestmoor neighborhood, destroyed 38 homes, and ignited a fireball that burned for nearly an hour. The investigations that followed laid bare decades of contemptible disregard for safety by PG&E, which enjoys a near monopoly on electricity and residential natural-gas sales in much of Northern California. The gas pipeline had been fabricated in 1956 using substandard materials, and it had not been properly inspected or maintained in the decades since. It tore open along a poorly welded seam and exploded beneath homes in the early evening after pressure levels spiked following a control room power outage.
From a CPUC press release [PDF]:
The Safety and Enforcement Division says that the death toll, physical injuries, and extensive damage to homes by the pipeline blast is unsurpassed in its severity and PG&E’s [record of] failures is long and reprehensible.
“There is no amount of money that will bring back the eight people who tragically lost their lives in the pipeline blast or heal the lasting wounds to the people of San Bruno. All we can do is make sure such a tragedy does not happen again. I listened to legislators and the public and determined that every single dollar available from PG&E should go straight to efforts that will ensure safety,” said [CPUC Safety and Enforcement Division Director Jack] Hagan. “The recommendation is what the Safety and Enforcement Division believes is the maximum financial penalty that can be imposed on PG&E shareholders without compromising safety. This is a penalty far greater than the CPUC, or any other state regulatory body, has ever assessed.”
San Bruno had called on the CPUC to impose a steep fine and channel much of it to mandated safety improvements. From ABC7:
“They blew up our city. Eight people were killed, a whole neighborhood destroyed,” San Bruno Mayor Jim Ruane said. The city’s lawyer says the dollar amount was arrived at by calculating safety violations dating back to when the faulty pipe was installed in 1956. Every day the utility was in violation counts.
“The potential penalties in this case, if you took all of the violations over the half century, we’re talking about, it’s roughly on the order of several hundred billion dollars,” lawyer Steven Meyers said. “We’re only asking for $2.25 billion.”
“The company has already paid a very heavy price and I think numbers like you mentioned are just unrealistic,” [PG&E CEO Tony Earley] said Monday. In a rare chat with local media, the PG&E Chairman and CEO said shareholders have already paid more than $1.5 billion in gas safety improvements and if the penalties are as high as San Bruno wants, it will be bad for business and bad for ongoing safety investments.
“I don’t have that money sitting in the bank. I’ve got to go out and raise that money from shareholders who’re willing to invest in the company and future,” he said. “I don’t write them a letter and say, ‘Please shareholders, send me $1,000 each.’”
Oh, heavens no, Tony. Why should shareholders be on the hook for a company’s deadly profiteering?
John Upton is a science aficionado and green news junkie who
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Manhunt: The Search for Bin Laden
HBO Documentary Films
100 minutes
Forget Zero Dark Thirty. Instead, check out director Greg Barker’s intimate look at the dogged nerds and tough-guy CIA officials who spent decades on Osama bin Laden‘s trail. This doc (based on Peter Bergen’s 2012 book) has the pulse of a Michael Mann thriller, tracing the hunt from long before Al Qaeda became a household name. It offers a fascinating glimpse at “the Sisterhood,” a crew of female CIA analysts who were “borderline obsessed” with nailing bin Laden in the 1990s. Details of their vital desk work are contrasted with interviews with former CIA higher-up (and torture advocate) Marty Martin, who refers to his “gangsta”-like role harvesting intel overseas.
Manhunt premieres Wednesday, May 1 (the two-year anniversary of the mission that killed bin Laden) at 8:00 p.m. ET/PT. Check out the trailer:
Click here for more movie and TV features from Mother Jones.
This review originally appeared in the May/June issue of Mother Jones.
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HBO’s "Manhunt: The Search for Bin Laden": Way Cooler Than "Zero Dark Thirty"
Mother Jones
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THE THING THAT STRUCK ME when I first met my cousin Houston was his size. He wasn’t much taller than me, if at all, and was slight of frame. On the other side of the visitors’ glass, he looked surprisingly small, young for his 22 years. The much more remarkable thing about him turned out to be his vocabulary, vast and lovely, lyrical almost—until it came to an agitated or distracted halt. In any case, all things considered, he seemed altogether extremely unlike a person who had recently murdered someone.
AUDIO: Click on the button below to hear Mac McClelland read this story—or, download our free podcast here.
The symptoms displayed by Houston (in my family, a cousin of any degree is simply “a cousin”; technically, Houston is my third) in the year preceding this swift and horrific tragedy have since been classified as “a classic onset of schizophrenia.” At the time, it was just an alarming mystery. Houston had been attending Santa Rosa Junior College, living with his mom, playing guitar with his dad, when he became withdrawn and depressed. He slept all day; his band had broken up, and suddenly he had no friends. His dad, Mark, who had once struggled with depression and substance abuse but was now a pillar of the recovery community, and his mom, Marilyn, tried to help, took him to a psychiatrist. Houston didn’t have a drinking problem, but he mostly stopped drinking anyway. He didn’t smoke pot anymore, or even cigarettes. His psychiatrist indicated possible schizoaffective disorder in his notes, but put Houston on a changing regimen of antidepressants over the next eight months. It didn’t make any difference. Houston had started stealing his mom’s Adderall. He said it helped him feel better. He got fired from multiple jobs. Marilyn kicked him out, and he moved in with Mark.
Read more about America’s mental health care crisis:
Schizophrenic. Killer. My Cousin.
TIMELINE: Deinstitutionalization And Its Consequences
MAP: Which States Have Cut Treatment For the Mentally Ill the Most?
WATCH: Haunting Photographs From Inside Abandoned Asylums
“This was not my nephew,” my Aunt Annette, Mark’s sister, says of Houston’s behavior then. “He was always solicitous and loving and talkative with me. Now, he was anxious, quiet, said very strange things. He would say things that seemed not to come from him. I asked him how his therapy was going, and he said, ‘Terrible.'”
Toward the end of Houston’s devolution, he started having violent outbursts, breaking furniture; he tossed his mom across a room. Desperate now, Mark and Marilyn called the psychiatrist repeatedly and asked what to do. He told them to call the police.
“You can call the police,” the deputy director of Sonoma County’s National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), David France, said when I asked him what options are available to a parent whose adult child appears to be having a mental breakdown. “The police can activate resources,” like an emergency psych bed in a regular hospital, or transport and admission to a psychiatric hospital in a county that, unlike Sonoma, has one. But only if the police decide your child is a danger to himself or others can they arrest him with the right to hold him for three days—what in California is called a 5150, after the relevant section of state law. Otherwise you can be turned away for lack of space even if your loved one is willing to be admitted, or be left no good options if they’re not. Ninety-two percent of the patients in California’s state psych hospitals got there via the criminal-justice system.
The photographs that accompany this story are part of photographer Jeremy Harris’ ongoing project “American Asylums: Moral Architecture of the 19th Century.” See a video interview with Jeremy here.
But Mark didn’t want to call the police. For one, he didn’t think Houston was dangerous, just upset, despairing. Also, Mark read the news. The Santa Rosa cops had killed two mentally ill men they’d been called to intervene with in the last six years, one case resulting in a federal civil rights suit. This is not a problem unique to Santa Rosa—or to greater Sonoma County, which in 2009 paid a $1.75 million settlement to the family of a mentally ill 16-year-old whom sheriff’s deputies shot eight times. There’s no comprehensive data yet, but mental illness appears to be a factor in so many arrest-related deaths that the Justice Department has considered adding mental-health status to its national database of such deaths. Just last year, for example, the DOJ found the Portland, Oregon, police department had a “pattern or practice of using excessive force…against people with mental illness,” including eight shootings in 18 months and the beating to death of an unarmed man in 2006.
Anyway, Mark didn’t think three days of lockdown in a mental facility would make his son less unstable. He was looking for a meaningful treatment plan, not to rustle Houston through emergency services. “All those kids get shot by the police,” he told Marilyn. “Just let me handle it.”
So Mark didn’t call the police, and Houston didn’t get any additional help. Ten days before all the really bad things happened, Annette came out to visit from Ohio. “Honey,” she said to her nephew, “something’s going on with you, babe. Either something’s happened to you, or you’re not sharing something. I’m really, really worried that something’s going on.” She says he turned his head and looked at her eerily and said, “Maybe I’ll tell you about it sometime.” She says, “It didn’t even sound like him.”
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