Chris Hedges's Blog, page 307

The Mental Health Crisis Afflicting America’s Youth Is All Too Real

The first signs of a problem started to emerge around 2014: More young people said they felt overwhelmed and depressed. College counseling centers reported sharp increases in the number of students seeking treatment for mental health issues.

Even as studies were showing increases in symptoms of depression and in suicide among adolescents since 2010, some researchers called the concerns overblown and claimed there simply isn’t enough good data to reach that conclusion.

The idea that there’s an epidemic in anxiety or depression among youth “is simply a myth,” psychiatrist Richard Friedman wrote in The New York Times last year. Others suggested young people were simply more willing to get help when they needed it. Or perhaps counseling centers’ outreach efforts were becoming more effective.

But a new analysis of a large representative survey reinforces what I – and others – have been saying: The epidemic is all too real. In fact, the increase in mental health issues among teens and young adults is nothing short of staggering.

An epidemic of anguish

One of the best ways to find out if mental health issues have increased is to talk to a representative sample of the general population, not just those who seek help. The National Survey on Drug Use and Health, administered by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, has done just that.

It surveyed over 600,000 Americans. Recent trends are startling.

From 2009 to 2017, major depression among 20- to 21-year-olds more than doubled, rising from 7 percent to 15 percent. Depression surged 69 percent among 16- to 17-year-olds. Serious psychological distress, which includes feelings of anxiety and hopelessness, jumped 71 percent among 18- to 25-year-olds from 2008 to 2017. Twice as many 22- to 23-year-olds attempted suicide in 2017 compared with 2008, and 55 percent more had suicidal thoughts. The increases were more pronounced among girls and young women. By 2017, one out of five 12- to 17-year-old girls had experienced major depression in the previous year.

Is it possible that young people simply became more willing to admit to mental health problems? My co-authors and I tried to address this possibility by analyzing data on actual suicide rates collected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Suicide is a behavior, so changes in suicide rates can’t be caused by more willingness to admit to issues.

Tragically, suicide also jumped during the period. For example, the suicide rate among 18- to 19-year-olds climbed 56 percent from 2008 to 2017. Other behaviors related to depression have also increased, including emergency department admissions for self-harm, such as cutting, as well as hospital admissions for suicidal thoughts and suicide attempts.

The large increases in mental health issues in the National Survey on Drug Use and Health appeared almost exclusively among teens and young adults, with less change among Americans ages 26 and over. Even after statistically controlling for the influences of age and year, we found that depression, distress and suicidal thoughts were much higher among those born in the mid- to late-1990s, the generation I call iGen.

The mental health crisis seems to be a generational issue, not something that affects Americans of all ages. And that, more than anything else, might help researchers figure out why it’s happening.

The shift in social life

It’s always difficult to determine the causes behind trends, but some possibilities seem less likely than others.

A troubled economy and job loss, two typical culprits of mental stress, don’t appear to be to blame. That’s because U.S. economic growth was strong and the unemployment rate dropped significantly from 2011 to 2017, when mental health issues were rising the most.

It’s unlikely that academic pressure was the cause, as iGen teens spent less time on homework on average than teens did in the 1990s.

Although the increase in mental health issues occurred around the same time as the opioid epidemic, that crisis seemed to almost exclusively affect adults older than 25.

But there was one societal shift over the past decade that influenced the lives of today’s teens and young adults more than any other generation: the spread of smartphones and digital media like social media, texting and gaming.

While older people use these technologies as well, younger people adopted them more quickly and completely, and the impact on their social lives was more pronounced. In fact, it has drastically restructured their daily lives.

Compared with their predecessors, teens today spend less time with their friends in person and more time communicating electronically, which study after study has found is associated with mental health issues.

No matter the cause, the rise in mental health issues among teens and young adults deserves attention, not a dismissal as a “myth.” With more young people suffering – including more attempting suicide and more taking their own lives – the mental health crisis among American young people can no longer be ignored.

Jean Twenge, Professor of Psychology, San Diego State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Hollywood’s Love Affair With Racism

At a time when American society is increasingly diverse, it is necessary that our entertainment products reflect those changes in meaningful and nuanced ways, for reasons that extend beyond representation. At UCLA, Darnell Hunt, dean of social sciences, and Ana-Christina Ramon, director of research and civic engagement for the social sciences division, have found another incentive for Hollywood to get its act together when it comes to diversity, both on screen and off: It’s profitable.

Hunt and Ramon have collaborated on an annual report, “Old Start, New Beginning,” for the past six years. In it, they focus on matters of representation in the nation’s entertainment capital. According to their research, since their project began in 2014, “Hollywood’s getting better; it’s getting worse.”

“We found that people really do want to see the real world reflected on screen,” Ramon tells Truthdig Editor in Chief Robert Scheer in the latest edition of “Scheer Intelligence.” “On a per capita basis, people of color really are a driving force, in terms of the purchasing power that they have in the industry. And I think for a long time, Hollywood has ignored that.”

The three also talk about the film “Green Book” and what its controversial Oscar win says about Hollywood and American society at large in regard to how we view race.

“It’s hard to tell historical stories, and it’s much easier to revise history and to kind of oversimplify things into these conflicts between individuals, because that lets kind of our culture off the hook,” Hunt says. “It sort of conveniently sanitizes the culpability the nation as a whole may have for certain types of things. And it’s more of a feel-good proposition for people who don’t want to face those types of issues.”

Listen to their discussion to learn more about what Hollywood is getting both right and wrong about what Americans want to see on their screens. You can also read a transcript of the interview below in the media player.

Robert Scheer: Hi, it’s Robert Scheer with another edition of “Scheer Intelligence,” where the intelligence comes from my guests. In this case, two well-known sociologists, the chair of that department at UCLA being Darnell Hunt, and the director of research, Ana-Christina Ramon. And the reason I wanted to have you here this week is because of the controversy about the Oscars. And you know, we have these periodic things, #OscarsSoWhite and Oscars inclusive. And there’s no question mass culture is important; it sets values, it determines attitudes, it influences reality in dramatic ways. But did we make too much of the Oscars this time? Is there really big change? And you guys have produced a report, the sixth annual report that you have on diversity. And it had a snappy title: “Old Start, New Beginning.” So why don’t you just tell me, what’s going on? Is this a new day, a new market? And I should hasten to add that your studies are important, because you center on what sells, what finds an audience. And one of the things that stuck out for me in that report is you’re suggesting that with the new ways of distributing digital media, with the role of Netflix changing the market, we’re no longer with the old studio system, there’s room for diversity, because you’re trying to get a diverse market.

Darnell Hunt: Well, first of all, I just want to say thanks for inviting us, Robert. We’re really happy to be here to talk about the work we do at UCLA on this study. First I just want to let you know that I’m the dean of social sciences, and Ana-Christina Ramon is the director of research and civic engagement for the social sciences. And the report is now produced every year out of the Division of Social Sciences. It originated in the Bunche Center five years ago, six years ago, but it moved over a couple of years ago. So what we try to do, basically, is gain a sense of what’s happening in the industry to develop some comprehensive, reliable, objective numbers that allow us to track from year to year whether or not we’re actually making progress. Prior to our study coming out back in 2014, which was the first year, you know, there was a lot of talk, and a lot of it was anecdotal, about well, Hollywood’s getting better, it’s getting worse. And it was hard to really put your finger on what was happening without a firm kind of frame of reference that looked at everything. And we look at pretty much everything that’s in the TV pipeline, so this year we looked at over 1,300 TV shows–believe it or not, there are that many. [Laughs] When you start counting broadcast cable, digital platforms, scripted and reality and other programming. And then we look at the top Hollywood films. We rank them by box office, and we look at the top 200 films, and we subtract out foreign-language films, which usually leaves us around 170, 175 films each year. And the basic question we ask is, first of all, is diversity in front of and behind the camera increasing, going backwards, or staying the same? And then the second question we ask, which we think is actually the most important question, is what is the relationship between the level of diversity we see on the screen, and the bottom line? That is to say, movie box office, and ratings in television. And what we’ve found for six years straight now in our series is there is a relationship, and TV shows and movies that look more like America–that is to say, that are roughly 30 to 40-something percent diverse–on average do the best, in terms of box office and in terms of ratings. And that stand to reason. I mean, America right now is nearly 40 percent people of color. That share is growing by about a half a percent a year, and in a couple decades we’re going to be majority minority. And all too often in Hollywood there’s been this belief that, you know, you have to cater to the mainstream audience, which was understood to be the white audience, in order to make profitable movies and TV shows. And so what that meant is, over decades we saw the majority of TV shows and movies with white leads, men dominating in terms of the major roles, the lines–I mean, all the different ways we determine who’s prominent in a TV show or a movie. And increasingly, there’s been a disconnect between what Hollywood was producing and what audiences were wanting. And so this is what we found in our study series, that you can actually discern the tastes of audiences of color, of women, and there’s some really clear patterns. And increasingly, people of color are flexing their muscle, really, at the box office and in terms of TV ratings. Because we get data on ticket buyers; we also have data on, from Nielsen on ratings and social media engagement with TV shows. I’ve probably talked much too long. [Laughter] I’ll turn it over to Ana-Christina, do you want to [talk] about the report?

Ana-Christina Ramon: We found that people really do want to see the real world reflected on screen. The biggest groups that are really consumers of media are Latinos for film, and African Americans for television. On a per capita basis, people of color really are a driving force in terms of the purchasing power that they have in the industry. And I think for a long time, Hollywood has ignored that. And so now they see that that is something that they should capitalize on, and they’ve been able to capitalize on it in some ways with television. Because they finally saw, like a show such as Empire, that they were for too long taking for granted the African-American TV audience. And so then they finally saw that they could make a show that would get really high ratings. The ratings for that show in particular have been one of the highest ratings in the past couple of reports that we’ve had. And so it just shows that the audience of color is really an audience that, you know, needs to get the attention and needs to be reflected in what the TV shows and the movies that are being produced.

RS: Everything you’re saying is obvious, and since these are businesses they should have known this all along, they should have gotten with the program. And I’m thinking of the analogy with professional sports, where we’ve experienced a great deal of discrimination. I know the Lakers when they came to L.A. for a convention, the rule in the NBA was two black players on the starting team was all you could handle. And you know, of course, we had segregation in sports for the longest time, despite a fan base out there. And you actually have come up with the football rule, the Rooney Rule, as one of the solutions that you think explains how opaque Hollywood has been on this issue. That there isn’t enough inclusion and involvement in the decision-making on the highest level.

DH: One of the things we talk about is we–I’m a sociologist by training, and so I’m very interested in structures, in how things are structured and how that produces particular types of outcomes, despite what individuals may intend to do. One of the things we know about the industry is that for generations, really from the inception of the industry, it was a white, male-dominated industry. It’s an industry that’s sort of patterned by comfort levels, people hiring people with whom they’ve worked before, they feel comfortable with; it’s a high-pressure, high-intensity, you must meet the deadline type of industry. And the tendency was for people to almost by, you know, sort of routine reaction, surround themselves with people that they knew they could go to really quickly, who kind of think like them and often look like them. And so what you got was a reproduction of white, male culture in most of what Hollywood produced. That is to say, the white men were the protagonists, they were the leads; the women were there to service them or to serve as companions. And you know, when a woman character was developed, it was often second to the male character, and so forth and so on. And the same was true for people of color. Anyone who wasn’t a white male was kind of “othered” in interesting ways within the ecosystem of the movie or the TV show. That was the typical, traditional Hollywood pattern. It “worked,” you know, and I’ll put that in quotation marks, because demographically America was overwhelmingly white throughout much of its history, particularly if you think of the rise of cinema at the beginning of the 20th century, and then the introduction of TV in the 1940s, 1950s. But all that began to change as America itself, you know, started increasingly becoming more diverse. In fact, when you get to a point like where we are today, where 40 percent of the population is people of color; women have always been, you know, half the population or slightly more than half the population; you get to the point where the white male dominant culture just doesn’t work. Audiences don’t want that, and they demonstrate that if you look at the top 10 shows by race of household, for example, or if you look at shows that women prefer over shows that men prefer. Usually people prefer shows where the lead character–that is to say, the character whose story it is–they can relate to. And if all of your stories have white men as leads, well, the white men probably feel pretty good about that, but everyone else is like well, you know, I’m looking for something in this show that I can relate to. So maybe there’s another character in there that looks like me, or kind of looks like me, and I like it for that reason. There’s a joke that black people told, you know, throughout most of the history of television, like you know, we would run to the phone and call someone if there was a black person on television. Because like, gee, this was like an unusual occurrence. Well, we’re beyond that point now, obviously. But that was much of the history of American television. And it was the same for Latinos and Asian Americans and other groups who were underrepresented, or in some cases invisible. Like Native Americans, to this day, you can barely find them on TV or in the movies.

RS: Well, that brings up a point I want to–I want to talk about the educational role of mass media in this. I think there’s an obligation for Hollywood, and it extends beyond inclusion; it’s really dealing with justice. You mentioned Native Americans; well, Native Americans–the destruction, the genocide of Native Americans was endorsed by Hollywood, celebrated by Hollywood, you know. And the fact of the matter is, if you go right through, we had the depiction of people as the other, meaning you didn’t have to care about them. The irony with Hollywood is that was even done towards Jewish people. And even though this was an industry dominated by Jewish studio heads, there was no discussion of the rise of fascism, the role of antisemitism. And Jewish people were actually told to change their nose, change their look, change their name, certainly. So what I want to get at is that the role of this mass media traditionally was not only to ignore the other, it was to affirm the dominant values of the society.

DH: Well, that’s exactly right. I wouldn’t say it’s a one-to-one relationship, but there’s a close relationship to American culture and American politics, if you look at it decade by decade, in terms of what the major genres are, what the major themes are. You know, during the Cold War there was a particular type of movie that was made. And Hollywood often reflected that, with something of a lag. Again, it wasn’t perfectly in sync, because it takes time to develop movies and TV shows, but there is a relationship. And the people who, you know, work in Hollywood are people too. They are subject to the culture, they’re subject to their unconscious biases, and all these other factors that caused them to say hey, that’s a great idea, let’s develop this, let’s turn it into a movie or TV show. And all of the stereotypes that have been used to demean different groups throughout history often found their way into Hollywood movies, particularly when the people who were the subject of the stereotypes didn’t have any power in the industry. So that’s very common, and Native Americans are a classic example to this day. Now, some groups have been able to advocate for themselves, and they’ve been relatively effective at forcing the industry to include them a little bit more. Say African Americans; I mean, African Americans are often perceived by other underrepresented groups as like the–I hate to use this term, but the model minority with respect to Hollywood. In the sense that in some cases, African Americans were actually overrepresented in television, that their share of TV characters was larger than their share of the overall population. But if you start looking at the quality of those representations, the images and the stereotypes that were still embedded in them, you can see all the problems associated with an industry that’s telling stories about people when those people don’t have a role in the decision-making process.

RS: As one example of this, let’s take one of the more recent controversies, the Green Book movie. And it’s been criticized from a number of different ways, and they all have validity. And the question the film avoided, and this is true of a lot of mass media, is the responsibility. Historical responsibility. Because after all, this was the early sixties. This is after World War II, now; this is after the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement. And yet, the movie avoids the question, why was this the norm for these otherwise decent, reasonable white people? How did they accept it? Why did it take an alienated hood from the Bronx to somehow be the buffer? And so, OK. At this moment people will be groaning, and they’ll say well, you know, a movie can only do so much. This is why I bring up the question of cultural reparations. Because I don’t think it’s enough to, you know, whether you’re talking about gays or you’re talking about Asians or you’re talking about women, or any group that’s been marginalized, discriminated against, exploited. If you don’t give the history, then they just seem like whiners.

DH: There’s a tendency within the history of Hollywood to sort of turn every conflict into an individual conflict. Because then you can kind of develop a narrative and a dramatic arc that, you know, drives the movie or the TV show. And so Hollywood loves these buddy films. It’s even better when you have a black and a white buddy, and the white buddy is kind of the stand-in for the white audience, who becomes the hero. And in fact, that’s one of the criticisms of Green Book, that it’s really the white character’s story. In fact, Mahershala Ali, you know, he gets Best Supporting Actor even though it’s a story about black people in the South and the Green Book. You know, which is in a way kind of ironic, given the history of Hollywood and the way these things work. So certainly, there’s been this tendency in Hollywood to avoid history. It’s hard to tell historical stories, and it’s much easier to revise history and to kind of oversimplify things into these conflicts between individuals. Because that lets kind of our culture off the hook; it sort of conveniently sanitizes the culpability the nation as a whole may have for certain types of things. And it’s more of a feel-good proposition for people who don’t want to face those types of issues.

RS: [omission for station break] I want to cut to a question you just raised on responsibility, and that goes to the reparations question. And that is, if we just take people as this shot of time now, why are people in a certain state of affairs? Why don’t the schools work better, say, in Oakland or in L.A.? And if there’s no historical context, let alone an assessment of the responsibility of mass media for that state of affairs, you miss the whole point. The recognition goes to Donald Trump’s, you know, “make America great again,” and Hillary Clinton’s “America’s always been great”–no! It wasn’t always great, and it wasn’t great before. And the refusal to take on that question–that’s what bothered me about the Green Book. Why was there a Green Book in the early 1960s with the Beatles coming along–what are we talking about? What is this about America? To my mind, the real problem with Hollywood mass culture is they’ve always wanted at the end of the day to celebrate a feel-good story about America.

ACR: The thing is, Hollywood often embraces a colorblind approach. So the colorblind approach doesn’t work in the real world because studies have shown that if you’re in a company and you have a colorblind approach versus a more multicultural approach, a colorblind approach fails. Because when you just tell everyone that, oh, we’re all the same, we don’t look at race, then you just kind of negate the struggles that people of color have experienced. And it’s really a way to make white people feel good about the state of affairs, when you know, most of the time people of color are the ones that are having to then deal with racism, deal with everyday experiences of discrimination, and institutional racism itself. And so that’s, I think, something that is perpetuated with Hollywood stories for the most part. They just have this idea that, oh, we’re all the same deep down; we can just all be friends regardless of all these other issues that are going on in our society. So I think that that is a letdown, because in this day and age, for a movie like Green Book to really ignore, like you said, the history of why the Green Book was created and needed, then, really doesn’t do service to what needs to be understood. And kind of like what you said, I guess, that it makes people look like whiners now, if you know, you say well, there is still institutional racism. There is still discrimination. You know, and then people think well, you know, these images that I see make it seem like everything is OK, because we can all get along in the end, and why is it such a big deal, why are you complaining.

RS: Yeah, I think that’s a critical point, and it goes to this focus on Hollywood, which we have to recognize. There is mass culture, it shapes people’s attitudes, I’m not taking anything away from your study. But one of the problems is you run into this, you run into two issues. One is class, and the other is celebrity. Hollywood tends to stress the success. Looking for the ideal role model, and then denying the reality that other people face. You know, the lack of jobs–so for instance, the population of African Americans in California has declined, and it declined because the kind of opportunities, the kind of jobs, the kind of training, the kind of skill set went away. And there’s no recognition of that. So I just want to get some sense, because you guys are working in this area, are things getting better? Quite apart from where Hollywood is, what is going on?

DH: The founding fathers of sociology, my discipline, you know, they predicted that race was sort of like a byproduct of other, more significant processes, and as societies modernized, it would just go away. Well, they were all wrong. W.E.B. Du Bois, of course, his famous line at the beginning of the 20th century is that race, you know, will be the question of the 20th century. And in fact, it was. But it’s been far from resolved. The color line, as he put it, remains a key organizing feature in our society. Part of the problem is that we live in a society where you have large degrees of inequality, and structures are in place to maintain order by trying to stabilize the various groupings of people you have into different classes, into different races, so that elites who control things aren’t as vulnerable to, I guess, challenges of their authority as they might otherwise be. It’s a lot easier to keep people fighting with one another, and vilifying each other, than focusing on the people who really control things. And so we’ve had ideologies like the American dream, for example, which argues that, you know, you work hard, you develop yourself, you can do better than your parents’ generation; in fact, you know, there’s nothing you can’t do. Well, of course that’s false. In fact, all the data show now that the current generation is doing worse than their parents did, because we’ve had economic decline in this country. And it’s disproportionately affected different groups; you know, racialized groups have a much harder time, and so forth. So a lot of the tensions we have in society, a lot of the debates we have about race and everything else, are really masking these other, larger, fundamental, underlying inequalities that have always plagued our society. I mean, you can go back to the constitution; it was free, white, property-owning men. You know, who had the, who could vote and who had the power, and only as we amended the Constitution were other people allowed participation, women with the vote and people of color at some point. And you know, even then, I mean, we had need for civil rights acts in the early sixties, and voting rights acts, and things like that. And then we took steps backwards. I would say that we’re in a period right now that is challenging a lot of the progress we’ve made throughout our nation’s history. And it’s not accidental that these challenges are happening at the same time that demographically, that we’re moving towards majority-minority status. So there are lots of things happening, so I think your original question is, well, why are we still dealing with these issues? Because of the fundamental fact of inequality, and of our inability to live up to the ideal of being equal. And what that really means in terms of distribution of resources, access to power, and all the other things that would have to happen for people to really realize that ideal. And all the tensions we face are around those basic issues, and we’ve had this never-ending pattern of taking a few steps forward and then taking a few steps back. All the urban uprisings we had at various points in our history were a backlash or a reaction to too much progress in the eyes of certain people. And I think what we’re dealing with right now politically; I mean, the question is, are we going to have a backlash from the other direction based on sort of the excesses of the current administration and the political position. It’s hard to predict, of course, you know, with any certainty what’s going to happen. But things are very volatile for that reason.

RS: So I want to ask you, end on a positive note. Because in your study you point out that there’s a fragmentation of the market, Netflix and all this sort of thing, Amazon and what have you. So you talk about sort of new opportunity for smaller budget, for finding different audiences. And there were two very powerful movies that I happened to see up in Oakland, California, made by local people. One was sort of an attack on the mass marketing, gig jobs and everything, and one is on racial identification of a different kind, in Blindspotting and Sorry to Bother You. They were, I thought, both brilliant films. And they could find an audience. And what I’m wondering about is whether this is not going to be the beginning of a different way of making movies. That they can then delve into class, which both of those films did; how do you actually make a living if you’re not especially talented in some way athletically, or if you don’t have nurturing parents from day one, and good opportunities and so forth. And I just wondered whether you have any sense that the industry itself will fragment in much the way the internet has fragmented the newspaper industry, a lot of journalism, which you studied here at USC. And whether that isn’t going to be the beginning of a new day.

ACR: I think that it definitely is a sign of a new day in terms of movies, in terms of TV shows that you can see on any kind of device, mobile device nowadays. The issue, though, is distributing those movies, being able to distribute, being able to get the financing. Those are still barriers to getting more people to see that art, to see the reflections on the culture. And so those are still going to be, I think, difficult for people of color who are filmmakers and who are creators of content.

DH: Yeah, finding an audience, that’s key. And obviously the larger, multinational conglomerates that own the networks and studios, they, you know, are like an oligopoly. They have market power in terms of being able to drive potential viewers to their programming because of their advertising and marketing budgets. And to the degree that net neutrality comes under attack, drive traffic to their websites at faster speeds than independent producers. I mean, a lot of these people with YouTube channels now, producing interesting, web-based, scripted series, are in jeopardy of losing their audiences or losing a large proportion of their audience, if we did lose net neutrality. So these are all question marks that are going to define the possibilities going forward. But I think that the new beginning that we refer to is the fact that TV, because of the change we’ve seen in TV in recent years because of changing technology, streaming video on demand, et cetera, has provided us with a model for what’s possible. I mean, the fact that there’s so many more original programs being created, new talent that never got a shot before, because they have to fill the space and they can’t keep going back to the same white male producers–it’s shown people what’s possible, it’s given audiences a taste of what they could get, and they’re not going to go back. They’re going to demand that in the future. So the question is, how will that play out and how will the industry respond?

RS: OK, so let me end this on–I tried being positive, let me be a little bit depressing. You know, in California we had a very significant black community, let me just single that community out. And I want to talk about the migration that was accompanied by World War II. And what you had, really, was the land of opportunity; you had new industrial jobs and aircraft and the defense industry generally, and longshore and so forth.

DH: Yep. By the way, the two of us actually co-edited a volume called Black Los Angeles.

RS: And yeah, so asserting as a documentable fact that there was this sort of the American dream becoming a reality out of necessity. The same reason women entered the workforce. What we see now is winners and losers. And some of those winners can be people of color, and they can be women, and so forth. But sitting here at USC, and I’m going to go teach a class now after we do this–we have a steady pattern of information distributed to our students about the crime rate. It’s mandated by law, and it’s a five-foot-ten Latino of some sort, or a six-foot one, African American, snatching a cell phone, this prized possession, you know, doing something of that order. And that’s the other. And that’s a lot of the people who live around here, and we’ve gentrified part of the community, but the rest are pushed away, and they can’t afford the prices in the gentrified area, you know. And much of America is now gentrified within the cities, and so forth. And the odd thing is, the only thing that connects all these people could be mass media. But if mass media does what you have suggested, that it wants to tell a positive story about America, it’s going to miss that story. This is an interesting question about art, because after all, the challenge of art is to make us look at the thing that makes us uncomfortable. Or establish the humanity of the other We get it a little bit with the documentaries, but generally, we get a feel-good narrative. And I just want to ask you people as sociologists now, are we moving to a two-society world here, in which there is this group that are just to be ignored, expendable, contained, and imprisoned–and then you have this industry that you guys analyze, in which whatever your color, if you make it, you’re suddenly in that rarefied group of winners? What do these stats show? I know we have stats here at USC, we have Stacy Smith’s great project in diversification, and you have at UCLA and so forth. What do they tell us about class?

DH: Well, first of all, most people in America think that they’re middle-class. And you know, most of our political tropes are always couched in language talking about what is good for the middle class. What that does is sort of mask degrees of inequality we have in our society, and most notably the fact that the top, you know, one percent owns more than the bottom 99 percent in terms of wealth. That’s really ridiculous in a society that thinks of itself as a democracy and as a land where people are equal and free to pursue their own pursuits. Because what it sets up is such profound power imbalances that people can’t adequately participate in their democracy. They can’t advocate for the types of programs that would cater to the least in society in the way that we should, in the measure of a great society. So class is one of those things that we don’t really like to talk about a lot here. You go to the U.K., and they talk about class. But they also have, you know, a safety net where they have, you know, universal health insurance and all the other types of things that we don’t provide, or people are reluctant to provide in this country. It’s why we’ve been debating healthcare for decades, and why that was a huge issue with the last midterm election and the 2016 election. It’s something that has been exploited by elites to sort of make it harder for people to challenge their position in society. And so we’ve used race, which often masks class differences. We’ve used ethnicity, we’ve used immigration status, we’ve used all these other types of things to make it harder for people to form coalitions from similar classes to advocate for what they deserve as citizens of a society, because they’re fighting over these other identities or differences that are very real, because of the way our society is structured. So that’s the conundrum I think we find ourselves in in this country, that many of our allies in Europe and other places have done a better job dealing with. I mean, they have their own racial problems, too. I mean, particularly when they have new immigrants coming in from Africa and other places, suddenly those racial issues arise as well. But I think it’s really extreme here, in terms of our ideology as a nation and the way we think of ourselves, and the types of things that we just don’t talk about and we don’t deal with, and class is one of them. You’re right, the income inequality has grown; it hasn’t gotten better, it’s grown. The wealth differences have grown over time. And we’re at a point now where the elite, I mean someone like Jeff Bezos for example, I mean–can you imagine? You’re worth more than nations. How can that happen in a democracy, and what are the negative, the fallout from that? But we live in a country where we believe in the winner-takes-all, that you know, if you’re smart enough and industrious enough, or through whatever tactics you use to be able to amass wealth, there’s no limit on what you can do. And you have minimal responsibility to account for that; people avoid taxes, they don’t pay taxes, or they pay, their tax burden’s a lot lower than what it should be. And they try to obfuscate what they’re doing to the country by saying oh, but we’re philanthropists. But that’s a much smaller amount than you would be paying in taxes, and you’re also unilaterally saying, this is how I’m using my money and this is what you have to do with it. Which is different than participating in a democracy. So that’s one of the huge issues that we face.

ACR: I think that widening wealth gap has created like generational inequality–so for, especially for people of color, then, it’s harder to get out of that, right. But also for poor white people, you know, as well. And I think that with the changing demographics, just like, probably with like the last election, I think that race does become an issue. Because it’s easy for certain politicians, they scapegoat people of color, and immigrants; that way they can just blame it on, like, oh, well, you’re not poor because of something that the policies that have been enacted, or the way that the government has been just enacting certain policies. They just blame it on, like, oh, it’s because these other people are taking your jobs. And so I think that that has created, then, this environment where, again, like what Dr. Hunt was saying, then people are just fighting amongst themselves instead of coming together and uniting against, like, a common force that they could be working against to make things more equal for everyone

RS: When we try to study mass media, there are things that are easy to count. You know, gender, race, and number of positions–and they’re all important. The hope, however, is that with greater representation, greater diversity, you’ll also broaden your perspective.

DH: Oh, absolutely. Yeah.

RS: And that will extend to class. And what bothers me about the focus on the Oscars and on Hollywood and everything, it’s this lottery of the super-successful. And it doesn’t translate into an understanding, a concern for people who don’t make it that well, who don’t become famous. This whole sensitivity of the enterprise, which you guys are monitoring, is really an affirmation of the distinction, the moneyed distinction, that now overwhelms the society.

DH: Well, one of the reasons that I’m cautiously optimistic about where we’re headed, at least in television–I mean, the TV model, you know, commercial television in America has been about advertising, it’s about selling viewers to advertisers, basically. And traditionally what that’s meant for television is that they had to create a buying mood when you watch the show. And so that meant that there was always a skew towards relatively affluent families, in nice suburban homes, with lots of consumer products. Because that’s what you’re selling in the commercials. And that’s always been sort of the basic default of commercial television. There have been exceptions; Roseanne, you know, the TV show, and there have been a few others where they featured working-class families. But those are exceptions to the rule. What’s different today, though, with streaming video on demand, it’s no longer based on advertiser ratings. It’s based on subscriptions to consumers who buy access to Netflix, Hulu, or Amazon. That gives the potential creators of programming a little bit more leeway, a little bit more degrees of freedom to produce shows that don’t have to appeal to advertisers, and to create that buying mood. So you can do stories about impoverished families or situations that don’t live in beautiful homes, and who are successful, you know, attorneys and doctors and that type of thing, that are more reflective of the range of experiences we have in this country. That’s a possibility, at least, and I think that if we are seriously committed to presenting a more balanced view of life, you have to show the good with the bad. You have to show the challenges with the triumphs. And every community has those. And so I’m a proponent for showing the warts as well as the successes. I’m African American; I wouldn’t want to see programs about African Americans where everyone’s a successful brain surgeon, and at the same time, we have no sense of what’s happening to lots of black people in inner-city communities. I want to see all of that. I don’t want to see all inner-city, or all, you know, super successful; I want to see a balance, I want to see a range of different experiences within the diversity of the experience we call blackness. Now, I would imagine that other groups want to see the same thing, and I think if we can do that, then we can start moving one step closer to presenting a view of America that helps us develop the perspective necessary to change things for the better.

RS: That is an optimistic point of view. Hopefully the industry can find profit by also being accurate in its depiction of society. We’ll see. But that is all the time we have for this edition of “Scheer Intelligence.” I want to thank Dr. Ana-Christina Ramon and Dr. Darnell Hunt, and they are from UCLA. And we are pleased to have you here at USC, where we’ve taped this. Our engineers at KCRW are Kat Yore and Mario Diaz. Our producers are Josh Scheer and Isabel Carreon. And here at USC, the great Sebastian Grubaugh has held the show together despite my fumbling throughout. Thank you.

DH, ACR: Thank you.

At Least 49 Dead in Terror Attack on New Zealand Mosques

Updated:

Officials in New Zealand have put the number of confirmed victims in Friday’s terrorist attack on a pair of mosques at 49 people dead with 48 wounded, many seriously. Police have detained multiple people as part of the investigation into the attack, but so far have charged just one man—described as “an extremist, right-wing, violent terrorist”—with multiple counts of murder.

According to the New Zealand Herald:

 Australian police have identified the shooter as Brenton Tarrant – a white, 28-year-old Australian-born man. Twitter has shut down a user account in that name.

The gunman published an online link to a lengthy “manifesto”, which the Herald has chosen not to report.

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison confirmed an individual taken into custody was an Australian-born citizen. He called him “an extremist, right-wing, violent terrorist.”

And the Associated Press reports:

One man was arrested and charged with murder in what appeared to be a carefully planned racist attack. Police also defused explosive devices in a car.

Two other armed suspects were being held in custody. Police said they were trying to determine how they might be involved.

With such a brutal and premeditated attack, coupled with a manifesto published online and the fact that the assailant filmed the massacre, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said the events in Christchurch represented “an extraordinary and unprecedented act of violence” as she mourned that many of the victims were likely migrants or refugees who came to New Zealand expecting safety and security.

“It is clear,” Ardern said, “that this can now only be described as a terrorist attack.”

Earlier:

Witnesses are depicting horrifying scenes from the city of Christchurch, New Zealand on Friday following mass shootings by one or more gunman that occurred at two mosques in the city.

While these figures are sure to change, as of this writing there are indications that “many people” are dead with one local outlet putting the initial confirmed number of victims at nine while more recent but unconfirmed reports indicicate the deathtoll is likely to be dozens or higher. One suspect in the slayings is reported by police to be in custody, but law enforcement has said they are still looking for other assailants and are treated it as an active shooter situation.

According to the Herald, these are some of the key developments at this hour:

• Dozens feared killed as at least two gunmen open fire at two central Christchurch mosques

• City in lockdown, with reports of a third shooting scene and a car bomb in Strickland St

• One gunman, believed to be Australian, filmed as he shot victims in the mosque – and wrote a 37-page manifesto declaring his intentions

• Teen witness: “I just ran as fast as I could, over the fence to Hagley Park, I didn’t stop. The gunshots sounded like pop, pop, pop…I heard over 50.”

Get live updates at the Herald here; the Stuff here; and the Guardian here.

One shooting was reported at the Deans Ave mosque—where one witness who survived the massacre told a local reporter there were “bodies all over me” after a gunman came in with an automatic gun and fired dozens, if not hundreds, of rounds.

A witness who lived next door to the mosque and went to the help after the shooter fled, told the Associated Press: “I saw dead people everywhere. There were three in the hallway, at the door leading into the mosque, and people inside the mosque.” He added, “It’s unbelievable nutty. I don’t understand how anyone could do this to these people, to anyone. It’s ridiculous.”

A separate shooting was also reported at the Linwood, several kilometers away.

In response to reports that at least one gunman livestreamed a 17-minute portion of the shooting, journalists were among those calling on media outlets not to show any such footage and urging social media platforms to immediately shutter any of the active accounts that might be hosting the video:

The #Christchurch shooter clearly wanted that horrific footage shared. Don’t do it. Don’t watch it. It is a nightmare. Hearts are with New Zealand & muslim friends. What a horrible day. Numb. @Twitter take down his account ASAP.

— Sophie McNeill (@Sophiemcneill) March 15, 2019

The Herald reports in detail about the manifesto that was released by a person claiming to be behind the attack. According to the newspaper:

The man claiming to be the shooter identified themselves as Brenton Tarrant – a white, 28-year-old Australian-born man.

In a 74-page manifesto published online he outlined who he was and why he carried out the massacre at the Christchurch mosque.

He said there was an anti-Islamic motivation to the attack but it was anti-immigration, anti-ethnic replacement and anti-cultural replacement in origin.

Witness accounts offered a devastating narrative of what took place at the Deans Ave mosque. As Stuff, a major news outlet in the country, reports:

The former president of the Muslim Association of Canterbury Mohammed Jama said a man with a gun went into the Deans Ave mosque about 1.40pm on Friday.

About 300 people were inside the mosque “and he started shooting all the people.”

He saw about four people injured and two people lying on the ground. He did not know if they were alive or dead.

One man who was there at the time said a man came in with an automatic rifle and was “just killing people.” He ran.

Another witness said the man was wearing a helmet.

“He had a big gun and a lot of bullets and he came through and started shooting like everyone in the mosque, like everywhere, and they have to smash the door and the glass from the window and from the small door to try and get out.”

The witness said the man fired more than 50 times.

During a press conference, New Zealand’s Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said the brutal attack has created “one of New Zealand’s darkest days,” and called the shooting “an unprecedented act of violence.”

Multiple Deaths in Shootings at 2 New Zealand Mosques

CHRISTCHURCH, New Zealand — Multiple people were killed in mass shootings at two mosques full of people attending Friday prayers, as New Zealand police warned people to stay indoors as they tried to determine if more than one gunman was involved.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern described it as “one of New Zealand’s darkest days” and said the events in the city of Christchurch represented “an extraordinary and unprecedented act of violence.”

One person was taken into custody but it was unclear if there were other people involved, Police Commissioner Mike Bush said. He said anybody who was thinking of going to a mosque anywhere in New Zealand on Friday should stay put.

Authorities have not said who they have in custody. But a man who claimed responsibility for the shootings left a 74-page anti-immigrant manifesto in which he explained who he was and his reasoning for his actions. He said he considered it a terrorist attack.

Ardern at her news conference alluded to anti-immigrant sentiment as the possible motive, saying that while many people affected by the shootings may be migrants or refugees “they have chosen to make New Zealand their home, and it is their home. They are us. The person who has perpetuated this violence against us is not.”

Authorities have not yet said how many people were killed and wounded. “It’s a very serious and grave situation,” Bush said.

The deadliest shooting occurred at the Masjid Al Noor mosque in central Christchurch at about 1:45 p.m.

Witness Len Peneha said he saw a man dressed in black enter the mosque and then heard dozens of shots, followed by people running from the mosque in terror.

Peneha, who lives next door to the mosque, said the gunman ran out of the mosque, dropped what appeared to be a semi-automatic weapon in his driveway, and fled.

Peneha said he then went into the mosque to try and help.

“I saw dead people everywhere. There were three in the hallway, at the door leading into the mosque, and people inside the mosque,” he said. “It’s unbelievable nutty. I don’t understand how anyone could do this to these people, to anyone. It’s ridiculous.”

He said he helped about five people recover in his home. He said one was slightly injured.

“I’ve lived next door to this mosque for about five years and the people are great, they’re very friendly,” he said. “I just don’t understand it.”

He said the gunman was white and was wearing a helmet with some kind of device on top, giving him a military-type appearance.

Police said there was a second shooting at the Linwood Masjid Mosque.

Mark Nichols told the New Zealand Herald he heard about five gunshots and that a Friday prayer-goer returned fire with a rifle or shotgun.

Nichols said he saw two injured people being carried out on stretchers past his automotive shop and that both people appeared to be alive.

The man who claimed responsibility for the shooting said he was 28-year-old white Australian who came to New Zealand only to plan and train for the attack. He said he was not a member of any organization, but had donated to and interacted with many nationalist groups, though he acted alone and no group ordered the attack.

He said the mosques in Christchurch and Linwood would be the targets, as would a third mosque in the town of Ashburton if he could make it there.

He said he chose New Zealand because of its location, to show that even the most remote parts of the world were not free of “mass immigration.”

Mass shootings in New Zealand are exceedingly rare. The deadliest in modern history occurred in the small town of Aramoana in 1990, when gunman David Gray shot and killed 13 people following a dispute with a neighbor.

___

Perry reported from Wellington.

At 89, Would-Be Ford Assassin Sara Jane Moore Back Behind Bars

Editor’s note: Geri Spieler did extensive research for her book about Sara Jane Moore, “Taking Aim at the President: The Remarkable Story of the  Woman Who Shot at Gerald Ford,” which was published by St. Martin’s Press/Macmillan in 2009.

Sara Jane Moore, the woman who tried to assassinate President Gerald Ford in 1975 and missed him by six inches, is back in prison after 12 years of freedom.

According to officials, the 89-year-old violated her lifetime parole by leaving the country without permission, even though she had been granted a passport. Her name was placed on a list of parole violators and she was arrested at Kennedy International Airport on Feb. 23, after returning from Israel.

She has a long history of not letting rules get in the way of what she wants to do. Her failure to follow her parole conditions fits with her behavior in prison, where she continually butted heads with prison authorities and spent many days in solitary confinement.

Moore served 32 years of her life sentence and was released in 2007, a year after Ford died. Her early parole was grandfathered into federal laws that became more stringent in 1987.

She pleaded guilty to plotting to assassinate Ford. Her attempt took place 17 days after Lynnette “Squeaky” Fromme, a follower of cult leader Charles Manson, pointed a gun at the 38th president as he was leaving a meeting in Sacramento, Calif.

As the judge in Moore’s case noted, her aim was true, and the only reason she didn’t succeed in hitting Ford was because of a misaligned site on a gun she purchased the morning she drove to the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco (now the Westin St. Francis) to carry out her plot. Her attempt to correct her aim was thwarted by a former Marine, Oliver Sipple, who was credited with saving Ford’s life.

Only much later during her incarceration, when she was getting close to a possible parole, did Moore express remorse for her actions. At the time of her arrest, and for years after, she said she was sorry she had missed her mark.

“Am I sorry I tried? Yes and no,” she said at her sentencing hearing. “Yes, because it accomplished little except to throw away the rest of my life. And, no, I’m not sorry I tried … because at the time it seemed a correct expression of my anger.”

After her release from prison, Moore married Philip Chase, a clinical psychologist, and lived in a retirement community in North Carolina. Chase died in 2018.

Before her assassination attempt, Moore was married to a doctor and lived in the upscale Blackhawk Country Club community in Danville, Calif. She joined the political activities roiling the San Francisco Bay Area following the 1974 kidnapping of newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst by the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA). In its first communication after the kidnapping, the group demanded that Hearst’s family use its wealth to feed the poor. A food giveaway was headquartered in an abandoned warehouse in San Francisco’s China Basin neighborhood, and Moore was drawn to the action.

Through these events, she connected with Tribal Thumb, a 25-member revolutionary group led by ex-con Earl Satcher. Satcher had served 18 years in prison for armed robbery, assault and illegal gun possession. He believed in revolution to bring down oppression.

Members of Satcher’s group groomed Moore to be their representative to start a revolution by assassinating Ford.

Assistant U.S. attorney F. Steele Langford said that had he had the opportunity to prosecute the case, it would have been reasonable to assume the “members of Tribal Thumb would have been indicted in the assassination attempt against President Ford.”

As Federal District Judge Samuel Conti, who tried Moore’s case, observed,  “The only reason the president was not killed was not through any fault of your own, it was a malfunctioning of that gun. Your aim was straight. The gun shot to the right a little bit. If it were a correct gun, you would have killed the man.”

Moore is being held at the  Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, N.Y., awaiting an appearance before a judge who will determine her fate for the parole violation.

Death Penalty Debate Takes a Turn Toward Sanity

When news broke Tuesday night that California Gov. Gavin Newsom had decided to sign an executive order imposing a moratorium on the death penalty in the Golden State, I was staggered. My heart pounded, and my mind raced back to all the years I spent as a young attorney representing defendants in capital cases—a physically exhausting and emotionally draining task, and one that, at times, seemed utterly futile.

Now that the order has been signed and I’ve had an opportunity to review it, I’m stunned by the scope and honesty of the governor’s action. Not only does it grant reprieves to the state’s 737 death row inmates, it repeals the state’s lethal-injection protocol and will close the infamous execution chamber at San Quentin State Prison.

The reasoning Newsom offered for his decision is especially compelling. “The intentional killing of another person is wrong and as Governor, I will not oversee the execution of any individual,” he said in a press release issued by his office. “Our death penalty system has been, by all measures, a failure. It has discriminated against defendants who are mentally ill, black and brown, or can’t afford expensive legal representation. It has provided no public safety benefit or value as a deterrent. It has wasted billions of taxpayer dollars. Most of all, the death penalty is absolute. It’s irreversible and irreparable in the event of human error.”

Related Articles









The Death Penalty Is Part of Our Shared and Tortured History



by Kevin Cooper

I still have two former clients housed at San Quentin’s death row. One, Ricardo Rene Sanders, has been there for over 36 years, tying him for the dubious honor of having the fourth-longest tenure among California’s condemned population.

In many ways, Sanders’ case epitomizes what’s arbitrary, wrong and evil about the death penalty. Sanders and two codefendants were charged with staging a robbery and shooting four people to death at a Bob’s Big Boy restaurant in Los Angeles in 1980. One of the defendants pleaded guilty and received a life sentence with the possibility of parole. The other, tried separately from Sanders, was convicted but was given a sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Only Sanders was sentenced to death, even though no physical evidence, firearms or fingerprints were found connecting him to the crime. The appellate courts, both state and federal, upheld his conviction and sentence, even though evidence discovered post-conviction revealed that prosecutors had secretly secured the release of a notorious jailhouse informant and subsequently used him to romance and persuade a female shooting victim to identify Sanders at trial.

Sanders has always maintained his innocence. I stopped representing him in 1992, when I became a judge. Since then, he has been represented by Pasadena attorney Verna Wefald, who operates a solo practice on a shoestring budget. I’ve written about her before in this column, most recently when she won a dismissal in the case of Bobby Joe Maxwell, who spent nearly 40 years in prison for two murders he didn’t commit.

Wefald is one of the gems of the legal profession, ever determined and dogged, toiling away outside the limelight, perpetually underpaid with the meager stipends dispensed to court-appointed counsel for the indigent. With her options for further appeals dwindling, Wefald told me that she nearly cried when she learned of Newsom’s order. We agreed that it was time to celebrate.

Three other states—Oregon, Colorado and Pennsylvania—have governor-imposed moratoria on the death penalty, but none is as far-reaching or significant as Newsom’s decree. California has far and away the largest death row in the country. Florida, with 343 condemned inmates, sits in a distant second place. As of July 1, 2018, there were 2,738 inmates on death row nationally.

Beyond its sheer mathematical impact, Newsom’s order directly calls into question the penological underpinnings of capital punishment.

Under the rules of “guided discretion”—the name given to the version of capital punishment that the Supreme Court’s 1976 decision in Gregg v. Georgia found constitutional—juries in capital cases are given the task of balancing and weighing statutory aggravating and mitigating factors relating to the charged offense, as well as the defendant’s background and character, to determine which defendants convicted of murder should be sent to prison and which should be condemned to die. The system is designed to be rational and fair and to minimize the impact of emotion and bias in sentencing.

But the system has failed, notwithstanding subsequent efforts made by state legislatures across the country, as well as by Congress when it reinstated the federal death penalty in 1988, and by later court decisions aimed at achieving further refinements. The death penalty remains, essentially, what it has always been—a capricious, primitive, state-sanctioned practice marred by racial and class disparities, fueled by rage and grief rather than reason, stoked by political animus, and with no more deterrent effect than long-term imprisonment.

Black and brown defendants continue to be sentenced to death in disproportionately greater numbers than white offenders. The death penalty is also disproportionately meted out in cases involving white victims. Worst of all, according to the Death Penalty Information Center in Washington, D.C., at least 15 likely-innocent men have been executed in the U.S. since 1989.

To be clear, Newsom’s order has its limitations. It does not overturn any convictions, and it will not result in the release of anyone from prison. The reprieves it grants are temporary and will last only as long as Newsom remains in office.

As expected, Newsom’s order is generating severe blowback from hardcore proponents of the death penalty and fearmongering politicians, foremost among them President Donald Trump. Trump, who took out a full-page ad in four New York City papers in 1989 to call for the execution of five minority teenagers falsely accused of raping a white jogger in Central Park, sent out a tweet at 4:39 a.m. Wednesday condemning Newsom. The president wants to expand the death penalty.

The battle against capital punishment is far from over. It has, however, taken what may well prove to be a decisive turn with Newsom’s order, this time in the direction of our better angels.

Facebook Facing Criminal Probe Over Data Sharing

Last October, Mark Zuckerberg was still optimistic. “We have great products here that people love,” the Facebook founder said during an earnings call. The social network’s year, however, hasn’t been so rosy. As Vox explained in December, Facebook “has found itself at the center of a growing storm over a wide array of issues, ranging from data privacy to Russian meddling to fake news,” and despite multiple apologies, “the scandals keep coming.”

In June, The New York Times reported that Facebook entered into data-sharing partnerships with such smartphone makers as Apple and Samsung, selling access to Facebook users’ data, often without their knowledge or consent. This week, the Times reports, those partnerships are under criminal investigation, as a New York grand jury subpoenaed records from at least two of the 150 companies with whom Facebook had agreements, according to sources who requested anonymity.

The investigation is being overseen by the United States Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York. It’s unclear when the investigation began, as is the specific focus.

Facebook is already contending with government investigations. As The Washington Post reported in February, Facebook and the Federal Trade Commission are negotiating a multibillion-dollar fine that would settle an investigation into privacy breaches. If imposed, it would be the largest fine in FTC history.

“If talks break down,the FTC could take the matter to court in what would likely be a bruising legal fight,” the Post reported.

As the Post pointed out, Facebook is also fighting a suit by the attorney general of Washington, D.C., that “contends Facebook misled its users about its data-collection practices.”

The social media giant is also facing scrutiny by the Securities and Exchange Commission, and is under investigation by the Justice Department’s securities unit for its role in the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which the voter-data company received personal information from 87 million people. That case is ongoing; a former employee told the Times he had been questioned in February.

Representatives from the Eastern District and the Justice Department declined to comment to the Times on the recent subpoenas.

Last week, Zuckerberg announced in a blog post that his company will shift its focus to encrypted posts and private messaging rather than public sharing. “I believe a privacy-focused communications platform will become even more important than today’s open platforms,” he said, adding that he is committed to building “a simpler platform that’s focused on privacy first.”

In a statement regarding the subpoenas, a Facebook representative told the Times, “We are cooperating with investigators and take those probes seriously,” adding, “We’ve provided public testimony, answered questions and pledged that we will continue to do so.”

Senate Rejects Trump Border Emergency as Republicans Defect

WASHINGTON — The Republican-run Senate rejected President Donald Trump’s declaration of a national emergency at the southwest border on Thursday, setting up a veto fight and dealing him a conspicuous rebuke as he tested how boldly he could ignore Congress in pursuit of his highest-profile goal.

The Senate voted 59-41 to cancel Trump’s February proclamation of a border emergency, which he invoked to spend $3.6 billion more for border barriers than Congress had approved. Twelve Republicans joined Democrats in defying Trump in a showdown many GOP senators had hoped to avoid because he commands die-hard loyalty from millions of conservative voters who could punish defecting lawmakers in next year’s elections.

With the Democratic-controlled House’s approval of the same resolution last month, Senate passage sends it to Trump. He has shown no reluctance to casting his first veto to advance his campaign exhortation to “Build the Wall,” and it seems certain Congress will lack the two-thirds majorities that would be needed to override him.

“I’ll do a veto. It’s not going to be overturned,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. “It’s a border security vote.”

Though Trump seems sure to prevail in a veto battle, it remains noteworthy that lawmakers of both parties resisted him in a fight directly tied to his cherished campaign theme of erecting a border wall. The roll call came just a day after the Senate took a step toward a veto fight with Trump on another issue, voting to end U.S. support for the Saudi Arabian-led coalition’s war in Yemen.

In a measure of how remarkable the confrontation was, Thursday was the first time Congress has voted to block a presidential emergency since the National Emergency Act became law in 1976.

Even before Thursday’s vote, there were warnings that GOP senators resisting Trump could face political consequences. A White House official said Trump won’t forget when senators who oppose him want him to attend fundraisers or provide other help. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly on internal deliberations.

At the White House, Trump did not answer when reporters asked if there would be consequences for Republicans who voted against him.

Underscoring the political pressures in play, Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., who last month became one of the first Republicans to say he’d oppose Trump’s border emergency, said Thursday he’d vote to support it. Tillis, who faces a potentially difficult re-election race next year, cited talks with the White House that suggest Trump could be open to restricting presidential emergency powers in the future.

Still, the breadth of opposition among Republicans suggested how concern about his declaration had spread to all corners of the GOP. Republican senators voting for the resolution blocking Trump included Mitt Romney of Utah, the party’s 2012 presidential candidate; Mike Lee of Utah, a solid conservative; Maine moderate Susan Collins and Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, a respected centrist.

Republicans control the Senate 53-47. Democrats solidly opposed Trump’s declaration.

Presidents have declared 58 national emergencies since the 1976 law, but this was the first aimed at accessing money that Congress had explicitly denied, according to Elizabeth Goitein, co-director for national security at New York University Law School’s Brennan Center for Justice.

Trump and Republicans backing him said there is a legitimate security and humanitarian crisis at the border with Mexico. They also said Trump was merely exercising his powers under the law, which largely leaves it to presidents to decide what a national emergency is.

“The president is operating within existing law, and the crisis on our border is all too real,” said Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.

Opponents said Trump’s assertion of an emergency was overblown. They said he issued his declaration only because Congress agreed to provide less than $1.4 billion for barriers and he was desperate to fulfill his campaign promise on the wall. They said the Constitution gives Congress, not presidents, control over spending and said Trump’s stretching of emergency powers would invite future presidents to do the same for their own concerns.

“He’s obsessed with showing strength, and he couldn’t just abandon his pursuit of the border wall, so he had to trample on the Constitution to continue his fight,” said Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.

Republicans had hoped that Trump would endorse a separate bill by Utah’s Sen. Lee constraining emergency declarations in the future and that would win over enough GOP senators to reject Thursday’s resolution.

But Trump told Lee on Wednesday that he opposed Lee’s legislation, prompting Lee himself to say he would back the resolution.

The strongest chance of blocking Trump remains several lawsuits filed by Democratic state attorneys general, environmental groups and others.

On Twitter, Trump called on Republicans to oppose the resolution, which House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., helped drive through the House last month.

“Today’s issue is BORDER SECURITY and Crime!!! Don’t vote with Pelosi!” he tweeted, invoking the name of a Democrat who boatloads of GOP ads have villainized in recent campaign cycles.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., who is backing Trump, went to the White House late Wednesday with other senators to see if some compromise could be reached that would help reduce the number of GOP senators opposing Trump, according to a person familiar with the visit who described it on condition of anonymity. The effort fell short.

The National Emergency Act gives presidents wide leeway in declaring an emergency. Congress can vote to block a declaration, but the two-thirds majorities required to overcome presidential vetoes make it hard for lawmakers to prevail.

Lee had proposed letting a presidential emergency declaration last 30 days unless Congress voted to extend it. That would have applied to future emergencies but not Trump’s current order unless he sought to renew it next year.

Reputed Gambino Crime Boss Shot to Death in New York

NEW YORK — The reputed boss of New York’s Gambino crime family was gunned down outside his home, dying a virtual unknown compared with his swaggering 1980s-era predecessor, the custom-tailored tabloid regular John Gotti.

Francesco “Franky Boy” Cali, 53, was found with multiple gunshot wounds at his red-brick colonial-style house on Staten Island on Wednesday night and was pronounced dead at a hospital.

Witnesses reported seeing a blue pickup truck speeding away, police said. No immediate arrests were made.

Federal prosecutors had referred to Cali in court filings in recent years as the underboss of the Gambino organization. News accounts since 2015 said he had ascended to the top spot.

The Gambino family was once among the most powerful criminal organizations in the U.S., but federal prosecutions in the 1980s and 1990s sent Gotti and other top leaders to prison, diminishing its reach.

The last Mafia boss to be shot to death in New York City was Gambino don Paul Castellano, assassinated on Gotti’s direction while getting out of a black limousine outside a high-end midtown Manhattan steakhouse in 1985. Gotti then took over.

“We thought those days were over,” Mayor Bill de Blasio said of Cali’s death. “Very surprising, but I guess old habits die hard.”

Cali kept a much lower profile than Gotti and was killed in far less spectacular fashion than Castellano. Cali was shot in the chest at least six times on a tree-lined street in a quiet neighborhood a short walk from ball fields, a country club and a day camp.

Gotti, with his expensive double-breasted suits and overcoats and silvery swept-back hair, became known as the Dapper Don, his smiling face all over the tabloids. As prosecutors tried and failed to bring him down, he came to be called the Teflon Don.

In 1992, Gotti was convicted in Castellano’s murder and a multitude of other crimes. He was sentenced to life in prison and died of cancer in 2002.

The Mafia’s notoriety and influence have waned in New York City since then, but there have been flare-ups.

On Wednesday, hours before Cali was killed, the reputed boss and consigliere of the Bonanno crime family were acquitted in a Brooklyn racketeering and extortion case. In October, reputed Bonanno associate Sylvester Zottola was fatally shot while waiting for a cup of coffee at a McDonald’s drive-thru in the Bronx.

Last week, the longtime boss of the Colombo crime family, 85-year-old Carmine “the Snake” Persico, died at a North Carolina hospital near the federal prison where he had been serving what was effectively a life sentence. Persico was convicted in a 1986 case overseen by then-U.S. Attorney Rudy Giuliani.

Cali’s only mob-related criminal conviction came a decade ago, when he pleaded guilty in an extortion scheme involving a failed attempt to build a NASCAR track on Staten Island. He was sentenced to 16 months behind bars and was released in 2009.

In that case, authorities intercepted conversations shedding light on his quiet underworld influence and popularity at home and abroad. An Italian mobster said Cali was “everything over there” in New York and referred to him as “a friend of ours.”

A prosecutor echoed those sentiments at a 2008 bail hearing, saying Cali was seen “as a man of influence and power by organized crime members in Italy.”

__

Plastics May Be Wreaking Havoc on Your Health

How often are we told something is bad for us, yet we continue to keep it in our lives? Sure, a little bit every now and then won’t kill you, but it’s tough to say what is a little and what is a lot. The trouble for most of us comes down to convenience. It’s just easier to live our normal lives, not overthinking consumption habits—until the consequences are impossible to ignore. Take plastic.

A statement published earlier this year by the European Commission’s Scientific Committee on Health, Environmental and Emerging Risks identified 14 emerging health and environmental issues. Right near the top of that list was plastic waste. What was the nature of that concern? This was precisely the question raised by the statement, which emphasized the “urgent” need “for a better assessment of hazard and risk” associated with exposure to plastics of different shapes and form.

Before we unpack the pestilence of plastic though, let’s begin with a few basic facts. During World War II, U.S. plastic production increased by 300 percent. Since then, plastic has become ever more ubiquitous, and by 2014, according to market research firm PlasticsEurope, had surpassed 300 million tons produced per year. There’s a good reason for that. The wondrous nature of plastic is that it’s lightweight, highly malleable and—here’s the real kicker—resistant to biodegradation. It’s already well known that this last property is turning out to be a huge problem as the plastic piles up, but what is less understood are the exact reasons why.

Plastic is made up almost entirely of hydrocarbon chains, which are an incredibly stable type of molecular bond. In cases where hydrocarbon chains occur naturally, that stability is a necessary component of an organism’s function and generally forms part of a greater ecosystem. Plastics, however, are synthetic, which means they’re no good as a food source for microorganisms (with at least one rare exception), and as we’ve so tragically come to learn, that is a major problem.

On one hand, there’s the obvious issue of what happens to all that accumulated plastic trash. We all know the answer to that one: it turns into giant islands of floating trash, it goes up into poor turtles’ nostrils, and is found in the stomachs of beached whales. In fact, according to the World Wide Fund for Nature’s recent Living Earth 2018 report, 90 percent of the world’s seabirds have plastic in their stomachs, a figure that is expected to rise to 99 percent by 2050.

What is less well known are the implications this holds for human health.

Marauding Microplastics

Over the course of several decades, as plastic is exposed to the elements, it begins to decompose into smaller particles. While this process, known as photooxidation, does not affect plastic on a molecular level, it does eventually break it down to its nanoparticles. If you’re finding that hard to imagine, picture a grocery bag that’s been zapped by a shrink ray: It’s the exact same piece of plastic, only now it’s microscopic.

On the surface, this result may appear to be a good thing. Out of sight, out of mind, right? If only it were that simple. Plastic may actually be at its most threatening once it has broken down to the point it’s invisible to the naked eye because at that point, those little particles can travel a lot faster and further, and into the bodies of animals, including us.

Research conducted by the State University of New York at Fredonia found a significant amount of microplastics in bottled water. To be precise, 10.4 microplastic particles per one liter of water were recorded in a sample of 259 bottles representing 11 major brands across nine countries, including Aquafina, Dasani, Evian, Nestlé Pure Life and San Pellegrino, reflecting twice the amount of plastic found in a previous study using tap water. Researchers suggested the plastic contamination could have partially come from the bottling process.

“That’s fine, I’ll just stick to municipal water,” you say? Think again.

“Substantial amounts of microplastics” were recently found in tap water and rivers throughout South Africa, according to a recent study conducted by scientists from North-West University. Zoologist Henk Bouwman, a member of the research team, explained that the findings were conclusive, but the implications remain unclear. “There is no consensus yet on any health impacts as the science is still in its infancy,” he told Johannesburg’s Daily Maverick. “It might be benign, and it might not be. There are a whole lot of things we don’t understand at this stage.”

This topic was further explored by National Geographic in a 2018 article. For the piece, Chelsea Rochman, an ecologist at the University of Toronto, shared her research that found that fish suffered liver damage from ingesting polythene plastic (the kind plastic bags are made of), while oysters exposed to polystyrene tended to produce fewer eggs and less mobile sperm. But this does not necessarily mean humans will suffer the same effects.

As the article’s author Elizabeth Royte points out, it’s difficult to study the impact of microplastics on human health for a number of reasons. First, there’s the simple fact that “people can’t be asked to eat plastics for experiments.” Extrapolating the findings from fish experiments doesn’t work either, as “plastics and their additives act differently depending on physical and chemical contexts,” as well as the fact that “their characteristics may change as creatures along the food chain consume, metabolize or excrete them.” As a result, notes Royte, “we know virtually nothing about how food processing or cooking affects the toxicity of plastics in aquatic organisms or what level of contamination might hurt us.”

For Rochman, there is no doubt that “there are effects from plastics on animals at nearly all levels of biological organization.” Debra Lee Magadini, a microplastics researcher from Columbia University quoted in the article, estimates that we’ll have a better idea of exactly what those effects might be in “five to 10 years’ time.”

OK, so we may not have clear evidence on the direct health impacts of microplastics, but what about more immediate side effects?

Let’s start with the ocean. A recent study conducted by a team of Chinese scientists discovered a sizable portion of plastic was discovered in the Mariana Trench. Published in the journal Geochemical Perspectives, the findings reported a discovery of up to 2,000 microplastic pieces found in a quarter-gallon of water at the Challenger Deep, the world’s deepest point in the western Pacific Ocean’s Mariana Trench, concluding it may be one of the world’s largest “microplastic sinks.”

For one, there’s the fact that microplastics are foreign particles entering our bodies. Inflammation, for instance, is a response triggered by the immune system to this sort of invasion, writes Rachel Adams, a senior lecturer in biomedical science at Cardiff Metropolitan University, in The Conversation. Another cause for concern is that these microparticles act as carriers for other toxins entering the body. Toxic metals like mercury and organic pollutants like pesticides are just two examples of hazardous materials that could enter the body attached to plastic particles. They can slowly accumulate over time in our fatty tissue.

“We do not currently have clear evidence that plastic microparticles in drinking water have a negative effect on health,” writes Adams. “But given the effects other particles can have, we urgently need to find out more about plastic microparticles in the body.”

John Meeker, professor of environmental health sciences and global public health at the University of Michigan, concurs. “We first need to figure out how best to measure exposure then document whether people are being exposed, and, if so, how much,” wrote Meeker over email. In order to do this, he continued, scientists need to determine what environmental factors influence exposure levels and “what aspects of microplastics could be most relevant to toxicity—is it size, shape, chemical makeup or additives used in the plastics, or even toxins picked up by the plastic from its surrounding environment?” Once these factors have been established, we can begin to consider how the body processes these plastics, and what effects the various levels of exposure can have on humans over a period of time.

“Once we have found ways to measure exposure in humans, we will then need to conduct cohort studies in various types of populations to look for associations between exposure and various health endpoints,” said Meeker, advising that “these should be done in concert with experimental laboratory studies on toxicity to establish estimates about health risk.”

For the gamblers out there, this lack of scientific certainty at present might seem like an invitation to continue rolling the plastic dice. The potential hazards of microplastic, however, are far from the only cause for concern.

Bothersome BPA and Problematic Phthalates

Modern living has made it so that there’s no escaping contact with plastic—and the various extra chemicals it contains. Take Bisphenol A (BPA), which gives plastic its shape and structure, and the phthalates that make plastic soft and flexible. We end up ingesting a fair amount of these chemicals when plastic comes into contact with our food or even our skin. In turn, this affects our hormone levels, which is why, for the most part, chemicals such as BPA are heavily regulated. There is a growing body of research showing that exposure to industrial chemicals commonly found in plastics may help contribute to metabolic disorders like obesity and diabetes.

Added to this is the concerning fact that an increasing number of these chemicals are being detected in humans. A recent study conducted by the University of Exeter found traces of BPA in over 80 percent of teenagers. Reporting on the study, The Guardian explained how BPA mimics estrogen, and in so doing disrupts the endocrine system, which is responsible for regulating metabolism, growth, sexual function and sleep. But as is the case with microplastics, it is difficult to draw conclusive causal links between BPA and these health impacts due to ethical concerns around testing on humans.

Despite this lack of certainty, there’s enough cause for concern that governments have responded to this plastic plight. In recent years, legislation has been passed in Australia, Canada, the European Union and the United States restricting or prohibiting the use of phthalates in certain consumer products. According to a paper published by the Indian Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, these moves respond to the “variety of adverse outcomes” caused by the chemical, “including increased adiposity and insulin resistance” as well as “decreased levels of sex hormones, and other consequences for the human reproductive system.”

While it’s important to understand the health impact of plastic, perhaps a more pressing question is what happens when we tell ourselves that plastic is safe—and continue to produce it in ever greater quantities. According to Statista, a market research firm, global plastic production has grown from 50 to 335 million metric tons over the past four decades. Chances are likely that the ultimate consequence of our plastic consumption will be something far greater, and perhaps direr, than our current scientific understanding is able to predict.

This article was produced by Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute, and originally published by Truthout.