Hillary Clinton continues to fundraise with fracking investors, despite her assertion Sunday that she would largely curtail fracking inside the U.S.

Fracking is a controversial mining technique used to extract natural gas from shale rock. It releases vast quantities of methane into the atmosphere and groundwater, frequently poisoning the water supply of nearby communities.

On Wednesday, the Clinton campaign was to hold a $575-a-head fundraising lunch at a Ritz-Carlton Hotel on the Northern California coast hosted by Alisa Wood, a partner at the international private equity firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. (KKR).

In 2009, KKR began heavily investing in fracking, purchasing large shares of three North American oil and gas companies, and selling two of them for billions in profits. The third was hit hard by plummeting gas prices, and declared bankruptcy last year. But KKR was not deterred, and still owns a large portfolio of small fossil fuel companies, at least two of which — Cinco Industries and Comstock Resources — use fracking.

During the Democratic debate Sunday night, a student at the University of Michigan asked both candidates whether they supported fracking.

Clinton said she did, but with three big caveats:

“You know, I don’t support it when any locality or any state is against it, number one. I don’t support it when the release of methane or contamination of water is present. I don’t support it — number three — unless we can require that anybody who fracks has to tell us exactly what chemicals they are using. So by the time we get through all of my conditions, I do not think there will be many places in America where fracking will continue to take place.”

When asked the same question, Sanders said, “My answer — my answer is a lot shorter. No, I do not support fracking.”

In July, Bernie Sanders and former presidential candidate Martin O’Malley pledged not to accept donations from fossil fuel companies. Clinton did not sign the pledge.

Many of Clinton’s largest fundraisers are lobbyists for oil and gas corporations. Some of her largest contribution bundlers are lobbyists representing Chevron, Cheniere Energy, and TransCanada — all companies that use fracking.

Prior to announcing her candidacy, Clinton also received $990,000 for speeches she made to the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce — a heavy investor in TransCanada and the Keystone XL pipeline.

After a rally in Iowa last December, Clinton claimed to be unaware she ever received donations from fossil fuel companies. “Well, I don’t know that I ever have. I’m not exactly one of their favorites,” she said. “Have I? OK, well, I’ll check on that. They certainly haven’t made that much of an impression on me if I don’t even know it.”

An investigation by Mother Jones found that Hillary Clinton personally lobbied for U.S. fracking rights overseas as secretary of state. Speaking at a 2010 conference of foreign ministers, Clinton said, “I know that in some places [it] is controversial, but [shale] gas is the cleanest fossil fuel available for power today.”

Correction: March 10, 2016

An earlier version of this story reported that Clinton herself would attend the fundraising lunch; in fact, the guest of honor was Ruth Porat, the CFO of Alphabet.

Top photo: Hillary Clinton speaks during Sunday night’s debate.

The post Hillary Clinton Wants to Regulate Fracking, but Still Accepts a Lot of Fracking Money appeared first on The Intercept.

Democracy Now! 2016-03-09 Wednesday

• Headlines for March 09, 2016
• Bernie or Hillary? Cornel West & Dolores Huerta Debate After Sanders' Upset Win in Michigan
• "We Are Pushing Real Revolution": Black Lives Matter on Why They Don't Have Faith in Any Candidate
• Bernie, Hillary or Revolution in the Streets? Cornel West, Dolores Huerta & Black Lives Matter Debate
• Tech CEOs & Republican Leaders Met Last Weekend to Plot to Stop Donald Trump

Download this show

Democracy Now! 2016-03-08 Tuesday

• Headlines for March 08, 2016
• "Here's to Flint": Broadcast Premiere of ACLU Documentary on the Fight for Democracy & Clean Water
• Honduran Activist Berta Cáceres Died in Gustavo Castro Soto's Arms; Now His Life is in Danger

Download this show

Rapper and grassroots organizer Boots Riley’s recent book is titled “Tell Homeland Security: We Are the Bomb”. Riley appeared at Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington DC, where he was interviewed by author and Edge of Sports blogger Dave Zirin.

Special thanks to Politics and Prose Bookstore & Coffeehouse

Featuring:

• Boots Riley, “Tell Homeland Security: We Are the Bomb” author
• Dave Zirin, “Edge of Sports” blogger

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has called her support for gun control laws a key differentiator from her opponent Bernie Sanders, who she claims isn’t tough enough on the industry. But in mid-March, a Clinton campaign fundraiser will be co-hosted by a lobbyist whose clients have included the National Rifle Association (NRA).

As David Sirota reported Monday in the International Business Times, Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta is a co-host and the guest of honor at a fundraising lunch in the nation’s capital on March 21.

One of the other co-hosts is Jeff Forbes of the lobbying firm Forbes-Tate.

Forbes has represented the NRA since 2009 and as of the last quarter of 2015 was still registered to lobby for the organization. On his lobbying disclosure, Forbes wrote that he was signed up to lobby for “Issues related to 2nd Amendment rights, regulation and gun control, and tax and appropriations related to same; issues related to corporate tax reform.” [Update at 4:41 p.m. ET: Jennifer Baker, director of public affairs for the NRA’s Institute for Legislative Action, emails us to say that “Jeff Forbes is no longer an NRA consultant.”]

During the 2013 push for universal background checks, Forbes was one of a phalanx of Democratic Party lobbyists employed by the NRA to kill that legislation.

Forbes is an alumnus of the Bill Clinton administration and later worked as chief of staff to former Montana Democratic Sen. Max Baucus.

Another co-host is Steve Elmendorf, who has lobbied for Goldman Sachs and the U.S.-Colombian Free Trade Agreement.

Related:

• Hillary Clinton Won’t Say if She’ll Release Transcripts of Goldman Sachs Speeches
• Top Hillary Clinton PAC Donation Amounts to 222,000 Bernie Sanders Donations
• Hillary Clinton Laughs When Asked if She Will Release Transcripts of Her Goldman Sachs Speeches
• Hillary Clinton Made More in 12 Speeches to Big Banks Than Most of Us Earn in a Lifetime

Top photo: A mock police tape placed outside the National Rifle Association headquarters in Fairfax, Virginia, during an August 2014 gun violence protest.

The post NRA Lobbyist Will Co-Host Hillary Clinton Fundraiser appeared first on The Intercept.

President Obama's latest attempt to close Guantanamo Bay prison has been met with fierce opposition from Congress. We look at what the prison has come to mean to the American public...and what it means for jihadists. Plus: a look at vigilante groups fighting to uphold their version of the law on both sides of the US-Mexico border, the Apple/FBI showdown, and the GOP "front-runner" who has yet to actually win a primary or caucus. 

LISTEN TO STEPHEN REICHER NOW!

There is a school of thought that groups often bring out the worst in humankind. Think only of the Charles Mackay book on “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds,” the U.S. Founding fathers’ visceral fear of ‘mob rule,’ or the influential social science of Gustave Le Bon and others during the French Third Republic.

And yet, as a university student future social psychologist Stephen Reicher often witnessed sublime behavior from collections of people. He saw that groups could foster racism – and they could foster civil rights movements. What he saw much of the time was group behavior “completely at odds with the psychology I was learning.”

“In a sense, you could summarize the literature: ‘Groups are bad for you, groups take moral individuals and they turn them into immoral idiots.’

“I have been trying to contest that notion,” he tells interview David Edmonds in this Social Science Bites podcast, “[and] also to explain how that notion comes about.”

In a longer-than-normal podcast, Reicher explains how group mentality can bring out the best in individuals and reviews the history of crowd psychology and some of its fascinating findings that have enormous policy implications in a world of mass protest and terroristic threat.

For example, in discussing studies on the escalation of violence, Reicher explains how indiscriminate responses by authorities can create violence rather than defuse it, a useful lesson for Western countries dealing with generally peaceful populations that may still produce a few terrorist inductees from their ranks.

Reicher is the Wardlaw professor at the School of Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of St. Andrews. A fellow of the British Academy, his most widespread recognition outside the academy comes from his work with Alexander Haslam on the BBC Prison Study, or The Experiment. He is also the co-author of several books, including 2001’s Self and Nation: Categorization, Contestation and Mobilization, with Nick Hopkins, and 2014’s reference work Psychology of Leadership with Haslam.

To directly download this podcast, right click HERE and “Save Link As.”

Social Science Bites is made in association with SAGE. For a complete listing of past Social Science Bites podcasts, click HERE.

A transcript of this podcast appears below, or you may download a PDF of the transcript HERE.

***

Nigel Warburton: We know that groups can be dangerous. Mob-mentality takes over, and ordinary people become capable of terrible things, right? But is the psychology of group behavior as straightforward as that? Steve Reicher has done extensive research on how people behave collectively. He has a more nuanced and more optimistic view, a view that includes the possibility that group mentality can bring out the best in us, as well as the worst.

David Edmonds: Steve Reicher, welcome to Social Science Bites.

Stephen Reicher: Hello.

David Edmonds: The topic we are talking about today is groups and psychology. How did you get into this topic?

Stephen Reicher: Whether it’s a reconstruction or not, I always tell myself a particular story as to how this happened. I came from a very nice, polite background, very well brought up, and in my first year at university, we had an occupation, it was the days when we had occupations, and it was over a nursery, we wanted a nursery, although the real issue was about women’s access to university, and I was a bit frightened of these things, and I wasn’t the sort of student that went into occupations, and I remember there was a big vote, and the vote was for the occupation, and I felt, well, since I voted, I should go along, and I remember going into the Senate House, occupying the Senate House, and sitting there in these meetings that would go on all night, and the fascinating thing was at the same time I was taking part in these huge collective events, I was learning about the psychology of groups, and it was telling me how groups are irrational, and how, in groups, people become more emotional, and they become less thoughtful, and so on, that they lose their selves, and then I would go back after my lectures to the occupation, and take part in what, for me, were the most intellectually exhilarating, committed, meaningful occasions I’d had in my entire life. So the empowering experience of groups was completely at odds with the psychology that I was learning.

David Edmonds: And, since then, a couple of decades ago, you’ve been studying how groups behave?

Stephen Reicher: That’s very polite of you, sadly it’s more than a couple of decades. Yes, I’ve been very interested in, broadly speaking, the psychology of groups, and how we behave in groups, and how we are transformed by groups, and what groups have to say about the nature of human sociality, and at the same time, I’ve been really interested in groups as a source of change, a source of resistance, in a sense, you could summarize the literature as saying ‘groups are bad for you’; groups take rational individuals, they take moral individuals, and they turn them into immoral idiots, and I’ve been trying to contest that notion, but also to explain how that notion comes about, because I think if you go to the origins of social psychology, the origins of crowd psychology, it comes about in the 19^th century, specifically in France, which was, at that time, in the Third Republic, very unstable, buffeted by various collective movements, populism, religious movements, above all trade union movements, and crowd psychology grew up as a defense of the status quo, it was an attempt to say these people are mad, what they’re doing is illegitimate. It was precisely because of the power of crowds, that the powerful were afraid of crowds, and thought to pathologize them, so there’s clear politics to this anti-collectivism, a clear conservative, elitist politics.

David Edmonds: And the idea, from those who were worried about groups, is that you somehow become irrational in groups, that your self is somehow submerged into something bigger and scarier?

Stephen Reicher: Absolutely, I mean, the classic text in this regard is a book by Gustave le Bon written in 1895 called The Crowd, probably the most influential psychology text of all time. Moscovici, the French social psychologist, argues that it doesn’t only theorize, it created the mass politics of the 20^th and the 21^st century, and le Bon’s book was cited by Mussolini, by Goebbels; Mein Kampf has been called a poor person’s The Crowd. He argues, when we get together in a crowd, we literally become submerged in the crowd, we lose our individuality. Because individuality is the basis of our judgments, of reason, we become subject to contagion, we can’t resist any passing idea or emotion, and moreover, because we have lost our rational, conscious personality, we regress to something more primitive, something more brutal, the quote I always like, and roughly he says ‘it will be noticed that the characteristics of crowds, their fickleness, their emotionality, their incapacity of reason, is reminiscent of inferior forms of humanity, savages and children’, so there’s a clear racism, 19^th century racism, and ageism, and elsewhere there is sexism which inhabits that view. In brief, it’s the mad mob view, it’s a view that you see every time you see collective behavioral riots, it’s the fact that these people aren’t protesting about anything, they don’t have any grievances, they don’t had any reason, they are ‘mad’, so we’ve got nothing to ask about ourselves, and the inequalities of our society, we can just point at them and say it’s just about them.

David Edmonds: Can I ask what we mean by ‘group,’ because you’re suggesting there that the group might be the mob group, the riot, but presumably there’s also the football crowd, what about the class I sit in, is that a group? What about the commuters in my carriage on the Northern line in London, do we constitute a group? What is a group?

Stephen Reicher: That’s an excellent and a key question, because of a a key distinction to be made, I think, between what one might call a physical group, which is simply a set of people who happen to be in the same place at the same time, and a psychological group, which is a set of people who consider themselves as having something in common, who have a ‘we’ feeling, if you like, we are whatever the group might be, whatever the category might be, we are West Ham fans, if you’re that irrational.

David Edmonds: Careful…

Stephen Reicher: We are socialists, we are Catholics, whatever it might be, and the best way of illustrating that is through an experience which anybody, certainly who lives in London, will have had, which is you’re in that carriage, that Underground or that Overground carriage, and you’re part of a physical group, there are hundreds of you crammed in, but you feel no psychological commonality, you’re psychologically individual, if anybody looks over your shoulder at your newspaper, you feel violated, if they brush up against you, it makes you shudder. But then, the train breaks down, and there’s one of the countless excuses from that huge book of excuses, you know, the wrong type of leaves or snow, whatever it might be, and then things change, because then you get an emergent sense of commonality. We are aggrieved commuters, by contrast with the company, we form a category, and you see people begin to turn to each other, talk to each other, I mean even sometimes share their sandwiches, which, as British people, is really extreme, so you can see we all have that experience of the transition from the physical to a psychological group, where people have, if you like, that sense of ‘we’.

David Edmonds: One fascinating aspect of that, it seems to me, is how quickly that ‘we’ identity can be formed.

Stephen Reicher: Well, not only can it form very quickly, but it also shows us that the boundaries of ‘we’ and ‘they’ are almost infinitely malleable and change as part of a social process, so one of the key aspects, I think, of contemporary group psychology is an insistence on what one might call the ‘variable self’, the fact that one can move from an individual self to a collective self very quickly, but also the fact that the boundaries of selfhood can change very quickly, as well.

People, for instance, who you thought of as an out group, I mean if you take a football match you might have a sense of ‘they’ are the fans of the other team, but if a player collapses on the pitch, or looks as if he might die, if there’s a disaster, suddenly the ‘we’ encompasses the other group as well, and whereas you used to be antagonistic towards them, suddenly they become people like you, you see forms of solidarity, and forms of support, and forms of help, so it points to the fact that when we look at the human social behavior, the variable self, and the processes of the variable self, and the different groups, and categories, and solidarities we form, it’s absolutely essential to understand, and one of the reasons why I’m so interested in studying groups, and crowds in particular, is that in crowds we see those processes up close, we see categories changing, we see people beginning to become enemies of those they used to trust, and becoming intimates with those they used to disparage.

David Edmonds: You see it, you say. What kind of methods do you use to identify these kinds of phenomena?

Stephen Reicher: There are many, psychologists, in particular, who define themselves by method. I see that as a sign of insecurity. Psychology desperately wants to be taken seriously as a science, we get more funding if we are a science, apart from anything else, and we think the sign of science lies in calling a room a laboratory, and only doing experiments, and I think that’s very sad. First of all, because conceptually, I think you start from your question and from what sort of evidence you need to warrant your claims, and sometimes your claims are going to be qualitative, you go for qualitative data, sometimes they’ll be quantitative and you go for quantitative data, so my approach has always been multi method, to start from the question and start from the phenomena.

David Edmonds: Give me an example.

Stephen Reicher: I can give you a negative example, because this was brought home to me, very early, when I looked at the literature on crowds, and there’s a lot of work, very good experimental work, on the effects of anonymity on behavior, the assumption was that people are anonymous in crowds, they are submerged, so how does anonymity affect behavior, so you get people to become anonymous by putting hoods over their head, or doing things in the dark, and then you get them to give electric shocks to people, say obscene things about their parents, all sorts of weird and wonderful studies with very clear results, but there’s just one problem. When you actually go to crowds, yes, they might seem anonymous from the outside, the police might see a sea of faces, but when you’re inside a crowd, on the whole, you’re there with people you know, you’ll often see acquaintances you’ve seen at different demos, we’re not necessarily anonymous, so however wonderful these studies are, they’re not very useful if they don’t speak to the nature of the phenomenon, so for me, the first point of any scientific enquiry is to map the phenomenon.

When I started off doing work on crowds, I found the most magnificent studies actually weren’t in psychology, they were in social history, they were E. P. Thompson’s wonderful accounts of food riots, they were Natalie Davis’ wonderful accounts of religious riots, they weren’t psychology, but they mapped the phenomenon, told us what a psychology must be able to explain, so I combine methods. Let me give you a much more concrete example relating to what we were just talking about, these aspects of solidarity. On the one hand, observational studies of a whole series of crowd events shows us that under certain conditions, often when the police treat the crowd as a homogenous danger, ‘kettle’ everybody, whether they were throwing stones or not, you see the emergence of a sense of shared identity amongst people who were previously disparate, and you see forms of solidarity amongst them, people start helping each other, so I was very interested in this idea of shared identity and helping, so we did some experimental studies with a colleague, Mark Levine in Exeter. We did a series of studies on categories and helping. Very simple study: You get people who are Manchester United fans, and you talk to them as Manchester United fans, and you say well, look, we are going to do a study in another building, and as they walk along to the other building, somebody runs along, falls over, hurts themselves, wearing either a Manchester United shirt, a Liverpool shirt or a red t-shirt, and they help the person in the Manchester United shirt, not the Liverpool shirt and not the red t-shirt.

Now, often people use that as a headline, but the really interesting thing about this study was a different condition where again, we take the same people, Manchester United fans, but this time we address them as football fans, we say we are doing research on football fans, they go to the other building, somebody runs along, falls over wearing a Manchester United shirt, a Liverpool shirt or a red t-shirt. This time, because they’re in group identity is more extensive, it’s a football fan, and Liverpool fans are now in group, rather than out group, they help the Manchester United fan, they help the Liverpool fan, and they don’t help the person in the red t-shirt, so there you have nice convergent evidence which puts together the real world phenomenon with a controlled systematic investigation showing how varying the ways in which we define identities, varies the limits of solidarity.

David Edmonds: A lot of academic research can seem very esoteric, but I can see how this has very, very important practical policy implications; kettling, for example, which you mentioned, which is the practice of the police putting together a group of protesters in a small area, and not letting them out, not letting others in, is a way that the police use to control crowds, and you’re suggesting that this might be an ineffective method, because it creates, what, a hostile identity amongst that group?

Stephen Reicher: One of the things we’ve been studying for many years is the escalation of violence, the problem with the classic psychology, which says all groups are dangerous, and which says even reasonable people can get carried away in the crowd, is it suggests, in particular when trouble starts in a crowd, that everybody might become involved, everybody is equally dangerous, and therefore leads to practices of intervention which clamp down on everyone.

Now, we argue that, first of all, when you have intergroup violence, it’s almost impossible to explain it by just looking at one party to that violence, just looking at the crowd. We need to look at the intergroup interactions, the intergroup dynamics between crowd and police. Secondly, in a number of very different types of crowd events, student demonstrations, environmentalist disputes, and so on, you can see a common dynamic of escalation, whereby you get an initially heterogeneous crowd, some want to do more confrontational things, most people don’t, trouble starts, the police see them all as dangerous, clamp down on everyone. Then people who didn’t previously see themselves as anti-police, being treated as the opposition, see themselves as oppositional, and therefore you see a shift and an escalation.

The real issue about crowd behaviour and crowd violence isn’t why a few people who came to be violent are violent, that’s a rather banal issue, it’s why so many people who came not to be violent, become involved in those dynamics, those dynamics of escalation. Now, that’s a tough message to get through, because of course, when there is trouble, the first thing any government wants to do is to admit that it, its policies, or its agencies might play a role in the creation of that conflict, that the police don’t just manage and control violence, they might be a party to the creation and construction of violence. On the other hand, of course, actually it’s a very practical form of theory, it begins to point to very clear forms of intervention, and different forms of policing, so on the basis of the work we’ve done, myself and my colleagues, and this work has been led by Clifford Stott, and also with John Drury who’s at Sussex. We’ve talked about facilitative policing, policing which starts off by asking what are the groups in the crowd? What are their different identities and intentions, which ones can we facilitate, and if the police start from the question not ‘what can we stop?’ but ‘what can we allow and how can we help people?’, then you get a very different set of dynamics.

David Edmonds: And has it itself been tested? Does it work?

Stephen Reicher: Yes, it has been tested. The first time it was used was at the European Football Championships in Portugal in 2004. Interestingly in Portugal, there are two different police forces: one in one part of the country, and another in the Algarve. Now, Clifford used these principles, worked with the police, in the larger part of the country, there wasn’t any trouble, in the Algarve, they used traditional policing, and they had two or three riots, so there’s pretty good evidence.

But what’s even more interesting is that if the police facilitate the larger crowd, then if there begins to be trouble, people in the crowd self-police. I’ll give you a couple of examples of that, one reasonably banal, and I think one much more consequential. The banal one, then again, this is Clifford’s work on the World Cup in 1998. England fans were seen as very dangerous; Scotland fans were seen as good fun, ‘boisterous bonhomie’ was the term that was used, which is a nice way of saying getting drunk and doing outrageous things, but with a smile on your face. Now, because the England fans were seen as so negative, and were challenged and came under attack, after a while, what you did if you were a fan, even if you didn’t want trouble, was to look for the biggest and meanest person, and stand near them in order to defend yourself. The dynamics led to those who cause trouble becoming more central, more prototypical, more influential.

Amongst the Scottish fans, if anybody started to fight, or started causing trouble, other fans would leap on them and say, ‘no, we don’t want to lose our reputation.’ This wasn’t the matter of the individuals, domestically, Scottish football is every bit as violent, if not more violent, it’s much more those intergroup dynamics, that if you see a whole group as pariahs, treat them all as pariahs, you’ll reap what you sow.

Now, one of the things that is interested me greatly in recent times is whether we can take these dynamics of escalation, and apply them not in situations where people confront each other in huge numbers, but where you might have one member of a group interacting with a member of another group, it’s an inter-individual interaction at one level, but they interact as members of groups, so we looked at the interactions between the police and various minorities, and the one which is most newsworthy at the moment were Muslim minorities. The site which became clearest was the airport, and what you would find was Muslims would come home because they saw themselves as fully Scottish, but they would be treated as oppositional, as other, there would be misrecognition, and in that misrecognition was something very, very painful. People were hurt, not because they didn’t see themselves as Scottish, precisely because they did.

When you begin to treat all members of a group as potentially disloyal, if you subject them to special surveillance which tells them that they’re in doubt, you begin to give more credibility to voices who might say ‘the state is your enemy’, and what’s more, you might undermine their willingness to interact and to give information to the authorities. Paradoxically, that surveillance from the outside doesn’t increase the amount of information you get, it decreases it because people aren’t willing to talk to you, so I think these dynamics of escalation which you see incredibly clearly in crowds, talk to far more widespread and everyday phenomena in our society.

David Edmonds: We’ve mainly been talking about groups as a negative phenomena, but you see them as potentially very positive?

Henri Tajfel (Photo: By European Association of Social Psychologie)

Stephen Reicher: One of the most important aspects of all my work is to say let’s challenge this anti-collective pathologizing view of groups. There’s a wonderful study of crowds in the French Revolution by a French historian, written in 1952, Lefebvre, where he says perhaps it’s only in the crowd that people lose their petty day-to-day concern, and act as the subjects of history. In other words, they express collective understandings, they express group ideologies, but there’s a wider point. It goes back to actually my very first lectures in social psychology, which were by Henri Tajfel, who was a Polish Jew who during the Second World War was interned as a French prisoner of war, but always had the shadow of being discovered as a Jew, and dying as a result, and you might think that for someone in that situation, he would subscribe to this notion that groups are terrible things, that after all it’s through group processes that Nazis killed Jews.

Henri indeed developed Social Identity Theory, which many people see as a theory of discrimination between groups. The argument is that if you identify yourself as a member of a group, and you want to give meaning to that identity, it can only be done in comparison with other groups, who we are only makes sense in comparison to who you are, and if we assume that people want to define their group positively, they can only do so by defining other groups negatively, so you have this process of differentiation where we define ourselves as better than you. Many people use that to say, well here’s yet another theory of how groups make you biased, and make you act negatively. But they miss the point, because for Henri that was a starting point, he said there might be this psychological dynamic whereby we want our groups to be positive, but we live in a real world where there is inequality, where whether you like it or not, you’re ascribed to groups which are negatively defined, you are defined as black in a racist world, as a woman in a sexist world, as a Jew in an anti-Semitic world, as gay in a homophobic world.

So the interesting question is, given that psychological dynamic, how does it play out in real world situations, under what conditions do we succumb to this inequality, and under what conditions do we challenge it? And Henri’s argument was that turns into a question of when do we act as individuals trying to work within the system, and survive and thrive despite our group membership, and when do we band together, in terms of our group membership, to challenge that inequality. So it might be that group processes lead to racism, but it’s through group processes, it’s through the civil rights movement, that you challenge racism. It is through groups that the powerless gain the power to challenge their inequality, so the question of change, and the question of creating a more equal world is fundamentally a question of how and when do people act together in to challenging that, and if you develop a whole ethos which says that groups are bad for you, in effect what you’re doing is you’re warning people off the very resource they have to change things.

David Edmonds: But also, I guess at the root of this is a question about what we are, I mean whether we are individuals, or whether we are best understood as part of some kind of collective.

Stephen Reicher: I do think that’s an absolutely critical question, and what classic psychology tell us is that agency is a function of the sovereign individual, that the loan individual with their personal values, and their personal norms, acts in meaningful and rational ways, and the group somehow subverts that agency, it takes that agency away, what Le Bon is saying is you don’t only lose morality, and you don’t only lose control, you lose agency. In the crowd you can no longer think for yourself, and you’re blown like a leaf in the wind by any passing idea or emotion, and I think work on crowds shows precisely the opposite because when you see yourself as a member of a group, first of all, that provides, if you like, a scaffold for making sense of the world, for saying what counts, for understanding your relations to others, the group isn’t something which takes away an understanding of the world, it’s something which positions you from which you can understand your world and act in your world, but it’s more than that, because the other thing the crowd does, of course, is it brings you together to empower you to act together to enact your understanding, and let me give you what, for me, was a very nice example of that.

I teach a final year seminar on crowds, and every year, I say to students, for reasons we’ve been discussing, go out and experience some sort of crowd, understand the phenomenon before we start looking at the explanations of it in psychology. One year, the students went away, and they came back and they were ecstatic in the next seminar, which is relatively rare – students are not normally that ecstatic in my seminars, and I said, ‘well, tell me what happened’ and they said, ‘well, we went to a Make Poverty History demo’, it was the year of the G8 in Scotland, and they said ‘it was fantastic, for the first time in our lives, we were telling governments what to do, rather than governments telling us what to do’, so the passion of crowds was not a passion that was counter-posed to reason, it was a passion which derived precisely from the fact that for the first time in their lives, they saw themselves as agents, not pawns, as the agents who make history, and that’s why Lefebvre’s comment, perhaps only in the crowd we become subjects of history, is so important and so profound for understanding the collective scaffolding of human agency.

David Edmonds: And if we accept that groups can be agents for change, obviously they can be, they can be forces for good and they can be forces for evil, does that mean you have to take a normative stance as a social scientist, to adjudicate between these different kinds of groups?

Stephen Reicher: What I certainly think you have to do is to be aware of those normative issues, and make a clear distinction between normative and analytic issues. One of the questions people would always ask me, when I made arguments like this, would be, ‘Well, what about Nuremberg rallies?’, and my response would be on the one hand, I suspect that for the individuals involved, they were exhilarating and empowering, and they might even have been good for their individual health. As for the consequences of those actions, then of course they would be extremely bad for the health of everybody else, but where, if we are concerned about the consequences of these rallies, does the problem lie?

Now, on the whole, the classic approach is to say, well it lies in the inherent psychology of the group, that’s why they go out and they murder and destroy, and my argument would be no, the problem lies in the specific norms and values of those groups. The problem isn’t group psychology, it is, if you like, at the ideological and the political level, and what we mustn’t do is confuse those two levels, and the real problem of much classic psychology is it takes a political preference, and it turns it into a cognitive hierarchy. In other words, it’s a political preference for individualism is turned into the claim that the individual is somehow cognitively more able and superior to the group, and that’s what I want to contest.

David Edmonds: Steve Reicher, thank you very much.

Stephen Reicher: Thank you.

The post Stephen Reicher on Crowd Psychology appeared first on Social Science Space.

Many Democrats will tell you that there has rarely, if ever, been a more menacing or evil presidential candidate than Donald Trump. “Trump is the most dangerous major candidate for president in memory,” pronounced Vox’s Ezra Klein two weeks ago. With a consensus now emerging that the real estate mogul is the likely GOP nominee, it would stand to reason that the most important factor for many Democrats in choosing their own nominee is electability: meaning, who has the best chance of defeating the GOP Satan in the general election? In light of that, can Democrats really afford to take such a risky gamble by nominating Hillary Clinton?

In virtually every poll, her rival, Bernie Sanders, does better, often much better, in head-to-head match-ups against every possible GOP candidate. Here, for instance, is a compilation of how Clinton does against Ted Cruz in recent polls: She trails the Texas senator in all but one poll, and in the one poll she leads, it is by a paltry 2 points:

By stark contrast, Sanders leads Cruz in every poll, including by substantial margins in some:

A similar story is seen in their match-ups against Trump. Although they both end up ahead in most polls, Sanders’ margin over Trump is generally very comfortable, while Clinton’s is smaller. Clinton’s average lead over Trump is just 2.8 percent, while Sanders’ lead is a full 6 points:

Then there’s the data about how each candidate is perceived. Put simply, Hillary Clinton is an extremely unpopular political figure. By contrast, even after enduring months of attacks from the Clinton camp and its large number of media surrogates, Sanders remains a popular figure.

A Gallup poll released this week reported that “29 percent of Americans offer a positive observation about Clinton while 51 percent express something negative.” As Gallup rather starkly put it: “Unfortunately for Clinton, the negative associations currently outnumber the positive ones by a sizable margin, and even among Democrats, the negatives are fairly high.” Sanders is, of course, a more unknown quantity, but “the public’s comments about Sanders can be summarized as 26 percent positive and 20 percent negative, with the rest categorized as neutral, other or no opinion.”

In fact, the more the public gets to see of both candidates, the more popular Sanders becomes, and the more unpopular Clinton becomes. Here’s Quinnipiac explaining that dynamic in one graph just a few days ago:

#Sanders and #Clinton reaching new high and new low favorability ratings, respectivelyhttps://t.co/jJ8e3rTVU6 pic.twitter.com/C4zkShxP3C

— Quinnipiac Poll (@QuinnipiacPoll) February 18, 2016

This Huffington Post chart, compiling recent polls, shows not only that Clinton is deeply unpopular among the electorate, but becomes increasingly unpopular the more the public is exposed to her during this campaign:

Or look at the same metric for critical states. In Ohio, for example, Sanders’ favorability rating is +3 (44-41 percent), while Clinton’s is negative 20 (37-57 percent).

Then there’s the particular climate of the electorate. While it’s undoubtedly true that racism and ethno-nationalism are significant factors in Trump’s appeal, also quite significant is a pervasive, long-standing contempt for the political establishment, combined with enduring rage at Wall Street and corporate America, which — along with the bipartisan agenda of globalization and free trade — have spawned intense economic suffering and deprivation among a huge number of Americans. This article by the conservative writer Michael Brendan Dougherty is the best I’ve read explaining the sustained success of Trump’s candidacy, and it very convincingly documents those factors: “There are a number of Americans who are losers from a process of economic globalization that enriches a transnational global elite.”

In this type of climate, why would anyone assume that a candidate who is the very embodiment of Globalist Establishment Power (see her new, shiny endorsement from Tony Blair), who is virtually drowning both personally and politically in Wall Street cash, has “electability” in her favor? Maybe one can find reasons to support a candidate like that. But in this environment, “electability” is most certainly not one of them. Has anyone made a convincing case why someone with those attributes would be a strong candidate in 2016?

Despite this mountain of data, the pundit consensus — which has been wrong about essentially everything — is that Hillary Clinton is electable and Bernie Sanders is not. There’s virtually no data to support this assertion. All of the relevant data compels the opposite conclusion. Rather than data, the assertion relies on highly speculative, evidence-free claims: Sanders will also become unpopular once he’s the target of GOP attacks; nobody who self-identifies as a “socialist” can win a national election; he’s too old or too ethnic to win, etc. The very same supporters of Hillary Clinton were saying very similar things just eight years ago about an unknown African-American first-term senator with the name Barack Hussein Obama.

Perhaps those claims are true this time. But given the stakes we’re being told are at play if Trump is nominated, wouldn’t one want to base one’s assessment in empirical evidence rather than pundit assertions, no matter how authoritative the tone used to express them?

It’s possible to argue that electability should not be the primary factor. That’s certainly reasonable: Elections often are and should be about aspirations, ideology, and opinion-changing leaders. But given the lurking possibility of a Trump presidency, is now really the time to gamble on such a risky general election candidate as Hillary Clinton?

Top photo: Donald Trump greets attendees after speaking at a campaign event at the Myrtle Beach Sports Center in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, Feb. 19, 2016.

The post With Donald Trump Looming, Should Dems Take a Huge Electability Gamble by Nominating Hillary Clinton? appeared first on The Intercept.

MSNBC cut away from a live Bernie Sanders press conference this afternoon as the Democratic presidential candidate was talking about his opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement. Watch the cutaway:

“You’ve been listening to Bernie Sanders, less of a press conference, more of a speech. I want to turn back to the Republican side of things,” said Kate Snow, as she pivoted to news of Ted Cruz firing a press spokesperson.

MSNBC owner Comcast has lobbied for the TPP. Last year, it fired host Ed Schultz, an outspoken opponent of the agreement.

A Media Matters study found that outside of Schultz’s show, the TPP was mentioned only twice on MSNBC during an 18-month period. Last year, MSNBC host Joe Scarborough admitted to The Intercept that his network was “guilty” of ignoring the TPP.

Top photo: Cancer patients and health professionals at a TPP protest in Washington, D.C. Many fear the agreement would make life-saving drugs unaffordable.

The post MSNBC Cuts Away From Bernie Sanders as He Condemns Trans-Pacific Partnership appeared first on The Intercept.

Democracy Now! 2016-02-18 Thursday

• Headlines for February 18, 2016
• Apple vs. the FBI: Inside the Battle Snowden Calls "The Most Important Tech Case in a Decade"
• What Is the Government Still Hiding? ACLU Continues Fight to Obtain Photos of Bush-Era Torture
• Keep It in the Ground: Author Terry Tempest Williams Buys 1,750 Acres of Oil & Gas Leases in Utah
• Targeting Transgender Children, South Dakota Passes Transphobic School Bathroom Bill

Download this show

Developer Blog

Ryan Hafen

Guest Blogger

Purdue University

# install.packages("rbokeh", repos = "http://packages.tessera.io")
library(rbokeh)

gmap(lat = 40.73306, lng = -73.97351, zoom = 12,
  width = 680, height = 600)

bike - read.csv("https://gist.githubusercontent.com/hafen/3d534ee95b964ef753ab/raw/dbe9f0cbe29d17151d852e8cc1c3466f7a7f02e9/201512_nycbike_summ.csv", stringsAsFactors = FALSE)

head(bike)

#           station      lat       lon n_start n_end
# 1 1 Ave & E 15 St 40.73222 -73.98166    4258  4272
# 2 1 Ave & E 18 St 40.73381 -73.98054    2854  2860
# 3 1 Ave & E 30 St 40.74144 -73.97536    3241  3251
# 4 1 Ave & E 44 St 40.75002 -73.96905    2020  2013
# 5 1 Ave & E 62 St 40.76123 -73.96094    2165  2156
# 6 1 Ave & E 68 St 40.76501 -73.95818    3533  3530

We have the names and geographic coordinates of each station and how many bikes started and ended at each station in December 2015.

To start, let’s overlay the station locations on the Google map. We do this just as we do with any rBokeh plot, by adding layers.

gmap(lat = 40.73306, lng = -73.97351, zoom = 12,
  width = 680, height = 600, map_type = "hybrid") %>%
  ly_points(lon, lat, data = bike, hover = c(station, n_start, n_end))

This simply shows the locations of the bike stations (using ly_points()) on top of a “hybrid” map, one of the few map_type options available with gmap(). When we hover a station we get the station name and the number of arrivals and departures. We can zoom in to see where the stations are located (note: exactness of placement can be questionable due to lat/lon rounding in our data or slight mis-alignment of the times, but we will see that it does a pretty good job here).

Using different map types

There are four different map types that can be used, “hybrid”, “satellite”, “roadmap”, “terrain”. We will use “roadmap” for the rest of the examples here but feel free to experiment with the others.

Here is how to make the map with “roadmap” map type.

gmap(lat = 40.73306, lng = -73.97351, zoom = 12,
  width = 680, height = 600, map_type = "roadmap") %>%
  ly_points(lon, lat, data = bike, hover = c(station, n_start, n_end))

Using different styles

You can specify different Google map styles for your plots using the map_style argument and retrieving one of the built-in map styles using gmap_style(). For example, below we create a map with the “blue_water” style.

gmap(lat = 40.73306, lng = -73.97351, zoom = 12,
  width = 680, height = 600,
  map_style = gmap_style("blue_water")) %>%
  ly_points(lon, lat, data = bike, hover = c(station, n_start, n_end))

See ?gmap_style for a list of styles that I have built in to the package.

Using custom styles

If you do not like any of the built-in styles, you can use your own. For example, snazzymaps.com has several Google map styles.

You can simply copy the json and pass that as map_style. For example, we can take the json from the “Brooikline Blank” style shown in the image above and specify it as our map style.

style - '[{"featureType":"administrative","elementType":"all","stylers":[{"hue":"#ffffff"},{"lightness":100},{"visibility":"off"}]},{"featureType":"landscape","elementType":"all","stylers":[{"hue":"#ffffff"},{"saturation":-100},{"lightness":100},{"visibility":"on"}]},{"featureType":"poi","elementType":"all","stylers":[{"hue":"#ffffff"},{"saturation":-100},{"lightness":100},{"visibility":"off"}]},{"featureType":"road","elementType":"geometry","stylers":[{"hue":"#000000"},{"saturation":-100},{"lightness":-100},{"visibility":"simplified"}]},{"featureType":"road","elementType":"labels","stylers":[{"hue":"#ffffff"},{"saturation":-100},{"lightness":100},{"visibility":"off"}]},{"featureType":"transit","elementType":"geometry","stylers":[{"hue":"#000000"},{"lightness":-100},{"visibility":"on"}]},{"featureType":"transit","elementType":"labels","stylers":[{"hue":"#ffffff"},{"lightness":100},{"visibility":"off"}]},{"featureType":"water","elementType":"all","stylers":[{"hue":"#ffffff"},{"saturation":-100},{"lightness":100},{"visibility":"on"}]}]'

gmap(lat = 40.73306, lng = -73.97351, zoom = 12,
  width = 680, height = 600, map_style = style) %>%
  ly_points(lon, lat, data = bike,
    hover = c(station, n_start, n_end))

A slightly more interesting plot

So far what we’ve been plotting is a bit boring. Let’s go a little further and make the point sizes relative to the difference between the number of times it was a starting vs. ending destination. We’ll make the points green if there were more departures than arrivals and red if there were more arrivals than departures. Finally, let’s get even more fancy and add a set of polygons on top of the map the delieate the NYC community districts. I don’t know why this would be particularly useful for looking at bike stations, but it’s a nice illustration of the versatility you have in adding layers to a plot just like you do with normal rBokeh figures.

The polygon data for the community districts needs to be read in from a gist, and then we can make the plot.

cdist - read.csv("https://gist.githubusercontent.com/hafen/a447521ff8b24ddefba5/raw/044e174d7b9e6a370fff429f9cda4d0903b4c0a6/communitydistricts.csv")

bike$diff - bike$n_start - bike$n_end
bike$color = ifelse(bike$diff > 0, "#2CA02C", "#D62728")

gmap(lat = 40.73306, lng = -73.97351, zoom = 12,
  width = 680, height = 600, map_style = gmap_style("blue_water")) %>%
  ly_polygons(x, y, group = which, data = cdist,
    fill_alpha = 0.1, line_width = 2, color = "orange") %>%
  ly_points(lon, lat, data = bike,
    hover = c(station, n_start, n_end, diff),
    fill_alpha = 0.8, size = abs(diff), color = color, legend = FALSE)

Yippee.

Why use rBokeh for maps

While there are many R packages with map plotting capabilities, often with these packages you either get the map as the primary output and a limited / less R-like set of tools for plotting on top or alternatively you get a lot of tools for plotting but the result is a static image. With rBokeh you get all of rBokeh’s plotting functionality with an interactive map. Of course I could be completely ignorant of features in other packages.

For the future of map plotting, Bokeh has a generic tile rendering capability which could open up a lot more possibilities, but I’m not sure how mature this capability is right now beyond Google maps.

Remember, you can install rBokeh from the R channel in Anaconda Cloud:

$ conda install -c r r-rbokeh

MP3 Link

This week on CounterSpin: The consensus of Beltway media seems to be that a single-payer healthcare system, similar to those in other industrialized countries is “excellent in theory,” but “dead on arrival” in Washington, making its proponents, including Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, naive at best. Americans make life-altering healthcare choices, in which worry over cost plays a big part, every day, but serious public discussion about how to address that crisis is a sometimes thing. So we should care what media are saying about single payer—as a lesson in policing possibilities, even apart from what it means for the presidential race.

One of the country’s foremost experts on the subject is Steffie Woolhandler. A primary care physician for many years, she’s co-founder of Physicians for a National Health Program and a professor at the CUNY School of Public Health.

MP3 Link

And first, as usual, we’ll take a quick look back at recent press, including Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump and Planned Parenthood.

MP3 Link

SOURCE LINK:

• “Doctors Group Welcomes National Debate on ‘Medicare for All,’” Physicians for a National Health Program (1/22/16)

The kind of question CNN‘s Christopher Cuomo asked Bernie Sanders at CNN‘s Iowa town meeting (1/26/16):

You will hear people say that your paying for it is actually punitive. You’re going to punish people who make money, you’re going to punish the financial district, you’re going to punish, and wind up changing the idea of an open and free economy, because you’re going to punish them for speculating. Which means they won’t speculate as much, which means you won’t get as much activity.

And, if you do a checklist of how you pay for everything, what you’re doing is amassing the biggest government ever, after President Clinton said the era of big government was over. It seems like Bernie Sanders is saying, Not only it’s over, I’m going to do it bigger than ever.

The kind of question Cuomo asked Hillary Clinton:

Interesting weekend for you. Boston Globe endorsement. Des Moines Register endorsement. Maybe the best accolade: President Obama gave an interview, talked about this race. Seemed to get more into it than he has in the past. He said you’re, quote, “wicked smart. Knows every policy inside and out.” Sounds like an endorsement….

He says, also in there, you get undue criticism, and he says, And by the way, I have some regrets about my campaign and some of the things we did. Was that surprising?

See Cenk Uygur’s brilliant breakdown of how CNN stacked the deck in Des Moines:

Jim Naureckas is the editor of FAIR.org. Follow him on Twitter: @JNaureckas.

Messages to CNN can be sent to here (or via Twitter @CNN). Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective.

In a win for the environment, electric grid reliability, and rationality, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Monday to uphold a federal rule that makes it easier for grid operators to promote energy conservation. That might not sound particularly riveting, but it’s actually an important victory for the Obama administration in its fight against climate change.

A bit of background: The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission put out an order in 2011 to promote “demand response,” which incentivizes big electricity users and groups of smaller consumers to cut their consumption during peak hours. Demand-response programs save energy, save money in energy costs, and help make sure the grid stays stable. Big utilities and energy suppliers, however, didn’t like the “save energy” part per se — it cuts into their profits — so they filed suit to overturn the rule. In 2014, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with the suppliers and ruled that FERC had overstepped its authority (check out David Roberts’ post on that ruling for more).  

But on Monday, SCOTUS overturned that ruling in a 6–2 decision (Justice Samuel Alito recused himself), meaning FERC can continue to regulate programs that cut energy use during peak times.

Why is this important? Consider, for example, what happens on a hot day. People crank up their air conditioners, and that causes a surge in electricity demand. That can lead utilities to fire up their “peakers,” power plants used just at high-demand times, which are often fired by natural gas and produce the most expensive electricity out there.

Luckily, there are energy sector players called aggregators to come to the rescue. Serving as brokers between consumers and the folks that operate regional grids and wholesale electricity markets, aggregators help organize groups of businesses or homeowners and then pay these consumers (say, via rate reductions or utility credits) not to use electricity at peak hours.

Aggregators can then sell these brilliantly named “negawatts” to the grid as saved capacity. FERC’s 2011 order made this process easier and more fair. It allows aggregators to compete with suppliers on wholesale electricity markets, selling negawatts at effectively the same price as megawatts. And it means the federal government (as opposed to just states) has the authority to regulate these kinds of transactions.

The SCOTUS ruling also promotes clean energy and climate action. Demand response implicitly incentivizes some of the dirtier peaker plants to close, since the only reason they’re kept online in the first place is to handle spikes in demand. Demand response also almost always results in lower emissions: Negawatts represent electricity that doesn’t have to be produced. And it seems to be the case that if people and businesses cut back on electricity usage at peak times, they don’t shift all that usage to off-peak hours; rather, they just use less electricity overall. If that’s not a win-win-win-win, I don’t know what is.

Democracy Now! 2016-01-21 Thursday

• Headlines for January 21, 2016
• Pakistan Mourns New Taliban School Massacre in Latest Blowback from Internal Conflict, Afghan War
• British Lawmakers Debate Banning "Fool," "Buffoon" Donald Trump over Anti-Muslim Views
• Detroit Student: "I Want to Be Able to Go to School Without Worrying About Being Bitten by Mice"
• Detroit Rocked by Teachers' "Sickout" Protesting Dire Conditions Under Emergency Management
• The 1% Economy: The World's Richest 62 People Now Have as Much as Poorest 3.6 Billion

Download this show

Ellen Meiksins Wood passed away yesterday after a long struggle with cancer. Wood was a thinker of extraordinary range, writing with authority on ancient Greece, early modern political thought, contemporary political theory, Marxism, and the structure and evolution of modern capitalism.

But even more importantly, she was one of those enchanted few from the New Left who never relented in their commitment to socialist politics. In fact, it was with her 1986 book The Retreat from Class that she burst onto the stage as a major presence on the intellectual left.

That book was one of the early, and certainly most compelling, criticisms of the emerging post-Marxist milieu taking shape in the erstwhile New Left. Intellectually, it offered a bracing defense of historical materialism against post-Marxist critiques; politically, it announced Wood censure of a generation that — after a brief dalliance with socialist politics — was turning against it with ferocious intensity.

Wood combined her defense of class analysis with an insistence that it be disciplined by empirical research. And on those grounds she never hesitated to engage even those historians and theorists who were closest to her.

In Peasant-Citizen and Slave, she took issue with G. E. M. de Ste. Croix, perhaps one of the greatest historians of antiquity and certainly its most illustrious Marxist analyst, who argued in his The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World that the main source of surplus in both Greece and Rome was the labor of slaves. Wood argued that while de Ste. Croix was certainly correct in noting the importance of slave labor in antiquity, he greatly exaggerated its centrality for surplus production.

Wood built her case with a careful examination of primary sources, through which she not only countered de Ste. Coix, but also constructed one of the compelling materialist analyses of the structure of Greek democracy.

Slightly more than a decade later, Wood took on Robert Brenner, her lifelong friend and political comrade, on the origins of modern capitalism. While Wood was deeply influenced by Brenner’s argument about the origins of capitalism in England, she insisted that his analysis of capitalism’s rise in the Low Countries was both empirically questionable and analytically flawed. Again, her argument was characterized by a careful examination of the facts with razor-sharp analytical precision. Her criticism remains one of the most important critiques of Brenner’s highly influential work.

Wood is perhaps best known for her role in the development of “political Marxism.” This is the name given to an argument about the structure and origins of capitalism, based most centrally on the work of historian Robert Brenner. Brenner and his colleagues have argued that what defines capitalism is a particular set of social property relations, which are unique to the modern era, and which force all economic actors to a dependence on the market. Whereas in all previous eras, production was subsistence oriented, capitalism is the first economic system that forces producers to sell on the market, and hence to have to compete in order to survive.

Wood argued that this had two vital implications. First, capitalism is the first economic system in which the market plays a central role. So while markets have existed for millennia, ours is the first era in which they actually regulate production and exchange, and hence generate the social division of labor.

This did not come about naturally. There is no in-built tendency for markets to grow to the point where they displace pre-capitalist forms of production. They had to be created by forcibly stripping peasants of their land.

Second, Wood maintained that profit-maximization is something that is forced onto the producers as a means of survival. Firms don’t make profits because they are greedy — they do it because if they don’t, they will be driven out of the market.

The market, therefore, is not an institution built on the happy exercise of an entrepreneurial spirit, but a highly coercive institution that not only dominates workers, but also capitalists.

This has a clear political implication — so long as production is based on market competition, the antagonism between workers and employers cannot be erased. For as long as employers have to survive by winning the competitive battle, they must focus ruthlessly on minimizing their costs. This means capitalists must constantly squeeze workers’ wages and benefits as part of their survival strategy. The market pits capitalists against their own workers.

Wood’s conclusion? As long as capitalist property relations are in place, class struggle will remain a central axis of contention.

In the years following the publication of The Retreat from Class, Wood published dozens of essays deepening this argument and showing how political theory ignores the specificity of capitalism only at its peril.

In her last years, Wood had embarked on an extraordinarily ambitious analysis of the development of political thought, from Antiquity to the modern era. Wood sought to locate the central thinkers of each era in their social — particularly class — context, showing how the major themes and arguments were linked to the central political dynamics of the time. In doing so she sought to embed the political ideologies of each era in the underlying class structure.

Wood had completed two volumes in the series, extending from the Greeks to the Enlightenment. A third volume — bringing the story to the current century — was in preparation, but will not now be completed.

I only met Ellen on a couple of occasions, but like so many others on the Left, I feel I owe her a tremendous debt. She was not only a fantastically gifted theorist — perhaps the most brilliant of her generation — but she also held her ground morally and politically through what is undoubtedly the most difficult period for the Left since its inception.

Ellen showed so many of us what it means to be a committed intellectual — that it is possible to be intensely moral and relentlessly analytical; to be passionate but still work with a cool attention to detail; to be profoundly rooted in a movement but maintain one’s independent judgment.

She carried all this off with an effortlessness that one can only try to emulate. Her demise is a loss that we will all feel deeply for some time to come. And sadly, it is a loss that the Left does not yet have the resources to absorb.

(credit: NOAA)

Citizens of the United States have a higher income than Costa Ricans, and they spend more of it on health care. In spite of this, Costa Rica has a higher life expectancy than the US—a new article published in PNAS attempts to explain why. The analysis focuses on the steep socioeconomic gradient in health that exists in the US, where the poor have considerably worse health outcomes than the wealthy.

The authors, Rosero-Bixby and Dow, argue that while the wealthiest people in the US have a higher life expectancy than anyone in Costa Rica, the poorest residents of the US have a considerably lower life expectancy.

In Costa Rica, the life expectancy is 78.5 years, though the per-capita GDP is quite low at $9,200. In contrast, the US has a GDP of $40,000, and a life expectancy of 77.4 years. Typically, economic development raises the national life expectancy, so it’s unusual that the US does not have a life expectancy commensurate with its income.

Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

The Washington Post‘s Chris Cillizza is gobsmacked, apparently.

“This Crowd Shot From Donald Trump’s Massachusetts Rally Is Absolutely Mind-Boggling,” the headline over Cillizza’s The Fix blog post reads (12/5/16), highlighting a photo that Post correspondent Jenna Johnson posted on Twitter:

Thousands and thousands packed into arena in Lowell, MA, for Donald Trump’s rally. pic.twitter.com/OQ3It53lXL

— Jenna Johnson (@wpjenna) January 5, 2016

Cillizza commented:

The building…holds 8,000 people, and local officials were estimating that it was filled to capacity or beyond. That is a MASSIVE amount of people — especially considering that the high temperature in Lowell yesterday was 29 degrees and Trump’s rally didn’t start until the evening.

Before I get to the real point, let me note that 29 degrees in Massachusetts in January is not particularly cold—the average January temperature in Lowell is 24 degrees—and January is generally when the presidential primaries really get going, so the temperature does not really add to the remarkableness of people going to see Donald Trump at an indoor arena.

But the bigger issue is that this “MASSIVE” turnout for Trump a month before the primary is not even half the size of the crowd Bernie Sanders attracted in the same general area three months ago. As the Boston Globe (10/3/15) reported:

Sanders addressed a near-capacity crowd of 20,000 at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center, with a few thousand more watching a feed of his address while on Lawn on D. Hoping to secure a good spot at the event, people formed a line that stretched a half-mile down Summer Street, nearly reaching South Station two hours before the event began.

And Cillizza knows this, because he wrote about it at the time (10/5/15)—even employing more all-caps excitement (and another odd weather reference):

TWICE AS MANY PEOPLE CAME TO SEE BERNIE SANDERS ON A CHILLY OCTOBER DAY IN 2015 THAN DID THE SAME FOR BARACK OBAMA IN 2007.

The post came complete with an excited tweet:

My goodness…. #bernieinboston pic.twitter.com/TJILt0CZbR

— Cynthia (@cynthia4877) October 4, 2015

The headline of Cillizza’s Sanders crowd piece is: “20,000 People Came to See Bernie Sanders in Boston. Why Aren’t We Talking More About It?” That’s a good question. Like, why aren’t we talking about it when we’re getting excited three months later about Trump drawing 60 percent fewer people?

I guess the answer to that is implicit in a piece Cillizza posted a little more than a week later (10/14/15), headlined “Why Bernie Sanders Isn’t Going to Be President, in Five Words.” The five words, if you’re wondering, are “I am a democratic socialist.” And that makes you ineligible to be president, in Cillizza’s view, since only 3 in 10 people say they have a favorable opinion of socialism and 61 percent express an unfavorable opinion of it.

As it happens, those were almost exactly the favorable/unfavorable numbers for the Republican Party the last time CBS polled about it (10/4-8/15)—32 percent favorable, 59 percent unfavorable—but nobody says that means it’s impossible for a Republican to be elected president.

The beyond-the-pale status of “socialism” does mean, however, that Sanders comes up in relation to Trump’s crowd numbers only as a reason not to get too excited about Trump’s crowd numbers: “After all,” writes Cillizza (1/5/16), “if crowd size at rallies was determinative, Bernie Sanders, not Hillary Clinton, would be the heavy favorite to be the Democratic presidential nominee.”

P.S. To get a sense of how badly Cillizza wants to hype the Trump crowd, check out this second Twitter photo he posted, from the Lowell Sun‘s Rick Sobey:

The line to get in for Trump stretches to the Post Office #TrumpInLowell pic.twitter.com/ndap2g82Ue

— Rick Sobey (@rsobeyLSun) January 4, 2016

Take a close look at that photo. I count maybe 33 people in it. I have no doubt there was a longish line to get into the 8,000-seat arena, but you could take a photo of 33 people standing in line to see John Kasich.

Ever since members of the U.K. Labour Party in September elected Jeremy Corbyn as party leader by a landslide, British political and media elites have acted as though their stately manors have been invaded by hordes of gauche, marauding serfs. They have waged a relentless and undisguised war to undermine Corbyn in every way possible, and that includes — first and foremost — the Blairite wing of his party, who have viciously maligned him in ways they would never dare for David Cameron and his Tory followers.

In one sense, that’s all conventional politics: Establishment guardians never appreciate having their position and entitlements threatened by insurgents, and they are thus uniting — Tory and Labour mavens alike — to banish the lowly intruders from their Oxbridge court (class and caste loyalty often outweighs supposed ideological differences). Corbyn’s reaction to all of this is also conventional politics: He quite reasonably wants to replace his Blairite shadow ministers who have been vilifying him as a Terrorist-loving extremist with those who are supportive of his agenda, a perfectly rational response that the British media is treating as proof that he’s a cultish Stalinist tyrant (even though Blairites, when they controlled the party, threatened to de-select left-wing MPs who failed to prove sufficient loyalty to Prime Minister Blair). In response to the dismissal of a couple of anti-Corbyn ministers yesterday, several other Labour MPs have announced their protest-resignations with the gestures of melodrama and martyrdom at which banal British politicians excel.

Rather than wallow in all that internal power jockeying of a former world power, I want to focus instead on one specific argument that has arisen as part of Corbyn’s cabinet “re-shuffling” because it has application far beyond Her Majesty’s realm. One of the shadow ministers replaced yesterday by Corbyn is a total mediocrity and non-entity named Pat McFadden. He claims (plausibly enough) that he was replaced by Corbyn because of remarks he made in the House of Commons after the Paris attack, which the British media and public widely viewed as disparaging Corbyn as a terrorist apologist for recognizing the role played by Western foreign policy in terror attacks. (Can you fathom the audacity of a Party leader not wanting ministers who malign him as an ISIS apologist?)

Other Labour MPs resigning from their positions today in protest of McFadden’s dismissal have expressly defended the substance of McFadden’s remarks about terrorism; one of them, Stephen Doughty, tweeted this today, with the key excerpt of McFadden’s statement about terrorism:

I agree with everything @patmcfaddenmp said in these comments. Shocked if this why he's been sacked. pic.twitter.com/PabO2xeLTZ

— Stephen Doughty (@SDoughtyMP) January 6, 2016

This claim — like the two ousted shadow ministers themselves — is so commonplace as to be a cliché. One hears this all the time from self-defending jingoistic Westerners who insist that their tribe in no way plays any causal role in what it calls terrorist violence. They insist that those who posit a causal link between endless Western violence in the Muslim world and return violence aimed at the West are “infantilizing the terrorists and treating them like children” by suggesting that terrorists lack autonomy and the capacity for choice, and are forced by the West to engage in terrorism. They bizarrely claim — as McFadden did before being fired — that to recognize this causal link is to deny that terrorists have agency and to instead believe that their actions are controlled by the West. One hears this claim constantly.

The claim is absurd: a total reversal of reality and a deliberate distortion of the argument. That some Muslims attack the West in retaliation for Western violence (and external imposition of tyranny) aimed at Muslims is so well-established that it’s barely debatable. Even the 2004 task force report commissioned by the Rumsfeld Pentagon on the causes of terrorism decisively concluded this was the case:

Beyond such studies, those who have sought to bring violence to Western cities have made explicitly clear that they were doing so out of fury and a sense of helplessness over Western violence that continuously kills innocent Muslims. “The drone hits in Afghanistan and Iraq, they don’t see children, they don’t see anybody. They kill women, children, they kill everybody,” Faisal Shahzad, the attempted Times Square bomber, told his sentencing judge when she expressed bafflement over how he could try to kill innocent people. And then there’s just common sense about human nature: If you spend years bombing, invading, occupying, and imposing tyranny on other people, some of them will want to bring violence back to you.

There’s a reason the U.S. and NATO countries are the targets of this type of violence but South Korea, Brazil, and Mexico are not. Terrorists don’t place pieces of paper with the names of the world’s countries in a hat and then randomly pick one out and attack that one. Only pure self-delusion could lead one to assert that Spain’s and the U.K.’s participation in the 2003 invasion of Iraq played no causal role in the 2004 train bombing in Madrid and 2005 bombing in London. Even British intelligence officials acknowledge that link. Gen. David Petraeus frequently described how U.S. policies — such as Guantanamo and torture — were key factors in how Muslims become radicalized against the U.S. In June, Tony Blair’s former deputy prime minister, John Prescott, made this as clear as it can be made when he admitted the Iraq War was “wrong”:

When I hear people talking about how people are radicalized, young Muslims. I’ll tell you how they are radicalized. Every time they watch the television where their families are worried, their kids are being killed or murdered and rockets, you know, firing on all these people, that’s what radicalizes them.

Can that be any clearer?

Obviously, none of this is to say that Western interference in that part of the world is the only cause of anti-Western “terrorism,” nor is it to say that it’s the principal cause in every case, nor is to deny that religious extremism plays some role. Most people need some type of fervor to be willing to risk their lives and kill other people: It can be nationalism, xenophobia, societal pressures, hatred of religion, or religious convictions. But typically, such dogmatic fervor is necessary but not sufficient to commit such violence; one still needs a cause for the targets one selects.

In its statement claiming responsibility for the attack on Paris, ISIS invoked multiple ostensibly religious justifications for the violence but also said the targeting of the French was due to “their war against Islam in France and their strikes against Muslims in the lands of the Caliphate with their jets” (France had been bombing ISIS in Iraq since January 2015 and in Syria since September). In the same month, ISIS claimed responsibility for an attack on a Russian jet as retaliation for Russian airstrikes in Syria, as well as an attack on Lebanon as a response to Hezbollah’s violence. Here’s beloved-by-the-D.C.-establishment Will McCants of the Brookings Institution telling Vox why ISIS attacked Paris:

Even in those cases where religious extremism rather than anger over Western violence seems to be the primary cause — such as the Charlie Hebdo murders, done to avenge what the attackers regarded as blasphemous cartoons — the evidence is clear that the attackers were radicalized by indignation over U.S. atrocities in Iraq, including at Abu Ghraib. Pointing out that Western violence is a key causal factor in anti-Western terrorism is not to say it is the only cause.

But whatever one’s views are on that causal question, it’s a total mischaracterization to claim that those who recognize a causal connection are denying that terrorists have autonomy or choice. To the contrary, the argument is that they are engaged in a decision-making process — a very expected and predictable one — whereby they conclude that violence against the West is justified as a result of Western violence against predominantly Muslim countries. To believe that is not to deny that terrorists possess agency; it’s to attribute agency to them.

The whole point of the argument is that they are not forced or compelled or acting out of reflex; the point is that they have decided that the only valid and effective response to Western attacks on and interference in Muslim societies is to attack back. When asked by a friend about the prospect of “peaceful protest” against U.S. violence and interference in Muslim countries, Shahzad, the would-be Times Square bomber, replied: “Can you tell me a way to save the oppressed? And a way to fight back when rockets are fired at us and Muslim blood flows?”

One can, needless to say, object to the validity of that reasoning. But one cannot deny that the decision to engage in this violence is the reasoning process in action.

By pointing out the causal connection between U.S. violence and the decision to bring violence to the West, one is not denying that the attackers lack agency, nor is one claiming they are “forced” by the West to do this, nor is one “infantilizing” them. To recognize this causation is to do exactly the opposite: to point out that some human beings will decide — using their rational and reasoning faculties and adult decision-making capabilities — that violence is justified and even necessary against those who continually impose violence and aggression on others (and, for the logically impaired, see the update here on explaining — yet again — that causation is not the same as justification).

It’s understandable that self-loving tribalistic Westerners want to completely absolve themselves and their own violent societies of having any role in the terrorist violence they love to denounce. That’s the nature of the tribalistic instinct in humans: My tribe is not at fault; it’s the other tribe to which we’re superior that is to blame. But blatantly distorting the debate this way — by ludicrously depicting recognition of this decision-making process and causal chain as a denial of agency or autonomy — is not an acceptable (or effective) way to achieve that.

Top photo: An Iraqi youth reacts to a U.S. military Bradley fighting vehicle on fire in southeast Baghdad, Iraq, after it was struck by a roadside bomb, according to eyewitnesses. July 2, 20007.

The post The Deceptive Debate Over What Causes Terrorism Against the West appeared first on The Intercept.

When President Obama announced the Home Affordable Modification Program, or HAMP, on February 18, 2009, in Mesa, Arizona, he promised it would assist 3 to 4 million homeowners to modify their loans to avoid foreclosure. Almost seven years later, less than 1 million have received ongoing assistance; nearly one in three re-defaulted after receiving inadequate modifications; and 6 million families lost their homes over the same time period.

Now the program is ending.

Tucked away on page 1,983 of the omnibus spending package, signed into law earlier this month, is the following language: “The Making Home Affordable initiative of the Secretary of the Treasury, as authorized under the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 … shall terminate on December 31, 2016.”

This language closes out a series of measures initiated after the financial crisis to aid homeowners facing foreclosure, but mostly, it ends HAMP. Few noted its passage, but progressives should be happy to see it go. Perhaps no program of the Obama era did more significant — and possibly irreparable — damage to the promise of an activist government that can help solve the country’s problems.

HAMP’s failure stemmed from its design. Rather than a cash-transfer program that hands vouchers to distressed borrowers so they can lower their mortgage payments, the government gives the money to mortgage servicing companies, to encourage them to modify the loans. But while the government sets benchmarks to follow, the mortgage companies ultimately decide whether or not to offer aid.

To appreciate why this could never succeed, you must understand that mortgage servicers typically have no direct interest in the loan. They are glorified accounts-receivable departments hired by mortgage holders to process monthly payments, handle day-to-day contact with homeowners, and distribute the proceeds. And with small staffs of entry-level workers, they could only turn a profit if they never need to perform any customer service. Handling millions of individual requests for relief simply overwhelmed them.

Furthermore, servicers make their money from a percentage of unpaid principal balance on a loan. Forgiving principal — the most successful type of loan modification — eats into servicer profits, so they shy away from that, opting for less effective interest rate cuts. Plus, servicers collect structured fees — such as late fees — which make it profitable to keep a borrower delinquent. Even foreclosures don’t hurt a servicer, because they make back their portion of fees in a foreclosure sale before the investors for whom they service the loan. The modest incentive payments in HAMP were no match for the contrary financial incentives toward foreclosure, rather than modifying loans.

With servicers in control of modifications, they could manipulate the program to pile more bad debt on borrowers and squeeze a few extra payments out before foreclosing. Servicers chronically lost borrowers’ income documents to extend the default period. They prolonged trial modifications well past three months, so they could rack up late fees. They granted modifications that folded servicer fees into the principal of the loan, increasing the unpaid principal balance — and thus their profit — while pushing the borrower further underwater. And they trapped borrowers after denying a modification, demanding back payments, missed interest, and late fees, with the threat of foreclosure as a hammer. This often forced borrowers into “private” modifications with worse terms than the status quo. HAMP became a predatory lending scheme rather than an aid program, and even “successful” permanent modifications went sour too often, with high re-default rates.

According to the Special Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (SIGTARP), 70 percent of homeowners who applied for the program were turned down for a permanent modification. Despite initially promising a $75 billion commitment to HAMP, through September of this year, the government has spent only $10.2 billion, with an additional $2 billion on related programs. Most of the spending came after the initial years when the foreclosure crisis was at its most acute.

In the most damning revelations of servicer misconduct, employees at Bank of America’s mortgage servicing unit testified in a class-action lawsuit that they were told to lie to homeowners, deliberately misplace their documents, and deny loan modifications without explaining why. For their efforts, managers rewarded them with bonuses — in the form of Target gift cards — for pushing borrowers into foreclosure.

Despite this, the Treasury Department never permanently sanctioned a single mortgage servicer for HAMP violations by clawing back incentive payments. They never used their leverage to force better outcomes. Instead, former Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner told government officials, HAMP’s purpose was to “foam the runway” for the banks. In other words, it allowed banks to spread out eventual foreclosures and absorb them more slowly, protecting bank balance sheets. Homeowners are the foam being steamrolled by a jumbo jet in that analogy.

In recent years, the government tweaked HAMP, opening it up to more borrowers and giving higher incentive payments for principal reduction. But after years of horror stories, homeowners reasonably wanted nothing to do with the program, the way squirrels learn not to eat the poisonous berries. In the most recent SIGTARP statistics, 13,231 homeowners started permanent HAMP modifications in the third quarter of the year, while 13,226 others re-defaulted, leaving a net increase in active modifications of just five. Permanent modifications have decreased in 16 of the last 17 quarters.

Treasury Department spokesperson Mark McArdle has defended HAMP by touting the fewer modification denials in recent years, which coincides with fewer homeowners bothering to apply. Treasury also alleges in recent reports that 58 percent of borrowers denied a HAMP modification received some alternative modification from their servicer or resolved their delinquency, without noting whether that alternative made the homeowners’ financial situation better or worse.

Treasury’s claim comes from surveys of the servicers themselves, who have incentives to say that they help their customers. But we know that approximately 6 million families have lost their homes since the financial crisis began in September 2008, and unless few of them ever tried to get a HAMP modification, it’s hard to square the numbers.

You can excuse many of Obama’s accomplishments that failed to reach their goals by arguing that they sprung from a broken Congress, with supermajority hurdles ensuring Republican input. But HAMP, after being authorized by the legislation that gave us the bank bailout, was designed and implemented entirely by the White House. Congress authorized the executive branch to “prevent avoidable foreclosures,” and left the details to them. That HAMP became the result is the purest indication of how the administration prioritized the health of financial institutions over homeowners.

It also unnecessarily reinforced the old Ronald Reagan dictum that the most dangerous words in the English language are “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” Families who sought out a government program to assist them in a time of need saw only a mortgage servicer who lost their paperwork, strung along their requests, and injured their financial security. The millions who experienced this abuse will find it difficult to ever believe in government again.

The post Obama Program That Hurt Homeowners and Helped Big Banks Is Ending appeared first on The Intercept.

IN MID-NOVEMBER, just weeks before the deadliest terrorist attack on U.S. soil since 9/11, the Joint Regional Intelligence Center and the sheriffs’ departments of San Bernardino and Riverside counties held the First Annual Inland Terrorism Liaison Officer Conference in Fontana, California. The two-day event — for law enforcement, public officials, and select members of the private sector — included sessions like “Policing Violent Extremism” and “Preventing Lone Wolf Attacks.”

In fact, this part of California’s Inland Empire has become home to a cottage industry of counterterrorism training in recent years aimed at teaching people how to spot would-be terrorists before they attack. By all accounts, those trainings failed to help anyone spot Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik, the married couple who shot and killed 14 people and injured 22 others at a meeting of San Bernardino County Health Department employees on December 2.

Many of the trainings, which focus on helping attendees identify “behavioral indicators” of potential terrorists, were held at the Ben Clark Training Center in Riverside, California, less than 25 miles from where the attacks took place.

These behavioral indicators have become central to the U.S. counterterrorism prevention strategy, yet critics say they don’t work. “Quite simply, they rely on generalized correlations found in selectively chosen terrorists without using control groups to see how often the correlated behaviors identified occur in the non-terrorist population,” Michael German, a former FBI agent who is currently a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, told The Intercept.

The trainings are based on flawed theories that just don’t stand up to empirical scrutiny, according to German. “The FBI, [National Counter-Terrorism Center], and [Department of Homeland Security] promote these theories despite the fact they have been refuted in numerous academic studies over the past 20 years,” he said.

Yet the behavior indicator training business appears to be booming in California, where the training sessions are sponsored by an alphabet soup of counterterrorism organizations that have sprung up in recent years, including the Joint Regional Intelligence Center; the Los Angeles chapter of InfraGard, a partnership between the FBI and private sector; and the state fusion center.

The Joint Regional Intelligence Center, in turn, has produced dozens of Official Use Only intelligence bulletins focusing on behavior indicators. One intelligence bulletin, from March 2015, identified potential indicators of radicalization including “history of mental instability/illness”; “employment/financial problems”; and “marital/family problems.”

Southern California’s enthusiasm for terrorist spotting dates back to 2002, when it was home to the first Terrorism Liaison Officer program, the controversial initiative that enlists and credentials community members and private sector industry representatives to report any potentially suspicious behavior. The program was first launched out of the Los Angeles chapter of InfraGard — which covers seven nearby counties including Riverside and San Bernardino where the attacks occurred and the perpetrators lived; the program has since been rolled out nationwide.

The Los Angeles chapter of InfraGard has also been a major beneficiary of federally funded grant money for counterterrorism training. In 2013 the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors doubled the funding of its multimillion-dollar sole source contract with InfraGard to $2,530,000 and extended it through 2018.

One of the companies hired by InfraGard to conduct counterterrorism training is CT Watch, headed by Roque “Rocky” Wicker, who also holds an executive leadership position with the Los Angeles InfraGard chapter. Employees of CT Watch have taught seminars, such as “Threat of ISIS and radicalization in the homeland.”

“The indicators work,” Wicker told The Intercept in an interview. “Behavior indicators work. You just need to train the right people.”

If Wicker is right, then the dozens of trainings held in California over the past year failed to train the right people to spot San Bernardino shooter Farook, who was a state employee and would have interacted with other state officials on a daily basis, or his friend Enrique Marquez, who was indicted Wednesday on charges related to his role in plotting with Farook to carry out attacks in 2011 and 2012.

In the months leading up to the attacks, law enforcement sources say terrorism trainings had increased in response to threats specific to California. For example, a recent issue of Dabiq, the Islamic State’s magazine, had listed potential central California targets.

Recent training sessions held in Riverside include “How to assess the threat posed by a potential lone wolf attacker,” “The Stealth Jihad in the United States,” and “Behavior threat assessment: preventing the Active Shooter,” which took place on October 22, just weeks before the San Bernardino shootings. The last one was designed “to equip law enforcement and security stakeholders with the skills and tools necessary to identify potentially violent individuals, assess the risk they pose of engaging in violence, proactively manage the risk and prevent violent attacks — including active shooter events.”

There were also three separate “Tactical Response to School & Community Violence” active shooter trainings in November, the most recent of which was held on December 2, the same day as the terrorist attack. Participants in the training were among the first to arrive at the scene of the San Bernardino shootings.

As for why behavioral indicator spotting failed to identify the San Bernardino shooters, one problem is simply that that the indicators are overly broad. A local law enforcement official involved in the vetting of suspicious activity reports in the Riverside area told The Intercept that prior to the attack, they’d received hundreds of suspicious activity reports, “most of which turn out to be bullshit. We run them down of course, but mostly, it’s a lot of nothing.”

Research: Sheelagh McNeill

The post Prior to San Bernardino Attack, Many Were Trained to Spot Terrorists; None Did appeared first on The Intercept.