Delicately wielding a scalpel, Chris Maynard (previously here and here) slices into feathers to create images of the very creatures that shed them, reproducing birds of flight within his tiny found canvases. Not only is Maynard concerned about the material aesthetically, but is also interested in how humans have treasured feathers and their meaning for thousands of years.
Often Maynard places the positive cut-out next to its negative shape, making it appear as if the tiny bird is flying from the feather, or escaping its original form. Each feather varies in size and color, from the tiny and muted to large and brightly colored. The feathers used in his works are acquired legally from zoos and private aviaries, all naturally shed by birds that range from crows to peacocks.
Recently the Pacific Northwest artist, author, and naturalist has compiled his works into a book that provides detail into his creative process, the lifespan of his subject, and the symbolism of feathers titled Feathers, Form and Function. Maynard also covers the biological in the book, outlining how how feathers have evolved and grow. You can see more of Maynard’s writing and works on his blog here.
Khalifa was arrested in August by US customs officials at Los Angeles international airport when he refused to get off of his hoverboard.
He saw the arrest as a speed bump in a greater social movement. After the incident, he tweeted: “I stand for our generation and our generation is gonna be riding hover boards”.
Sorry, I can't seem to stop sharing Monbiot essays. This one's for Karthik and a pet complaint I've heard, here's a great sentence for you:
"Perhaps it’s no coincidence that so many post-reproductive white men are obsessed with human population growth, as it’s about the only environmental problem of which they can wash their hands."
It’s about time we discussed the real population crisis.
By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 18th November 2015
This column is about the population crisis. About the breeding that’s laying waste to the world’s living systems. But it’s probably not the population crisis you’re thinking of. This is about another one, that we seem to find almost impossible to discuss.
You’ll hear a lot about population in the next three weeks, as the Paris climate summit approaches. Across the airwaves and on the comment threads it will invariably be described as “the elephant in the room”. When people are not using their own words, it means they are not thinking their own thoughts. Ten thousand voices each ask why no one is talking about it. The growth in human numbers, they say, is our foremost environmental threat.
At their best, population campaigners seek to extend women’s reproductive choices. Some 225 million women have an unmet need for contraception. If this need were answered, the impact on population growth would be significant, though not decisive: the annual growth rate of 83 million would be reduced to 62m (1). But contraception is rarely limited only by the physical availability of contraceptives. In most cases, it’s about power: women are denied control of their wombs. The social transformations they need are wider and deeper than donations from the other side of the world are likely to achieve.
At their worst, they seek to shift the blame from their own environmental impacts. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that so many post-reproductive white men are obsessed with human population growth, as it’s about the only environmental problem of which they can wash their hands. Nor, I believe, is it a coincidence that of all such topics this is the least tractable. When there is almost nothing to be done, there is no requirement to act.
Such is the momentum behind population growth, an analysis in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences discovered, that were every government to adopt the one-child policy China has just abandoned, there would still be as many people on Earth at the end of this century as there are today. If two billion people were wiped out by a catastrophe in mid-century, the planet would still hold a billion more by 2100 than it does now.
If we want to reduce our impacts this century, the paper concludes, it’s consumption we must address. Population growth is outpaced by the growth in our consumption of almost all resources. There is enough to meet everyone’s need, even in a world of 10 billion people. There is not enough to meet everyone’s greed, even in a world of 2 billion people.
So let’s turn to a population crisis over which we do have some influence. I’m talking about the growth in livestock numbers. Human numbers are rising at roughly 1.2% a year. Livestock numbers are rising at around 2.4% a year. By 2050, the world’s living systems will have to support about 120m tonnes of extra human, and 400m tonnes of extra farm animals(2).
Raising them already uses three quarters of the world’s agricultural land. One third of our cereal crops are used to feed them. This may rise to roughly half by 2050. More people will starve as a result, because the poor rely mainly on grain for their subsistence, and diverting it to livestock raises the price. Now the grain that farm animals eat is being supplemented by oil crops, particularly soya, for which the forests and savannahs of South America are being cleared at shocking rates.
This might seem counter-intuitive, but were we to eat soya, rather than meat, the clearance of natural vegetation required to supply us with the same amount of protein would decline by 94%. Producing protein from chickens requires three times as much land as protein from soybeans. Pork needs nine times, beef 32 times.
A recent paper in the journal Science of the Total Environment suggests that our consumption of meat is likely to be “the leading cause of modern species extinctions”. Not only is livestock farming the major reason for habitat destruction and the killing of predators, but its waste products are overwhelming the world’s capacity to absorb them. Factory farms in the US generate 13 times as much sewage as the human population. The dairy farms in Tulare county, California produce five times as much as New York City.
Freshwater life is being wiped out across the world by farm manure. In England, as I reported last week, the system designed to protect us from the tide of crap has comprehensively broken down. Dead zones now extend from many coasts, as farm sewage erases ocean life across thousands of square kilometres.
So why is hardly anyone talking about the cow, pig, sheep and chicken in the room? Why are there no government campaigns to reduce the consumption of animal products, just as they sometimes discourage our excessive use of electricity? A survey by the Royal Institute of International Affairs found that people are not unwilling to change their diets, once they become aware of the problem, but that many have no idea that livestock farming damages the living world.
It’s not as if eating less meat and dairy will harm us. If we did as our doctors advise, our environmental impacts would decline in step with heart disease, strokes, diabetes and cancer. British people eat, on average, slightly more than their bodyweight in meat every year, while Americans consume another 50%: wildly more, in both cases, than is good for us or the rest of life on Earth.
But while plenty in the rich world are happy to discuss the dangers of brown people reproducing, the other population crisis scarcely crosses the threshold of perception. Livestock numbers present a direct moral challenge, as in this case we have agency. Hence the pregnant silence.
www.monbiot.com
Footnotes:
While the number of unintended pregnancies would fall by 52m (or 70%), this does not mean that the number of babies would fall by the same amount. The Guttmacher/UNFPA report breaks down the outcome thus: “21 million fewer unplanned births; 24 million fewer abortions; six million fewer miscarriages; and 0.6 million fewer stillbirths.”
Additional global meat consumption by this date is estimated to be roughly 200 million tonnes. Boned meat comprises roughly half the weight of a living animal. So total additional livestock biomass will be in the order of 400 million tonnes, or 400 billion kg. The average human weight is 52 kg and the anticipated rise in population by 2050 is 2.3 billion (the median estimate is 9.7 billion by that date). So the additional human weight is likely to be somewhere around 120 billion kg.
The author, a public interest lawyer from Pennsylvania, says now is the time for non-Muslim allies to loudly counter the Islamophobia that's being fanned by Donald Trump. Resul Muslu / Shutterstock.com
Dear non-Muslim Allies,
I am writing to you because it has gotten just that bad. I have found myself telling too many people about the advice given to me years ago by the late composer Herbert Brun, a German Jew who fled Germany at the age of 15: “Be sure that your passport is in order.” It’s not enough to laugh at Donald Trump anymore. The rhetoric about Muslims has gotten so nasty, and is everywhere, on every channel, every newsfeed. It is clearly fueling daily events of targeted violence, vandalism, vigilante harassment, discrimination. I want you to know that it has gotten bad enough that my family and I talk about what to keep on hand if we need to leave quickly, and where we should go, maybe if the election goes the wrong way, or if folks get stirred up enough to be dangerous before the election. When things seem less scary, we talk about a five- or a ten-year plan to go somewhere where cops don’t carry guns and hate speech isn’t allowed on network television. And if you don’t already know this about me, I want you to know that I was born in this country. I have lived my whole life in this country. I have spent my entire adult life working to help the poor, the disabled, and the dispossessed access the legal system in this country. And I want you to know that I am devoutly and proudly Muslim.
I am writing this in response to a non-Muslim friend’s question about what she can do. Because there is much that can be done in solidarity:
If you see a Muslim or someone who might be identified as Muslim being harassed, stop, say something, intervene, call for help.
If you ride public transportation, sit next to the hijabi woman and say asalam ‘alaykum. (That means "peace to you.") Don’t worry about mispronouncing it; she won’t care. Just say "peace" if you like. She’ll smile; smile back. If you feel like it, start a conversation. If you don’t, sit there and make sure no one harasses her.
If you have a Muslim work colleague, check in. Tell them that the news is horrifying and you want them to know you’re there for them.
If you have neighbors who are Muslim, keep an eye out for them. If you’re walking your kids home from the bus stop, invite their kids to walk with you.
Talk to your kids. They're picking up on the anti-Muslim message. Make sure they know how you feel and talk to them about what they can do when they see bullying or hear hate speech at school.
Call out hate speech when you hear it—if it incites hatred or violence against a specified group, call it out: in your living room, at work, with friends, in public. It is most important that you do this among folks who may not know a Muslim.
Set up a “learn about Islam” forum at your book club, school, congregation, dinner club. Call your state CAIR organization, interfaith group or local mosque and see if there is someone who has speaking experience and could come and answer questions about Islam and American Muslims for your group. They won’t be offended. They will want the opportunity to do something to dispel the nastiness.
Write op-eds and articles saying how deplorable the anti-Muslim rhetoric has gotten and voice your support for Muslim Americans in whatever way you can.
Call your state and local representatives, let them know that you are concerned about hate speech against your Muslim friends and neighbors in politics and the media, that it is unacceptable and you want them to call it out whenever they hear it, on your behalf.
Out yourself as someone who won’t stand for Islamophobia, or will stand with Muslims—there is an awful lot of hate filling the airways, and there are an awful lot of people with access to the media and/or authority stirring the pot about Muslims. Please help fill that space with support instead. Post, write, use your profile picture or blog to voice your support.
Ask me anything. Really. Engage the Muslims in your life. Make sure you really feel comfortable standing for and with your Muslim friends, neighbors, coworkers.
I can tell you that in addition to the very real threat to their civil and human rights that Muslims are facing, we are dealing with a tremendous amount of anxiety. While we, many of us, rely on our faith to stay strong, we are human. This is not an easy time. What you do will mean everything to the Muslim Americans around you. Thank you for reading and bless you in your efforts. Share freely.
Sofia Ali-Khan is a public interest lawyer currently writing and wrangling preschoolers in the suburbs of Philadelphia. This was originally posted on Facebook, and is being reprinted here with her permission.
Our waking experience overflows with small sensations that we almost never verbalise: the feel of pushing a computer key; a brief, satisfying scratch; a word or image rising into consciousness before dissipating. Experience Composite aims to capture those small, abstract moments that otherwise go ignored or quickly disappear. Commissioned in association with the Wellcome Collection, this short film builds on the work of the US psychologist Russell Hurlburt, who in 2006 developed a process called descriptive experience sampling (DES) to document the small moments that make up our inner lives. DES participants wear a small beeper and write down the contents of their experience when it sounds off randomly during the day. Using split-screen image pairings, the UK director Ed Prosser’s experimental short film crafts several ‘beep summaries’ into brief vignettes that both express and expand on these fleeting experiences.
That's not a gundam, that's grandma. Tupungato / Shutterstock.com
The Wall Street Journal has a fascinating post about Japan's growing “silver market.” This market is about keeping old people out of retirement and in jobs for as long as possible. The reason for this is because one in every four Japanese is above the age of 65, and it is expected that by 2050, which is right around the corner, it will be one in every three. What this means is that the country will not be able to support all of these old and unproductive people.
There are lots of things to do in Japan; it has positions to fill, things to move, fields to pick. The economy can't be based on a group that does nothing between age 65 and death—which on average happens for women at 85 and for men at 81. This is why Abenomics is working only outside of the country, and not where it is much needed (within it). Japan is just getting too old. It slipped into a recession again.
The easy solution to this problem is: "a sharp influx of immigrants" from poorer countries. But this is not an option for Japan because it is "one of the world’s most homogeneous cultures," and apparently wants to stay that way no matter what. So, Japan is turning to the hard solution: increasing the number of robots and keeping the elderly in the job market. For the old folks who are healthy, this is a cinch. There are plenty of jobs for them to fill, and employers like their kind of labor because it is cheap. WSJ:
“Compared to younger people, we can curb their pay,” says Katsutoshi Sekine, who runs a farm cooperative in Chiba Prefecture and offers his nearly 20 senior fruit and vegetable pickers 80% of the going wage.
As for those who are not in great health, they can be transformed into cyborgs. There are technology corporations that have developed exoskeletons (some are even called HAL) and "smart suits" to help elderly people do hard work on farms (bend over) and even construction sites (lift things).
The writing in WSJ's post indicates no amazement at these unexpected 21st-century, post-cyberpunk developments. Indeed, it optimistically points out that Japan might be a pioneer in the future of labor in advanced capitalist societies, all of which are demographically heading in the direction of Japan. They, too, do not want to solve one of capitalism's big obstacles (lack of population growth) in the obvious manner—with immigrants. And so Japan is positioning itself to become a major exporter of silver labor technologies (or "smart aging") to the rest of the xenophobic overdeveloped world. The analysts think that the country could make billions upon billions in this new market.
Privacy advocates are warning federal authorities of a new threat that uses inaudible, high-frequency sounds to surreptitiously track a person's online behavior across a range of devices, including phones, TVs, tablets, and computers.
The ultrasonic pitches are embedded into TV commercials or are played when a user encounters an ad displayed in a computer browser. While the sound can't be heard by the human ear, nearby tablets and smartphones can detect it. When they do, browser cookies can now pair a single user to multiple devices and keep track of what TV commercials the person sees, how long the person watches the ads, and whether the person acts on the ads by doing a Web search or buying a product.
Related: a Chrome extension that broadcasts URLs over audio.
Faig Ahmed distorts the patterns of traditional Azerbaijani rugs, dimantling their structure in order to build compositions that trick the eye by appearing to melt off the wall. By rearticulating the original design, he creates contemporary sculptural forms that look like digital glitches, patterns flatlining halfway through a tapestry or gradually morphing into a digital mosaic.
Ahmed explains that his fascination for textiles stems from their historical value, humanity utilizing fabric for nearly the entire length of human history. “Another thing that interests me is pattern,” says Ahmed. “Patterns and ornaments can be found in all cultures, sometimes similar, sometimes very different. I consider them words and phrases that can be read and translated to a language we understand.”
Ahmed lives and works in Baku, Azerbaijan and graduated from the sculpture department of Azerbaijan State Academy of Fine Art in 2004. The artist previously focused on painting, video, and installation, but now currently focuses on textile and sculpture. Ahmed recently had a solo exhibition with Italian gallery Montoro12 titled “Omnia Mutantur, Nihil Interit,” and is currently in the group exhibition “Crafted: Objects in Flux” at The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston until January 10, 2016. (via Booooooom)
Use your birthday to figure out your own personal knuckle tattoos!
January: DRUG February: HATE March: DICK April: REAL May: DIRT June: THUG July: CASH August: GIRL September: FIST October: SHIT November: BUTT December: KILL
1st: CITY 2nd: RIOT 3rd: FACE 4th: FEAR 5th: GRIN 6th: WOLF 7th: PISS 8th: RASH 9th: DOGS 10th: TITS 11th: LUBE 12th: SAND 13th: FIRE 14th: KIDS 15th: BIRD 16th: NERD 17th: BOYS 18th: MOMS 19th: DADS 20th: VEIN 21st: WURM 22nd: FART 23rd: TRAP 24th: MOAN 25th: HOLE 26th: KING 27th: FUCK 28th: EYES 29th: LIFE 30th: LOVE 31st: STAB
"The amendment to the city's budget would allocate $600,000 to the Social Justice Fund (SJF) through the Office of Civil Rights. SJF, in turn, would use its unique philanthropic approach—grant-making through a collective decision-making process by community members who form a "giving project"—to dole out funds to social justice groups to work on alternatives to jailing youth, including restorative justice. Of the $600,000, $100,000 would go to administrative costs, $250,000 would go toward creating new programs, and the remaining $250,000 would go toward expanding or strengthening existing programs, according to Williams."
Anti-juvenile jail activists gathered in March at Seattle University to develop a "people's plan" alternative to King County's plan to build a new detention center. That plan is finding its way into the city budget. Alex Garland
The Seattle City Council will vote next week on a measure to spend more than half a million dollars on the development of alternatives to jailing children, following through on the September passage of a resolution that established a long-term goal of moving toward zero youth detention in the city.
The measure is likely to pass, not just because it already has five co-sponsors—a majority of the city council—but because a powerful movement against racially disproportionate youth detention is pressuring the city's lawmakers to make good on their words.
About 10 percent of King County's juvenile population is black, but in 2013, black youth made up about 43 percent of those incarcerated. In 2014, that proportion shot up to 51 percent, even as the overall number of detained youth has declined.
Activists were "laughed at and ridiculed," said James Williams, a member of Ending the Prison Industrial Complex (EPIC), when they first began telling officials that no young person should be jailed. "It's the community that made this happen," he said. "People are listening to us now, when they wouldn't before."
The amendment to the city's budget would allocate $600,000 to the Social Justice Fund (SJF) through the Office of Civil Rights. SJF, in turn, would use its unique philanthropic approach—grant-making through a collective decision-making process by community members who form a "giving project"—to dole out funds to social justice groups to work on alternatives to jailing youth, including restorative justice. Of the $600,000, $100,000 would go to administrative costs, $250,000 would go toward creating new programs, and the remaining $250,000 would go toward expanding or strengthening existing programs, according to Williams.
"I think it's transformational for the community to be coming forward with anti-racist solutions, ideas, and processes that can really disrupt the school-to-prison pipeline," Williams said.
SJF's giving project will be made up of members of anti-racist community-based agencies and African-American youth. Formerly incarcerated individuals will participate, too, Williams said, in order for those who have been most impacted by the justice system to have a say in where the money goes and what it's used for.
Opposition to the county's $210 million "Children and Family Justice Center," which will replace the King County Juvenile Detention Center and is planned to begin construction next year, began in 2012, just before the voters passed a funding levy, and has ramped up since then. In a recent interview, King County Executive Dow Constantine said zero youth detention, while an admirable goal, won't come to fruition in the "foreseeable future." He questioned how opponents of youth detention would deal with children who commit heinous violent crimes and pose an immediate risk to others' safety.
"There's no kid who needs to be detained? That is objectively false," Constantine said.
Williams said the $600,000 in funding for community groups from the City of Seattle represents "how we find the answer to that question that everyone is asking. Let's create spaces for people who believe there's another way so we can find that way."
Opponents of the new juvenile detention center are also flooding Seattle's Department of Planning and Development with letters arguing against granting construction permits to the county. For example, here's attorney Sarah Lippek, who also co-chairs the Seattle Human Rights Commission:
The entire purpose of the facility is barbaric and unethical. You will find yourself standing on the wrong side of history if you abet the construction of the so-called 'Children and Family Justice Center.'
The era of mass incarceration in the United States is coming to an end—and it cannot happen soon enough. There are many seemingly well-intentioned policies that allow us to imprison our children; our people of color; our homeless people; our neighbors with mental health issues. These policies, and the bodies that promulgated them, are being internationally recognized as unethical and immoral.
Travis Mann, a University of Washington law student, weighed in with another letter: "The City of Seattle cannot have a goal or vision of zero-use of juvenile detention while giving the County authorization or permission to build a new juvenile detention center."
The King County Bar Association, meanwhile, called on its members last week to voice their support for the construction of the jail and court center. "We need to counter a write-in campaign organized by a small group of opponents of incarceration," said KCBA Executive Director Andrew Prazuch in an e-mail blast. He couldn't be reached for comment before publication.
Mann, the UW law student, criticized the association for not representing a diversity of views within the legal community.
In February, King County Superior Court Judge Susan Craighead went from calling the movement against the facility a "cancer on the body politic," to apologizing and acknowledging that the county has "not been listening well enough to our community." And in March, the county reduced the number of planned detention beds in the new facility by 25 percent, from 154 to 114, in response to what Council Member Larry Gossett called "street heat."
"I think that to the extent that any significant social change has occurred, it's been due to public pressure," Gossett said in April. "This [movement] is an example of that... It made me talk more to my colleagues and say, 'We got to do better.'"
The Seattle city council members sponsoring the budget amendment are Mike O'Brien, Tim Burgess, Jean Godden, Bruce Harrell, and Kshama Sawant. But Williams, the Ending the Prison Industrial Complex activist, warns that moving to zero detention of youth "won't work if it seems like a well-meaning idea from a couple of politicians." He explains:
Stopping locking up young people? That's a scary concept for a lot of people in the city of Seattle. That's real. People call the police when they're scared, or call for young people to be locked up when they're scared. So if we're going to do something else, and people are going to accept that there's another way of doing things, we need to make sure the community is involved in shaping that process and pushing it forward...
I submit that even people for who do horrendous acts—locking up young people, even when they make big mistakes, is not really going to help them sort through what they're going through or prepare them for success when they come out. We talk about locking up young people. They are going to come home. So locking them up is not a solution.
So let's create a space where young people who are reacting to trauma in unhealthy ways... where people who understand what they're going through can... lead them in another direction. Because locking them up, that's just like kicking the can down the road, and the community is going to deal with it later. Prison makes people numb. It makes people hard. What it takes to be respected when you're doing that time and what it takes to be successful when you come home are two completely different things. I want to stop sending kids down that road and create a space that's more therapeutic and healing.
We can't just expect the community... to work on this after work or in between jobs and whatever and put together this wonderful proposal while the funding and the resources are going somewhere else. So this is it. This is how we find the answer to that question that everyone is asking. Let's create spaces for people who believe there's another way so we can find that way.
regarded as a male tree because of the fact it produces pollen—unlike female yews, which produce distinctive seed-bearing red berries.
But botanists have spoken of their surprise after finding three red berries on a branch of the yew this year - in signs at least part of the male tree is becoming female.
It's reportedly "not unheard of for yews—and other conifers that have different sexes—to switch sex." But an expert says, "Normally this switch occurs on part of the crown rather than the entire tree changing sex."
In the greatest environmental disaster of the 21st Century (so far), Indonesia has been blotted out by smoke. And the media.
By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 30th October 2015
I’ve often wondered how the media would respond when eco-apocalypse struck. I pictured the news programmes producing brief, sensational reports, while failing to explain why it was happening or how it might be stopped. Then they would ask their financial correspondents how the disaster affected share prices, before turning to the sport. As you can probably tell, I don’t have an ocean of faith in the industry for which I work.
What I did not expect was that they would ignore it.
A great tract of the Earth is on fire. It looks as you might imagine hell to be. The air has turned ochre: visibility in some cities has been reduced to 30 metres. Children are being prepared for evacuation in warships; already some have choked to death. Species are going up in smoke at an untold rate. It is almost certainly the greatest environmental disaster of the 21st Century – so far.
And the media? It’s talking about the dress the Duchess of Cambridge wore to the James Bond premiere, Donald Trump’s idiocy du jour and who got eliminated from the Halloween episode of Dancing with the Stars. The great debate of the week, dominating the news across much of the world? Sausages: are they really so bad for your health?
What I’m discussing is a barbeque on a different scale. Fire is raging across the 5000-kilometre length of Indonesia. It is surely, on any objective assessment, more important than anything else taking place today. And it shouldn’t require a columnist, writing in the middle of a newspaper, to say so. It should be on everyone’s front page.
It is hard to convey the scale of this inferno, but here’s a comparison that might help: it is currently producing more carbon dioxide than the US economy. In three weeks the fires have released more CO2 than the annual emissions of Germany.
But that doesn’t really capture it. This catastrophe cannot be measured only in parts per million. The fires are destroying treasures as precious and irreplaceable as the archaeological remains being levelled by Isis. Orang utans, clouded leopards, sun bears, gibbons, the Sumatran rhinoceros and Sumatran tiger, these are among the threatened species being driven from much of their range by the flames. But there are thousands, perhaps millions, more.
One of the burning islands is West Papua, a nation that has been illegally occupied by Indonesia since 1963. I spent six months there when I was 24, investigating some of the factors that have led to the current disaster. At the time, it was a wonderland, rich with endemic species in every swamp and valley. Who knows how many of those have vanished in the past few weeks? This week I have pored and wept over photos of places I loved, that have now been reduced to ash.
Nor do the greenhouse gas emissions capture the impact on the people of these lands. After the last great conflagration, in 1997, there was a missing cohort in Indonesia of 15,000 children under the age of three, attributed to air pollution. This, it seems, is worse. The surgical masks being distributed across the nation will do almost nothing to protect those living in a sunless smog. Members of parliament in Kalimantan (Indonesian Borneo) have had to wear face masks during debates. The chamber is so foggy that they must have difficulty recognising each other.
It’s not just the trees that are burning. It is the land itself. Much of the forest sits on great domes of peat. When the fires penetrate the earth, they smoulder for weeks, sometimes months, releasing clouds of methane, carbon monoxide, ozone and exotic gases like ammonium cyanide. The plumes extend for hundreds of miles, causing diplomatic conflicts with neighbouring countries.
Why is this happening? Indonesia’s forests have been fragmented for decades by timber and farming companies. Canals have been cut through the peat to drain and dry it. Plantation companies move in to destroy what remains of the forest to plant monocultures of pulpwood, timber and palm oil. The easiest way to clear the land is to torch it. Every year, this causes disasters. But in an extreme El Niño year like this one, we have a perfect formula for environmental catastrophe.
The current president, Joko Widodo, is – or wants to be – a democrat. But he presides over a nation in which fascism and corruption flourish. As Joshua Oppenheimer’s documentary The Act of Killing shows, leaders of the death squads that helped murder around a million people during Suharto’s terror in the 1960s, with the approval of the West, have since prospered through other forms of organised crime, including illegal deforestation.
They are supported by a paramilitary organisation with three million members, called Pancasila Youth. With its orange camo-print uniforms, scarlet berets, sentimental gatherings and schmaltzy music, it looks like a fascist militia as imagined by JG Ballard. There has been no truth, no reconciliation; the mass killers are still greeted as heroes and feted on television. In some places, especially West Papua, the political murders continue.
Those who commit crimes against humanity don’t hesitate to commit crimes against nature. Though Joko Widodo seems to want to stop the burning, his reach is limited. His government’s policies are contradictory: among them are new subsidies for palm oil production that make further burning almost inevitable. Some plantation companies, prompted by their customers, have promised to stop destroying the rainforest. Government officials have responded angrily, arguing that such restraint impedes the country’s development. That smoke blotting out the nation, which has already cost it some $30 billion? That, apparently, is development.
Our leverage is weak, but there are some things we can do. Some companies using palm oil have made visible efforts to reform their supply chains; but others seem to move slowly and opaquely. Starbucks, PepsiCo, Kraft Heinz and Unilever are examples. Don’t buy their products until they change.
On Monday, Widodo was in Washington, meeting Barack Obama. Obama, the official communiqué recorded, “welcomed President Widodo’s recent policy actions to combat and prevent forest fires”. The ecopalypse taking place as they conferred, that makes a mockery of these commitments, wasn’t mentioned.
Governments ignore issues when the media ignores them. And the media ignores them because … well there’s a question with a thousand answers, many of which involve power. But one reason is the complete failure of perspective in a deskilled industry dominated by corporate press releases, photo ops and fashion shoots, where everyone seems to be waiting for everyone else to take a lead. The media makes a collective non-decision to treat this catastrophe as a non-issue, and we all carry on as if it’s not happening.
At the climate summit in Paris in December, the media, trapped within the intergovernmental bubble of abstract diplomacy and manufactured drama, will cover the negotiations almost without reference to what is happening elsewhere. The talks will be removed to a realm with which we have no moral contact. And, when the circus moves on, the silence will resume. Is there any other industry that serves its customers so badly?
In case you haven't watched a train wreck in a while.
Need to watch a train crash into a train station? Read some comments!
Most neuroscientists believe that the brain learns by rewiring itself—by changing the strength of connections between brain cells, or neurons. But experimental results published last year, from a lab at Lund University in Sweden, hint that we need to change our approach. They suggest the brain learns in a way more analogous to that of a computer: It encodes information into molecules inside neurons and reads out that information for use in computational operations.
Gary Waters/Getty Images
With a computer scientist, Adam King, I co-authored a book, Memory and the Computational Brain: Why Cognitive Science Will Transform Neuroscience. We argued that well-established results in cognitive science and computer science imply that computation in the brain must resemble computation in a computer in just this way. So, of course, I am fascinated by these results.
A computer does not learn by rewiring itself; it learns by encoding facts into sequences of ‘0s’ and ‘1s’ called bit strings, which it stores in addressable registers. Registers are strings of tiny switches. When a switch is set one way, it physically represents ‘1’; when set the other way, it physically represents ‘0’. The registers in a computer’s memory are numbered, and the numbers… Read More…
Usually when droughts occur and reservoir water levels recede, it’s not a good thing. But a certain drought in Southern Mexico is attracting a lot of enthusiasm. Water levels in the Nezahualcoyotl reservoir have dropped by 82 ft (25 meters), revealing the remains of a mid-16th century colonial church. Known as the Temple of Santiago, the structure was erected by Dominican friars but then abandoned in the 1770s because of plagues.
The 48-ft tall church became a relic of memory in 1966 when the construction of a dam submerged it under water. Since then it’s only emerged twice: once in 2002 and again, now. As it did in 2002, the church has become a popular destination for tourists and local fisherman have been taking spectators out on boats to get a close-up view of the rare occurrence.
“The people celebrated,” recalls a local fisherman, of the last time the church emerged out of the water. “They came to eat, to hang out, to do business. I sold them fried fish.” If the drought continues, water levels could get low enough for people to walk inside the church.
Why does a Dre/Snoop song always sound good in a hood internet mix? Magical.
All together, in your best DJ Khaled voice: ANOTHER ONE. From us 2 u, here's The Mixtape Volume Nine, a nonstop mix of the best bootleg jams that we've assembled over the last year or so. Enjoy it, dance to it, etc.
1. Blackstreet x Ratatat | No Chrome 2. Jidenna ft Kendrick Lamar x Major Lazer & DJ Snake | Classic Lean 3. Tinashe x Oliver | 2 Years On 4. Big Sean x The Knocks | I Don't Fuck With Classics 5. Dr. Dre ft Snoop Dogg x Dillon Francis | Still B.R.U.K. 6. Outkast x Madeon | Being Rosa 7. Rihanna x Django Django | Bitch Better Have My Lighter 8. Chedda Da Connect x ODESZA | Flicka Da Sun 9. The Weeknd x Daft Punk | Can't Feel The World 10. O.T. Genasis x Fujiya & Miyagi | You Are The Baking Soda To My CoCo 11. Rae Sremmurd x Caribou | Our Type 12. Usher ft Migos x Tame Impala | Still Letting It Happen 13. Nicki Minaj x Galantis | Anaconda Jelly 14. Chromeo x Wave Racer ft B▲by | Flash Of Jealousy 15. D.R.A.M. x Jamie xx | Cha Cha Nearer 16. ILoveMakonnen ft Drake x Penguin Prison | Calling Up On A Tuesday 17. Wiz Khalifa x Hudson Mohawke | We Dem Chimes 18. J. Cole x Sam Gellaitry | Apparent Reflectionz 19. Kendrick Lamar x Taylor Swift | Backseat Shake Off 20. Nelly x Jai Wolf | Country Summer 21. The Notorious B.I.G. x Flume | Some Poppas 22. The Persuasions x Dr. Dre | Different Times 23. Jay-Z x Mura Masa | Lovesick Izzo 24. Freeway & Girl Talk x Tycho & Com Truise | Yeah I'm Awake 25. Omarion ft Jhené Aiko x Neon Indian | Post-Annie 26. Mark Morrison x Ratatat | Return Of The Tach 27. Beyoncé x Porter Robinson ft Amy Millan | DivinXO
Chicago-based photographer Freddy Fabris has worked for years on commercial projets for clients like Leo Burnett, Saatchi & Saatchi, and Ogilvy & Mather, but it was a recent decision to focus on a personal project exploded into a bevy of awards and accolades. Fabris, who has a background in painting, had long been ruminating about how to pay tribute to the works of classic painters like Rembrandt and Da Vinci using his camera. While accompanying a friend to a cluttered auto repair shop, inspiration suddenly struck. Fabris would pose the mechanics in the style of classical portraits, and in tableaus reminiscent of Philippe de Champaigne’s The Last Supper and Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam. As he shared the idea with colleagues and collaborators, everyone quickly jumped on board and the Renaissance series was born.
While the photos are admittedly absurd, the staggering amount of craft and skill present in each shot is undeniable. From the careful composition of bodies to the striking use of light to illuminate the face of each subject, the portraits in particular are strangely dignifying. The photos have since won the 1st Place International Color Award, the One Eyeland Silver Award, and an APA Conceptual Award. You can explore more of Fabris’ work on his website.
By Ralph Nader In college, Economics 101 is often described as the social science discipline that deals with the production, distribution and consumption of goods and services. MIT Economist Paul Samuelson liked to focus on scarcity, or more specifically, the … Continue reading →
A hat tip to my cousin in Barcelona for sending me the link to this video, which is a European production aired by the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation.
This is a documentary that examines the history and present implementation of "planned obsolescence." It begins with the worldwide Phoebus cartel that controlled light bulb manufacturing in the early 20th century, then looks at computer printers - at least some of which are manufactured with a chip that locks up the printer after X number of pages are printed.
Probably not 1 in 100 readers of this blog will have the time to view an hour-long program, but I encourage those interested to at least skip ahead to see the effects of global e-waste dumping and Ghana and listen to some of the arguments for "de-growth."
Fascinating new lines of research suggest that we are good people, tolerating bad things.
By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 14th October 2015
Do you find yourself thrashing against the tide of human indifference and selfishness? Are you oppressed by the sense that while you care, others don’t? That because of humankind’s callousness, civilisation and the rest of life on earth are basically stuffed? If so, you are not alone. But neither are you right.
A study by the Common Cause Foundation, due to be published next month, reveals two transformative findings. The first is that a large majority of the 1000 people they surveyed – 74% – identify more strongly with unselfish values than with selfish values. This means that they are more interested in helpfulness, honesty, forgiveness and justice than in money, fame, status and power. The second is that a similar majority – 78% – believes others to be more selfish than they really are. In other words, we have made a terrible mistake about other people’s minds.
The revelation that humanity’s dominant characteristic is, er, humanity will come as no surprise to those who have followed recent developments in behavioural and social sciences. People, these findings suggest, are basically and inherently nice.
A review article in the journal Frontiers in Psychology points out that our behaviour towards unrelated members of our species is “spectacularly unusual when compared to other animals”. While chimpanzees might share food with members of their own group, though usually only after being plagued by aggressive begging, they tend to react violently towards strangers. Chimpanzees, the authors note, behave more like the Homo economicus of neoliberal mythology than people do.
Humans, by contrast, are ultra-social: possessed of an enhanced capacity for empathy, an unparalleled sensitivity to the needs of others, a unique level of concern about their welfare and an ability to create moral norms that generalise and enforce these tendencies.
Such traits emerge so early in our lives that they appear to be innate. In other words, it seems that we have evolved to be this way. By the age of 14 months, children begin to help each other, for example by handing over objects another child can’t reach. By the time they are two, they start sharing things they value. By the age of three, they start to protest against other people’s violation of moral norms.
A fascinating paper in the journal Infancy reveals that reward has nothing to do with it. Three to five-year-olds are less likely to help someone a second time if they have been rewarded for doing it the first time. In other words, extrinsic rewards appear to undermine the intrinsic desire to help. (Parents, economists and government ministers, please note). The study also discovered that children of this age are more inclined to help people if they perceive them to be suffering, and that they want to see someone helped whether or not they do it themselves. This suggests that they are motivated by a genuine concern for other people’s welfare, rather than by a desire to look good. And it seems to be baked in.
Why? How would the hard logic of evolution produce such outcomes? This is the subject of heated debate. One school of thought contends that altruism is a logical response to living in small groups of closely related people, and evolution has failed to catch up with the fact that we now live in large groups, mostly composed of strangers. Another argues that large groups containing high numbers of altruists will outcompete large groups which contain high numbers of selfish people. A third hypothesis insists that a tendency towards collaboration enhances your own survival, regardless of the group in which you might find yourself. Whatever the mechanism might be, the outcome should be a cause of celebration.
So why do we retain such a dim view of human nature? Partly, perhaps, for historical reasons. Philosophers from Hobbes to Rousseau, Malthus to Schopenhauer, whose understanding of human evolution was limited to the Book of Genesis, produced persuasive, influential and catastrophically mistaken accounts of “the state of nature” (our innate, ancestral characteristics). Their speculations on this subject should long ago have been parked on a high shelf marked “historical curiosities”. But somehow they still seem to exert a grip on our minds.
Another problem is that – almost by definition – many of those who dominate public life have a peculiar fixation on fame, money and power. Their extreme self-centredness places them in a small minority, but, because we see them everywhere, we assume that they are representative of humanity.
The media worships wealth and power, and sometimes launches furious attacks on people who behave altruistically. In the Daily Mail last month, Richard Littlejohn described Yvette Cooper’s decision to open her home to refugees as proof that “noisy emoting has replaced quiet intelligence” (quiet intelligence being one of his defining qualities). “It’s all about political opportunism and humanitarian posturing,” he theorised, before boasting that he doesn’t “give a damn” about the suffering of people fleeing Syria. I note with interest the platform given to people who speak and write as if they are psychopaths.
The consequences of an undue pessimism about human nature are momentous. As the Common Cause Foundation’s survey and interviews reveal, those who have the bleakest view of humanity are the least likely to vote. What’s the point, they reason, if everyone else votes only in their own selfish interests? Interestingly, and alarmingly for people of my political persuasion, it also discovered that that liberals tend to possess a dimmer view of other people than conservatives do. Do you want to grow the electorate? Do you want progressive politics to flourish? Then spread the word that other people are broadly well-intentioned.
Misanthropy grants a free pass to the grasping, power-mad minority who tend to dominate our political systems. If only we knew how unusual they are, we might be more inclined to shun them and seek better leaders. It contributes to the real danger we confront: not a general selfishness, but a general passivity. Billions of decent people tut and shake their heads as the world burns, immobilised by the conviction that no one else cares.
You are not alone. The world is with you, even if it has not found its voice.
The Color of Debt: How Collection Suits Squeeze Black Neighborhoods
Our first-of-its-kind analysis shows that the suits are far more common in black communities than white ones.
by Paul Kiel and Annie Waldman, ProPublica
Reporter Paul Kiel was featured in a segment of the radio program This American Life. Listen to the story of how racial disparities in debt collection lawsuits impacted an entire neighborhood.
On a recent Saturday afternoon, the mayor of Jennings, a St. Louis suburb of about 15,000, settled in before a computer in the empty city council chambers. Yolonda Fountain Henderson, 50, was elected last spring as the city’s first black mayor.
On the screen was a list of every debt collection lawsuit against a resident of her city, at least 4,500 in just five years. Henderson asked to see her own street. On her block of 16 modest ranch-style homes, lawsuits had been filed against the occupants of eight. “That’s my neighbor across the street,” she said, pointing to one line on the screen.
And then she saw her own suit. Henderson, a single mother, fell behind on her sewer bill after losing her job a few years ago, and the utility successfully sued her. That judgment was listed, as well as how one day the company seized $382 from her credit union account — all she had, but not enough to pay off the debt.
As the lines of suits scrolled by on the screen, Henderson shook her head in disbelief, swinging her dangling, heart-shaped earrings.
“They’re just suing all of us,” she said.
That’s not only true in Jennings. The story is the same down the road in Normandy and in every other black community nearby. In fact, when ProPublica attempted to measure, for the first time, the prevalence of judgments stemming from these suits, a clear pattern emerged: they were massed in black neighborhoods.
The disparity was not merely because black families earn less than white families. Our analysis of five years of court judgments from three metropolitan areas — St. Louis, Chicago and Newark — showed that even accounting for income, the rate of judgments was twice as high in mostly black neighborhoods as it was in mostly white ones.
These findings could suggest racial bias by lenders or collectors. But we found that there is another explanation: That generations of discrimination have left black families with grossly fewer resources to draw on when they come under financial pressure.
Over the past year, ProPublica has investigated a little-known but pervasive shift in the way debt is collected in America: Companies now routinely use the courts to pursue millions of people over even small consumer debts. With the power granted by a court judgment, collectors can seize a chunk of a debtor’s pay. The highest rates of garnishment are among workers who earn between $25,000 and $40,000, but the numbers are nearly as high for those who earn even less.
Despite their prevalence, these suits remain remarkably hidden, even to people in the communities most burdened by them.
Jennings, a suburb in north St. Louis County, has shifted since the 1960s from almost entirely white to 90 percent black. Above, a man paints his fence and children play at a block party. (Edwin Torres/ProPublica)
In the city of St. Louis and surrounding St. Louis County, where Jennings lies, only about a quarter of the population lives in neighborhoods where most residents are black. But over half of court judgments were concentrated in these neighborhoods.
Armed with these judgments, plaintiffs — typically debt buyers, banks, hospitals, utilities, and auto and high-cost lenders — have seized at least $34 million from residents of St. Louis’ mostly black neighborhoods through suits filed between 2008 and 2012, ProPublica’s analysis found.
April Kuehnhoff, an attorney at the National Consumer Law Center, said that the analysis raised “crucial questions about how racial disparities are entering the debt collection system and what we can do to eliminate these disparities.” The findings, she said, should spur lawmakers to reform overly punitive federal and state collections laws.
Collection suits — typically over smaller amounts like credit card debt — fly across the desks of local judges, sometimes hundreds in a single day. Defendants usually don’t make it to court, and when they do, rarely have an attorney.
For those who do show up, the outcome isn’t all that different. In Missouri, most judgments resulted in the plaintiff attempting garnishment, whether the defendant appeared in court or not, according to ProPublica’s analysis.
In Jennings, which since the 1960s has shifted from almost entirely white to 90 percent black, the suits are unrelentingly common. Between 2008 and 2012, there was more than one lawsuit for every four residents. And yet, this fact astounded residents when they heard it, because it is a facet of life that most keep private. Parents hide it from their children, and neighbors never think to discuss it.
The typical household income in Jennings is about $28,000, an income level at which families spend, on average, all of their income on basic necessities, federal survey data shows. Each paycheck must be carefully apportioned with the most vital costs — mortgage or rent, food and utilities — prioritized.
A garnishment hits this kind of household budget like a bomb. Federal law and most state laws protect only the poorest of the poor from having their wages seized, otherwise allowing plaintiffs to seize up to a quarter of a worker’s after-tax pay. If that paycheck is deposited in a bank, that and other money in the account can be seized to pay down the debt. When garnishment protections do exist, the burden is usually on debtors to figure out if and how the laws protect their assets.
The City Council chambers of Jennings, Missouri. In addition to the mayor, five of the eight sitting city council members have been sued over a debt. (Edwin Torres/ProPublica)
In Jennings, the struggles with debt compound other hardships common to black communities in St. Louis and elsewhere: conflicts and tension with police, and a municipal court system that has jailed residents over unpaid traffic tickets. To Jennings’ northwest lies the city of Ferguson, where the killing of teenager Michael Brown by a police officer last year sparked protests and rioting.
The Rev. Starsky Wilson is co-chair of the Ferguson Commission, a panel created by Missouri’s governor to study the underlying social and economic conditions behind the unrest. Lack of economic mobility is a key issue, he said, and there are two sides of the coin. Improvements in education, job training and wages can push people up the ladder. But equally important, he said, are the forces that drag them down.
“If you’re still stuck in this web of indebtedness, you’re not going to be economically mobile,” he said.
Experts cite many reasons why blacks might face more lawsuits, foremost among them the immense gap in wealth between blacks and whites in the U.S. It’s a gap that extends back to the institution of slavery and, more recently, to 20th century policies that promoted white homeownership while restricting it for blacks.
In Jennings, that is a reality felt even in City Hall, where, along with the mayor, five of the eight sitting city council members (seven of whom are black) have been sued over a debt — although none of them knew about their shared plight until ProPublica shared its data.
“I’m in a generational hole,” said Miranda Jones, 41, a Jennings city council member and executive with Better Family Life, a St. Louis-based nonprofit devoted to supporting black families. She and her husband have been sued three times in recent years over debts, once resulting in the seizure of $800 from her bank account.
“Coming from East St. Louis from a poor family, I started off in debt,” she said. She managed to transcend those circumstances to attain a college degree, but that accomplishment came with a load of student loan debt.
“I’m trying to break the cycle for my kids, and it’s very difficult,” she said.
Walk the quiet streets of Jennings and ask residents how they came to be sued over a debt, and they will often tell you that there came a moment when they had to make a financial choice.
For Judy Harvey, a 64-year-old retiree who’s lived in the same two-bedroom home with her husband for 20 years, it happened after her hours were scaled back at work. For Gladys Clayborn, 59, who lives in a house around the corner, it was heart trouble that led to major surgery and permanent disability.
However it happened, they found themselves behind on their bills, and they needed to decide which to pay.
“When you rank those bills, you’re definitely going to put those things that are essential to health and safety — that you can’t function without on a day-to-day basis — first,” said Jones, the council member.
Sylvester and Gladys Clayborn sit in their kitchen as their granddaughters and great niece play nearby. The couple fell into debt when Gladys was permanently disabled after heart surgery. (Edwin Torres/ProPublica)
Sometimes it’s credit card bills that get pushed to the back of the line. Sometimes it’s an old medical bill or a loan with a 100 percent interest rate. And quite often in Jennings and other black communities in St. Louis, it’s the sewer bill.
The Metropolitan St. Louis Sewer District provides service to almost all of the city of St. Louis and the surrounding county. The bill is not usually a large one — the average monthly rate in 2012 was about $29 for a single family home — but MSD, unlike other utilities like electricity, lacks the power to shut off service to customers who fall far behind.
In 2010, MSD decided too many customers weren’t paying their bills, so it dramatically increased its collection efforts. It went from filing about 3,000 suits in 2010 to filing about 11,000 in 2012, more than any other company that year.
Most of MSD’s customers are white, but the suits were largely filed against residents of black communities like Jennings. ProPublica examined MSD’s court judgments against residents of lower- and middle-income neighborhoods and found that MSD obtained judgments in the mostly black neighborhoods at a rate about four times higher than in the mostly white ones.
When MSD sues, the debts can be quite small, even as little as $350. And the size of those debts may help explain why MSD files so many more suits in black neighborhoods.
ProPublica’s analysis of court data for Newark and Chicago found that the debts that led to suits in mostly black neighborhoods were, on average, about 20 to 25 percent smaller than the debts of residents of mostly white ones.
In the Newark area, for instance, when a company sued a resident of a middle-income white neighborhood, the average balance was $3,466; in a black neighborhood, the average was $2,628.
This suggests white consumers are, in general, better able to resolve smaller debts.
Latanya Graves is a 38-year-old single mother of three who lives in Jennings. Sitting in her living room last August as her children tried to cook pancakes and sent smoke throughout her home, Graves remembered the desperation that set her on the path to having her wages garnished.
After a period of unemployment, she’d tried to save her home from foreclosure by taking out loans at sky-high interest rates — the only kind she could get. And with other more critical bills to pay, she’d let her MSD bill slide.
In Three Cities, Collection Suits Cluster in Black Neighborhoods
ProPublica’s analysis found that majority black neighborhoods were hit twice as hard by the court judgments as majority white neighborhoods, even when adjusting for differences in income. Hover to see the correlation between court judgments and majority black neighborhoods.
Credit: Al Shaw and Annie Waldman/ProPublica
St. Louis
Median Income →
Judgments per 100 →
Chicago
Median Income →
Judgments per 100 →
Newark
Median Income →
Judgments per 100 →
People in her position often don’t have other options, Graves said. “Hoping that if they don’t pay this bill for a few months and it doesn’t get cut off,” she said, “they could see that as a safety net for them.”
Later, Graves’ choices resulted in lawsuits: She fell hopelessly behind on the loans when she was laid off from her clerical job a second time and didn’t see a way to catch up on her sewer bill. Then the suits led to garnishments. With the interest continuing to run on her high-cost loans, the debts had grown from hundreds of dollars to thousands.
For months at a time in 2011 and then again in 2012, a quarter of her pay was gone.
“It’s a big burden on your shoulders,” Graves said. “You go to bed thinking about, ‘How am I going to pay these bills? How am I going to do this?’ You wake up thinking about it. You go to work thinking about it.”
Earning about $15 an hour at the time, she had to scramble, she remembered, to get to the end of the month. She worked as much overtime as possible. Her parents helped out by buying groceries.
“It brings back a lot of memories, a lot of bad memories,” she said, wiping away tears.
Lance LeComb, MSD’s spokesman, said the company had no demographic data on its customers and treated them all the same. The racial disparity in its suits, he said, is the result of “broader ills in our community that are outside of our scope and exceed our abilities and authority to do anything about.”
MSD, he said, has attempted to address those ills by hiring more minority workers. The utility is also willing to work with delinquent customers and “be as generous as possible with repayment terms.” But it has a duty to pursue debts to the fullest extent, he said. “We owe it to all our customers to keep our rates as low as possible and to ensure that they are treated fairly and equitably.”
The utility also has to be aggressive because it needs to raise revenue, he said, primarily to pay for the billions of dollars of infrastructure improvements required to bring the sewer system up to environmental standards. The average 2015 monthly bill is about twice what it was in 2003.
MSD does have a program to reduce payments for lower-income customers. According to an estimate released by MSD earlier this year, about 39,000 customers are eligible. But as of June, only about 2,300 were enrolled. MSD is “not satisfied with this level of enrollment,” LeComb said.
MSD is far from the only company flooding St. Louis courts with lawsuits over small debts. In Missouri and across the country, debt buyers are a common presence in local courtrooms. The companies buy debts for pennies on the dollar and then try to recover what they can from debtors.
The industry began filing suits in large numbers in the early 2000s, and in all three of the cities ProPublica studied, debt buyers filed the most suits of any type of plaintiffs between 2008 and 2012. In the Newark area, more than half of the 66,000 court judgments won against residents of mostly black neighborhoods stemmed from debt buyer lawsuits.
Debt buyers primarily buy defaulted credit card accounts, but the data shows that they routinely sue over smaller balances than banks do. In the Chicago and Newark areas, debt buyers filed suits with an average balance about 30 percent smaller than the average suit by a major bank.
Perhaps as a result, debt buyer lawsuits were far more numerous in black communities, ProPublica found. In Newark, for example, the rate of judgments was about twice as high among middle-income, mostly black neighborhoods than among the middle-income, mostly white ones.
Jan Stieger, executive director of the debt buyers’ trade group DBA International, said debt buyers don’t know the race of debtors when they buy accounts. Any racial gap in the pattern of suits, she said, is not the result of debt buyer behavior. And debt buyers typically try other methods, such as collection calls, before suing.
“Truly, nobody is treated differently in this process,” she said.
The clients at Beyond Housing, a St. Louis nonprofit that provides assistance to low-income families, are roughly half white and half black. But the staff has noticed a dispiriting difference: white clients are far more likely to have some kind of support to draw on, whether it’s their own assets or help from a family member.
For black clients, “so much of that kind of help has been already tapped out,” said Linda Ingram, the manager of the foreclosure intervention department. The lack of resources makes it harder for black clients to extricate themselves from debt. It also means the most stable members of a family can easily get overstretched.
Low- and Middle-Income Black Families: Less Wealth, Less Help
Federal survey data shows that there is a wide gap between the financial resources of white and black families, even when examining families with similar income.
White
Black
Median Net Worth
$11,968
$1,392
$55,088
$8,414
$101,005
$22,852
$0-$20K
$20-$40K
$40-$60K
Household Income
Liquid Assets (Available Cash)
$488
$104
$2,010
$654
$3,862
$1,943
$0-$20K
$20-$40K
$40-$60K
Household Income
Ability to Borrow $3,000 From Family or Friends in an Emergency
46%
27%
62%
42%
71%
51%
$0-$20K
$20-$40K
$40-$60K
Household Income
Source: Federal Reserve, 2013 Survey of Consumer Finances, ProPublica analysis.
“I can’t tell you the number of times I have a 55- to 65-year-old African-American woman who can’t make her mortgage payment because she’s helped other members of the family to the detriment of keeping herself afloat,” Ingram said.
By any measure, black households are worse off financially than white ones. They make, on average, far less money. But more pernicious is the vastly larger gap in wealth between whites and blacks — a divide that is wider than it was 30 years ago.
The source of this disparity is as deep as the nation’s history, said William A. Darity Jr., a professor of economics and public policy at Duke University. And addressing it is not as straightforward as improving employment or education among blacks.
It stems largely from “differences in the capacity of one generation of parents to transfer their resources to the next,” Darity said. “And those differences are strongly associated with race.”
Black families have fewer assets like homes and cars, as well as less cash stashed away. The gap remains even among families toward the lower end of the income scale: According to our analysis of the Federal Reserve’s 2013 Survey of Consumer Finances, the typical white family with annual income between $20,000 and $40,000 had about $2,010 in liquid assets, while the typical black family in that range had just $650.
Low-income families generally do “very, very well given the very meager resources and high expenses they have,” said Michael Collins, faculty director of the Center for Financial Security at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “But there comes a point in time when there’s just nothing there. There’s no more income, there’s no more savings, and the options are pretty limited, because you don’t have the social network, you don’t have the legal and other resources available to you to find a solution.”
Dora Byrd, 70, lives in Northwoods, a suburb that borders Jennings to the southwest, with her husband, Alphonso Byrd, 81. The couple married late in life after being introduced by their children. They are both retired after long careers, she as a domestic employee and he as a mechanic.
They live in the home Alphonso Byrd bought in 1968, when, he said, he was the first black man to move onto the block.
“And then signs started going up like popcorn,” he said. The area is now 95 percent black.
Both have extended themselves to help their children. Alphonso Byrd put his name on his daughter’s house when she was faced with losing it to foreclosure, he said. Dora Byrd allowed her disabled daughter to move into her former home after she moved in with her husband.
Both were sued by MSD when the sewer bills on those houses went unpaid.
In Dora Byrd’s case, MSD went after her bank account. She’d been living primarily off of a monthly $600 Social Security check. It’s illegal for federal benefits to be garnished, but at the time, she had both a checking and a savings account, and only the money electronically deposited into her checking account was automatically protected.
As a result, MSD was able to seize $645 from her savings account, more than a third of the money in her accounts, according to bank records.
The money in the savings account “was just a little something we put away if something was to come up,” she said. With her reserves drained, Byrd said, the following months were tight.
LeComb, the MSD spokesman, said that the utility does not know the age of its customers, and that if Byrd had filed a claim in court stating that the funds were exempt, the garnishment would have been terminated.
Near the end of one street in Jennings sits a neat brick bungalow, similar to others lining the block. Its windows look out on a shady tree and a patch of grass just large enough to be called a lawn.
Until 2012, Cori Winfield lived here with her four kids. In 2013, Rosalyn Turner moved in with two of her children. The two women do not know each another, but they are connected by more than just the house: They have both been sued by a local subprime auto lender Midwest Acceptance.
And they have both learned a harsh lesson: Through court judgments, companies like Midwest can pursue debts for decades, following debtors to each promising new job, each new savings account.
Since 2012, Cori Winfield has had her wages garnished over an unpaid car loan. Because the debt continues to run at an annual interest rate of 30 percent, she has already paid more than twice of what she owed when the car was repossessed in 2010. (Edwin Torres/ProPublica)
Back in 2009, Winfield, 38, visited Allstar Motors, a used car lot, after her car disappeared from her street one morning. Believing it stolen, she’d filed a police report. It wasn’t until years later, she said, that she found out the car had actually been towed because of unpaid parking tickets.
When she was a teenager, she’d saved up from her job at White Castle to buy her first car, a feat, she said, that taught her “if I can do that, I can do everything else I put my mind to.”
But this time, she’d had no chance to save. Getting to work, taking her kids where they needed to go — that required a car, and she’d only put away a couple hundred dollars.
At Allstar, she found a 2002 Dodge Caravan for $8,000, more than she was used to paying for a car. Her credit was spotty, so the loan the dealer offered her was steep, too: it came at a 30 percent annual interest rate. But Winfield thought she couldstretch to make the $327 monthly payment.
It was a hopeful time in Winfield’s life. The year before, she’d started a new job at a brokerage services firm and had already seen a bump in pay from $12 to $13 an hour. In the fall of 2009, she and her husband, who worked as a janitor, bought the brick bungalow, their first home. She’d managed to pay off her student loans in order to qualify for the mortgage, she said. It was a landmark accomplishment.
In 2009, Cori Winfield took out an $8,240 loan to buy a car at Allstar Motors in St. Louis. The car was repossessed in 2010 and auctioned for $3,050. Her wages are being garnished to pay off the remaining amount, plus interest. (Dan Gill for ProPublica)
But one year later, the minivan payments proved to be too much after all, and the lender, Midwest Acceptance, repossessed the vehicle. She and her husband separated, and she couldn’t afford the mortgage on her own. The couple declared Chapter 13 bankruptcy, a move that at least put off foreclosure. But they defaulted on the bankruptcy plan payments after about five months.
In that, they were typical of black debtors. Most Chapter 13 filers default and thus retain their debts. But there’s evidence that black debtors are often steered to Chapter 13 plans even though filing through Chapter 7, which is less costly and can provide near-immediate relief, would be the better choice. A 2012 study found blacks were twice as likely to file under Chapter 13 as other filers.
Robert Lawless, a law professor at the University of Illinois who was one of the authors of the 2012 study, said the racial skew in bankruptcy filings should be seen in conjunction with the disparity in debt collection lawsuits. ProPublica’s analysis, “along with our study and many others, shows that the civil justice system is not working well for lower-income blacks,” he said.
The day Winfield’s bankruptcy was dismissed, Midwest Acceptance filed suit against her. She owed almost $5,000, the company claimed, for a car she no longer had. Midwest had auctioned off the Dodge Caravan for $3,050 — less than half what she’d paid for it just 18 months earlier — but added $1,100 in fees from the repossession to her debt. And the balance was still running at the high interest rate.
Now without a car, the whole family took the bus, which meant at least three hours a day in transit for Winfield.
Her priorities became basic: keeping the gas on, finding a place to live, saving for another car. Amid these demands, the debt to Midwest fell by the wayside. But by securing a judgment against Winfield, Midwest ensured that the company would get its money whether it fit in her budget or not.
Rosalyn Turner stands on the doorstep of her home in Jennings. Turner was sued over an unpaid sewer bill that was her landlord’s responsibility and an unpaid car loan she took out ten years prior. “It’s hard not to go crazy and stress out, you know,” she said. (Dan Gill for ProPublica)
Turner rented Winfield’s old home in 2013, moving in with her teenage daughter and adult son, who is mentally disabled and requires special care. By that point, the house had been snatched up for $14,000 by a California-based private equity firm that invests in distressed real estate.
Turner, 43, had been forced to move quickly after a plumbing problem at her previous rental in Ferguson. Raw sewage flooded the basement, ruining her possessions and snuffing out the pilot light on the boiler, which left the family without hot water.
“That was the worst time in my life. I used to cry myself to sleep,” she said.
After her landlord failed to fix the problem, Turner decided to break her lease. But before she could, she was sued by MSD. She owed over $2,000 in unpaid sewer bills for the Ferguson home, the utility claimed.
Turner’s lease clearly stated that the sewer bills were the landlord’s responsibility. The bills had been sent to him, not her. But when she faxed a copy of her lease to MSD’s attorney and called to explain, she was told that MSD could sue her anyway, since she was listed on the account, she said.
Turner didn’t see how she could afford an attorney, nor did she see a point in appearing in court. MSD received a default judgment against her.
Six Ways to Reform the Legal System for Debt Collection
Laws governing debt collection lawsuits and garnishments are often antiquated, poorly thought out and place the burden on debtors to know their rights. Below are ideas for reforms.
1. Lower How Much Can Be Taken from Debtors’ Wages
The federal law limiting wage seizures to 25 percent of after-tax income passed in 1968. Lawmakers appear to have pulled this percentage out of a hat. Some states protect more of a worker’s pay — and four (Texas, Pennsylvania and the Carolinas) prohibit garnishment for most debts. But most states allow the federal level. Federal surveys show that low-income workers can’t afford to lose a quarter of their pay.
2. Restrict How Much Can Be Taken from Debtors’ Bank Accounts
3. Provide Clear Notice to Debtors About Laws That Protect Them
When states do provide legal protections for debtors — such as allowing those with children to keep more of their pay under a “head of family” exemption — the burden is typically on the debtor to assert these protections. But there’s frequently no clear notice provided to debtors that the protections exist.
4. Limit Attorney’s Fees to Reflect Actual Work on a Suit
When companies sue, they often request an “attorney’s fee,” which is routinely granted and added to the judgment. The fees are usually set at arbitrary, fixed amounts, even though attorneys may spend only a few minutes on a suit. In 2013, we reported that one subprime lender in Mississippi added an attorney fee equal to one-third of the principal balance to each suit, even though the attorney was a company executive.
5. Cut Interest on Judgments to Reasonable Level
Under Missouri law, lenders can request that judgments grow at the original loan’s rate of interest. Particularly when high-cost lenders sue, this can result in what one St. Louis judge called a form of “indentured servitude”: A debt can balloon at triple-digit interest even as the debtors’ wages are seized. A $1,000 loan can become a $40,000 debt, forcing the debtor to declare bankruptcy or make payments for a lifetime.
6. Improve Enrollment in Programs to Help Low-Income Debtors
Some common plaintiffs, such as utility companies and nonprofit or public hospitals, have an obligation to serve the public. These sorts of entities often have programs to help lower-income patients or customers, and yet, as ProPublica has documentedrepeatedly, many debtors don’t know about these programs.
In St. Louis, defendants had counsel in less than 8 percent of debt collection cases filed between 2008 and 2012, ProPublica’s analysis shows. And in lower-income black neighborhoods, just 4 percent had a lawyer.
MSD’s lawsuit named both Turner and her landlord as defendants. But so far, only Turner’s wages have been garnished. Last year, Turner was taking home about $740 every two weeks from her job with the state when the garnishment hit. MSD took a quarter of that pay for three months until Turner’s seasonal job was terminated. MSD has seized $1,400, but over $1,100 still remains on the debt.
MSD’s LeComb said the utility had operated according to policy when suing Turner, since “the tenant is the party benefiting from the service,” but that MSD would review how the policy was applied in her case and whether it ought to be changed.
Soon after Turner moved to the Jennings house, she was sued again — this time by auto lender Midwest Acceptance, who claimed she owed more than $10,000.
Turner had taken out a loan 10 years earlier that, like Winfield’s, had been financed by Midwest. In 2005, after Turner was laid off and fell behind on payments, the car was repossessed and sold at auction.
According to Turner’s court file, she was personally served with a summons for the lawsuit in November 2013. She doesn’t recall being served, and when her court date came around, she wasn’t there.
Even if Turner had appeared, it’s unclear that it would have done her any good. With an attorney, however, she might have gotten the case dismissed. That’s because the statute of limitations on Turner’s loan under Missouri law was four years, a period that had long expired by 2013.
But the onus is on the defendant to raise such a defense. As a result, Midwest obtained a judgment.
Midwest declined to discuss Turner’s case, but said that the statute of limitations could be extended if, for instance, a debtor made a voluntary payment on a debt. Turner said she hadn’t done that.
Robert Swearingen, an attorney with the nonprofit Legal Services of Eastern Missouri who specializes in consumer issues, reviewed the lawsuit for ProPublica. Based on the suit and Turner’s recollections, he said, “It seems clear as day to me that they filed the lawsuit outside the statute of limitations.” It was something creditors often did, he said, since defendants rarely know their rights.
Turner has been looking for work since her last job, a seasonal position at UPS, ended earlier this year. Since then, she’s been relying on unemployment to support her family. With a long career as a bus and truck driver, she’s hopeful for work, but if she does find it, she knows she won’t have the full benefit of that paycheck for long. Midwest tries to garnish her paycheck wherever she goes, from Walmart to her job with the state to UPS. And if Midwest doesn’t take a chunk of her pay, MSD just might.
“It’s hard not to go crazy and stress out, you know,” she said. “I just keep praying and asking the Lord for help. That’s all I can do.”
For Winfield, the three years since losing her home have been a trial. She has moved four times, she said, most recently to leave a neighborhood where her house was robbed and shootings were frequent. And, like many black residents of the St. Louis area, she speaks bitterly of her experiences with police after an unpaid speeding ticket led to a weekend in jail.
Still, she remains determined to provide a stable environment for her children, she said recently, sitting in her current home, which remains sparsely furnished as a result of the burglary.
(Edwin Torres/ProPublica)
“I just want to do everything that I can to make sure that my kids don’t go through as much as I went through,” she said. Her own upbringing was marked by her mother’s addiction to crack, she said, and while her kids have been through a lot, she thinks she’s largely succeeding at her goal.
But garnishment has proven to be a legacy she couldn’t escape. Winfield remembers her mother trying to make a reduced paycheck stretch further, and it has become part of her life, too. Midwest Acceptance began seizing 25 percent of her after-tax pay in March 2012.
Every two weeks, almost $250 was gone. “I was not making it,” she said.
During an online search for help, Winfield learned she qualified for a “head of family” exemption under Missouri state law, which reduces the maximum garnishment to 10 percent. The law doesn’t require anyone to tell debtors like Winfield of the exemption, and the burden is on them to claim it.
The extra $300 each month was “a lifesaver,” she said. “I can at least pay rent and pay bills.”
But because she is paying less each paycheck, she will be stuck paying more over the long term.
In Missouri, lenders can request that judgments accrue interest at the contract rate. In Winfield’s case, her debt continues to grow at an annual rate of 30 percent. The $4,900 Winfield owed after her old car was auctioned became $6,900 by the time Midwest obtained its judgment. She has had more than $8,500 taken from her paychecks over the years and still owes more than $2,400.
If she ever pays off the loan, which at the current pace won’t be until 2017, she will have paid a total of at least $13,000 to Midwest.
In a written statement, Midwest Acceptance said it was legally allowed to charge post-judgment interest at the contract rate, but was willing to accept less than was owed “as long as the client continues to communicate with us and makes a good-faith effort to reduce the balance.”
The build-up of interest can be even more punishing on high-cost installment loans. The law allows lenders to make loans with interest rates in the triple digits and then attach that rate to court judgments. It’s a system that can turn a $1,000 loan into a $40,000 debt, ProPublica has reported, and leave the debtor with a choice: endure garnishment in perpetuity or declare bankruptcy.
These costly debts hit black communities in St. Louis at a rate about five times higher than mostly white neighborhoods, ProPublica found. High-cost installment lenders and subprime auto lenders obtained more than 8,200 judgments against residents of mostly black neighborhoods from 2008 through 2012. The lenders have seized at least $9.5 million from debtors through those cases.
ProPublica found even more of an imbalance in the Chicago area. There, the national subprime auto lender Credit Acceptance obtained judgments against residents of mostly black neighborhoods at a rate 18 times higher than it did against residents of mostly white neighborhoods. Credit Acceptance did not respond to multiple calls and emails seeking comment.
There is evidence that black consumers take out higher interest loans more often than whites. For example, black consumers are much more likely to take out a payday loan than whites with similar income, according to the Survey of Consumer Finances. Recently, there have been a series of federal enforcement actions against auto lenders based on allegations that they over-charged minority borrowers.
In its statement, Midwest Acceptance said there was “no intentional disparity of any kind in lawsuits or garnishments” and that the company had no information on the race of its borrowers and treated all customers the same.
Last week, Henderson, the mayor of Jennings, picked up her paycheck at city hall, and discovered that $185 was gone — garnished by MSD. The sewer district had tracked her down at her new job and taken the maximum allowed by law, a quarter of her biweekly pay.
Without it, Henderson said, she’s not sure she’ll be able to cover all her expenses, which include caring for her 8-year-old son. “I’m going to have to scrap and scrounge and rob Peter to pay Paul here,” she said.
When asked if she’d ever heard of the “head of family” exemption, Henderson said she hadn’t, but vowed to submit the forms as soon as possible to reduce the garnishment.
She was surprised to learn that she wasn’t alone — the pay of a council member had been seized by MSD last week, too. Henderson said she’d be sure to tell her about the exemption, since the council member had a son of her own.
“We’re all in the same boat,” she said. “It’s the black community.”
Paul Kiel covers business and the economy for ProPublica, reporting on the foreclosure crisis, consumer debt and other financial issues.
Annie Waldman is a senior reporting fellow. She recently graduated with honors from the dual masters program at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs and the School of Journalism.
First, university administrations have grown highly sensitized to any perception that they or their faculty are using intimidation and coercion to bust unions of academic workers. So sensitized that they’ve drafted a set of four rules, replete with a handy acronym, just in case the faculty can’t remember to keep things cool.
The basic rule is: No “TIPS”
No Threats
No Interrogation
No Promises
No Surveillance
You have to appreciate the hilarity. Like most elite faculty, Harvard’s professors probably oppose a union of graduate students because they think it will sully the intellectual virtues of America’s most prestigious university. Yet here they are being instructed by that most prestigious university to oppose that union with the help of slogans and acronyms.
And believe it or not: that’s the good news. The use of fear and favor can be fatal to a union drive, and it’s good that at least some portion of the faculty is being told not to go there. (Whether that message sticks once the drive really gets going is another matter.) What’s more, it shows how conscious Harvard’s administrators — really, lawyers (and probably not even in-house lawyers; there are firms that specialize in this stuff) — are that the law and the courts may not be on their side on this issue.
Second, and even more interesting, is how, having explained to the world’s leading luminaries of light and reason that they should not terrorize the workers and students with whom they work (and don’t assume these luminaries don’t need that explained to them), the administration proceeds to instruct the faculty in what they should do.
Do Share the University’s Record on Stipends and Benefits, where known. Provide information to students about the array of benefits that they presently receive, including the University’s record of steady improvement over time — without a union.
Do Explain the Disadvantages of Union Membership. There are economic costs to joining a union, including the likelihood that they will be required to pay annual dues. There are also non-economic costs, including the intrusion of a third party into an academic relationship, adding a new political entity (the United Auto Workers) with its own agenda to existing relations.
Do Explain the Collective Bargaining Process. The process of collective bargaining requires parties to meet at reasonable times and places to discuss wages, hours, and working conditions. However, the law does not dictate what must go into a contract. Thus, the union cannot guarantee any specific outcome, such as an improvement in stipend or other benefits, as these matters would become subject to collective bargaining. If there is a recognized union of graduate students, the University would bargain in good faith, but the University cannot be forced to accept union demands. The University would also be allowed to propose its own changes to the status quo in negotiations. You can also mention that negotiations for a first contract usually take a year or longer during which time there could not be any unilateral changes to the status quo, including changes in compensation.
Do Explain the Election Process. In order for a union to file a petition for an election with the NLRB [National Labor Relations Board], it must obtain authorization cards from at least 30 percent of the employees in an appropriate unit. Students have the right to decide whether or not to sign a union authorization card, and even if they do sign a card and an election is later held, they don’t have to vote in favor of the union. If there is an election, it would be conducted by the NLRB and would be a secret ballot election. The election is decided by a majority of votes cast, just like a political election. Also, because the majority of first and second year students do not teach or serve as research assistants, they may not be considered eligible members of a graduate student union.
Do Correct Inaccurate or Misleading Union Statements and Campaign Materials. Inform students of inaccuracies and provide the correct information, if known. Remind students that the union may make promises, but it cannot guarantee anything.
Do Provide Information about the Union’s Record. Inform students about the union’s local, regional, and national track record representing graduate students, if you are aware of it.
What’s fascinating about this to-do list is just how much, without realizing it, Harvard’s administration has conceded the union’s case. In two ways: by having the faculty talk to grad workers about issues like pay and benefits, Harvard’s administration is conceding that grad workers think like other workers. They care about things like pay and benefits.
But Harvard is also conceding something about the faculty. The premise of grad union drives is that grad students are workers and the administration is management. Where the faculty stand in all that is usually a matter of some dispute. Most grad unions, for understandable reasons, try to reassure the faculty that they don’t view them as management, but as potential allies. Most administrations, for understandable reasons, try to deny that the faculty are management. Most faculty haven’t a clue what they are.
But what is Harvard doing here but treating the faculty as if they are management, as if they are the enforcers of the administration’s policies? In the same way that the moguls of General Motors or Hyatt or Amazon instruct their front-line managers in how to talk to workers — often using the same kind of boilerplate that Harvard is using here — Harvard is training its managers in how to talk to the workers there.
Like most scholars, Harvard’s faculty are used to thinking of themselves as independent minds. They’ve engaged in intense, often solitary, study of their chosen fields for decades. They’ve learned to take nothing on faith; they examine the evidence and come to their own opinions.
Yet here is Harvard senior management providing middle management with a CliffsNotes guide to American labor law, and expecting leading scholars of Shakespeare, colonial America, urban poverty, and the European Union to repeat its talking points to their students. If that doesn’t convince the Harvard faculty that, from the university’s perspective, they really are management, no amount of evidence and reason will.
Still from Adam Purple and the Garden of Eden / Harvey Wang and Amy Brost
In 1975, artist and social activist Adam Purple, known for his permanent purple attire, looked out his window in the crime-ridden Lower East Side of New York City to witness two children playing in a pile of rubble. Struck by his own memories of a childhood spent barefoot in rural pastures and forests in Missouri, he suddenly wished these children could feel the dirt beneath their own feet in a safe, debris-free environment. Almost immediately he began work on the Garden of Eden.
Over period of five years, Purple worked continuously to build a concentric garden that would eventually grow to 15,000 square feet. As nearby abandoned structures were torn down the garden continued to grow, a process he metaphorically likened to a garden that knocked down the buildings around it. He physically hauled bricks and building materials away from the site, and hauled in manure from the horses in Central Park.
The Garden of Eden not only provided safe haven to the community, but also produced food in the form of corn, berries, tomatoes, and cucumbers. By the early 80s it had become a famous and beloved landmark in the Lower East Side.
Unfortunately the city of New York never officially recognized Purple’s garden. While other local parks were clearly marked on official city maps, the Garden of Eden space was always labeled as ‘vacant’. Despite pleas from the community, the entire garden was razed with bulldozers in just 75 minutes on January 8, 1986 to make way for development.
