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Gas storage facility questioned

Now that our governor has made the bold decision to ban horizontal fracking in New York, we must remain vigilant in researching and questioning the safety of other elements of fracking infrastructure, such as storage of gas, treatment of fracking waste, pipelines, oil trains, etc.

Of particular urgency in our region is Crestwood Midstream’s plan to turn depleted salt mines along Seneca Lake, two miles north of Watkins Glen, into a major propane, butane and natural gas storage hub for the northeast. Such heavy industrialization is not only incompatible with the existing wine and tourism industries, but is foolhardy: salt mines are historically the most dangerous places to store gases.

This storage facility is proceeding despite broad public opposition and unresolved questions about geological instabilities, public health and safety. Frequent protests are being held outside the facility. Read more at http://www.wearesenecalake.com/ and http://gasfreeseneca.com/.

ANNA SEARS

via www.democratandchronicle.com

A Report From the Frontlines in the War Against Fracking » CounterPunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names

But as inspiring as the WASL protests have been, the legal system in the Town of Reading has been less so as it has made a mockery of both law and justice. Those attending court appearances of the arrested have been shocked by the lawlessness of the proceedings. One town justice, John Norman, recused himself because of his employment by Crestwood. The other, Raymond Berry, has steadfastly refused requests for his recusal due to his comments from the bench taking issue with the protesters, and the impression that he takes his orders from the District Attorney’s Office, looking to representatives from that office to guide his decision making when court is in session.

Berry’s harsh and arbitrary sentencing has left lawyers and court observers wondering if he is unfamiliar with New York’s sentencing law or if he is merely zealous in his defense of the Crestwood corporation. Arrestees have been charged with trespass violations. Such violations—they are not crimes and are essentially the equivalent of a parking or speeding ticket—are punishable by fines of up to $250 or, if the defendant is unable or unwilling to pay the fine, a jail sentence of up to 15 days. Normally, it is exceedingly rare for anyone to be sentenced to jail for a violation. But normal is not a word to be used in connection with Berry’s court, as he arbitrarily hands down maximum jail sentences for routine violations.

Court proceedings on the evening of Wednesday, December 17 were a morass of lawless confusion. Friends accompanying Laura Salamendra to her second appearance were turned away at the courthouse door by a deputy from the Schuyler County Sheriff’s Office at 5:00pm. Officer Kirk Smith stated he was under orders from the Sheriff to close the court to the public. He remained immune to arguments that closing the court’s proceedings to the public violated constitutional rights, saying that he was following the orders of the Sheriff. (In an apparent effort to deter attendance of court proceedings, parking was also suspended on the road outside the courthouse under a temporary order from the Sheriff’s Office and an adjacent public parking lot has been closed, forcing those who wished to attend court proceedings to walk about a third of a mile after parking their cars.) Only Salamendra and Attorney Sujata Gibson were allowed in. A phone call to Schuyler County Judge Dennis Morris requesting that he order Town Justice Berry to open his court to the public went unanswered and unreturned.

When Salamendra and Gibson entered the courtroom, they interrupted what appeared to be Assistant District Attorney (ADA), John Tunney, in a closed, one-sided ex parte conversation with Judge Berry over how to deal with Crestwood arrestees like Salamendra, and how to deal with Attorney Gibson, who has been acting as a legal adviser to some of the protesters. Gibson overheard Tunney instructing the judge “to make sure she [Gibson] doesn’t talk for the defendants,” and to “get it in writing” if she represents anyone. Gibson immediately objected, arguing, “This sounds like ex parte arguments.” “If he [ADA Tunney] has an argument, he should make it in open court. This is illegal.” According to Gibson, Tunney’s response was to laugh at her.

Attorney Gibson then objected to the closed court. Judge Berry said he had no choice in the matter. She responded, “If you’re being told [to close the court], that’s inappropriate and you should recuse yourself.” Salamendra then insisted that she was entitled to have her supporters with her. ADA Tunney responded, “she can have one [support person],” and pointed to the Sheriff’s deputies, telling them that she could have one support person with her. Salamendra then left to get the one support person she was being allowed, but the police would not let her out of the courtroom, wanting her to give them the person’s name so they could bring the person into the courtroom. “Why can’t I go?” she asked the of

via www.counterpunch.org

The Year in Activism | BillMoyers.com

No Fracking in New York

(Photo: We Are Seneca Lake)

Day after day, from October through December, citizens from New York’s Finger Lakes region braved the elements to blockade the entrance of the Texas-based energy company, Crestwood Midstream. Crestwood had planned to build a natural gas storage facility adjacent to Seneca Lake, a source of local drinking water that also benefits the region’s tourism and wine-making sectors. In the cold and rain, they sang songs, arms locked, until police arrested them. When New York Governor Andrew Cuomo announced a statewide ban on hydraulic fracturing earlier this month, it was the hard work, commitment and struggle of activists like those in the Finger Lakes region, as much as the science the governor spoke of, that won this fight.

via billmoyers.com

The Time Is (Still) Now | Rev. Winnie Varghese

I would like to think that officers Ramos and Liu would have wanted to work in a police force that did not criminalize and murder people based upon race.

From what I can tell these two officers were at the wrong place at the wrong time and took the brunt of a black man's armed psychosis. Terrible, but what does that have to do with police accountability?

Well, the psychotic man who murdered them said he was out to avenge the murder of Eric Garner.

He also shot his former partner in the stomach in another state, hours away, first, and she and her amazing family in the midst of their own trauma informed the police that he was threatening to murder cops in Brooklyn. You have to wonder how vulnerable we are to being shot, and if we might want to face that together, when the NYPD with their high tech anti-terrorism kit and expertise cannot protect their own.

I wonder why this heinous murder has become a referendum on protesting unjust police practices and not on domestic violence; transporting guns across state lines; failed threat alerts; or mental illness?

Why does the shooting of police officers matter more than the shooting of the woman who was shot by someone she knew? I'm pretty sure I know why. Not because they protect and serve, but because they symbolize the power of the state in a way that an ex girlfriend with a civilian job does not.

via www.huffingtonpost.com

New York Says No to Fracking: State Bans Drilling Following Grassroots Outcry over Public Health | Democracy Now!

AMY GOODMAN: Activists note infrastructure related to fracking remains in place upstate New York. On Tuesday, 41 people were arrested for blocking the gates of a gas storage facility as part of a campaign against the Texas-based company Crestwood Midstream. The group, We Are Seneca Lake, has seen more than 130 arrests in a series of actions against the company’s plans to expand methane gas storage at a lake which provides drinking water to 100,000 people.

Among those at the protest was the biologist, the activist, the author, Sandra Steingraber. She joins us now from Ithaca, New York. She co-founded both New Yorkers Against Fracking and Concerned Health Professionals of New York. Her books include Living Downstream and, her latest, Raising Elijah: Protecting Children in an Age of Environmental Crisis.

Also joining us from Cornell University is Cornell professor Tony Ingraffea. He’s also the president of Physicians, Scientists and Engineers for Healthy Energy.

We welcome you both to Democracy Now! This is a major decision. New York has major gas deposits. Sandra Steingraber, can you talk about how this actually happened? Sure, the governor announced it, but what was the pressure brought on the governor?

SANDRA STEINGRABER: Well, that’s a tale that could be told as an opera, I think. So, we had the good fortune to have a moratorium in place by our previous governor, and I’ll let Tony tell some of the details of how that came to be. But because we had pushed the pause button, that gave those of us in the scientific community a chance to begin to really look at the data and the research and what it showed.

And we started off with only a handful of studies. There were only six studies on the health effects of fracking and the environmental impacts in 2008, for example, when we had the first moratorium declared. Now there are 414 studies and counting. And so, it was like we had pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, and when you only have a couple of pieces and you try to see what the picture is, it’s hard to see. But we saw troubling signs, but it was a little bit like trying to read the tea leaves. And then, as more data came in and more studies were done, and we talked to more scientists and we knew what the data looked like that was in the pipeline that was coming up to be published, we began to put more pieces of the jigsaw puzzle. And now we have 414 pieces assembled.

via www.democracynow.org

Fracking Movement Wins As NY Bans Fracking | PopularResistance.Org

Tom Wilber who writes Shale Gas Review which covers gas development in Marcellus and Utica shales, noted the power of the anti-fracking movement and how it related to the science on fracking:

Science is part of the calculus. But despite what Cuomo would like us to believe, scientists don’t make these kinds of decisions. The full equation is Science + politics = policy. Cuomo finally got tired of being hounded on the issue by his political base. The movement in New York against shale gas was relentless and it was focused on him. 

People rising up and saying ‘no’ to fracking made it impossible for the government to ignore the health, safety and environmental problems caused by fracking. See this December 2014 compendium of the research. This victory is one that will spur the anti-fracking movement throughout the country and puts in question the fracking infrastructure being built, e.g. pipelines, compressor stations and export terminals, currently being pushed throughout the country by Big Energy.  

Inside Climate News reports that Sandra Steingraber, an environmental health expert and fracking activist in New York, told them from the parking lot of a sheriff’s office where she was bailing out 28 musicians arrested in an ongoing protest against a fracked gas storage facility in the Seneca Lakes region of New York that when she told the activists the news, they picked up their instruments and there was “singing and dancing in the streets.” She added “Fracking is able to roll over so many communities because people are told it is inevitable. This decision emboldens us all. It shows this fight is winnable.”

At a meeting in Calvert County last night where Dominion Resources is building a fracked gas export terminal, Tracey Eno of Calvert Citizens for a Healthy Community, a member of We Are Cove Point, mentioned the Cuomo decision to inspire people to realize that we can defeat big energy. 

Yesterday morning we

via www.popularresistance.org

Environmentalists Are Gearing Up for the Next Phase of New York's Fracking Wars | VICE | United States

At times it appeared as if Cuomo was leaning toward allowing fracking to proceed in New York. In 2012, he considered a plan that would have allowedfor fracking in New York's Southern Tier, as a way to boost the upstate region's struggling economy. But opponents of fracking accused the governor of trying to create "sacrifice zones," in which the state's poorest residents would bear the brunt of drilling's environmental costs. Even on Wednesday, Cuomo seemed to distance himself from the decision, telling reporters that he was deferring to his health and environmental advisors on the decision.

Never the less, environmental activists gathered outside the governor's office in midtown Manhattan yesterday for a victory rally after the announcement. But while they celebrated the ban, many also warned that a battle lays ahead over natural gas developments— gas pipelines, compressor stations, storage facilities—that have begun cropping up as gas from neighboring states passes through New York and into energy markets along the Eastern Seaboard. The new projects, they argued, could come with their own set of negative environmental impacts, even if drilling itself is banned.

"This is the next big battle," said Fox, citing the Constitution Pipeline, a 125-mile natural gas transmission vein that was approved by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) earlier this month, as a future target of protest.

A slew of FERC-approved natural compressor stations have also cropped up in New York, including one in Minisink, a township about sixty miles for New York City where residents have told me they are afraid to go outside for fear of the headaches, nosebleeds, and dizzy spells that they have started to experience since the station went online in June 2013. The FERC, together with the New York DEC, also gave their blessing this year to a plan that will allow Texas-based energy firm Crestwood Midstream to store natural gas in abandoned underground salt mines near Seneca Lake in upstate New York.

"They've fracked so much gas out of the ground now that there's a glut of it," said Sandra Steingraber, a biologist at Ithaca College and a vocal opponent of fracking. "Natural gas storage projects don't just represent environmental health problems in the long run — water contamination, air pollution, which is what fracking gives us — they also represent basic safety issues," she added, emphasizing that natural gas is also highly explosive.

Steingraber is one of the 130 activists who have gone to jail for protesting the Seneca Lake storage project, including a group of 41 who were arrested for trespassing on Crestwood property on Tuesday, the day the fracking ban was announced.

via www.vice.com

13 Crestwood protesters appear in court; most plead not guilty to chargesThe Ithaca Voice

One defendant of 13 entered a guilty plea. Eight pleaded not guilty to his or her charges. Many refused to enter a guilty or not guilty plea and said that Judge Raymond Berry should recuse himself from the case.

Faith Meckley, 19, an IC student and the youngest of the defendants, pleaded guilty to trespassing. Meckley said that she would refuse to pay any fine imposed by the Court.

“I will not pay money to a [justice] system that I believe is broken,” she said.

Judge Berry adjourned her sentencing (Meckley objected to the postponement) and stated he wanted to think about her statement before imposing a sentence.

Before the 7 p.m. arraignment, court officials had made a statement that only the defendants would be let into the courtroom, and that the media would not be permitted in, based on the size of the courtroom and the number of people present. After negotiations with Dr. Sandra Steingraber, a leader in the protests, court officials changed their stance on opening the courtroom.

via ithacavoice.com

Tens Of Thousands Surge Through Manhattan, Decry Police Violence | PopularResistance.Org

New York, NY- Like the waves of a tsunami tens of thousands surged through Manhattan on Saturday to decry police violence and the killings of unarmed Blacks. The Millions March reflected growing public anger towards a broken justice system tilting towards police impunity for misconduct.

Marchers chanted “Black Lives Matter,” I can’t Breathe,” and “No Justice, No Peace,” popular catch-phrases of the growing movement.The Millions March was “unlike anything I’ve seen since the civil rights movement,” said Tippy Brooks, an activist who has been involved in social justice issues for 50 years.

The permitted part of the march began in Washington Square Park and finished at the Police Headquarters. But then the energy of thousands carried it forward past the designated route-unabated-pushing past New York City Police barricades, closing downtown thoroughfares and temporarily shutting down the Brooklyn Bridge. Though one arrest, there was little police could do to stop it. Thousands crossed Brooklyn Bridge, pushing deep into Brooklyn, and ending 10 hours after the demonstration started.

“I was afraid to go past police but the young weren’t afraid so I went across with them,” said Eunice, a 50 year old grandmother from the Bronx, who didn’t give her last name and was at her first protest.”

In the week before the Millions March, momentum had been building with nightly die-ins at Grand Central Station, shut downs of Macy’s and Forever 21 retail stores, and protests at Union And Times Squares which had become a popular theme of resistance.For the protesters who left Foley Square and continued blocking streets downtown, there was a sense of new felt power, as anger mixed with exhilaration when police were unable to stop them. At one point they covered a police car with protest signs in defiance.

A New York grand jury decision not to indict NY Police Officer Daniel Pantaleo in the choke-hold killing of Eric Garner, an unarmed Black man last week, came days after another prominent grand jury decision in St Louis, not to indict Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson in the killing of Mike Brown, another unarmed Black youth. Both cases helped galvanize nationwide response to police misconduct.

via www.popularresistance.org

It’s All Tied Together

THE police killing unarmed civilians. Horrifying income inequality. Rotting infrastructure and an unsafe “safety net.” An inability to respond to climate, public health and environmental threats. A food system that causes disease. An occasionally dysfunctional and even cruel government. A sizable segment of the population excluded from work and subject to near-random incarceration.

via www.popularresistance.org

Torture, police killings and the militarization of America - World Socialist Web Site

In the course of the current protests over the killings of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, there has been a concerted attempt by political forces ranging from President Obama to the millionaire operative Al Sharpton, along with a network of organizations orbiting the Democratic Party, to insist that the entire issue is one of racism, to be answered by a “conversation on race,” a “new civil rights movement” or various police reform palliatives.

All of this is meant to divert popular outrage into safer channels and conceal a far more sinister reality. A militarized police force, working in close collaboration with the US military and intelligence complex, is being prepared for violent repression against the working class as a whole. It will be used against strikes, demonstrations, protests and other forms of opposition to the policies of the corporate and financial elite.

Torture, police killings, the destruction of core democratic rights—all are methods employed by a criminal ruling class whose wealth is secured through financial parasitism. It has built up its fortunes by transferring social wealth from the working class—the overwhelming majority of the population—to the top 1 percent, while employing militarist violence to further its plunder abroad.

These ruling layers operate not out of strength or confidence in their system, but rather out of fear. They know that record levels of social inequality are not only incompatible with democracy, but must give rise to social revolt at the next, inevitable eruption of global financial crisis. If the torturers and the police killers enjoy impunity, it is because preparations are being made to turn them loose against a rebellious population.

Bill Van Auken

via www.wsws.org

Why #BlackLivesMatter Should Transform the Climate Debate | The Nation

Thinly veiled notions of racial superiority have informed every aspect of the non-response to climate change so far. Racism is what has made it possible to systematically look away from the climate threat for more than two decades. It is also what has allowed the worst health impacts of digging up, processing and burning fossil fuels—from cancer clusters to asthma—to be systematically dumped on indigenous communities and on the neighborhoods where people of colour live, work and play. The South Bronx, to cite just one example, has notoriously high asthma rates—and according to one study, a staggering 21.8 percent of children living in New York City public housing have asthma, three times higher than the rate for private housing. The choking of those children is not as immediately lethal as the kind of choking that stole Eric Garner's life, but it is very real nonetheless.

If we refuse to speak frankly about the intersection of race and climate change, we can be sure that racism will continue to inform how the governments of industrialized countries respond to this existential crisis. It will manifest in the continued refusal to provide serious climate financing to poor countries so they can protect themselves from heavy weather. It will manifest in the fortressing of wealthy continents as they attempt to lock out the growing numbers of people whose homes will become unlivable.

And in the not too distant future, the firm if unstated belief that not all lives matter could well push our governments to deploy high-risk "geoengineering" technologies like spraying sulfur into the stratosphere in order to reduce global temperatures. Never mind that several studies project that a side effect could be suppressing the summer monsoons in India and Africa, with the water and food security of billions of people hanging in the balance.

via m.thenation.com

Basic Thought: An example of online social justice’s disconnect from offline communities | The South Lawn

But then came the letter they wrote detailing their reasons for the deactivation. It was a joke. But it was not a joke because of the completely delusional belief that PhD students are waiting for them to come back so that they can steal their ideas for their dissertations. It was not a joke because of the talk of their frameworks, which are really just basic sociological concepts that have been denuded of meaning for capitalistic consumption. It is not a joke because of the decree that wholly common-sensical acts of compassion and community-building are somehow radical. It is not a joke because simple disagreement has been translated into “abuse” and “triggering” behavior. It is not even a joke because I’Nasah Crockett, Zahira Kelly, Trudy Hamilton, Aura Bogado, Lauren Chief Elk, Sarah Kendzior, and Jessica Luther are all jokes themselves.

No. It is a joke because it is a document that is so removed from the communities that these people claim to represent. It is a joke because such self-centered and narcissistic performances have become a regular part of these “activists” shticks, and the notion that other people suffer in this world is of secondary thought to their mantra of “fuck you, pay me”. It is a joke because for all the discussion of praxis, these petty bourgeois capitalists do not seek radical change and an overturning of our socioeconomic and political systems. It is really incredible to see, actually: capitalists paying members of an oppressed class to write about their real or perceived oppressions, offering solutions that always center on such atomized and individualistic notions of “rhetorical violence” and “spaces” and “privilege-checking”. They are paying these people to maintain the status quo with radical aesthetics, and these writers are completely okay with that. That is a joke.

At some point, though, the joke stops being funny. It starts being a distraction to real movements for change, and it takes up space and energy in offline organizing. At some point, the show has to end, the mic has to be cut off, and people gotta be told to take the no-talent show somewhere else. I am not on Twitter anymore, nor will I ever be again. But my hope is that their screeds may find a few less retweets, a few less favorites, and less enthusiastic displays of solidarity now that their true intentions of capital accumulation and attention-seeking have been revealed.

via thesouthlawn.org

Pentagon Signals Security Risks of Climate Change - NYTimes.com

WASHINGTON — The Pentagon on Monday released a report asserting decisively that climate change poses an immediate threat to national security, with increased risks from terrorism, infectious disease, global poverty and food shortages. It also predicted rising demand for military disaster responses as extreme weather creates more global humanitarian crises.

The report lays out a road map to show how the military will adapt to rising sea levels, more violent storms and widespread droughts. The Defense Department will begin by integrating plans for climate change risks across all of its operations, from war games and strategic military planning situations to a rethinking of the movement of supplies.

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, speaking Monday at a meeting of defense ministers in Peru, highlighted the report’s findings and the global security threats of climate change.

via www.nytimes.com

What progressives don't want to talk about in the Rolling Stone scandal - The Week

It isn't necessary for us to presume every individual accusation is true in order to work against sexual assault. The ways in which terms like "rush to judgment" and "due process" have gotten lumped into rape denialism does the movement against rape no favors. After all, while we can feel confident that false accusations of rape are rare, we also know that the system frequently fails to produce just outcomes in rape trials, with unjust outcomes falling along typical lines of class and race. In the long run, we will produce the most just outcomes by pursuing the truth about rape allegations the same way we should pursue all criminal allegations: by taking those allegations seriously, by investigating them rigorously, and by using consistent and fair standards of evidence. A commitment to a fair and careful process will ensure far better outcomes than social norms about believing all accusations ever could.

The allegations detailed in Rolling Stone, and the continuing, nightmarish saga that has followed, represent something like a worst case scenario for this norm: the insistence that skepticism or review of any rape allegation necessarily amounts to rape denialism leads a reporter to fail to do basic diligence in her reporting. That in turn leaves her vulnerable to the terrible fallout of this case, which could do deep, lasting harm to our efforts to fight campus rape. Sabrina Rudin Erdely clearly failed in her reporting; she failed Rolling Stone, she failed her readers, and she failed Jackie. Frankly, I think she should never be hired by a major publication to do investigative reporting again. But on a deeper level, this type of problem is the product of the norm itself, as it leaves us constantly at risk of investing our credibility in allegations that are not credible. It was inevitable.

"Feminism is not fragile," wrote Judith Levine regarding this situation. Our commitment to fighting rape must be equally strong. It can, and must, survive in a world where we know that not every allegation is true.

via theweek.com

College rape: Campus sexual assault is a serious problem. But the efforts to protect women are infringing on the civil rights of men.

In a footnote, the authors acknowledge that asserting that one-quarter of college students “might” be raped is not based on actual evidence: “These projections are suggestive. To assess accurately the victimization risk for women throughout a college career, longitudinal research following a cohort of female students across time is needed.” The one-fifth to one-quarter assertion would mean that young American college women are raped at a rate similar to women in Congo, where rape has been used as a weapon of war.

No one disputes that only a percentage of sexual assaults get reported, but the studies that have tried to capture the incidence of unreported rape are miles apart. As Christopher Krebs observed, “Some [surveys] I think create high numbers that are difficult to defend. Some create artificially low numbers that are impossible to defend.” We do have hard numbers on actual reports of sexual assault on campus thanks to the Clery Act, the federal law that requires colleges to report their crime rates. But even these figures are controversial. Minuscule sexual assault numbers have long been a consistent feature of Clery Act reporting. Victim advocates say administrators deliberately suppress their numbers in order to make the schools look safer. (Unsurprisingly, schools deny this.) In July, the Washington Post published the Clery number for 2012: There were just over 3,900 forcible sexual offenses, with most schools reporting single or low double-digit numbers. (Under the Clery Act a “forcible sexual offense” does not require the use of actual physical force, it can simply be an act against someone’s will. Offenses include everything from rape to fondling.) Given the approximately 12 million female college students, that’s a reported sexual assault rate of 0.03 percent.

Reported sexual assaults have been rising on campus in recent years, at a time when other campus crime is declining. (The nation as a whole has experienced a dramatic drop in all violent crime over the past few decades, including sexual assault, which is down more than 60 percent since 1995.) The rise of reporting on campus sexual assault is generally described by security experts as a function of a greater willingness on the part of women to make complaints, not an increase in incidence. Despite reports of “soaring” sexual a

via www.slate.com

College rape: Campus sexual assault is a serious problem. But the efforts to protect women are infringing on the civil rights of men.

the severe new policies championed by the White House, the Department of Education, and members of Congress are responding to the idea that colleges are in the grips of an epidemic—and the studies suggesting this epidemic don’t hold up to scrutiny. Bad policy is being made on the back of problematic research, and will continue to be unless we bring some healthy skepticism to the hard work of putting a number on the prevalence of campus rape.

It is exceedingly difficult to get a numerical handle on a crime that is usually committed in private and the victims of which—all the studies agree—frequently decline to report. A further complication is that because researchers are asking about intimate subjects, there is no consensus on the best way to phrase sensitive questions in order to get the most accurate answers. A 2008 National Institute of Justice paper on campus sexual assault explained some of the challenges: “Unfortunately, researchers have been unable to determine the precise incidence of sexual assault on American campuses because the incidence found depends on how the questions are worded and the context of the survey.” Take the National Crime Victimization Survey, the nationally representative sample conducted by the federal government to find rates of reported and unreported crime. For the years 1995 to 2011, as the University of Colorado Denver’s Rennison explained to me, it found that an estimated 0.8 percent of noncollege females age 18-24 revealed that they were victims of threatened, attempted, or completed rape/sexual assault. Of the college females that age during that same time period, approximately 0.6 percent reported they experienced such attempted or completed crime.  

That finding diverges wildly from the notion that one in five college women will be sexually assaulted by the time they graduate. That’s the number most often used to suggest there is overwhelming sexual violence on America’s college campuses. It comes from a 2007 study funded by the National Institute of Justice, called the Campus Sexual Assault Study, or CSA. (I cited it last year in a story on campus drinking and sexual assault.) The study asked 5,466 female college students at two public universities, one in the Midwest and one in the South, to answer an online survey about their experiences with sexual assault. The survey defined sexual assault as everything from nonconsensual sexual intercourse to such unwanted activities as “forced kissing,” “fondling,” and “rubbing up against you in a sexual way, even if it is over your clothes.”

via www.slate.com

'Survivalists' make up growing percentage of US holiday shoppers | Money | The Guardian

Wages haven’t increased along with job creation – and some economists say the unemployment rate may have to decline a lot more in order for that to happen. Some say we may need unemployment to hit 5% before we see a significant and lasting improvement in incomes across the board.

As in past recessions, many of the jobs that were lost were in relatively high-paying sectors of the economy, such as manufacturing and construction. Those that were created tended to be concentrated in the services sector: hospitality, fast food and, yes, retail. Those jobs paid an average of only $21,000 a year, and in aggregate the new jobs created pay 23% less than the jobs lost, according to a study by IHS Global Insight for the US Conference of Mayors.

Those are the kinds of numbers that are almost certainly going to spawn a lot of survivalists.

It’s one thing to have a bad year, income-wise. But after you’ve had a succession of them, drawing down family savings and selling off assets ranging from retirement plans to jewelry or electronics to pay the bills, holiday spending falls into the category of a luxury rather than a necessity.

Only days before Black Friday, the Conference Board announced a surprise in the form of a big drop in consumer confidence levels in November, to 88.7 from 94.5 in October.

via www.theguardian.com

Tom Wolfe on the 'Me' Decade in America -- New York Magazine (2)

The old alchemical dream was changing base metals into gold. The new alchemical dream is: changing one’s personality—remaking, remodeling, elevating, and polishing one’s very self . . . and observing, studying, and doting on it. (Me!) This had always been an aristocratic luxury, confined throughout most of history to the life of the courts, since only the very wealthiest classes had the free time and the surplus income to dwell upon this sweetest and vainest of pastimes. It smacked so much of vanity, in fact, that the noble folk involved in it always took care to call it quite something else.

Much of the satisfaction well-born people got from what is known historically as the “chivalric tradition” was precisely that: dwelling upon Me and every delicious nuance of my conduct and personality. At Versailles, Louis XIV founded a school for the daughters of impoverished noblemen, called L’Ecole Saint-Cyr. At the time most schools for girls were in convents. Louis had quite something else in mind, a secular school that would develop womenfolk suitable for the superior race guerrière that he believed himself to be creating in France. Saint-Cyr was the forerunner of what was known up until a few years ago as the finishing school. And what was the finishing school? Why, a school in which the personality was to be shaped and buffed like a piece of high-class psychological cabinetry. For centuries most of upper-class college education in France and England has been fashioned in the same manner: with an eye toward sculpting the personality as carefully as the intellectual faculties.

via nymag.com

Tom Wolfe on the 'Me' Decade in America -- New York Magazine

The saga of the Me Decade begins with one of those facts that is so big and so obvious (like the Big Dipper), no one ever comments on it anymore. Namely: the 30-year boom. Wartime spending in the United States in the 1940s touched off a boom that has continued for more than 30 years. It has pumped money into every class level of the population on a scale without parallel in any country in history. True, nothing has solved the plight of those at the very bottom, the chronically unemployed of the slums. Nevertheless, in Compton, California, today it is possible for a family at the very lowest class level, which is known in America today as “on welfare,” to draw an income of $8,000 a year entirely from public sources. This is more than most British newspaper columnists and Italian factory foremen make, even allowing for differences in living costs. In America truck drivers, mechanics, factory workers, policemen, firemen, and garbagemen make so much money—$15,000 to $20,000 (or more) per year is not uncommon—that the word proletarian can no longer be used in this country with a straight face. So one now says lower middle class. One can’t even call workingmen blue collar any longer. They all have on collars like Joe Namath’s or Johnny Bench’s or Walt Frazier’s. They all have on $35 Superstar Qiana sport shirts with elephant collars and 1940s Airbrush Wallpaper Flowers Buncha Grapes and Seashell designs all over them.

Well, my God, the old utopian socialists of the nineteenth century—such as Saint-Simon, Owen, Fourier, and Marx—lived for the day of the liberated workingman. They foresaw a day when industrialism (Saint-Simon coined the word) would give the common man the things he needed in order to realize his potential as a human being: surplus (discretionary) income, political freedom, free time (leisure), and freedom from grinding drudgery. Some of them, notably Owen and Fourier, thought all this might come to pass first in the United States. So they set up communes here: Owen’s New Harmony commune in Indiana and 34 Fourier-style “phalanx” settlements—socialist communes, because the new freedom was supposed to be possible only under socialism. The old boys never dreamed that the new freedom would come to pass instead as the result of a Go-Getter Bourgeois business boom such as began in the United States in the 1940s. Nor would they have liked it if they had seen it. For one thing, the homo novus, the new man, the liberated man, the first common man in the history of the world with the much-dreamed-of combination of money, free time, and personal freedom—this American workingman didn’t look right. The Joe Namath-Johnny Bench—Walt Frazier-Superstar Qiana Wallpaper sport shirt, for a start.

via nymag.com