Reading Moss’ book, I grew uneasy as he described the marketing and engineering principles used to reach one of the most targeted demographics: children. Examples include the use of fruit juice concentrate, which can make up as little as five percent of the total beverage, to give the “health halo” to sugary drinks. Other packaging mistruths include the promotion of cereals that are more than 50 percent sugar as part of a well-rounded breakfast. Lunchables are packaged to imitate the cheerful appearance of a gift to make children especially excited to open and enjoy the food inside.
Since the 1970s, researchers have known that kids are attracted to higher levels of salt and sugar, which companies have used as an advantage for their products. Moss quotes Julie Mennella, a biopsychologist, who describes this as “manipulating or exploiting the biology of the child.” I was one of the kids these companies targeted and successfully sold their products to, becoming one of their “heavy users.”
Underage workers in the corporate heaven of Foxconn
Cramped Altruism
Other People’s Children – NYTimes.com
I’ve noticed this thing quite a lot in American life lately — this sort of cramped vision of altruism in which it’s considered perfectly acceptable to support only those causes that are directly good for you and yours. We even have a tendency to view it as “inauthentic” when people support policies that aren’t in their self-interest — when a rich man supports higher taxes on the rich, he’s somehow seen as strange, and probably a hypocrite.
Needless to say, this is all wrong. Political virtue consists in standing for what’s right, even — or indeed especially — when it doesn’t redound to your own benefit. Someone should ask Portman why he didn’t take a stand for, you know, other people’s children.
CVS To Penalize Workers Who Don’t Disclose Weight, Body Fat
One of the country’s largest pharmacy chains is asking its workers to find out how fat they are and then disclose it to their insurance provider.
Not only is that company, CVS Caremark, telling workers who use its health insurance plan to have a doctor determine their height, weight, body fat, blood pressure and other health indicators. It is also asking workers to give permission to the insurer to turn over that information to a firm that provides benefits support to CVS, the Boston Herald reports.
Workers who don’t take part in the voluntary “wellness review,” paid for by CVS, will have to pay an annual $600 penalty.
Obamacare could make such practices more common. The health care reform law allows employers to levy a higher penalty against workers who don’t participate in company wellness programs. In some cases, workers could also have to pay more if they don’t meet certain health targets like appropriate body mass index.
Feds To Investigate Cleveland Police After 137 Shots Fired In 59-Car Chase | ThinkProgress
On November 30, 2012, what began as a routine police drug patrol in Cleveland, Ohio ended in an unauthorized 59-car police chase in which 137 shots were fired and two unarmed individuals were left dead. The department-wide malfunction has prompted an investigation by the Department of Justice into the city police department’s use of excessive force and the “the adequacy of CPD’s training, supervision, and accountability mechanisms.”
In spite of a police policy that no more than 2 vehicles be involved in a chase, more than 59 vehicles joined the pursuit “without the sector supervisor’s knowledge or permission,” according to a state investigation of the incident. The chase began after a car pulled over for a turn signal violation drove away, and was later identified by several other officers driving at a high speed. Due to faltering communication, and the misimpression that the individuals were armed and fired a shot, the incident escalated until one-third of the police department had joined the chase.
Lynn Parramore: Jamie Dimon’s Ultra-American Rise and Fall: The Great Gatsby Meets Moby Dick
Australians have an old joke about their country’s founding elements: Sure, we got the criminals, but America got the Puritans, which is much worse.
The folks who arrived on our shores from Europe four centuries ago brought with them some peculiar notions. The Puritans believed in the Calvinist “Doctrine of the Elect,” a depressing divine plan whereby God pre-selected those destined for heaven and damned everybody else to hell. You could never know who was on the A-list and who was in for a fiery eternity. At least that’s what old John Calvin had taught.
But mere mortals could never be content with so mysterious a system, so they became obsessed with finding out who was elect. Material possessions, they concluded, must be a sign. Didn’t people who worked hard and kept up their prayers often amass more stuff than others? Hard work was godly, and since it often resulted in riches, they must be godly, too. Wealthiness was next to godliness.
In an essay on The Great Gatsby, America’s great literary ode to our distinguishing love of wealth, John A. Pidgeon notes that the striving for money became a means of salvation. Take the Puritan reverence of riches, add in equal parts transcendentalism and rugged individualism, and you’ve got the American Dream in all its shining glory: If you work hard, if you believe fervently enough, you can make yourself a fortune. You, too, can join the ranks of the elect.
Study Explores Why Wrongful Convictions Happen | ThinkProgress
In the almost 25 years since post-conviction DNA evidence has been used to establish criminal innocence, public perception has been transformed by the realization that completely erroneous convictions are not uncommon, even in cases that land defendants on death row or in prison for life. A new exhaustive social science analysis of many of these exonerations since 1989 has identified ten primary factors that, together, have led to the convictions we now know were wrong.
The study by American University’s School of Public Affairs concludes that it is a confluence of circumstances – and the ultimate failure of prosecutors and/or defense attorneys to mitigate those circumstances – that makes the difference between a “near-miss” in which a person is indicted but never found guilty, and a wrongful conviction.
Some of the worst wrongful conviction cases have been linked to what is known as “tunnel vision,” in which a prosecutor who hones in one suspect has a tendency to reinforce beliefs of that suspect’s guilt, even when the evidence suggests otherwise.
According to a report in the Coloradoan (here), on Saturday Lt. Jim Broderick, 56, resigned from the Fort Collins (Colorado) Police Services where he had worked for 33 years. His career had a dramatic reversal when he was indicted on charges of felony perjury in June 2010 in connection with the grand jury indictment and trial of Tim Masters. Masters, who was fifteen at the time of the 1987 murder of Peggy Hettrick, was convicted and spent ten years in prison before DNA testing of crime scene evidence prompted the vacation of his murder conviction. Broderick had been the investigator in the case.
The National Registry of Exonerations’ report on the case (here) lists the cause of this wrongful conviction as perjury or false accusation and official misconduct. Prosecutors allegedly failed to turn over evidence to the defense and Broderick allegedly lied to the grand jury to help secure the indictment against Masters.
Gould believes the paths to wrongful convictions begin in the interrogation room and suggests police make checklists and be proactive with forensic testing. Several of these factors are obviously discriminatory such as the defendant’s age and criminal background.
Regrettably, this discrimination happens on a reoccurring basis and no one should have to be penalized for a crime they didn’t commit whether it is due to their past, perjury, or the hidden motives of a legal team. At the Pennsylvania Innocence Project, we are incessantly working to prevent and bring attention to these transgressions within the legal system.
In 1991, an unemployed printer named David Ranta was convicted of killing a Hasidic rabbi in Brooklyn.
Last week, Ranta was released from the maximum-security prison in which he’d spent nearly 22 years, after almost every piece of evidence used to convict him fell away. The New York Times reported [1] that the lead detectives on the case “broke rule after rule” — they “kept few written records, coached a witness and took Mr. Ranta’s confession under what a judge described as highly dubious circumstances.”
Richard (RJ) Eskow: The Price of Evil at JPMorgan Chase
You’d think shareholders would be up in arms at Dimon and the Board of Directors for mismanaging their bank so badly. And yet they’re all still in their seats, thanks in part to the way large corporations are allowed to manipulate their own corporate governance. Dimon is both CEO and Board Chair, an extraordinarily privileged position he was not asked to give up after the London Whale scandal.
And about that scandal: There are four things worth knowing about the Whale:
The trades were illegal, according to all the evidence.
Despite the bank’s bragging about its risk management model — which it publicized widely as a lure to investors — that model wasn’t followed by the London office.
Jamie Dimon’s publicists and politician friends have burnished his reputation as “America’s best banker” – and he bypassed his bank’s org chart so that the London unit reported directly to him.
His friends and publicists have also burnished his reputation as the country’s most ethical banker. As Henny Youngman used to say, How do ya like me now?
We’ve been all over JPMorgan Chase and Jamie Dimon for a long time. (See below for a partial listing), so we’re glad to see the public tide finally turning against the bank and its leader. One of the triggers for that shift was the Senate’s report on the bank’s trade, which is as damning in its own way as Rosner’s.
Political Animal – Why Law School Doesn’t Work Anymore
The supply of lawyers has made the quality of a legal jobs dramatically worse. Graduates of lower-tier law schools often now toil in contract positions as document reviewers, “who sit in horrible little basement rooms. They are performing mindless work in Dickensian conditions, stuck in there” explains one law professor with whom Stevens spoke. These jobs are dead-end ones, with no potential for career advancement; they merely pay the bills. And the bills are really high. The average student loan burden of new law school graduates is $125,000.
I’ve writtenabout this problem before but I admit that when I’ve addressed this I’ve probably focused too much on the education debt part of this, and the way law schools keep churning out more lawyers despite knowing that the career prospects for most of them aren’t very good.
One thing I’ve missed is how actual law firms operate in this system. I assumed that the problem was simply that many of these lawyers couldn’t get jobs. What Harper emphasizes is that the supply of lawyers means even graduates of good law schools who have jobs at the top firms aren’t doing as well.
Kendell Richburg Baltimore police: Do arrest quotas encourage cops to break the law?
Richburg was part of a plainclothes police unit known as the Violent Crimes Impact Section. The VCIS was charged with getting guns and drug dealers off the streets of Baltimore. (The unit was renamed and effectively disbanded last December by new police commissioner Anthony Batts, in the wake of citizen and City Council criticism that its tactics were too aggressive.) Lots of urban police departments have employed specialty units like these, tasked with moving into high-crime areas and rapidly lowering crime rates. These units persist because they work. They make a lot of arrests, seize a lot of guns and drugs, and generally produce the kind of statistics that police officials can proudly tout to politicians and the press. They are blunt objects, and sometimes you need a blunt object if you want to make a dent.
But look closely at incidents of police brutality or corruption and you’ll often see them connected to these “jump-out boys,” so named because the officers tend to jump out of cars and aggressively pursue their targets. In 2011, the city of Chicago disbanded its extremely effective Mobile Strike Force unit, in part because citizens complained that its members played too rough. (In a 2012 Chicago magazine story about the city’s new police chief, Noah Isackson mentioned the 2006 revelations that “some officers robbed and kidnapped residents, and the accusations a year later that one officer plotted to murder another.”) In 2002, New York City disbanded its Street Crimes Unit, three years after four plainclothes officers fired 41 shots at an unarmed man named Amadou Diallo, killing him on the steps of his apartment. (The proximate cause of the unit’s downfall was the lawsuit Daniels , et al. v. the City of New York, brought by the Center for Constitutional Rights in the wake of the Diallo shooting, alleging racial profiling in the Street Crimes Unit and the NYPD at large.)
Arrest quotas are likely to produce police misconduct. This isn’t farming. You can’t expect 1300 felons an acre like they were corn. Crime varies with opportunity. Such things as the weather (criminals hate cold weather) interfere with crime rates. Police
work is not a business (not yet) and until then we don’t need performance numbers based on arrests. There are a lot of ways to measure police performance but I would it to be clear that policemen who think, who can defuse difficult situations and secure the trust of the citizens on the beat are the ones to promote and rate highly. You can be a pretty poor excuse for a policeman and generate good numbers under a quota system.
Let me say it again – Policing is not a business. It’s a public service. Introducing corporate number crunching as performance measures takes police from defenders of the public to a constant threat to a citizen’s freedom or wallet. For a business model is a totalitarian model, money and power become the drivers of policy not justice and fairness.
“He stated that he targeted and focused on (Blacks and Latinos) because he wanted to instill fear in them that every time that they left their homes they could be targeted by police,” Adams said while questioned by plaintiff attorney Jonathan Moore. “First of all I was amazed that he was comfortable enough to state that that in that setting,” Adams continued.
After Sen. Adams expressed dismay at Kelly’s alleged admission, the commissioner allegedly replied, “How else are we going to get rid of guns?”
This high-profile case will contribute to many more people seeing how in fact stop-and-frisk is racist, illegitimate, and illegal. In just the first few days, some damning testimony has already come out. The lead plaintiff in the case, David Floyd, a Black medical student in the Bronx, testified how he has been subjected to stop-and-frisk twice: once as he was just walking down the sidewalk and a second time when he was helping a neighbor who had been locked out of their apartment. Floyd said, “I felt like I was being told I should not leave my home… First and foremost, I didn’t do anything; I am not a criminal.” 16-year-old Devin Almonor also testified, recounting how he was stopped and frisked and then arrested when he was 13-years-old as he was walking home. A lawyer representing the City of New York suggested a cellphone in his front pocket might have “created a bulge,”— as if that was reason enough for a cop to stop him to look for a concealed weapon.
Bronx NYPD officer Pedro Serrano taped his supervisor telling him, “The problem was what? Male blacks. And I told you that at roll call, and I have no problem telling you this: male blacks 14 to 20.” That tape was played in court.
Stop-and-frisk recreates the signification of criminality attached to black and brown skin and creates real forms of social stigmatization, diminishes life opportunities, limits basic rights, and reproduces mass joblessness.
Race-based policing thus contributes to cycles of violence, both state violence and violence between people, and reinforces the very practice of race-based policing while allowing the social conditions that lead to crime in the first place to go ignored.
In this way, the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk tactic is a case of what Loïc Wacquant calls the “racialized penalization of poverty” in the United States, with state-sanctioned violence used to subdue marginalized populations of highly-expendable surplus humanity, a population whose labor is no longer needed, all the while blaming the individual for social conditions far out of their control.
Rather than breaking the cycle of violence and deterring crime, tactics like stop-and-frisk recreate the conditions that produce violence and criminality, thus further contributing to their existence.
From the web site, Point of View: (This is a very fine, thoughtful post.)
Predictably, most of the mayoral candidates who support stop and frisk are white. Indeed, most of the most vocal supporters of stop and frisk are white. Most of these men and women (and their sons) have never been on the business end of a police stop and even if they were the odds are that they were treated with a level of dignity and respect rarely seen by black and Latino young men.
Even more interesting are the black and Latino public figures that support stop and frisk “with modifications”. The fact is that even if a person is stopped and frisked and is not cursed at or threatened with a beat down, even if that person is not thrown against a wall or subjected to racial epithets, they are still being stopped and frisked without probable cause. That black and Latino public figures would be complicit in degradation and humiliation “with modifications” is disturbing and distressing.
Black or white or Latino, it would seem that the supporters of stop and frisk either believe that only guilty people get stopped – but the statistics overwhelmingly show that this is not true. The alternative is that these apologists for illegality somehow believe that degradation and humiliation “with modifications” is a price that some people have to pay so that crime can be reduced.
The question has to be asked of these advocates of constitutional dilution – what price would be too high?
Matthew Keys and Anonymous: Has the DOJ learned from the Aaron Swartz case?
“It was part of the conspiracy to alter the online version of a news feature published on the web site of the Los Angeles Times,” the indictment alleges, and the “conspiracy” was successful, I guess: a single Los Angeles Times news story was altered to display humorously false content (“Pressure builds in House to elect CHIPPY 1337”) for like 30 minutes. That’s it. But judging by the indictment, the government probably has a case against Keys on this charge, however unfair it may seem.
Nonetheless, the charges under the CFAA seem outrageously severe. Keys is charged with transmitting and attempting to transmit malicious code, which in this case, as far as I can tell, just means that he shared his login and password with members of Anonymous. Each of these charges carries a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison. The trouble with our current computer laws is that they are so ridiculously vague that they can be used to justify garbage charges like these. When the CFAA was passed in 1984, most of the world wasn’t networked, and the law was meant to prosecute sophisticated, malicious hackers who targeted government computers or the financial system. Now the entire world is networked, but the CFAA still reads as if universities and the Department of Defense are the only institutions with Internet access. Why hasn’t the law been changed to sufficiently reflect the times? I suspect the CFAA has been left intentionally vague so that prosecutors can use it as a bludgeon—a catch-all statute that amps up prison time and frightens suspects into plea-bargaining.
The DOJ has apparently learned nothing. In this case the damage is so small, it would be hard to justify a misdemeanor much less felonies. Currently he faces twenty years and a half-million dollar fine.
He assisted a hacker group in changing one headline. Does the DOJ have no sense of proportion? Apparently no, and no sense of irony or insight either.
We have to change the law. The DOJ is out of control, and removing the law’s overbreath is the only way to cure the problem.
We make the penalties in the law proportionate to the harm done, something the prosecutors could have been considered bright enough to do on their own.
Until we change the law, they’re just going to keep on charging decades of jail time to force a guilty plea. Good tactics, but little relationship to justice.
Matthew Keys, social media editor at Reuters, has been formally accused for his involvement in the hacking of the L.A. Times website. His indictment was announced this past Thursday and online activists are outraged declaring that the Dept. of Justice never learned its lesson after the Aaron Swartz case. Swartz committed suicide in January. His family blames the justice system and the government’s ability to intimidate.
Keys provided log in passwords for the content management system to a member of the hacker group Anonymous. In 2010 The hacker group changed a headline on the L.A. Times website referencing another hacking group. He is being charged under the 1984 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Three charges have been made against him, estimating almost $250,000 and a minimum of five years in prison.
The deputy social media editor for Reuters has been indicted by the US Justice Department for allegedly conspiring with members of the hacktivist movement Anonymous.
According to a Justice Department statement released on Thursday, 26-year-old Matthew Keys of Secaucus, New Jersey was charged in the Eastern District of California with a number of counts involving his alleged cooperation with the international hacking group while employed as the web producer of Sacramento-based television station KTXL FOX 40.
Keys, confirms the DoJ, has been charged “with one count each of conspiracy to transmit information to damage a protected computer, transmitting information to damage a protected computer and attempted transmission of information to damage a protected computer.”
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