Has Elizabeth Warren Won Over the Banks?

James Berglie/Zuma

Industry reps who once thought she was "akin to the Antichrist" now can't stop praising the consumer protection chief. What gives?

— By Andy Kroll

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Fri May. 6, 2011 3:00 AM PDT

On her first day running the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), Elizabeth Warren met with a group of bankers from her home state, Oklahoma. Going into that meeting, Roger Beverage, president of the Oklahoma Bankers Association, feared the havoc Warren, who had developed a reputation as a fierce consumer champion, would soon wreak upon his state's banks. He and his colleagues in the banking industry, he recalls, "had this vision that she was akin to the Antichrist."

Today, Beverage considers himself a Warren convert. He openly praises Warren—who was appointed by the White House to get the bureau up and running but has not been nominated to head it—saying she is "far and away" the most qualified person to become the bureau's permanent director. "Ms. Warren has demonstrated that she is willing to work as hard as possible for the benefit of consumers, consumers' families, and community banks," Beverage says. "She would be an outstanding director, and I have encouraged both of our US senators to look past political rhetoric and look at what the woman has done."

Beverage's reversal reflects a noticeable thaw in relations between Warren and parts of the banking industry. This week, Camden Fine, president and CEO of the influential Independent Community Bankers Association, told a gathering of 1,000 bankers that the odds Obama would nominate Warren were "better than even," later remarking to American Banker that "you would have to look favorably on a [Warren] nomination because clearly she understands our model." Frank Keating, the head of the American Bankers Association, told a reporter that the ABA would support Warren if she were confirmed as CFPB director by the Senate. And Robert Palmer, who heads the Community Bankers Association of Ohio, captured the mood of small banks when he told Bloomberg Businessweek that if Warren "leaves, and the direction changes, we're not going to be very receptive."

See more at: http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/05/elizabeth-warren-cfpb-community-banks

The Real Prize of the Bin Laden Raid

— By David Corn

| Fri May. 6, 2011 12:30 PM PDT

Osama bin Laden. FBI

The headline news was the obvious: US raid kills Osama bin Laden. But the real prize obtained by the special forces that assaulted the compound in Abbottabad might not have been the Al Qaeda leader, but the information they scooped up during the 40 minutes they were on the ground.

Before the Navy SEALs airlifted out of the compound, they were "feeding this data to the targeteers," says a former CIA covert operative, who was at agency headquarters during the raid. He notes that "the phones [grabbed during the raid] can be dumped in seconds and uploaded in real time to headquarters."

According to the initial reports regarding the intelligence gathered in the raid, Bin Laden was more engaged in the leadership of Al Qaeda than many experts had assumed. Rather than being isolated in a cave, he was in this suburban compound exercising command functions for the terrorist network. Which suggests that specific information about Al Qaeda and its personnel and operations flowed through this facility. This intelligence—once translated, decoded (if any of it was coded), and analyzed—should provide US military and intelligence commands valuable information for attacking other parts of Al Qaeda. As the former CIA officer says:

There are many in the Al Qaeda leadership that have to assume their location, phones, and plans are exposed and are weighing whether they stay still, or run. If they move they risk instant detection, if they stay put, they will sweat that we are watching and waiting. The true impact of this raid on the Al Qaeda system is incredibly disruptive and destructive. We gathered up the command structures intel system and communications plans. That exposes everyone. I suspect we will capture or kill a lot of people over the next two weeks.

He points to news reports of a drone strike in Pakistan's North Waziristan region on Friday that killed at least eight suspected militants.

See more at: http://motherjones.com/mojo/2011/05/real-prize-osama-bin-laden-raid

Climategate: What Really Happened?

Illustration: Jonathan Bartlett

How climate science became the target of "the best-funded, best-organized smear campaign by the wealthiest industry that the Earth has ever known."

— By Kate Sheppard

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Thu Apr. 21, 2011 3:00 AM PDT

Read also: Chris Mooney on the science of why we don't believe science.

IT'S DIFFICULT TO IMAGINE how a guy who spends most of his time looking at endless columns of temperature records became a "fucking terrorist," "killer," or "one-world-government socialist." It's even harder when you meet Michael Mann, a balding 45-year-old climate scientist who speaks haltingly and has a habit of nervously clearing his throat. And when you realize that the reason for all the hostility is a 12-year-old chart, it seems more than a little surreal.

Back in 1999, Mann—then a newly minted Ph.D. (PDF)—and a pair of colleagues constructed a chart that plotted historical climate data, spanning from 1000 to 1980. Because recorded temperatures only begin in the late 19th century, Mann and his team largely relied on so-called proxy records—measurements of tree rings, coral, and ice cores whose variations illustrate temperature changes over the years. The graph showed that after nearly 900 years of relatively stable temperatures, there was a sharp uptick starting in the 20th century.

See more at: http://motherjones.com/environment/2011/04/history-of-climategate

The Great Collapse and You

— By Kevin Drum

| Fri Apr. 22, 2011 3:00 AM PDT

Earlier this week, David Frum wrote that although he's been a Reaganite free market true believer for nearly 30 years, he recently realized that the bargain he thought he had madesimply hasn't been kept:

Especially after 2000, incomes did not much improve for middle-class Americans. The promise of macroeconomic stability proved a mirage: America and the world were hit in 2008 by the sharpest and widest financial crisis since the 1930s. Conservatives do not like to hear it, but the crisis originated in the malfunctioning of an under-regulated financial sector, not in government overspending or government over-generosity to less affluent homebuyers. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were bad actors, yes, but they could not have capsized the world economy by themselves. It took Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, AIG, and — maybe above all — Standard & Poor’s and Moody’s to do that.

....Speaking only personally, I cannot take seriously the idea that the worst thing that has happened in the past three years is that government got bigger. Or that money was borrowed. Or that the number of people on food stamps and unemployment insurance and Medicaid increased. The worst thing was that tens of millions of Americans — and not only Americans — were plunged into unemployment, foreclosure, poverty. If food stamps and unemployment insurance, and Medicaid mitigated those disasters, then two cheers for food stamps, unemployment insurance, and Medicaid.

See more at:

http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2011/04/great-collapse-and-you

It's Not Just Rude, It's Ruining Your Brain

— By Kevin Drum

| Tue Apr. 19, 2011 9:38 PM PDT

Is it rude to be constantly checking messages while you're socializing with someone else? That's a matter of opinion. But a professor friend emails to remind me that rudeness is actually the least of the problems with the perpetual multitasking of the smartphone generation:

This is the way kids these days think. My administration calls it "the millennial student" and apparently we are supposed to cater to their habits. Fully half of my 60 person general physics class this semester sits in the back of the room on either phone or laptop. They're not taking notes. The good ones are working on assignments for other classes (as if being present in mine causes the information to enter their pores). The bad are giggling at Facebook comments.

....But here's the thing: there is convincing evidence that this inveterate multitasking has a serious, measurable and long lasting negative effect on cognitive function. Look up Stanford psychologist Clifford Nass sometime. There's a lovely episode of Frontline from a year or so ago featuring him. He has shown that multitaskers are not only bad at multitasking, but they are also worse than nonmultitaskers on every individual one of the tasks.

That's the millennial student and it isn't something to be catered to. Put the damn iPhone down before you make yourself stupid.

I should have remembered that! Nass has been studying "high multitasking" for years, and his results are pretty unequivocal. Here's the Frontline interview:

What did you expect when you started these experiments?

Each of the three researchers on this project thought that ... high multitaskers [would be] great at something, although each of us bet on a different thing.

See more at:

http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2011/04/its-not-just-rude-its-ruining-your-brain

Music Monday: Dap Queen Sharon Jones

— By Titania Kumeh

| Mon Apr. 18, 2011 4:00 AM PDT

Photo: Steven Dewall

Sharon Jones, the 54-years-strong soul chanteuse of Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings, has defied so many odds you'd think the band's latest album, I Learned the Hard Way, was about her. Jones swears it's not, though. The Dap Kings write her funk-filled songs. "She Ain't a Child No More," for instance, is about parents coming home, getting drunk, and beating their children. "My parents never did do that to me," the Georgia native says. "But they beat and abused themselves—that's why my mother separated from my father. He used to beat her. Maybe that's one of the reasons I haven't gotten married. I don't even have any children."

Jones is pretty much the most honest person you could hope to interview. She's openly talked about making it in the music industry the hard way. Before the New York Times dubbed her a "timeless soul singer" and Stephen Colbert called her "fierce," the raspy-voiced diva dropped her first album with the Dap Kings when she was in her forties. She tried breaking through in the music industry two decades earlier, she says. "But I didn't have the looks. This Sony guy told me I was too black, too fat, too short, and too old. Told me to go and bleach my skin. Told me to step in the background and just stay back." After getting turned down, Jones worked as a Rikers Island corrections officer, a Wells Fargo security guard, a sanitation officer, in postal offices, and as a wedding singer. "I was still doing the Wells Fargo thing when I met the Dap Kings," she says. For all those years, she knew she could really sing. "I just thought, "One day. One day." And that day came when I met those guys."

See more at: http://motherjones.com/mixed-media/2011/04/sharon-jones-interview-dap-kings

The Electric Car Strikes Back?

Chris Paine, director of Revenge of the Electric Car Images courtesy of the filmmakers

The director of Who Killed the Electric Car? on his new film, his personal fleet, and why he thinks EVs are ready to rise from the dead.

— By Kiera Butler

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Mon May. 2, 2011 2:30 AM PDT

Back in 2006, the documentary Who Killed the Electric Car? revealed how various industry players—including petroleum companies and car manufacturers themselves—conspired to sabotage the launch of the first electric vehicles. But shortly after the film was released, its director, Chris Paine, began to hear rumblings of an electric car comeback. "I started an email correspondence with GM," recalls Paine. "I said, 'we thought you had a great car and we were upset that you killed it. But if you're going to do it right, I'm going to tell the story, since it's not often that companies change their minds on big decisions like that.'" Sure enough, a few years later the next wave of electric cars have hit the market—and Paine's sequel, Revenge of the Electric Car, tells the story of what happened. I spoke to Paine shortly after his film's Earth Day premiere.

Mother Jones: What's changed since Who Killed the Electric Car?

Chris Paine: There was a lot of blowback after the first programs were killed. Consumers were saying, 'If we have to have cars, why are only bad cars available? Why do we have to rely on the Middle East?' So the right and the left came around—afor security reasons and environmental reasons—and then the car industry itself, which realized no one was buying cars when gas hit $4 a gallon in 2008. And here we are in 2011, with gas prices going nowhere but up, and there is a serious international consensus that you have to have higher miles-per-gallon cars.

See more at: http://motherjones.com/environment/2011/04/who-killed-electric-car-chris-paine