Following a yearlong Mother Jones investigation of Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey's elephant abuse, the USDA fined Ringling Bros. $270,000 for alleged Animal Welfare Act (AWA) violations from June 2007 to August 2011. It's the largest civil penalty against an exhibitor in the AWA's four-decade history. For each violation after June 2008, the USDA can fine up to $10,000. That means the USDA is most likely charging Ringling Bros. with more than 27 violations. 

In our November/December 2011 issue, Pulitzer Prize winner Deborah Nelson uncovered the big top on the circus's potential Animal Welfare Act (AWA) violations: elephants whipped with bullhooks, trapped in train cars filled with their own feces, and chained in place for a good part of their lives. Now, that could change. As part of the USDA's agreement with Feld Entertainment, Ringling Bros.' corporate parent, the company will start yearly AWA compliance trainings beginning March 31, 2012 for all new employees who work with animals. That would be a stark contrast to their past cooperation with the USDA. In Nelson's investigations, Ringling Bros. handlers were shown trying to postpone USDA investigations of their elephant training sites.

Feld Entertainment waived the opportunity for a hearing. In a press release, the company explained that "Feld Entertainment made a business decision to resolve its differences with the USDA." The company claimed it was more important to focus on the future of their animal care "instead of engaging in costly and protracted litigation." Feld still denies any wrongdoing or violation of USDA regulations, despite agreeing to pay the $270,000 USDA fine.

Here is the agreement, signed the Wednesday before Thanksgiving:

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Supporters of Troy Davis gather in Jackson, Georgia, in September.

The North Carolina state senate voted to gut a law on Monday that allows death row inmates to argue that racial bias influenced their sentencing. Enacted in 2009, the Racial Justice Act requires judges in North Carolina to commute death row inmates' sentences to life in prison if they find race played a "significant" role in the initial sentence.

State Republicans have long set their sights on undoing the law, the Wall Street Journal reports. The GOP-controlled North Carolina state house weakened the original law in June, changing its language to require that courts prove that prosecutors acted "with discriminatory purpose" when selecting juries and seeking the death penalty. But proving intent, as one attorney told the Raleigh News & Observer, is exceedingly difficult. And Colorlines' Jamillah King reports that the new language "represented a meaningful undermining of the point: The law had moved courts to a focus on racially disparate outcomes, rather than a racist intent."

The law's opponents say it is sloppily written, and could give inmates the ability to use statistics on racial bias from other jurisdictions in their appeals. Also at stake for Republicans: the future of capital punishment in North Carolina. They view the Racial Justice Act as a Trojan horse for ending the death penalty, pointing out that the state hasn't ordered up an execution since 2006 (three years before the law was enacted). Just a few weeks ago, 43 of North Carolina's 44 district attorneys wrote a letter to the state Senate asking legislators to repeal the Racial Justice Act for that very reason.

It's a fair point—if you're into executing people. Another fair point: according to a widely cited presentation at Michigan State University law school in 2010, defendants who killed a white person in North Carolina were more than twice as likely to receive the death penalty than when their victims were black. And the Raleigh News & Observer reports that African-American jury pool members who weren't rejected for cause were rejected at about twice the rate as potential white jurors.

But as Georgia's controversial execution of Troy Davis earlier this year affirmed, the trend towards disproportionately executing poor black men isn't confined to North Carolina. Here's Colorlines' King again:

Since the death penalty was reinstated in 1977, 56 percent of inmates killed by the state [of Georgia] have been black. . . .

Nationally, 48 percent— that’s nearly 70,000 people—of those who’ve been sentenced to life in prison are black, despite the fact that the black inmates make up 38 percent of the total prison population.

North Carolina is one of 34 states in the U.S. that currently executes prisoners. The Death Penalty Information Center lists it as having the country’s sixth largest death row. The majority of people on it—86 out of a total of 157 inmates—are African American.

What's at issue here isn't the sanctity of capital punishment. It's the fact that it has been wielded unjustly.

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Tod Kelly tells a story about a commercial nursery that hired his firm a few years ago to help get their workers compensation claims under control. After examining the nursery's operations, they made several recommendations about buying some new equipment and updating their training:

As we were wrapping up, as an aside, we noted that one of their larger ongoing back injury claimants was an illegal alien. We could close that claim out quickly, we told them, by letting the injured worker know that we would have light duty work for him were he able to legally work for the nursery. Since he wasn’t able, he could be terminated and all future indemnity costs would disappear. As soon as we explained this, the brothers began looking at each other, wide eyed and smiling. I cringed inwardly. I knew we had just made a mistake.

The updated equipment was never purchased, of course. And taking the time to train or stretch was seen as a waste of the company’s time and money. The claims continued to flood in, but now with each claim came notification from the employer that they had “reason to suspect” the claimant was an illegal worker, along with a request to send the light-duty letter so we could avoid making indemnity payments. Over the course of the next year the number of employee injuries increased 20%. But without indemnity costs their annual claims cost decreased 55% — and their insurance premiums went down as a result. They were able to terminate our services the next year with a glowing letter of recommendation.

Today they have moved from being one of a top-100 nursery to being a top-15, and by all accounts are going strong.

If this reminds you a lot of The Jungle, you aren't the only one. The rest of the piece is worth a read too.

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Conventional wisdom watch, bond market edition:

James Carville on the bond market, circa 1993: "I used to think if there was reincarnation, I wanted to come back as the president or the pope or a .400 baseball hitter. But now I want to come back as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody."

Karl Smith on the bond market, circa 2011: "I used to think if there was reincarnation, I wanted to come back as the bond market. But now I want to come back as the repo market. The repo market even intimidates the bond market."

Karl didn't actually say that, of course. But acting as his PR agent, I'm making his view a little more user friendly. In any case, he's right. Sovereign bonds are the backbone of the repo market, and the repo market is the backbone of the shadow banking system. So when sovereign bonds fail, the shadow banking system fails and there's a run. And as we all know, there's no FDIC insurance for the shadow banking system.

At a guess, the shadow banking system makes up about half of the entire banking system these days, and right now the shadow banking system is looking distinctly wobbly in Europe. Somebody needs to prop it up to stop a run, and that somebody is the European Central Bank. So far, though, they aren't stepping up to the plate. The best case scenario is that Noah Millman is right, and they're just playing a very high-stakes game of chicken in order to advance German interests:

One way of looking at the sequence of events is to say that the ECB was willing to permit contagion in order to wring out inflation. I think a better way of looking at it is to say that the ECB was willing to threaten Italy with insolvency in order to give Germany more formal control over Italy’s finances. That’s incredibly hard-ball politics, but if you are not accountable to anybody (which the ECB, basically, is not) then you can play really, really hard-ball politics.

When somebody eventually makes a movie about this, perhaps it will be called Seven Days in December. I hope it has as happy an ending as the original.

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