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Elizabeth Warren Wants to Make it Easier for Women to Sue Employers Over Pay Discrimination

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| Tue Jun. 11, 2013 10:21 AM PDT
Senator Elizabeth Warren/Flickr

It's been 50 years since President John Fitzgerald Kennedy signed the Equal Pay Act, a law that called for equal pay for equal work. Today, women today still earn 77 cents for every dollar a man earns. On Monday, in an op-ed in Massachusetts' Springfield Republican, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) called on Congress to end this once and for all by passing the Paycheck Fairness Act, a bill Warren and Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.) introduced in January.

Warren and Mikulski's Paycheck Fairness Act would amend the Equal Pay Act of 1963 to require employers that are sued for discrimination to demonstrate that wage differences between men and women doing the same work are the result of things like education, training, or experience, not gender. Right now, a woman who sues her employer has to prove she was discriminated against. If Warren's bill passes, employers would have to prove they didn't discriminate. The bill also strengthens penalties for pay discrimination, putting them on par with punishments imposed on employers who discriminate based on race or ethnicity; and increases protections against retaliation for workers who inquire about their employer's wage practices.

In the op-ed, the senator points out that the pay gulf between men and women adds up to "hundreds of thousands of dollars" over a lifetime, a gap our economy can't afford, especially as more women than ever are the primary breadwinners: "For middle class families, it takes two incomes to get by these days, and many families depend as much, if not more, on Mom's salary as they do on Dad's. And for single-parent households, lower salaries make it that much harder to stay afloat."

Paycheck inequality also makes America's student debt problem worse. Women and men borrow about the same amount to fund their educations, but a year after graduating, women only make 82 cents for every dollar men do. "This means that as a percentage of income, many young women bear a greater student loan debt burden than young men," Warren says.

Congress and the Obama administration have made steps toward greater pay equality in the past few years. The first bill that President Obama signed was the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which upholds the rights of victims of pay discrimination to seek legal recourse. Earlier this spring, the Senate passed a budget amendment supporting efforts to close the wage gap. On Monday, President Barack Obama also called for passage of the Paycheck Fairness Act, which was introduced in both chambers in the last Congress but never made it out of committee.

"There's still more work to be done," Warren says. "I want every little girl to grow up thinking about becoming a doctor or a scientist, a union leader or a small business owner. I don't want her to have to think about how she will get by on wages that are lower."

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Privacy Activists Worried About Immigration Bill

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| Tue Jun. 11, 2013 9:09 AM PDT

For years, groups like the American Civil Liberties Union and Electronic Frontier Foundation have kept tabs on potential privacy problems arising from immigration reform efforts. Now that a big immigration reform bill has made it out of committee and reached the Senate floor, privacy advocates are focused on three big concerns.

(1) Drone surveillance: US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) already uses Predator drones to patrol parts of the northern and southern borders, but the Senate immigration bill calls for surveillance "24 hours per day and for 7 days per week," in the southwest and southern border regions. The bill would also fund additional border enforcement and surveillance, including more drones, to the tune of $4.5 billion.

A federal statute from the 1950s allows border patrol agents to stop and search people at checkpoints located in the US up to 100 miles from any international border; the Senate immigration bill would allow the surveillance drones to fly over the same areas in most states. But by law, border agents can only enter private lands within 25 miles of the border without a warrant to track down immigrants who have unlawfully crossed the border.

Although the Senate immigration bill would require border drones to be unarmed, they would still possess the same high-tech surveillance capabilities designed for Predator drones used by the US military in Afghanistan. That, privacy advocates say, blurs the line that limits border patrol surveillance of private lands to 25 miles within the border. Beyond that, drone use raises the question of what other data the feds are sweeping up in the process of watching the border. In a recent New York Times Magazine story, a reporter witnesses an Air Force training exercise where drones track civilian vehicles on the highway. Regulations prevent the Air Force from targeting specific people, but it's okay for it to hand data collected "incidentally" in the course of a separate operation, such as training or observing illegal activity, to federal agencies. That same logic could apply to border surveillance, which could conceivably give the feds wide latitude on data collection because of the Mexican drug war.

In short, the bill "offers little protections or guidance on [drones'] use and on the grave privacy implications they create," explains Mark Jaycox, an EFF policy analyst.

[Read more]

The Financialization of America (and the World)

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| Tue Jun. 11, 2013 8:55 AM PDT

Bruce Bartlett writes today about the relentless financialization of the American economy and the danger it poses:

Ozgur Orhangazi of Roosevelt University has found that investment in the real sector of the economy falls when financialization rises....Adair Turner, formerly Britain’s top financial regulator, [suggests] that the financial sector’s gains have been more in the form of economic rents — basically something for nothing — than the return to greater economic value.

Another way that the financial sector leeches growth from other sectors is by attracting a rising share of the nation’s “best and brightest” workers, depriving other sectors like manufacturing of their skills.

The rising share of income going to financial assets also contributes to labor’s falling share....This phenomenon is a major cause of rising income inequality, which itself is an important reason for inadequate growth.

The dangers of runaway financialization are pretty well known and pretty well accepted. Given that, the key question you should ask is: Why? It's not inevitable, after all. The finance industry doesn't grow because some fundamental feature of the modern economy demands it. In fact, it's really more mysterious than it seems. After all, we know why, say, the car industry grew during the 20th century: because more people wanted cars. Likewise, we know why the tech industry is growing now: because more people want to surf the net and play video games.

So why has finance grown? Because the world needs more finance? Up to a point, sure: availability of capital is a key requirement for economic growth in a modern mixed economy. But we passed that point quite a while ago. Capital has been freely and easily available in America and most of the developed world for decades. So again: Why the continued growth? It doesn't seem to be demand driven, so there must be some other reason. Anyone care to guess in comments? No prizes for the right answer, I'm afraid.

Plan B Drives Conservatives Crazy

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| Tue Jun. 11, 2013 8:30 AM PDT

Over at The Corner, Wesley Smith passes along the story of a mother who pretended to be her 12-year-old daughter and successfully trapped an online sexual predator. Then, for some reason, he adds this:

Now, think about this story in the context of the Obama Administration’s decision to allow “women of all ages”—in the parlance of the radical reproductive rights crowd—to obtain the morning-after-pill without supervision. It will be yet another way in which parents could be kept in the dark about what is happening to their own children, perhaps even when they are victims of sexual predation. Truly sickening.

These people don't even make sense any more. Apparently the existence of online creeps is a good reason to prevent teenagers from deciding whether or not they want to bear children. Or something. Jesus.

We're Still at War: Photo of the Day for June 11, 2013

Tue Jun. 11, 2013 7:57 AM PDT

Marines with Fox Company, 2nd Battalion, 8th Marines (2/8), Regimental Combat Team 7, and Afghan National Security Forces provide security during Operation Nightmare in Nowzad, Afghanistan, June 6, 2013. Operation Nightmare was a clearing operation led by Afghan National Security Forces and supported by the Marines of 2/8. U.S. Marine Corps photo by Cpl. Kowshon Ye.

Edward Snowden Said Contractors Can "Watch Your Ideas Form as You Type." How Does That Work?

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| Tue Jun. 11, 2013 6:44 AM PDT
matrix photobank.kiev.ua /Shutterstock

Among the revelations made last week by NSA leaker Edward Snowden, few were more jarring than the suggestion that private security contractors have the capability to monitor your every online communication seemingly on a whim, in real-time. As he told the Washington Post, "They quite literally can watch your ideas form as you type."

Like most everything else Snowden disclosed, it seemed like something out of a spy movie. But with the caveat that no one outside the NSA truly knows the extent of the agency's reach, cybersecurity experts say that Snowden's charge rings true, at least in part. According to PowerPoint slides Snowden provided to the Post and the Guardian, PRISM collected stored communications information from sites such as Facebook, Skype, Google, and Yahoo, boasting of access to online social networking details, email, file transfers, photos and video and voice chats.

Barring direct access (physically installing some sort of keystroke capture, for example) analysts probably don’t have the capability to jump into a random Skype conversation and see what’s being typed—nor would they want to. "Are they probably actually doing that for like arbitrary people?," asked Julian Sanchez, a research fellow at the Cato Institute who specializes in tech privacy. "Probably not because that would take a lot of time and not be very useful."

[Read more]

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Buying Plan B Will No Longer Require an ID or a Prescription

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| Mon Jun. 10, 2013 10:00 PM PDT

The Obama administration did an about-face on emergency contraception Monday evening, announcing that it will allow women to obtain Plan B One-Step over the counter without age restrictions or ID requirements.

Last month, the Department of Justice had appealed an April 5 ruling by US District Court Judge Edward R. Korman, who said the Food and Drug Administration should make all forms of levonorgestrel-based emergency contraception, or EC, available over the counter to all women, regardless of age. Here's the letter the DOJ sent Korman on Monday:

We write to advise the Court that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) have complied with the Court’s April 10, 2013, judgment in the above-referenced case by granting the 2001 Citizen Petition and making Plan B One-Step (PBOS) available over-the-counter (OTC) without age or point-of-sale restrictions as described below. It is the government's understanding that this course of action fully complies with the Court's judgment in this action. Once the Court confirms that the government’s understanding is correct, the government intends to file with the Circuit Court notice that it is voluntarily withdrawing its appeal in this matter.

The Center for Reproductive Rights, which had sued the administration to force universal availability of EC, welcomed the change, but noted that it still does not go far enough. "Now that the appeals court has forced the federal government's hand, the FDA is finally taking a significant step forward," said the group's president, Nancy Northup. "But the Obama Administration continues to unjustifiably deny the same wide availability for generic, more affordable brands of emergency contraception."

Northup added that CRR "will continue to fight for fair treatment for women who want and need more affordable options."

What Does PRISM Do? How Does It Work? Take 2.

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| Mon Jun. 10, 2013 9:20 PM PDT

I learned today that the military—which, as you know, runs NSA—has long had an unclassified software package called PRISM that's a sort of workflow or project management tool for information collection. Here's a description from the Army Field Manual:

The description here of a "collection manager" initiating a sequence that results in a "mission tasking order" sounds fairly close to the Washington Post's description of PRISM as a tool that allows "collection managers [to send] content tasking instructions" to equipment installed at Google, Microsoft, and other companies.

So now I'm curious: Is Edward Snowden's PRISM the same as the piece of software described here? Is it just a vanilla piece of project management software that's widely used throughout the military? Or is it something else that's more specialized and just happens to have the same name? I'm not sure who can clear this up, but perhaps either Glenn Greenwald or Barton Gellman have some insight into this.

New Poll Says American Public is Fine With NSA Surveillance

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| Mon Jun. 10, 2013 5:11 PM PDT

Pew is out with the first poll asking the public what it thinks of the NSA phone record surveillance program. Unsurprisingly, the public thinks it's just peachy, by a margin of 56-41. What is surprising, though, is the epic size of the change in partisan attitudes since 2006. Back then, Republicans approved of the (recently revealed) NSA program by 38 points more than Democrats. Now, Republicans disapprove by 12 points more than Democrats.

This isn't the last word on the subject. The wording of the question is different this year compared to 2006, and that might account for a bit of the difference. But probably not much. Basically, when Bush was president, Republicans thought that monitoring telephone traffic was a great idea. Now, when Obama is president, they're not so sure—but Democrats think it's fine and dandy. This is about as remarkable a turnaround as I've seen on any subject in recent years.

Unfortunately, it's going to be harder than I thought to eventually get a firm read on this. I had figured that early polls would be tentative because so few people would understand what the NSA program entails (i.e., legal vs. warrantless, every call vs. some calls, metadata vs. listening in). Later polls would get progressively more accurate as this stuff became better known. But now that the PRISM program has also been revealed, it's likely that future polls will be forced to use mushy wording and public opinion will be a bit more confused. Oh well.

Edward Snowden and the Iceland Option

—By and

| Mon Jun. 10, 2013 3:30 PM PDT
Pincasso/Shutterstock

Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor who disclosed details about two massive spying programs, initially holed up in a hotel in Hong Kong, a part of the world he chose apparently because of its "spirited commitment to free speech and the right of political dissent." But it's not clear that Hong Kong officials are especially interested in sheltering him. And Snowden said when he went public this weekend that he might try to seek asylum in Iceland.

But Iceland is a long way from Hong Kong. At least 20 hours by air and easily a $3,000 ticket, the trip also would almost certainly require a stop in another European country that might be inclined to turn him over to the US during a layover. But could he try to follow the lead of Julian Assange and make his way to the Icelandic consulate in Hong Kong, where he could submit an application for asylum? The consulate is only about five miles from Snowden's last known whereabouts, the swanky Mira hotel in Kowloon.

A spokesman for the government of Iceland told USA Today this would not be possible because asylum seekers have to be in Iceland to start the application process:

"The main stipulation for seeking asylum in Iceland would be that the person must be in Iceland to start the process," said Johannes Tomasson, the chief spokesman for Iceland's Ministry of Interior in Reykjavik. "That would be the ground rule No. 1."

Snowden does have supporters in the country, namely Birgitta Jónsdóttir, a member of the Icelandic parliament, who released a statement this week saying, "We feel it is our duty to offer to assist and advise Mr. Snowden to the greatest of our ability." In an interview with Mother Jones, Jónsdóttir noted that Iceland's interior minister is a conservative "who has been saying [he wants] to strengthen ties with US, which means he will want to do everything that the US government tells him to do." But she explained that the parliament has the power to grant citizenship to people in special cases, which could spare Snowden from extradition because, she says, Iceland has never extradited an Icelandic citizen anywhere. This would still require Snowden to get from Hong Kong to Iceland. If he did, whether Jónsdóttir could rally enough of her colleagues to take action is anything but certain.

Jónsdóttir is the public face of the Pirate Party, a newly formed opposition party dedicated to media freedom and digital innovation. The party won only 3 out of 63 seats in the recently formed parliament and may not have much clout in the matter. Moreover, others in the government have not expressed a great desire to help Snowden. After all, the United States is one of Iceland's largest trading partners, and Iceland has a long-standing extradition treaty with the US, factors that even Jónsdóttir concedes could mean that Iceland is "not the best location" for Snowden to seek refuge.

If all else fails, Jónsdóttir says, "maybe we need to create like a whistleblower freedom boat somewhere to pick up refugees."