Author Archives: AleidaXloxni

Hillary Clinton Announces Support to Ban Wall Street Bonuses for Government Officials

by AleidaXloxni Posted on September 2, 2015

Mother Jones

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On Monday, Hillary Clinton came out in support of legislation seeking to end the so-called “golden parachute” payouts that traditionally benefit private sector executives who take on jobs within the federal government—a practice long criticized by Wall Street reformers such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren.

“The American people need to be able to trust that every single person in Washington—from the President of the United States all the way down to agency employees—is putting the interests of the people first,” Clinton wrote in an blog post for the Huffington Post, published Monday. “We want to do more to make sure that happens.”

Clinton’s backing of the the Financial Services Conflict of Interest Act comes after a report in the Intercept last month that revealed two senior-level State Department officials during her time as secretary, Thomas Nides and Robert Hormats, had received hefty payments from Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs respectively after taking on jobs with the State Department.

In July, Warren issued a challenge to all presidential candidates to support the legislation, calling it “a bill any presidential candidate should be able to cheer for.”

”We have a presidential election coming up,” she told a crowd in Phoenix. “I think anyone running for that job—anyone who wants the power to make every key economic appointment and nomination across the federal government—should say loud and clear that they agree: we don’t run this country for Wall Street and mega corporations. We run it for people.”

Clinton’s announcement on Monday shows she is listening closely to what Warren has to say.

Since announcing her second run for president, the former secretary of state has embraced a number of policies close to Warren’s heart, specifically on Wall Street reform. Last December, Clinton reportedly met privately with Warren to discuss her policy ideas. News of the conversation signaled Clinton could be ready to take a more populist approach to her campaign for the White House.

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Hillary Clinton Announces Support to Ban Wall Street Bonuses for Government Officials

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No, Democrats Aren’t a Bunch of Hopeless Wimps

by AleidaXloxni Posted on November 5, 2014

Mother Jones

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Just a quick note about an election meme that’s already driving me crazy: Democrats lost because they’re timid, vacillating milksops who can barely string together a coherent message and are congenitally unwilling to stand up for their own beliefs. No wonder everyone hates them!

Give me a break. Democrats are Democrats, and they act pretty much the same every election cycle. And yet, they won big in 2006, 2008, and 2012. If they’re such gutless milksops, how were those victories possible?

Look: every election cycle features different candidates. Obviously it’s possible that, on average, this year’s crop of Democrats were more milksoppy than usual. But here’s what’s far more likely: 2014 featured a fairly ordinary bunch of candidates, and the party’s leadership was roughly as effective and visionary (or not) as it normally is. Ditto for fundraising and GOTV efforts.

But every election cycle has structural differences. This one featured a bad Senate map for Dems. It was a midterm election. The party leader was a president whose popularity has waned. The economy continues to be listless. Washington is paralyzed by gridlock, which means that Democrats didn’t have many legislative successes to sell. And anyway, a consistent message would have been all but impossible given all the seats they had to defend in conservative states.

Maybe Dems could have done better. Maybe their message this year really was weak and stale. But if your theory of defeat is based on some enduring and egregious flaw that’s inherent in the Democratic Party, you should reconsider. It probably doesn’t explain as much as you think. Structural explanations that take account of varying conditions are almost always better.

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No, Democrats Aren’t a Bunch of Hopeless Wimps

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The Incredible Thing About Whale Poop Is That It Fights Climate Change

by AleidaXloxni Posted on July 7, 2014

Mother Jones

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This story originally appeared in CityLab and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

It’s not a good time to be living in the ocean. Aside from oil spills and the scourge of plastics pollution, the seas are becoming ever more acidic due to humanity’s CO2 flooding the atmosphere. The altered PH of the water makes for a bevy of problems, from making fish act in really weird ways to dissolving the shells of creatures critical to the marine food chain.

But a group of scientists from the University of Vermont and elsewhere think the ocean’s future health has one thing going for it: the restoration of whale populations. They believe that having more whales in the water creates a more stable marine environment, partly through something called a “whale pump”—a polite term for how these majestic animals defecate.

Commercial hunting of great whales, meaning the baleen and sperm variety, led to a decline in their numbers as high as 66 percent to 90 percent, the scientists write in a new study in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment. This mammalian decimation “likely altered the structure and function of the oceans,” says lead author Joe Roman, “but recovery is possible and in many cases is already under way.”

The researchers—who are whale biologists—present a couple of arguments for how these animals help secure the climate-threatened ocean. The first is their bathroom behavior: After feeding on krill in the briny deep, whales head back to the surface to take massive No. 2s. You can see the “pumping” process in action amid this group of sperm whales off the coast of Sri Lanka:

Tony Wu/University of Vermont

You have to feel for the person who took that photo. But these “flocculent fecal plumes” happen to be laden with nutrients and are widely consumed by plankton, which in turn takes away carbon from the atmosphere when they photosynthesize, die, and wind up on the ocean floor. A previous study of the Southern Ocean, to cite just one example, indicated that sperm-whale defecation might remove hundreds of thousands of tons of atmospheric carbon each year by enhancing such plankton growth. Thus, these large whales “may help to buffer marine ecosystems from destabilizing stresses” like warmer temperatures and acidification, the researchers claim.

The other nice thing whales do for the climate is eat tons of food and then die. In life, they are fantastic predators. But in death, their swollen bodies are huge sarcophagi for carbon. When the Grim Reaper comes calling, whales sink and sequester lots and lots of carbon at the bottom of the sea, like this dearly departed fellow:

Craig Smith/University of Vermont

While there’s no exact measurement of how these “whale falls” impact global carbon sequestration—and some argue it can’t have that big of an effect—Roman thinks it’s worth keeping in mind when thinking about protecting these vulnerable creatures. As he told an Alaskan news station last year, “This may be a way of mitigating climate change, if we can restore whale populations throughout the world.”

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The Incredible Thing About Whale Poop Is That It Fights Climate Change

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