Category Archives: alternative energy

California Dives Into the Unknown With $15 Minimum Wage

by NellEUHzum Posted on March 28, 2016

Mother Jones

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San Francisco and Los Angeles have already passed laws raising their minimum wages to $15 per hour. Now, in a victory for labor activists who were getting ready to put a $15 minimum wage on the ballot, the state is getting ready to follow suit:

According to a document obtained by The Times, the negotiated deal would boost California’s statewide minimum wage from $10 an hour to $10.50 on Jan. 1, 2017, with a 50-cent increase in 2018 and then $1-per-year increases through 2022. Businesses with fewer than 25 employees would have an extra year to comply, delaying their workers receiving a $15 hourly wage until 2023.

Future statewide minimum wage increases would be linked to inflation, but a governor would have the power to temporarily block some of the initial increases in the event of an economic downturn.

This would genuinely be terra incognita. The chart on the right shows the California minimum wage over the past 40 years, adjusted for inflation. An increase to $11 per hour in 2018 would return the state to slightly above its historical high point. Beyond that, however, the minimum wage goes far higher than it’s ever been.

What effect will that have, especially in lower-wage areas outside the big cities? There’s no telling. It won’t be Armageddon, but it might not be entirely benign either. Small increases in the minimum wage seem to have little or no effect on employment, but this increase isn’t small, and it unquestionably gets us beyond merely catching up with past erosion in the minimum wage. A statewide minimum of $15 would be a brand new thing.

Kansas recently tried out full-bore right-wing economics, and it’s pretty much been a disaster. Now liberals are getting their chance in California. Come back in a decade and we’ll find out if left-wing economics does any better.

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California Dives Into the Unknown With $15 Minimum Wage

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This Is What It’s Like to Try to Sue Donald Trump

by VickiGerard366 Posted on March 28, 2016

Mother Jones

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Of the many targets of Republican presidential contenders’ attacks on Donald Trump—and there have been plenty to choose from—one of their favorites has been Trump University. The now-shuttered educational enterprise (forced to change its name to the Trump Entrepreneur Initiative after the New York education department found its moniker to be misleading) is accused, in three separate lawsuits, of defrauding thousands of students into taking on massive debt they now can’t pay back by falsely marketing itself as a road to Trump-level wealth and business success.

But Trump University isn’t the only Trump endeavor that has landed in court. The tycoon has launched—or lent his name to—a slew of business ventures that have yielded frustrated customers and investors who have sought legal recourse. There are hundreds of lawsuits extending over 43 years that name Trump or one of his businesses. Here’s an incomplete list of some of those legal skirmishes that began when Trump joined his father’s business and continue through his run for the GOP nomination.

Trump Management: In 1973, the Department of Justice brought a lawsuit against Donald Trump and his father’s company, Trump Management, for alleged violations of the Fair Housing Act in connection with 39 buildings it operated. The DOJ alleged that building administrators racially coded apartment applications to secretly ensure that black applicants would be denied. The case was settled in 1975, without an admission of guilt from Trump Management.

Trump Tower: In 1980, Trump hired a contractor to demolish an old building to clear the way for Trump Tower, the midtown Manhattan skyscraper that today houses Trump’s main digs and the headquarters of the Trump Organization. To meet Trump’s deadline, the contractor hired 200 undocumented Polish laborers and kept them off the books, paying them $4 or $5 an hour—the minimum wage in 1980 was $3.10—and often requiring that they work 12-hour days with no overtime. In 1983, members of the local Wreckers Union filed a class action lawsuit against Trump for $4 million in unpaid union pensions and other contributions that would help increase benefits for some of the Polish workers. Many of the workers also alleged that they hadn’t been paid the full wages they were due. Throughout the case and even recently, Trump has insisted that he wasn’t aware his contractor had hired these Polish workers. The courts didn’t buy it. “We find that a conspiracy to deprive the funds of their rightful contributions has been shown,” wrote the district court judge in a 1991 ruling. “There is strong evidence of tacit agreement by the parties…to employ the Polish workers and to deprive them of the benefits ordinarily accorded to non-union workers on a union job, including contributions to the funds based on their wages.” The case was settled in 1999 for an undisclosed amount and sealed, but Rubio brought it up several times during a GOP debate in February.

Trump’s Atlantic City casinos: Between 1991 and 2009, four Trump ventures declared bankruptcy, three of them involving his hotel and casino empire in Atlantic City, New Jersey. These bankruptcies spawned a number of lawsuits. Here are three, including one from his own lawyer:

Trump was sued by a market analyst who predicted the bankruptcy of the Trump Taj Mahal casino years before it opened in 1990: When Trump was planning the Taj Mahal in the late 1980s, a market analyst named Marvin Roffman made it clear that he thought the venture wouldn’t succeed. Two weeks before the casino’s opening, after his dismal prediction about the casino’s future was quoted in the Wall Street Journal, a furious Trump called the Philadelphia brokerage firm where he worked, Janney Montgomery Scott, demanding an apology and threatening to sue. Roffman issued an apology, rescinded it, and was then fired. First Roffman sued his former firm for wrongful termination—settling for $750,000—and then, in July 1990, he sued Trump, later settling for an undisclosed amount.
Trump’s shareholders begged the bankruptcy court to derail Trump’s plan to reorganize his Atlantic City casinos as a “basket of goodies” for himself: In 2004, Trump Hotel & Casino Resorts declared bankruptcy. When the company and the bankruptcy court came up with a plan to reorganize the business, stockholders in the company filed documents with the bankruptcy court asking the judge to cut off Trump’s exclusive right to direct the reorganization of the casinos. They wrote in their filing that the current plan gave a “basket of goodies” to Trump—including a $2 million-a-year salary for his job as chairman—leaving virtually nothing for investors. Ultimately, the shareholders’ appeals were acknowledged and Trump Hotel & Casino Resorts agreed to pay the investors $17.5 million. It is unclear what happened to Trump’s salary.
A law firm won $50 million for Trump Entertainment but then had to sue its former client after Trump Entertainment tried to avoid paying its legal fees by claiming bankruptcy: In 2008, the law firm Levine Staller began filing tax appeals for the Trump Taj Mahal, Trump Plaza, and Trump Marina. Its work saved Trump’s company lots of money: In 2012, Levine Staller won a settlement that returned $35 million in overpaid taxes and cut $15 million from the company’s future liabilities, leading to a total savings of $50 million for the corporation. Trump agreed to pay $7.25 million to the law firm in legal fees, but then only paid Levine Staller $6 million before trying to claim the rest as unsecured debt in ongoing bankruptcy proceedings. In response, Levine Staller sued its former client, Trump Entertainment, and in 2014, a judge rejected Trump Entertainment’s request to be absolved of this debt and told the company to pay up.
Two Trump casino dealers filed (and later lost) a sex discrimination case after they were fired for wearing ponytails: In 1996, two male casino dealers at Trump Plaza in Atlantic City got fired after repeatedly refusing to comply with a new grooming policy at the casino that required men’s hair to be no longer than “mid-collar.” Both dealers wore ponytails, and received multiple warnings before being terminated. Once officially fired, they filed a case against Trump Plaza alleging that sex-differentiated hair policies are discriminatory, as well as several other charges. Both a lower court and the superior court of New Jersey ruled on behalf of Trump Plaza, saying that the hair length policy did not constitute sex discrimination.

Trump SoHo: In 2010, a group of buyers who had purchased condos at Trump SoHo, a luxury hotel and condo building in lower Manhattan, sued the Trump Organization, which managed the building, and the group of developers who had constructed it. They alleged that they were duped into buying these properties by representatives of Trump SoHo, who had exaggerated the building’s sales and instilled a false sense of confidence in future buyers about the project’s potential for success. The building was planned as a mixed-use condo and hotel project: Buyers could live in their properties only for a designated number of days each year, and the rest of the time their homes would be rented to hotel guests, with the buyer and Trump SoHo sharing rental revenue. In their complaint, the buyers said that they had been misled in the personal pitches and statements to the press made by representatives of Trump SoHo, who said the project was “30, 40, 50, 60 percent or more” sold. In reality, only 16 percent of the building’s units were sold—just 1 percent more than is needed to start an offering plan, a document for buyers that outlines the details of a construction project that is under development. A year later, the buyers settled with the sponsors of Trump SoHo after they promised to refund 90 percent of the apartment deposits. Trump SoHo was completed in 2010 and was purchased by CIM Group in 2014 after going into foreclosure proceedings because it couldn’t find enough buyers. Roughly two-thirds of the units still haven’t been sold.

Trump Tower Tampa: In 2009, a group of at least 20 condo buyers sued Trump for overselling his role in the development of a luxury condo project in Tampa that was ultimately never built and remains an empty lot to this day. Buyers put down 20 percent deposits on 190 units that cost between $700,000 and nearly $6 million, in part because the project’s marketing materials persuaded them that Trump was behind the development of the building. In fact, he had only lent his name to the project through a licensing agreement. The case was ultimately settled, with some buyers getting back as little as $11,115, after investing hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Trump Baja: Tampa was not the only place where condo buyers sued Trump for overselling his role in a project. In 2010, over 100 condo buyers sued Trump after they lost millions of dollars in deposits they’d put down on apartments in Trump Ocean Resort Baja, a planned luxury oceanfront hotel and condo building near Tijuana, Mexico, that was never built. The property was foreclosed on in 2008, in the midst of the financial crisis, before construction had begun. Buyers had been given the impression that Trump was developing the property—a selling point for many—but when the project was foreclosed on, it turned out that he had merely licensed his name to the venture. The lawsuit accused Trump of fraud and violating federal disclosure laws, among other charges, and a confidential settlement was secured in 2013.

Trump Model Management: In October 2014, Jamaican fashion model Alexia Palmer filed a lawsuit against Trump’s modeling agency. She alleged that Trump Model Management had engaged in “fraudulent misrepresentation” and violated immigration and labor laws when it agreed, as part of her visa application, to pay her a $75,000 annual salary, but then didn’t pay anywhere close to that amount. Palmer says she was paid just $3,880.75 over three years. Trump Model Management filed a motion to dismiss the case, and a New York district judge dismissed the case in March 2016.

The chefs: In June 2015, while announcing his candidacy for the Republican nomination, Trump memorably described Mexican immigrants as criminals and “rapists.” On July 8, acclaimed restaurateur José Andrés announced that he was pulling his restaurant from Trump’s planned Washington, DC, hotel due to the candidate’s comments. Shortly after, Geoffrey Zakarian, a second chef with an agreement to open an eatery at the hotel, also withdrew. In July and August, Trump sued Andrés’ company and Zakarian‘s firm for breach of contract, asking each for $10 million in damages and lost rent. About a month later, both chefs counter-sued Trump, alleging that the real breach of contract was on his side. As Andrés explained in his lawsuit, which sought $8 million in damages, Trump’s decision to disparage immigrants made it difficult to run a Spanish restaurant associated with his name. From Andrés’ complaint: “The perception that Mr. Trump’s statements were anti-Hispanic made it very difficult to recruit appropriate staff for a Hispanic restaurant, to attract the requisite number of Hispanic food patrons for a profitable enterprise, and to raise capital for what was now an extraordinarily risky Spanish restaurant.” BLT Prime, a steak restaurant chain, has since agreed to open a location in Trump’s DC hotel.

In February, as proceedings in the Andrés-Trump legal battle moved forward, internal Trump organization emails were submitted as part of court proceedings. After an email from Andrés’ company said the company was getting blow-back over Trump’s statements on immigrants, a Trump Organization vice president sent an email to Ivanka Trump. “Ugh,” the vice president wrote. “This is not surprising and would expect that this will not be the last that we hear of it. At least for formal, prepared speeches, can someone vet going forward? Hopefully the Latino community does not organize against us more broadly in DC/across Trump properties.”

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This Is What It’s Like to Try to Sue Donald Trump

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Hillary Email Scandal Continue To Be Dumb But Non-Scandalous

by CEEVerna673 Posted on March 27, 2016

Mother Jones

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Over at the Washington Post, Robert O’Harrow Jr. has a deep dive into the roots of Hillary Clinton’s email troubles. As near as I can tell, once you cut through the weeds it’s the story of a senior official who’s technically illiterate and didn’t want to change her email habits. Both Clinton and her inner circle of advisers were “dedicated BlackBerry addicts,” but apparently neither the NSA nor anyone else was willing to help them make their BlackBerries safe. So, like millions of us who have tried to stay under the radar of our IT departments, Hillary just kept on using hers, hoping that eventually everyone would forget the whole thing. In the meantime, she grudgingly obeyed rules that required her to leave her phone behind when she entered her 7th floor office, but used it everywhere else.

That remains inexplicably dumb, but hardly scandalous. Nonetheless, we have this:

The FBI is now trying to determine whether a crime was committed in the handling of that classified material. It is also examining whether the server was hacked. One hundred forty-seven FBI agents have been deployed to run down leads, according to a lawmaker briefed by FBI Director James B. Comey. The FBI has accelerated the investigation because officials want to avoid the possibility of announcing any action too close to the election.

147 agents! To track down leads on one email server whose location and purpose have been known for two years. That’s crazy. It’s gotta be time for the FBI to either bring some charges or shut this thing down. Enough’s enough.

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Hillary Email Scandal Continue To Be Dumb But Non-Scandalous

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Grant-Lee Phillips’ "The Narrows" Skillfully Mines Americana Turf

by AdrienneLazarev Posted on March 27, 2016

Mother Jones

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Grant-Lee Phillips
The Narrows
Yep Roc

Yep Roc Records

Criminally underappreciated, Grant-Lee Phillips is one of the more versatile singers around. As frontman of the band Grant Lee Buffalo in the ’90s, he could conjure a T. Rex glam-rock vibe without breaking a sweat. Today, on The Narrows, Phillips skillfully mines Americana turf, mixing muscular country rockers and sparse folk that echoes Woody Guthrie. While his weary, weathered intensity can evoke Bruce Springsteen’s acoustic works, there’s none of the Boss’ self-conscious striving for mythic significance. Thoughtful, precisely detailed stories of struggle and occasional triumph such as “Yellow Weeds” and “Taking on Weight in Hot Springs” linger in the mind like a great short story. The Narrows should have a long shelf life.

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Grant-Lee Phillips’ "The Narrows" Skillfully Mines Americana Turf

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Bernie Sanders Runs the Table

by Adalberto1522 Posted on March 26, 2016

Mother Jones

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Update 2, 7:32 a.m. EST: Sanders notched another big win, crushing Clinton in Hawaii’s caucuses to go three for three on Saturday. With 88 percent of precincts reporting, Sanders had more than 70 percent of the vote.

Update, 6:28 p.m. EST: Bernie Sanders won Saturday’s Democratic presidential caucuses in Washington. With 31 percent of precincts reporting, the Associated Press and other news agencies projected that Sanders would be the winner. Sanders had 76 percent of the vote to Clinton’s 24 percent. Washington is the largest prize of the day, with 101 delegates, and delegates will be awarded proportionally. (Many of the Republican contests allot delegates on a winner-take-all basis.)

In a rally on Saturday in Madison, Wis., where Sanders is campaigning ahead of the April 5 primary, the candidate reveled in the back-to-back wins.
“I think it’s hard for anybody to deny that our campaign has the momentum,” he said.

Bernie Sanders won the Democratic presidential caucuses in Alaska on Saturday. With 38 percent of precincts reporting, the Associated Press and NBC called the race for Sanders at 2:30 p.m. PST. Sanders had 78 percent of the vote and Clinton had 21 percent.

Results will come in later today for the Democratic caucuses in Washington state and Hawaii. Sanders is expected to win big in Saturday’s Washington caucuses, where 101 delegates are up for grabs.

Clinton started the day with a substantial lead in pledged delegates: 1,223 for Clinton to 920 for Sanders. That doesn’t include the unpledged “superdelegates,” among whom Clinton also holds an overwhelming lead.

We’ll update this story when more results are available.

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Bernie Sanders Runs the Table

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Is Russia About to Shoot Its Future in the Foot?

by StellaAudet Posted on March 26, 2016

Mother Jones

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A few days ago I read a piece about a proposed new oil tax in Russia, and it sounded vaguely important. But other stuff happened and I never wrote about it. Max Fisher says that was a mistake:

The most consequential development in international affairs this week may have come, believe it or not, in a proposed change to Russian tax policy….When oil was selling for $100 a barrel, about $74 of that went to the state in taxes…leaving oil companies with about $11 a barrel in profit….Now, oil is selling at $35 a barrel, and taxes only take $17 a barrel….Oil companies only take $3 a barrel in profit.

….While we think of oil companies as taking profits just to shower on themselves — and indeed, there is some of that — they also spend heavily on finding and developing new oil sources….The new tax would make it much harder for Russian oil firms to develop new oil sources. Over time, as current oil wells dry up, new ones would not come online to replace them….Even if oil prices go back up, Russian oil output will decline so drastically that its economy might never recover.

….The potential consequences here — of Russia so cannibalizing its own oil industry that its current economic decline becomes more or less permanent — are really difficult to overstate. Sooner or later, the Kremlin would have to do one of two things (or even both): cutting back the Russian military, which is wildly expensive but gives Moscow the geopolitical muscle it believes is so crucial, or cutting back already weak social services, which does risk political instability.

Read the whole thing for more details. This is still just a proposal, and even if it goes through it might well get modified before it does serious damage. Still, much of Russia’s foreign policy is driven by the brutal fact that it has an economy about the size of Italy’s and demographic problems even worse than Italy’s, but still wants to be thought of as a great world power. As this becomes ever harder to pull off, Russia’s leaders may feel the need to somehow prove that they still matter. This would be bad.

This tax may or may not go anywhere, but it’s something to keep an eye on.

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Is Russia About to Shoot Its Future in the Foot?

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Iggy Pop’s Menacing "Post Pop Depression"

by AraceliOster Posted on March 26, 2016

Mother Jones

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Iggy Pop
Post Pop Depression
Rekords Rekords/Loma Vista/Caroline International

Nasty Little Man

Rightly credited as one of punk’s founding fathers, the force of nature known as Iggy Pop is also a superior crooner, capable of channeling Frank Sinatra or Jim Morrison with un-ironic verve. That gift is on full display in Post Pop Depression, a collaboration with Queens of the Stone Age leader Josh Homme that proves to be a perfect fit. Iggy’s knack for brooding balladry meshes surprisingly well with the Queens’ style of epic melodies on such gems as the ominous “Break Into Your Heart,” a love song doused in menace, and the jumpy “Gardenia,” which echoes his classic late-’70s albums with David Bowie. As usual, Iggy muses on the meaning of life and his looming mortality muttering, “Death is a pill that’s hard to swallow,” in “American Valhalla,” a blunt reflection given extra poignancy by his friend’s recent passing. Now in his late 60s, Iggy periodically insists that he’s going to quit rock’n’roll, but if Post Pop Depression proves to be his parting shot, he’s leaving on a high note.

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Iggy Pop’s Menacing "Post Pop Depression"

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Sublime Photos of African Wildlife Roaming Their Lost Habitat

by GitaLayton Posted on March 26, 2016

Mother Jones

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As an ardent conservationist, photographer Nick Brandt’s early work showing the majesty of the large animals that once ruled East Africa wasn’t enough. Brandt created three gorgeous photo books focused on African animals in danger of extinction: On This Earth (2005), A Shadow Falls (2009) and Across the Ravaged Land (2013). As a result of that work, what he saw, and what he learned, in 2010 he created the Big Life Foundation with conservationist Richard Bonham. Big Life protects more than 2 million acres of the Amboseli-Tsavo-Kilimanjaro ecosystem in East Africa.

Brandt’s new project, Inherit the Dust, pushes his photography further to help visualize the impact poaching and development has on wildlife. Inherit the Dust helps viewers see areas where elephants, giraffes, lions and other animals once roamed by placing 30-foot panels with photographs in the now industrialized landscapes. You see elephants sauntering through large dumps or under overpasses, giraffes blending in with machinery at mining sites. It’s a striking and effective technique. The book includes 68 images that, though admittedly repetitive in their execution and style, are no less impactful.

Wasteland with Elephant 2015

The work in the book has a beautiful bleakness to it. Looking at the photos alone leaves you feeling depressed. But the images also raise an important issue: Who is Brandt to question—let alone criticize—African nations for developing their countries? Brandt addresses this in the introduction. “I had to stop and ask myself, am I just grieving for the loss of this world because as a privileged white guy from the West, I’ll never again be able to see these animals in the wild?”

He answers by taking a subtle swipe at China for its role in the blink-of-an-eye pace of development in African countries. He also says just because Western nations trampled their environments in the name of progress, that doesn’t mean it’s a model to follow. With his work as a photographer and with the Big Life Foundation, Brandt asserts that environmental consciousness and growing a country’s economy “do not have to be mutually exclusive.”

Brandt punctuates his argument with Inherit the Dust‘s sweeping, somewhat painful panoramic photos.

All photos by Nick Brandt, Courtesy of Edwynn Houk Gallery, New York.

Quarry with Giraffe 2014

Quarry with Lion 2014

Alleyway with Chimpanzee 2014

Road to Factory with Zebra 2014

Underpass with Elephants (Lean Back, Your Life is on Track) 2015

Wasteland with Rhinos & Residents 2015

Behind the scenes: Giraffe & Goats

Crew wrapping elephant panel at sunset, November 2014

Photos from Inherit the Dust are on exhibition at Edwynn Houck Gallery in New York (March 10 to April 30, 2016); Fahey Klein Gallery in Los Angeles (March 24 to May 14); and Camerawork in Berlin (May 12 to July 8). Nick Brandt is a featured speaker at this year’s LOOK3 Festival of Photography in Charlottesville, Virginia (June 13-19).

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Sublime Photos of African Wildlife Roaming Their Lost Habitat

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The Podcast Where Icons Like Iggy Pop, U2, Björk, and Wilco Get to Totally Geek Out

by NicholHeavener Posted on March 26, 2016

Mother Jones

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The seeds of the popular podcast Song Exploder were sown in the mid-2000s, when Los Angeles musician Hrishikesh Hirway first sat down to remix other people’s songs and found himself spellbound by the nuances and complexities of the individual tracks within. “It felt like such a privileged listening experience,” he recalls.

About a decade later, in January 2014, Hirway launched the podcast—which, over two-plus years and 68 episodes, has earned him a devoted fan base and interviews with superstars such as U2, Björk, and the National. Each episode deconstructs a single song, mashing up musical elements with audio snippets of the creators geeking out on gear or talking about what drives them to make music. It’s an experience dense with sounds, ideas, and narrative momentum that culminates in the fully assembled song. But Song Exploder transcends mere music. “It’s about how you take an idea from nothing to something fully realized,” the host explains.

Hirway is familiar enough with the process. He began recording as a college junior, calling himself “The One AM Radio.” Since relocating from his Peabody, Massachusetts, hometown to LA in 2006, he’s written scores for several films. And in 2013, he co-founded the hip-hop group Moors with rapper-actor Keith Stanfield of Straight Outta Compton fame.

Hirway at home in Los Angeles. Courtesy Song Exploder

At first, Hirway recruited musician friends as his podcast subjects, but he soon began reaching outside his social circles: an email to an address he found online led to an interview with composer Jeff Beal, known for his work on House of Cards. Persistence and luck—and help from fans of the podcast—have kept the big names rolling in. Last fall, while struggling to reach Wilco, Hirway remembered that the son of bandleader Jeff Tweedy had recently followed the podcast on Twitter; the episode came together within days.

Much of the podcast’s appeal lies in Hirway’s uncanny ability to bypass journalistic awkwardness in favor of honest and intimate conversations about music and life. A single episode will introduce you to an artist, but listening religiously offers something more: a glimpse into the nature of creativity and the eccentric ways musicians cultivate it. In one arresting episode, multi-instrumentalist Nick Zammuto of the experimental duo the Books tells Hirway how he plucked the lyrics of “Smells Like Content” from educational TV shows and the facade of the Brooklyn Public Library. “People labor over lyrics a lot, but really they’re kind of all around us all the time,” Zammuto says.

In another episode, members of the noise band Health explain how a programming error—”the whole song glitches, basically”—ended up in the chorus of “Stonefist.” Again and again, Hirway’s listeners encounter artists who are learning to embrace accidents, imperfections, and curveballs that collaborators throw their way. Shared, too, is the artists’ palpable thrill in describing how some songs emerge seemingly of their own accord. “You sit back and go, ‘How did I do that?'” says Wilco’s Tweedy.

Ultimately, Hirway aims to provide an experience that even someone without a note of musical training can relate to. After all, “Creativity is not this opaque box, this laboratory that is only accessible to a chosen few…All you really need is an idea and the will to see it through.”

Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy talks music with Hirway during a taping. Courtesy of Song Exploder

Explain That Tune

Being asked to choose your favorite Song Exploder episode is like being asked to name your favorite child. But these five selections offer a good taste of what Hirway’s podcast has to offer:

The Books’ Nick Zammuto, “Smells Like Content“: If you thought there were limits to what constitutes music, Zammuto will prove you wrong. He describes his use of such humble materials as PVP pipe and vinyl records—not the music on the records, but the records themselves—in this seminal early episode.

Courtney Barnett, “Depreston“: Barnett had a big 2015. The Australian rocker’s debut album, Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit, received rave reviews, and Barnett was nominated for the “best new artist” Grammy. In this episode, Barnett breaks down the track “Depreston” with characteristic wit and insight.

MGMT, “Time to Pretend“: If you’ve left your fortress in the last eight years, you’ve undoubtedly heard this song. Written when the band members were still in college, “Time to Pretend,” an anthem to imaginary stardom, had the surprise effect of making its creators famous. In this episode, MGMT recounts the song’s evolution—and how it felt to perform in druid capes on David Letterman.

Natalia Lafourcade, “Hasta la Raíz“: While Song Exploder has featured plenty of famous artists, Hirway also sees it as a vehicle for introducing accomplished musicians to a broader public. Mexican singer-songwriter Natalia Lafourcade was the perfect candidate: She won four Latin Grammys last year and an American Grammy in February, but is still little-known north of the border.

Ramin Djawadi, Game of Thrones theme: If you could somehow conjure up the musical equivalent to the word “epic,” it might sound like this. Composer Ramin Djawadi describes how he crafted the signature theme to the hit HBO show Game of Thrones, and what it was like to see the melody become an internet phenomenon, interpreted by fans and musicians around the world.

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The Podcast Where Icons Like Iggy Pop, U2, Björk, and Wilco Get to Totally Geek Out

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Matt Taibbi’s Case Against Hillary Clinton Is Surprisingly Weak

by EliseNivison076 Posted on March 26, 2016

Mother Jones

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Long post ahead. Sorry.

I think I’ve made it clear that I generally support Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders in the Democratic race. I don’t make a big deal out of this because I like Bernie too. My preference for Hillary is clear but fairly modest. Without diving into a long and turgid essay about this, here are few quick bullet points explaining why I like Hillary:

Her entire career has demonstrated a truly admirable dedication to helping the least fortunate.
Unlike her husband, she obviously doesn’t enjoy the cut and thrust of partisan campaigning. Yet she soldiers on after taking decades of sewage-level abuse that would overwhelm a lesser person. This demonstrates the kind of persistence that any Democrat will need governing with a Republican Congress.
She takes policy seriously and she’s well briefed. She doesn’t pretend that one or two big ideas can suddenly create a revolution.
She’s a woman, and yes, I’d like to see a woman as president.
Special pleading to the contrary, a moderate candidate is almost certain to be more electable in November than a self-declared democratic socialist.
In the Senate she demonstrated that she could work with Republicans. Yes, it was always on small things, the GOP being what it is these days. Still, she built a reputation for pragmatic dealmaking and for her word always being good.

Needless to say, Hillary also has weak points. She has decades in the public eye, and voters usually prefer candidates with more like 10-15 years of national exposure. What’s more, she obviously comes with a lot of baggage from those decades. On a policy level, I don’t get the sense that her foreign policy instincts have changed much based on events since 9/11, and that’s by far my biggest complaint about her. Finally, I’m not thrilled with political dynasties.

OK. That’s the throat clearing. The real point of this post is Matt Taibbi’s article explaining why he disagrees with Rolling Stone’s endorsement of Hillary. It’s hardly surprising that Taibbi is a Bernie fan, but I was little taken aback by the thinness of his argument. Here’s the nut of it:

The implication of the endorsement is that even when young people believe in the right things, they often don’t realize what it takes to get things done. But I think they do understand….The millions of young voters that are rejecting Hillary’s campaign this year are making a carefully reasoned, even reluctant calculation about the limits of the insider politics both she and her husband have represented.

For young voters, the foundational issues of our age have been the Iraq invasion, the financial crisis, free trade, mass incarceration, domestic surveillance, police brutality, debt and income inequality, among others. And to one degree or another, the modern Democratic Party, often including Hillary Clinton personally, has been on the wrong side of virtually all of these issues.

Let’s go through those one by one.

The Iraq invasion: This one is totally fair. Hillary did support the invasion, and it was the wrong call. What’s more, this is a good proxy for her general hawkishness, which is her weakest point among millennials and her weakest point among an awful lot of older voters too.

The financial crisis: Taibbi doesn’t even bother making an argument for this aside from some snark about the speeches Hillary gave to Goldman Sachs. But that’s just petty point scoring. Beyond that, it’s plainly unfair to blame her by association for legislation signed by Bill, which she had no hand in. And look: the only Clinton-era law that probably had a significant effect on the financial crisis was the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which was supported by 83 percent of the House and 100 percent of the Senate. Even Bernie voted for it. The truth is that Hillary’s positions on Wall Street reform are reasonably solid.

Free trade: This is a “foundational issue” for millennials? Starting in the late 90s, there was a 3-4 year period of anti-globalization protests, and that was about it for high-profile attention. Most millennnials were barely in their teens at that point. A recent Gallup poll asked Americans if increased trade was good or bad, and 35 percent said it was bad. Among millennials, it was 32 percent, lower than most other age groups. Trade is getting a lot of attention lately thanks to TPP and Donald Trump, but it’s just never been a foundational issue for millennials.

Mass incarceration: This again? Taibbi says that Bill Clinton “authorized more than $16 billion for new prisons,” and slams Hillary because she “stumped for that crime bill, adding the Reaganesque observation that inner-city criminals were ‘super-predators’ who needed to be ‘brought to heel.'” The truth: Bill Clinton had barely any effect on incarceration; Hillary’s “super-predator” remark was reasonable in context; and both Clintons have long since said they regretted the carceral effects of the 1994 crime bill—which, by the way, Bernie Sanders voted for. Give it a rest.

Domestic surveillance: Taibbi doesn’t actually say anything further about this, but I’ll grant that I prefer Bernie’s instincts on this issue, just as I prefer his instincts on most national security issues. But anyone who thinks Bernie could make a dent in this is dreaming. In concrete terms, mass surveillance enjoys substantial public support and virtually unanimous support among elites and lawmakers—and that’s after the Snowden revelations, which were basically the Abu Ghraib of mass surveillance. It’s really not clear that in practice, Bernie would do much more about this than Hillary.

Police brutality: Bernie barely even mentioned this until he was the target of protests from Black Lives Matter a few months ago. It’s hardly one of his go-to subjects, and there’s no real reason to think Hillary’s position is any less progressive than his. In any case, this is almost purely a state and local issue. As president, neither Hillary nor Bernie would be able to do much about it.

Debt and income inequality: Once again, Taibbi doesn’t bother to say much about this. Here’s his only actual argument: “Hillary infamously voted for regressive bankruptcy reform just a few years after privately meeting with Elizabeth Warren and agreeing that such industry-driven efforts to choke off debt relief needed to be stopped.” But this is just plain false. And while there’s no question that Bernie is stronger than Hillary on Wall Street issues, both rhetorically and in practice, Hillary has generally been pretty strong on all these issues too. And her proposals are generally a lot more serious and a lot more practical than Bernie’s.

Put this all together and here’s what you get. Hillary’s instincts on national security are troublesome. If that’s a prime issue for you, then you should vote against her. It’s certainly the issue that gives me the most pause—though I have some doubts about Bernie too, which I mention below.

She also lags Bernie in her dedication to bringing Wall Street to heel. But this is a much trickier subject. Bernie has thunderous rhetoric, but not much in the way of plausible plans to accomplish anything he talks about. Frankly, my guess is that neither one will accomplish much, but that Hillary is actually likely to accomplish a little more.

In other words, there’s just not much here aside from dislike of Hillary’s foreign policy views. That’s a completely legit reason to vote against her, but it’s hard to say that Taibbi makes much of a case beyond that.

Bernie Sanders too often lets rhetoric take the place of any actual plausible policy proposal. He suggested that his health care plan would save more in prescription drug costs than the entire country spends in the first place. This is the sign of a white paper hastily drafted to demonstrate seriousness, not something that’s been carefully thought through. He bangs away on campaign finance reform, but there’s virtually no chance of making progress on this. The Supreme Court has seen to that, and even if Citizens United were overturned, previous jurisprudence has placed severe limits on regulating campaign speech. Besides, the public doesn’t support serious campaign finance reform and never has. And even on foreign policy, it’s only his instincts that are good. He’s shown no sign of thinking hard about national security issues, and that’s scarier than most of his supporters acknowledge. Tyros in the Oval Office are famously susceptible to pressure from the national security establishment, and Bernie would probably be no exception. There’s a chance—small but not trivial—that he’d get rolled into following a more hawkish national security policy than Hillary.

I’m old, and I’m a neoliberal sellout. Not as much of one as I used to be, but still. So it’s no surprise that I’m on the opposite side from Taibbi. That said, I continue to be surprised by the just plain falseness of many of the left-wing attacks on Hillary, along with the starry-eyed willingness to accept practically everything Bernie says without even a hint of healthy skepticism. Hell, if you’re disappointed by Obama, who’s accomplished more than any Democratic president in decades, just wait until Bernie wins. By the end of four years, you’ll be practically suicidal.

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Matt Taibbi’s Case Against Hillary Clinton Is Surprisingly Weak

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