Category Archives: Bragg

Bush v. Rubio: Who Will Win Neocons’ Hearts and Minds?

by DemetriMattox Posted on May 15, 2015

Mother Jones

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As Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush, once political pals, now compete for the Republican presidential nomination, one battle they will be waging with each other will be who has better neoconservative bragging rights. Both have recruited prominent policy wonks from the hawkish wing of the GOP, and they may be heading to a showdown over who gains more support from this influential cadre. (Should he enter the 2016 race, Republican candidate Lindsey Graham will take a stab at winning over this group too.)

Ever since Rubio entered the Senate in 2011, he has made a strong play for the neocons. He has reached out to some of the George W. Bush administration’s most hawkish alumni for advice on foreign policy, and he has made national security a centerpiece of his campaign. The Rubio Doctrine, which he outlined in his first major foreign policy address as a candidate on Wednesday, comes straight out of the neocon playbook, calling for a robust military and aggressive approach to intervention.

But Rubio may find that out-neoconing Jeb Bush won’t be so easy. Bush, too, has assembled a foreign policy team almost entirely made up of former George W. Bush administration officials—including Paul Wolfowitz, a key architect of the Iraq War who for years peddled a conspiracy theory favored by neocons that held that Saddam Hussein, not Al Qaeda, was the main sponsor of anti-US terrorism. And Bush’s ties to the neoconservative movement date back to the mid-1990s, when he became affiliated with the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), a foreign policy think tank established by leading neocons and hawks.

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Bush v. Rubio: Who Will Win Neocons’ Hearts and Minds?

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You’re Really Going to Hate James Franco’s Offensive Nostalgia Trip to McDonald’s

by HugoCouvreur Posted on May 7, 2015

Mother Jones

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In the midst of plummeting sales, pressure to bump wages, and an apparent gastronomic identity crisis, McDonald’s needs all the help it can get right now to reclaim its status as a global fast-food powerhouse. Today, the company found a friend in actor James Franco.

The aspiring Renaissance man and actor, who once worked as a McDonald’s employee for a total of three months, has penned a bizarre op-ed in the Washington Post to defend the company from its growing chorus of detractors. The piece, titled “McDonald’s Was There for Me When No One Else Was,” describes his decision to quit UCLA as an undergrad in 1996 in order to pursue an acting career. While studying at a “hole-in-the-wall” acting school, Franco worked a part-time job at a Los Angeles McDonald’s:

When I was hungry for work, they fed the need. I still love the simplicity of the McDonald’s hamburger and its salty fries. After reading “Fast Food Nation,” it’s hard for me to trust the grade of the meat. But maybe once a year, while on a road trip or out in the middle of nowhere for a movie, I’ll stop by a McDonald’s and get a simple cheeseburger: light, and airy, and satisfying.

Franco, who seems to forget that being a drop-out from an elite university set him apart from most hourly workers at McDonald’s, goes onto reminisce about his rosy experience: Mixing it up with co-workers and even practicing funny accents. “I refrained from reading on the job, but soon started putting on fake accents with the customers to practice for my scenes in acting class,” he recalls. Franco even encountered a homeless family. “They lived out of their car and did crossword puzzles all day,” Franco writes. “Sometimes they would order McDonald’s food, but other times they would bring in Chinese or groceries.”

Franco also had the thrill of getting hit on by a man who actually cooked those “light, airy, and satisfying” burgers.

He wanted to hook up in the bathroom, but he didn’t speak English, so he had someone translate for him.

To everyone out there fighting for a living wage, this experience could offer some hope. After all, with the right attitude, McDonald’s can be a stepping stone on your path to Hollywood stardom, just as it was for James Franco.

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You’re Really Going to Hate James Franco’s Offensive Nostalgia Trip to McDonald’s

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America Officially Lost the Vietnam War 40 Years Ago This Week

by APJSvenmzo Posted on April 27, 2015

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

If our wars in the Greater Middle East ever end, it’s a pretty safe bet that they will end badly—and it won’t be the first time. The “fall of Saigon” in 1975 was the quintessential bitter end to a war. Oddly enough, however, we’ve since found ways to reimagine that denouement which miraculously transformed a failed and brutal war of American aggression into a tragic humanitarian rescue mission. Our most popular Vietnam end-stories bury the long, ghastly history that preceded the “fall,” while managing to absolve us of our primary responsibility for creating the disaster. Think of them as silver-lining tributes to good intentions and last-ditch heroism that may come in handy in the years ahead.

The trick, it turned out, was to separate the final act from the rest of the play. To be sure, the ending in Vietnam was not a happy one, at least not for many Americans and their South Vietnamese allies. This week we mark the 40th anniversary of those final days of the war. We will once again surely see the searing images of terrified refugees, desperate evacuations, and final defeat. But even that grim tale offers a lesson to those who will someday memorialize our present round of disastrous wars: toss out the historical background and you can recast any US mission as a flawed but honorable, if not noble, effort by good-guy rescuers to save innocents from the rampaging forces of aggression. In the Vietnamese case, of course, the rescue was so incomplete and the defeat so total that many Americans concluded their country had “abandoned” its cause and “betrayed” its allies. By focusing on the gloomy conclusion, however, you could at least stop dwelling on the far more incriminating tale of the war’s origins and expansion, and the ruthless way the US waged it.

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America Officially Lost the Vietnam War 40 Years Ago This Week

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One Tweet Shows How Far We As Americans Still Have To Go

by Monique7546 Posted on April 26, 2015

Mother Jones

Tonight is the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. It’s a really dumb event where journalists play grab ass with the subjects they cover. I think it’s a venial sin at worse, because every industry has its stupid, embarrassing events, but even I, an apologist for it, found myself nodding along when I read this tweet.

He’s talking about the WHCD at the Washington Hilton in DC and the protests against the killing of Freddie Gray in Baltimore. But in all seriousness, this tweet is evergreen. Terribly, awfully, intensely depressingly evergreen. This is America in 2015.

I’m going to watch the WHCD if I can, write some jokes, embed it in a blog post, etc…But the truth is: It doesn’t matter. What matters is what’s going on down the road. What matters is what’s going on down so many roads.

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One Tweet Shows How Far We As Americans Still Have To Go

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The Feds Say One Schmuck Trading From His Parents’ House Caused a Market Crash. Here’s the Problem.

by Dominic58J Posted on April 23, 2015

Mother Jones

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Illustration by Giacomo Marchesi

On Tuesday, the Justice Department and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, a key Wall Street regulator, blasted out press releases declaring a great victory in their war on illegal manipulation of financial markets. The reason for the feds’ braggadocio? They think they’ve caught the guy who caused May 2010’s “flash crash,” a market seizure that vaporized a trillion dollars in shareholder value in a matter of minutes.

Federal regulators say that Navinder Singh Sarao, a 36-year-old British futures trader whose company was reportedly based in his parents’ home, illegally placed huge sell orders he never intended to complete, artificially driving down the price of a key futures contract so he could later swoop in to buy it cheaply. (This is called “spoofing” in financial jargon.) There’s one big problem, though: By charging Sarao with “contributing to the market conditions that caused” the flash crash, federal regulators are changing their story about what really happened to financial markets five years ago.

Here’s the background. In the days and weeks after the flash crash, the Securities and Exchange Commission, alongside other regulators, worked diligently to figure out what had happened. The flash crash was chaos: Liquidity evaporated, the same stocks traded at both a penny and at $100,000, and CNBC hosts freaked out even more than usual. (Prices eventually returned to normal, and the SEC canceled some of the weirdest trades.)

The flash crash was essentially over in five minutes. But it took regulators nearly five months to come up with a theory about what happened. And in late September 2010, when the SEC and the CFTC—the same agency now charging Sarao with causing the crash—released a joint report on what happened, they didn’t mention spoofing, let alone Sarao. Instead, they blamed a large trade by a firm out of Kansas City.

It’s not even clear that the feds’ new explanation is correct. As Matt Levine notes over at Bloomberg View, regulators believe that Sarao continued to place massive fake sell orders in the years after the flash crash, but somehow that activity never triggered another crisis:

If regulators think that Sarao’s behavior on May 6, 2010, caused the flash crash, and if they think he continued that behavior for much of the subsequent five years, and if that behavior was screamingly obvious, maybe they should have stopped him a little earlier?

Also, I mean, if his behavior on May 6, 2010, caused the flash crash, and if he continued it for much of the subsequent five years, why didn’t he cause, you know, a dozen flash crashes?

So I mean…maybe he didn’t cause the flash crash?

But in some ways, it doesn’t particularly matter whether regulators’ new theory is correct. What matters is that it took so long for them to develop it.

As I reported in January 2013, today’s financial markets move so fast that regulators can’t even monitor them in real time, let alone intervene if something starts to go wrong. Sophisticated trading algorithms can buy and sell financial products faster than you can blink—all without human intervention, let alone real-time human judgment. When something does go wrong, it can take months or years to figure out what happened. “A robust and defensible analysis of even a small portion of the trading day can itself take many days,” Gregg Berman, who wrote the 2010 SEC/CFTC report, told me in 2013.

Since real-time intervention by human regulators is impossible, regulators have to rely on automatic measures—fail-safes that stop trading if prices rise or fall too fast, for example. But these sorts of automatic braking systems are, by definition, designed in response to the previous crisis. “We’re always fighting the last fire,” Dave Lauer, a market technology expert who has worked for high-speed trading firms, said in 2013. As I wrote then:

Years of mistakes and bad decisions led to the 2008 collapse. But when the next crisis happens, it may not develop over months, weeks, or even days. It could take seconds.

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The Feds Say One Schmuck Trading From His Parents’ House Caused a Market Crash. Here’s the Problem.

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McDonald’s Franchisees: "We Will Continue to Fall and Fail"

by GladisHouchins Posted on April 15, 2015

Mother Jones

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McDonald’s opened its first franchise in Des Plaines, Ill., 60 years ago today, but its franchisees aren’t exactly celebrating.

“The future looks very bleak. I’m selling my McDonald’s stock,” one operator wrote in response to a recent survey of McDonald’s franchises across the country, as quoted by Business Insider. “The morale of franchisees is at its lowest level ever.”

“McDonalds’ system is broken,” another wrote, according to MarketWatch. “We will continue to fall and fail.”

Is the fast-food giant having a mid-life crisis?

McDonald’s has some 3,000 franchises in the United States, and 32 of them—representing 215 restaurants—took part in the latest survey by Wall Street analyst Mark Kalinowski of Janney Capital Markets. Many of them complained about poor business this year and blamed corporate executives. When asked to assess their six-month business outlook on a scale of 1 to 5, they responded grimly with an average of 1.81. Maybe that’s because, according to the survey, same-store sales for franchises declined 3.7 percent in March and 4 percent in February.

Only three of the 32 franchisees said they had a “good” relationship with their franchisor, while about half described their relationship as “poor.” The average score for this question was 1.48 out of 5, the lowest score since Kalinowski first started surveying the franchisees more than a decade ago.

Reuters reported that a McDonald’s spokesperson responded to the survey by noting the poll size and saying that the company appreciates feedback from franchisees and has a “solid working relationship with them.”

Last month, McDonald’s executives invited franchisees to a “Turnaround Summit” in Las Vegas, to address its US sales decline. But the get-together didn’t seem to boost anyone’s spirits. “The Turnaround Summit was a farce,” one franchisee wrote in the survey, as quoted by AdAge. “McDonald’s Corp. has panicked and jumped the shark.” Another added, “McDonald’s management does not know what we want to be.”

Some franchise operators slammed McDonalds’ decision to raise pay by giving employees at company-owned stores $1 an hour above minimum wage. “We will be expected to do the same,” one wrote, according to Nation’s Restaurant News. “Watch for $5 Big Macs, etc. and Extra Value Meals in the $8 to $10 range.”

Next week, McDonald’s is set to report its first-quarter earnings.

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McDonald’s Franchisees: "We Will Continue to Fall and Fail"

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McDonald’s Is 60 Years Old. On Its "Opening Day" It Bragged About Having Served 15 Million Burgers.

by 0c4g78x Posted on April 15, 2015

Mother Jones

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Here is a hilarious thing that I find hilarious. The first McDonald’s franchise opened its doors 60 years ago today in Des Plaines, Illinois. This is the day McDonald’s Corporation celebrates as its birthday. When you dive into Google to find the opening day menu for the McDonald’s that opened in Des Plaines, Illinois, on April 15, 1955, this is what you find:

source: kottke.com

Notice anything funny? On its opening day menu, McDonald’s bragged about having already served “over 15 million burgers.” So what’s going on? Is this just a hilariously transparent case of false advertising or something else?

It turns out something else. Though McDonald’s as we know it traces its origins to April 15, 1955, in Des Plaines, Illinois, that was actually just the first franchise. McDonald’s had actually already existed for years in California. It was founded by brothers Dick and Mac McDonald in the 1940s. The site’s official history explains:

Entrepreneur Ray Kroc pitched his vision of creating McDonald’s restaurants all over the U.S. to the brothers. In 1955, he founded McDonald’s System, Inc., a predecessor of the McDonald’s Corporation, and six years later bought the exclusive rights to the McDonald’s name. By 1958, McDonald’s had sold its 100 millionth hamburger.

So there was nothing nefarious about this claim, but it is still pretty amusing.

Correction: This post originally said Des Plaines was in Iowa. It is in Illinois. I’m dumb.

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McDonald’s Is 60 Years Old. On Its "Opening Day" It Bragged About Having Served 15 Million Burgers.

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Notorious Astroturf Pioneer Rick Berman Is Behind Business Group’s Anti-Labor-Board Campaign

by BurtonMount Posted on March 25, 2015

Mother Jones

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In January, viewers catching the morning shows on CNN, Fox, or MSNBC met Heidi Ganahl, the bubbly founder and CEO of a national doggy day care chain called Camp Bow Wow.

“I’ve worked hard and played by the rules to make my franchise business a success,” Ganahl said in an ad that ran on all three networks, as video showed her fawning over a golden retriever. “Now, unelected bureaucrats at the National Labor Relations Board want to change the rules. As Americans, we deserve better. Tell Washington, ‘No.'”

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Notorious Astroturf Pioneer Rick Berman Is Behind Business Group’s Anti-Labor-Board Campaign

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This Democratic Congresswoman Wants the FBI to Take on Gamergate

by BiancaEmmer Posted on March 12, 2015

Mother Jones

Congress’ next target: the often-vitriolic online movement known as Gamergate. On Tuesday Rep. Katherine Clark (D-Mass.), backed by the National Organization for Women and the Human Rights Campaign, asked her House colleagues to join her in demanding tighter enforcement of cyber-stalking and online harassment laws.

The Violence Against Women Act gives the federal government the authority to prosecute individuals who send violent threats over the internet, but actual convictions are hard to come by—the Department of Justice has prosecuted just 10 people for cyberstalking between 2010 and 2013. (In a long reported piece for Pacific Standard last year, the writer Amanda Hess detailed the near-impossibility of getting any level of law enforcement to investigate online threats.) “If we step up prosecuting these cases and enforce the federal laws that are already on the books, cyber-stalking—and the severity and quantity of threats that are made— we hope will be reduced,” Clark tells Mother Jones.

The Massachusetts Democrat, who replaced now-Sen. Ed Markey in a 2013 special election, began looking for ways to take on internet harassment after discovering last fall that Brianna Wu, a video game developer who has become a target of so-called “GamerGate” trolls, lived in her district. Wu has received more than three dozen death threats over the last five months—including one, posted to YouTube, in which a knife-wielding man bragged about getting in a car crash on the way to Wu’s house to kill her. Clark got in touch with Wu, and then with the FBI. (Wu had committed the grave sin of suggesting that tech could be a more hospitable place for women.)

In many cases, Clark found that social media networks and private sites were ambivalent about addressing the threats delivered via their platforms too. “When Brianna Wu had to pull out of a gaming conference called PAX East just last month, the folks who were running the site for that said that a bomb threat did not violate their user policy,” Clark says. Her proposal wouldn’t have any effect on how private companies police their users, although she hopes companies—and trolls— will take harassment more seriously once law enforcement does. “What we’re hoping to do is change the culture around accepting these threats of death, of dismemberment, of great physical harm, as mere hoaxes, and really start to think of them in the violence they’re perpetrating and the economic harm that they’re doing,” she adds.

As Clark sees it, cracking down on harassment isn’t just about public safety and peace-of-mind—it’s about dollars and cents. “We are hearing from women that they are losing wages, they are losing opportunities, speaking engagements, they are incurring legal fees, and having to hire online protective services at their own cost,” she says. “Now that so much of our commerce is done online and a presence on social media is required for many professions, we really see this as an economic toll for women as well as a personal one.”

Right on cue, Clark herself became a magnet for abuse after publishing an op-ed on the subject on Wednesday. (Angry Twitter users told the congresswoman to drink bleach and expressed their desire to attack her, among other things.) But as a member of Congress, she knows she can get an audience with law enforcement if she ever feels truly threatened. “We’re really hoping that that is going to be available for anybody who is using the internet,” she says.

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This Democratic Congresswoman Wants the FBI to Take on Gamergate

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Study Confirms What Your Mother Always Says About Your Father

by Arnette0309 Posted on December 12, 2014

Mother Jones

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One day he’s going to die doing something stupid:

A 20 year study of the Darwin Awards, an annual review of the most foolish ways people have died, found almost 90 per cent were ‘won’ by males.

Of the 318 valid cases remaining, 282 (88.7 per cent) were awarded to males and just 36 to females, a gender difference entirely consistent with male idiot theory (MIT) that states men are idiots and idiots do stupid things.

Writing in the Christmas edition of the British Medical Journal, the researchers say it is puzzling that men are willing to take such unnecessary risks – simply as a rite of passage, in pursuit of male social esteem or solely in exchange for “bragging rights”.

The study is tongue in cheek but to be honest it’s not even really surprising. We’re awful. I’m a man. I come from a long line of men. (My father was a man. His father was a man…) Some of my best friends are men! But men are awful. Women are awful, too, but, you know, less awful.

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Study Confirms What Your Mother Always Says About Your Father

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