Category Archives: Sterling

Obama Just Came Out Hard Against the Washington Football Team’s Racist Name

by Leon51tt8 Posted on July 2, 2015

Mother Jones

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In an irony that will surely be lost on team owner Dan Snyder, the Washington Redskins are being kicked off their land.

From the Washington Post:

Interior Secretary Sally Jewell told D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser this spring that the National Park Service, which owns the land beneath Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium, was unlikely to accommodate construction of a new stadium for the Redskins unless the team changes its name.

Jewell oversees both national park land and America’s trust and treaty relationships with Native American tribes.

Her decision not to extend the District’s lease of the RFK land badly hinders Bowser’s bid to return the Redskins to D.C.—and boosts efforts to lure the team across the Potomac to Northern Virginia.

Jewell, who has been an outspoken critic of the team’s controversial name, added that adjusting the federal lease on the property, which doesn’t expire for another 22 years, is “not likely to be a priority for the administration.” The team’s owner Dan Snyder, who has vowed to never change the team’s name, has long been interested in building a new stadium in the DC area.

There’s actually a great precedent for this. As we explained in 2013,

The showdown began in 1961, when John F. Kennedy’s interior secretary, Stewart Udall, who’d committed to ending segregation anywhere in his sphere of influence, declared his intent to break pro football’s last color bar…The call for integration was met with opposition, most notably from the team’s owner, George Preston Marshall, a laundromat magnate turned NFL bigwig who had held firm for years. Udall had one advantage over Marshall: The team’s new home field, DC Stadium (later renamed RFK Memorial), was federal property. With Kennedy’s approval, Udall gave Marshall a choice: He could let black players on his team, or take his all-white squad to someone else’s gridiron.”

Don’t worry, Washington fans: There’s always Virginia (or stay in Maryland).

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Obama Just Came Out Hard Against the Washington Football Team’s Racist Name

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Good Luck Going After the Pope, Climate Deniers

by WillAbendroth Posted on April 27, 2015

Mother Jones

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If you write about climate change for a living, you get used to being on the receiving end of tweets, emails, and comments explaining why manmade global warming is a colossal hoax. But it turns out that if you’re the pope, the trolls take things a bit further. From our partners at the Guardian:

A US activist group that has received funding from energy companies and the foundation controlled by conservative activist Charles Koch is trying to persuade the Vatican that “there is no global warming crisis” ahead of an environmental statement by Pope Francis this summer that is expected to call for strong action to combat climate change.

The Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based conservative thinktank that seeks to discredit established science on climate change, said it was sending a team of climate scientists to Rome “to inform Pope Francis of the truth about climate science.”

“Though Pope Francis’s heart is surely in the right place, he would do his flock and the world a disservice by putting his moral authority behind the United Nations’ unscientific agenda on the climate,” Joseph Bast, Heartland’s president, said in a statement.

Jim Lakely, a Heartland spokesman, said the thinktank was “working on” securing a meeting with the Vatican. “I think Catholics should examine the evidence for themselves, and understand that the Holy Father is an authority on spiritual matters, not scientific ones,” he said.

The pope and his aides have publicly embraced the scientific consensus that humans are warming the planet, and tomorrow the Vatican is putting on a summit entitled “Protect the Earth, Dignify Humanity: The Moral Dimensions of Climate Change and Sustainable Development.” Heartland beat them to the punch, setting up a “prebuttal” event on Monday in Rome. Heartland seems especially upset that the Vatican summit will feature two notable figures—UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon and economist Jeffrey Sachs—who, it says, “refuse to acknowledge the abundant data showing human greenhouse gas emissions are not causing a climate crisis.”

Heartland is also encouraging its followers to send letters and emails to the pope and to spread the gospel of global warming denial to their local church officials. “Talk to your minister, priest, or spiritual leader,” advises Heartland’s website. “Tell him or her you’ve studied the global warming issue and believe Pope Francis is being misled about the science and economics of the issue.”

As my colleague James West reported, a sizeable majority of US Catholics actually share the pope’s belief the climate change is a serious threat. Heartland seems to be trying to shift their views on the issue by portraying climate activists as hostile to Catholic values. In an American Spectator op-ed today (headline: “Francis Is Out of His Element”), Heartland research fellow H. Sterling Burnett writes:

Those pushing for bans on fossil fuel use think too many humans are the environmental problem. Many of them worship the creation, not the Creator. The same people pushing the pope to join the fight against climate change support forcible population control programs such as those operating in China. That is not a Christian position.

On its website, Heartland goes even further, writing that “climate alarmists have misrepresented the facts, concocted false data, and tried to shut down a reasonable, scientific debate on the issue of climate change. This conduct violates the Eighth Commandment: ‘You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.'”

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Good Luck Going After the Pope, Climate Deniers

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5 Death Penalty Cases Tainted by Racism

by AYZShantell Posted on March 24, 2015

Mother Jones

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The intersection of race and justice on the street has loomed in the headlines this past year or two, with racially charged killings—Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and Tamir Rice, among others—sparking widespread protests and highlighting stark police biases: A recent Justice Department investigation, for instance, found that blacks in Ferguson, Missouri, accounted for an overwhelming majority of traffic stops, traffic tickets, and arrests over a two-year period—nearly everyone who got a jaywalking ticket was black. When black drivers were pulled over in Ferguson, the DOJ found, they were searched at twice the rate of white drivers.

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5 Death Penalty Cases Tainted by Racism

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A Hip-Hop Crew’s Take on Old Detroit vs. the So-Called New Detroit

by LouellaNewcomer Posted on January 19, 2015

Mother Jones

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Last March, the developers of a restored downtown Detroit apartment building, the Albert, released a promotional video showcasing the swanky amenities that awaited hip millenials if they would just sign a lease and say yes to a city many of their parents and grandparents had left behind. “Detroit is MY generation’s city,” a chirpy twentysomething exclaims as the promo fades to black and the Albert’s sleek graphic reemerges.

If the video was meant to give a behind-the-scenes tour of a building with 127 rental units, it also revealed the mindset of some of the architects of Detroit’s revitalization efforts, who are trying to rebrand the city. The implication of the “my generation” slogan was that the old guard would need to step aside. Indeed, the low-income senior tenants living in the Albert had been informed the previous April that they would need to make other housing arrangements. “There’s all this hubbub about a ‘new Detroit,'” one pushed-out tenant, 58-year-old Recardo Berrien, told Deadline Detroit. “I was born and raised in Detroit. For us not to be part of this ‘new Detroit’ is absurd. We don’t see ‘us’ in none of this. No elderly and poor. We are nowhere in the plans of anyone down here.”

As city leaders—and billionaires—structure Detroit’s future, there has been an emphasis on words like “new,” “revitalization,” “renaissance” and “regrowth,” but very little talk about the systemic issues that led to the city’s decline. The Detroit Future City Strategic Framework, the current blueprint for the revitalization effort, is a 761-page tome that mentions poverty just once and racism not at all. A section of the plan, which Mayor Mike Duggan’s development chief call his “Bible,” calls for a slowdown of city services in high-vacancy areas.

These contradictions are the subject of “H.O.M.E.S.,” the latest song by 30-year-old Detroit hip-hop artist Mic Write, in collaboration with DOSS the Artist, another local rapper. It’s an anthem of city pride that challenges the notion of their town’s corporate revitalization. “My city, my block, my street. Why pity my stock I eat. I read, I learn, I care. I think your data is obsolete. Look, Nigga this that miss me with your savior complex,” he raps in the first verse.

“I used to live in Midtown,” Mic Write told me. “And I was down in Midtown when it was not as bustling as it is now. I was able to see firsthand some of the renewal efforts.” He’s talking about a neighborhood within the 7.2 square miles targeted for redevelopment. “So you kind of learn the terms for it: gentrification, urban renewal. Sometimes you don’t have the terms, you just have a feeling and it goes from, ‘Oh wow, look at all these cool places that I can go to!’ to hearing stories that feel a little bit darker, like about people getting evicted, either formally or just priced out because it was becoming that type of place.”

Mic Write, a 2013 Kresge Foundation Literary Arts fellow and member of a rap collective called Cold Men Young (a play on Coleman Young, Detroit’s first black mayor), explains that he heard stories of friends displaced for the sake of renewal and felt compelled to create something that gets to the heart of the matter. “I don’t mind new things coming in and new lifeblood coming in,” he says. “But I think it’s an issue when there are certain exclusions that come along with it. So I wanted to write an anthem that said, ‘You can come in, but you can’t take what I’m not going to give.'”

So, while the song doesn’t dis the new, it does pay deference to the old. In the accompanying video, the two rappers walk through rich and poor neighborhoods, letting homes of all conditions take the spotlight. “One of the most defining things about Detroit is its homes, or lack thereof,” says DOSS the Artist. “You have this vacant space, this abandoned space. Living here or just spending time touring these different areas of the city, you begin to think, “What is the history? What does it mean for our community for there to be this vacant space where there used to be a life? Where have those people gone? What is left for them?”

Such questions are all too often ignored when civic discussions revolve around blight and the “urban wasteland” instead of the city’s past and the problems that brought about the neglect. Detroit’s history is like a thumbprint; you can ignore the evidence but can’t erase it. The 1967 12th Street Riots, white flight, scandal-ridden city politics, the fading of the Big Three, the subprime fiasco, and the city’s recent bankruptcy all are partly responsible for Detroit’s current state. And while the city is now out of bankruptcy and there’s been a renewed interest from investors in Detroit’s future, “H.O.M.E.S” is a reminder of the people who gave the city its vitality before everyone was obsessed with its re-vitality.

In January, New York magazine ran an article profiling nine Detroit artists and why they chose to live in the city. Pegged to the fact that Brooklyn-based art gallery Galapagos is moving to a warehouse there, the piece argued that Motown was finally having a hip moment, like SoHo in the 1970s. But then, we all know what SoHo’s like now: commercial and sanitized. The issue for Detroit readers was the lack of any connection to the city’s past. And although Detroit’s population is 83 percent black, the article feature exclusively white artists—many of them newcomers.

“H.O.M.E.S was really speaking a lot about the state of Detroit,” DOSS the Artist told me. “Which kind of mimics a lot of the rhetoric around all lives matter and black lives matter right now. This is a space that looks abandoned but it is entirely occupied by people everyday, just performing basic human needs.”

Master photo by Iain Maitland, www.iainmaitland.com

Video shot by Ben Friedman, www.benjamin.strikingly.com

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A Hip-Hop Crew’s Take on Old Detroit vs. the So-Called New Detroit

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The Mother Jones Guide to Evil NBA Owners

by JungDellinger Posted on October 29, 2014

Mother Jones

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Six months ago, the NBA rid itself of its worst owner, perpetual sleazebag Donald Sterling. Everyone praised the swift, harsh punishment meted out by commissioner Adam Silver for Sterling’s racist tirade—well, almost everyone. Shortly after the league announced the lifetime ban of the Clippers owner, Dallas Mavericks owner and Shark Tank celeb Mark Cuban called the league’s move “a very, very slippery slope.”

Cuban got on board the next day, even tweeting that he agreed 100 percent with Silver’s decision. But what was he so worried about? Well, the league’s 30 owners might not have Sterling-like baggage, but there’s plenty of embarrassing biographical material to mine—offensive emails, family feuds, sketchy business deals, and more—just like we here at Mother Jones did for their counterparts in baseball and football. So, with an eye on political contributions and general scumbaggery, here’s how the NBA’s most powerful men (and woman) stack up:

Atlanta
Boston
Brooklyn
Charlotte
Chicago
Cleveland
Dallas
Denver
Detroit
Golden State
Houston
Indiana
LA Clippers
LA Lakers
Memphis
Miami
Milwaukee
Minnesota
New Orleans
New York
Oklahoma City
Orlando
Philadelphia
Phoenix
Portland
Sacramento
San Antonio
Toronto
Utah
Washington

EASTERN CONFERENCE

Atlanta Hawks: Bruce Levenson, reportedly worth $500 million, likely won’t be the Hawks owner for long, not after the email he self-reported to the league following the Sterling debacle. The offending missive included observations like “My theory is that the black crowd scared away the whites and there are simply not enough affluent black fans to build a significant season ticket base” and “i want the music to be music familiar to a 40 year old white guy if that’s our season tixs demo,” and “I have even bitched that the kiss cam is too black.” (Notably, a league higher-up told one reporter that Levenson didn’t actually self-report the email, and others have suggested that he might have used it as an ownership exit strategy.)

Boston Celtics: Wycliffe “Wyc” Grousbeck—son of H. Irving Grousbeck, the cofounder of Continental Cablevision, which sold for $5.3 billion in 1996—was a Princeton rower before becoming a venture capitalist and eventually buying the Celtics with his dad in 2002. In his spare time, Grousbeck moonlights as a drummer (he once played with former Celtic Walter McCarty). His brother, a singer-songwriter who goes by Peter Walker, told the Boston Globe in 2004 that “Wyc’s pretty much a straight-up rock dude.”

Private equity investor Stephen Pagliuca is managing director at Mitt Romney’s old haunt, Bain Capital. But Pagliuca’s politics lean left: He’s a big Democratic donor, and in 2009 he ran for the party’s nomination to replace Ted Kennedy. He came in last of four candidates.

Brooklyn Nets: The famously tech averse Russian oligarch Mikhail Prokhorov (who reportedly doesn’t use a cellphone or computer in his office) bought the Nets for $200 million in 2010 and helped oversee their move from New Jersey to Brooklyn. He’s one of the tabloids’ favorite back-page curiosities, and why not? In 2007, he famously brought eight Russian models with him to the French Alps to help entertain the dozens of business associates he was partying with. French authorities temporarily detained him, fearing that he was encouraging prostitution. Prokhorov’s response: The French elite were just jealous because they were way behind when it came to fashion, life, and sex drive. (He later told 60 Minutes that he hadn’t yet found a woman who cooked well enough to marry.) He’s also really into jet skiing:

Charlotte Hornets: Six NBA titles. Five league MVP awards. Countless pairs of ripped jeans. Michael Jordan has stumbled often since his days as the league’s premier player, gumming it up as an executive, sneaker mogul, and even Hall of Fame inductee. Legendary for his competitive nature—and penchant for attacking teammates he saw as weak links—His Airness can’t seem to help himself when it comes to being the official arbiter of all-time NBA greatness. Mix in a decade as management, and you get plenty of “Back in my day…” moments, like when he recently called out superstars LeBron James and Dirk Nowitzki for suggesting that the league scale back its 82-game schedule: “Are they ready to give up money to play fewer games? That’s the question, because you can’t make the same amount of money playing fewer games.”

Chicago Bulls: Jerry Reinsdorf, who also owns baseball’s White Sox, has always been more of a baseball man. That’s where he’s focused much of his energy over the years, becoming one of the players union’s biggest adversaries and a pioneer of publicly funded stadiums. When he threatened to move the Sox to Florida in the early 1990s, he got a sweetheart deal from Illinois—or, as one confidant told the Chicago Sun-Times in 1993, “Not only are there ticket subsidies from the state, but if a light goes out in the bathroom, the state pays for the bulb and the installation. If we sent him to the Middle East to deal with the Arabs, they wouldn’t have any oil left. He’s that good.”

Cleveland Cavaliers: Not only is Dan Gilbert the nation’s most notorious user of Comic Sans, he’s also the billionaire owner of the country’s second-largest mortgage lender, Quicken Loans. And while Quicken has cultivated a squeaky-clean image over the years—note its annual place on those best-places-to-work lists, as well as its goofy emphasis on Gilbert’s “isms”—it did face its share of post-crisis lawsuits. Now that LeBron is back in Cleveland, Gilbert has just one rebuilding project to focus on: his commitment to turn around his hometown of Detroit, where he has bought and updated some 60 downtown properties at a reported cost of $1.3 billion, and moved 12,000 of his own employees there. (Some even have taken to calling downtown Detroit “Gilbertville.”) It’s a risk, but then again, Gilbert bankrolled roughly half of a $47 million campaign to bring gambling to Ohio via a 2009 ballot initiative. The initiative passed, and Gilbert’s Horseshoe Casino opened in downtown Cleveland in 2012.

Detroit Pistons: Tom Gores, 50, is a Beverly Hills tech buyout king and owner of Platinum Equity, which has bought out everything from steel manufacturers to the San Diego Union-Tribune (though it lost out on a bid for the Boston Globe back in 2009). Gores was born in Israel and moved to the Detroit area as a child; he worked at his brother Alec’s software company and private equity firm before leaving to start Platinum. The brothers’ relationship cooled when it was revealed that Tom, who is married with three kids, had a sexual relationship with Lisa Gores, Alec’s wife. (Alec had Los Angeles private detective Anthony Pellicano follow Lisa and Tom, and the scoop came out in Pellicano’s 2008 trial for illegal wiretapping.) For photos of Gores’ squinching game, check out the gallery at TomGores.com.

Indiana Pacers: Herbert Simon and his nephew David run one of the world’s largest real estate investment funds, the Simon Property Group. He has eight kids and is on marriage No. 3, to former Miss Thailand Bui Simon. He started SPG with his brother, Melvin, David’s father. When Melvin died, his widow, Bren, feuded with her stepchildren, calling David “a terrorist” and stepdaughter Debbie “Debbie bin Laden.” Herbert and Bui fought off three successive lawsuits from former domestic employees—all brought by the same attorney.

Miami Heat: In a 2005 Washington Post profile of Heat owner Micky Arison, team president and then-coach Pat Riley raved about him: “He’s about as down to earth as you’re going to get for a billionaire…He doesn’t need, nor does he pursue, the spotlight.” Arison took over Carnival Cruises from father Fred and presided over its rise—as well as its recent Poop Cruise-era fall. (He stepped down as CEO last year.) Still, Arison seems to take setbacks in stride, given his gracious response to LeBron James’ departure for Cleveland this past offseason and his general outlook on the business world (as told to the Post): “In any given year, out of 30 NBA teams, there is only one winner. In business, we can all be winners.”

Milwaukee Bucks: The most memorable thing hedge fund exec Wesley Edens—whom Vanity Fair described as a “cerebral, intense, very private wunderkind”—has done as one of the Bucks’ new owners is send his 18-year-old daughter, Mallory, to the NBA Draft Lottery this past May to represent the Bucks. (The team snagged the second pick.)

Meanwhile, fellow hedge fund exec and Clinton confidant Marc Lasry was up for consideration for the French ambassadorship—only to pull out just before stories emerged about his taste for high-stakes poker.

New York Knicks: Where to start with tabloid staple and Cablevision CEO James Dolan? With the sexual-harassment scandal involving former coach Isiah Thomas and team executive Anucha Browne Sanders? Or perhaps the lawsuit this past March from a shareholder alleging “grossly excessive” executive pay after Cablevision’s board approved $80 million in bonuses for Dolan and his father, chairman Charles Dolan? Then there’s the endless kookiness surrounding the team’s media policy, which requires a member of the PR office to be present for all interviews with Knicks players and coaches—and then to send transcripts up the chain of command, even to Dolan? Oh, and Dolan also fronts a band called JD & the Straight Shot. He wrote a song called “Under That Hood” (It’s all good/Under my hood/So misunderstood) about Trayvon Martin.

Orlando Magic: From Andy Kroll’s expansive profile on Richard DeVos and his political family:

He fit the part of GOP rainmaker-in-chief, wearing a diamond pinkie ring and Gucci loafers, driving a Rolls-Royce and frequently commuting to his nearby office by helicopter. He once docked Amway’s $5 million yacht on the Potomac River in Washington to hold court with Michigan’s congressional delegation, RNC staffers, and personnel from 12 embassies representing countries where Amway did business. DeVos was also a strident voice within the party: In an era when Republicans still courted labor, he urged the GOP to ignore union members. “If they want to be represented by somebody else,” he once said, “good for them.” At a party meeting in 1982, he called the recession that was spiking inflation and unemployment “beneficial” and “a cleansing tonic” for society.

DeVos recently was the subject of an Orlando Sentinel column headlined, “Is Magic’s Rich DeVos Next NBA Owner to Become a Target?” (The story, which came out after the Sterling fiasco, was about DeVos’ anti-gay views.)

Philadelphia 76ers: Buyout-firm maven Joshua Harris made his billions in private equity, cofounding Apollo Global Management, which made headlines in 2011 when it was revealed that it had paid a former California Public Employees’ Retirement System board member tens of millions of dollars to score billions in investments from the pension fund. (Apollo wasn’t accused of wrongdoing.) Harris, who also owns the New Jersey Devils, reportedly is on the verge of buying the English Premier League’s Crystal Palace. Meanwhile, the rebuilding-focused Sixers continue to suck; in April, following the team’s 19-63 season, Harris called the year “a huge success.”

Toronto Raptors: There are many fun things about the NBA’s only foreign franchise, including its throwback dino uniforms, its F-bomb-dropping general manager, and one of the smartest and most raucous fanbases in the NBA. (And, occasionally, Drake.) Owner Larry Tanenbaum, however, is boring as sin.

Washington Wizards: For a glimpse of Ted Leonsis at his peak, this 1995 New York Times Magazine profile is chock full of great stuff: As a bachelor, Leonsis would occasionally bring an Elvis bust with him when dining out with friends; later, as an AOL exec, he came around to the fact that the company was more Norman Rockwell than MTV: “Face it, when you go to a cocktail party and America Online diskettes are being used as coasters, you know you’ve become mainstream.” These days, Leonsis is DC sports royalty as owner of the Wizards, the WNBA’s Mystics, and the NHL’s Capitals—he once got into a physical altercation with a heckling fan, who accused Leonsis of grabbing his neck and throwing him to the ground after a Caps game.

WESTERN CONFERENCE

Dallas Mavericks: What is there left to say about Mark Cuban? The guy speaks for himself: This year alone, the self-made billionaire and self-identified Randian has defended Donald Sterling, waded into the Trayvon Martin controversy, and predicted the NFL would collapse within 10 years. Over the years, he’s been fined nearly $2 million by the league, tried to draft Michael Bloomberg to run for president, and commissioned a mural about his life. He’s come out of an insider-trading trial unscathed and actually built a pretty decent basketball team. Literally and figuratively, he’s the biggest shark in the tank.

Denver Nuggets: Stan Kroenke—a.k.a. “Silent Stan” for his reluctance to talk to the media—collects sports franchises like trophies. Besides the Nuggets, the multibillionaire owns the Colorado Avalanche, the St. Louis Rams, a MLS franchise, a lacrosse team, and has a majority share of the UK soccer club Arsenal. He’s made good money in real estate, but buying a bunch of teams is easier when you’re married to Ann Walton, of the Bentonville Waltons. Kroenke served on Walmart’s Board of Directors in the 1990s and has benefited from Walton ties for decades: The Denver Post reports that his retail ventures (often anchored by the megastore) have landed hundreds of millions in tax breaks.

Golden State Warriors: Peter Guber’s résumé sounds more appropriate for a Lakers owner. He’s a longtime showbiz exec and producer of big-time hits like Rain Man and The Color Purple. Since the ’90s, he has run Mandalay Entertainment, which has produced art-house gems like I Know What You Did Last Summer and I Still Know What You Did Last Summer. Guber is a fairly loyal Democrat, but he’s also said on record that President Obama has disappointed Hollywood, and he has sometimes donated to Republicans, such as the late former Sen. Ted Stevens. The Warriors have thrived under Guber’s tenure, but he may not have mastered email yet: He recently replied-all to the entire organization, writing that he had to learn “hoodish” in addition to the languages of the Warriors’ international players. (He claims that he meant to write Yiddish.)

Joe Lacob is the more hands-on, day-to-day owner of the Warriors. He’s a partner at the elite Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, which is the subject of a nasty, ongoing sexual-harassment lawsuit. Ellen Pao, a former partner, is suing the company for wrongful termination after she reported sexual harassment to senior management.

Houston Rockets: A billionaire New York financier, Leslie Alexander fits the stereotype of a fat-cat owner: He’s got a $42 million penthouse in Manhattan and launched a Hamptons wine club with a $50,000 entry fee. He ran First Marblehead, a for-profit student loan company that tanked during the 2008 financial meltdown—but not before cashing out nearly $300 million in stock. His love of green extends beyond taking people’s money, though—he’s also an outspoken animal rights activist who has given hundreds of thousands of dollars to PETA and affiliated groups. He also reportedly donated to a militant animal rights group whose US leaders were convicted of terrorism charges in 2006.

Los Angeles Clippers: Steve Ballmer is the newest (and with a net worth of $22.5 billion, richest) addition to the owners’ club. He forked over $2 billion in pocket change this year to rescue the Clippers from Donald Sterling. He’s fresh off a 14-year tenure as Microsoft’s CEO, abruptly quitting after years of internal and external criticism of his leadership. To be fair, he did preside over a very rough patch for the company—losing billions, getting beat by Apple, and overseeing the flop of the Zune. Forbes even called him the “worst CEO of a large publicly traded American company…without a doubt.” The famously exuberant BasketBallmer is now looking to rebound with the resurgent Clips—but not before banning Apple products from the locker room.

Los Angeles Lakers: Technically, the six children of Jerry Buss—the longtime Lakers owner who died last year—own a majority share of the team, but day-to-day owner Jeanie Buss has the final say. (Brother Jim focuses on basketball operations.) That unofficially makes her the league’s sole female owner. Despite her short tenure, she’s been criticized for the crazy deal she offered Kobe Bryant and her engagement to Lakers legend (and Knicks president) Phil Jackson. Earlier this year, Jackson was being considered for a job with the Lakers, but Jim was against hiring him, leading to even more Buss family strife.

Memphis Grizzlies: At 36, Robert J. Pera is the youngest NBA owner, and one of the world’s youngest billionaires. The Silicon Valley native founded Ubiquiti, an internet technology company that wants to kill off Cisco in the quest to wifi-ify America’s offices and cities. A former high school player, the 6-foot-3 Pera tweeted that he could easily take Mark Cuban in a 1-on-1, and even challenged Michael Jordan to a $1 million game. (Jordan called it “comical.”)

Minnesota Timberwolves: Glen Taylor has that classic life story: grew up on a farm, pulled himself by the bootstraps, and made himself into a multibillionaire by cobbling together a business empire based on printing and electronics. Big surprise, then, that he’s a staunch Republican: He was a Minnesota state senator from 1981 to 1990 and has given more than $700,000 to Republicans, particularly fellow Minnesotans like Rep. Michelle Bachmann. (He also just bought the left-leaning Minneapolis Star-Tribune for $100 million, and suggested he’d make it more conservative.) Politics aside, Minnesotans have been critical of Taylor’s track record as owner: He feuded with star big man Kevin Love and lost him to the Cleveland Cavaliers. The Timberwolves, meanwhile, suffer the league’s longest playoff drought.

New Orleans Pelicans: Tom Benson’s two-pronged moneymaking strategy consists of selling cars and taking taxpayers’ money. Louisiana’s richest man, he owns dealerships all over the state and in Texas too, in addition to New Orleans’ Fox affiliate and the New Orleans Saints. Thanks to a complex deal he negotiated on the Superdome (yup, he also owns that), Benson is set to rake in nearly $400 million in state subsidies on the taxpayers’ dime. He initially wanted to move the team—especially after Hurricane Katrina—but it seems he’s settled for this deal. Benson was honored with a statue outside the Superdome for his trouble; Louisiana has cut health care and education funding to save money.

Oklahoma City Thunder: Oklahoma hedge fund baron Clayton Bennett is easily the most hated man in the Pacific Northwest: He’s responsible for moving the beloved Seattle SuperSonics to Oklahoma City. In 2006, Bennett bought the team from Starbucks founder Howard Schultz and essentially promised to keep the team in Seattle. Almost immediately, he and his co-owners conspired to move the team, while assuring Sonics fans they’d stay. Minority owner and Bennett buddy Aubrey McClendon even went on the record in 2007, saying that they’d never intended to keep the team in Seattle. (McClendon, who founded the Chesapeake Energy Corporation, is a leading proponent of fracking, opponent of gay rights, and—as if all that weren’t enough—a former Swift Boater.) In spring 2008, Bennett and McClendon got their wish: The Sonics were officially defunct, and replaced by the Oklahoma City Thunder. Seattle was devastated.

Phoenix Suns: It’s tough to find an owner as loathed by his team’s fans as Robert Sarver. The 53-year-old Tucson native made his money running and selling a series of community banks, writing more than $1 billion in loans to Arizona businesses and homeowners during and after the financial crisis. He bought the Suns in 2004, and since then has presided over a steady exodus of talent—both on and off the court. Phoenix fans, who argue that he’s insanely cheap, are hyperbolic about his tenure, arguing that he’s run the team into the ground for his own profit. ESPN’s Bill Simmons once said Sarver “destroyed basketball” in Phoenix.

Portland Trail Blazers: Paul Allen does a lot of things: The Microsoft cofounder is an investor, philanthropist, film producer, art collector, blues musician, and yachting enthusiast. In his spare time, he tends to his sports franchises: the Blazers, the Seattle Seahawks, and soccer’s Seattle Sounders. He’s worth more than $16 billion and has pledged to give at least half of that away (e.g., his $100 million gift to fight Ebola). He’s given generously to political causes, including $1 million to back a charter-school bill with his old pal Bill Gates and more than $500,000 to committees and candidates—65 percent of it to Democrats.

Sacramento Kings: Vivek Ranadivé, an Indian-born billionaire—and the first and only Asian American NBA owner—could be the Most Interesting Man in Silicon Valley. He attended MIT, supposedly as a penniless exchange student, and went on to engineer software that digitized stock trading for Wall Street giants like Goldman Sachs. His Twitter feed is a steady stream of chill: hanging out with Shaq, hobnobbing with world leaders, and fawning over his wannabe pop-star daughter, whom he coached to a girls’ basketball championship. In addition to trying to turn around the long-struggling Kings, Ranadivé also has the modest goal of revolutionizing data, and has huddled with the new Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi—no friend to Muslims—on bringing basketball to India.

San Antonio Spurs: Peter Holt is American tractor royalty: His great-grandfather built the first one a century ago, and his family’s company, Holt Cat, is the biggest Caterpillar dealer in the country. His small-market team has won five NBA titles—all without paying a luxury tax—making Holt one of the more admired owners in the league. He counts Rick Perry in his fan club: The Texas guv has received more than $500,000 in campaign contributions from Holt since 2000, and returned the favor with a state appointment (Parks and Wildlife Commission) and some generous, multimillion-dollar tax breaks for Holt’s businesses.

Utah Jazz: Greg Miller inherited the Jazz from his dad, Larry, along with an expansive business empire that includes real estate, retail, and car dealerships. He seems an affable guy—although not even he was immune to feuding with Karl Malone—with a Twitter feed that showcases his globetrotting off-road expeditions. (He was even on Undercover Boss!) Miller is also a devout Mormon who credits “divine intervention” for the success of his franchise and businesses. During the 2012 election cycle, the Miller family companies gave nearly $1 million to the Mitt Romney super-PAC Restore Our Future after a brief flirtation with former Utah governor and Mormon cool-dad Jon Huntsman.

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The Mother Jones Guide to Evil NBA Owners

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New York City Doctor Tests Positive for Ebola

by Lionel4334 Posted on October 23, 2014

Mother Jones

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The New York Times reports Craig Spencer, a Doctors Without Borders physician who had recently been to West Africa to help treat Ebola patients, has tested positive for the disease. Spencer is the first person in New York to be diagnosed.

As Spencer’s identity had been confirmed late Thursday afternoon, it became known he had been bowling in Brooklyn on Wednesday, traveling via an Uber ride to and from Manhattan.

“Ebola is very difficult to contract, being on the same subway car or living near someone with Ebola does not put someone at risk,” de Blasio told reporters at a news conference Thursday evening.

Since coming back to the United States on October 14th, the city’s health commissioner, Dr. Mary Bassett, confirmed Spencer used the subway’s A, 1, and L lines and bowled at The Gutter in Williamsburg. Bassett said the city has been preparing for the possibility of an outbreak for the past few weeks, with Cuomo emphasizing healthcare workers have been well-trained for such an event.

Earlier Thursday, Spencer was taken to Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan after suffering from Ebola-like symptoms, including a 103-degree fever and nausea.

The New York City Health Department released a statement indicating Spencer had returned to the United States within the past 21 days.

The patient was transported by a specially trained HAZ TAC unit wearing Personal Protective Equipment (PPE). After consulting with the hospital and the CDC, DOHMH has decided to conduct a test for the Ebola virus because of this patient’s recent travel history, pattern of symptoms, and past work. DOHMH and HHC are also evaluating the patient for other causes of illness, as these symptoms can also be consistent with salmonella, malaria, or the stomach flu.

The New York Post first identified Spencer, who returned from Guinea on October 14 and reported his fever this morning.

CNN producer Vaughn Sterling tweeted the following:

This post has been updated throughout.

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New York City Doctor Tests Positive for Ebola

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NBA Player Kisses Sideline Reporter, Calls Her the Wrong Name

by MartiGTNgmkkccx Posted on October 19, 2014

Mother Jones

Before Tristan Thompson of the Cleveland Cavaliers took the court Friday to play the Dallas Mavericks, Allie Clifton, a Fox News Ohio reporter, tried to interview him about his game strategy.

After haphazardly answering one of her questions, Thompson calls her “Tina,” winks at the camera, and then kisses her on the cheek before running away.

Here’s video of the incident:

Contrary to some of the sports media’s reporting, kissing a reporter on air while she is working is not “an unexpected gift” or “harmless, and nothing more than an awkward one-sided exchange.” It’s downright uncomfortable and belittling, even if Clifton maintained utter professionalism throughout. As Kelly Dwyer at Yahoo Sports put it: “This isn’t cute or funny or meme-worthy…Just because you’re working with someone of the opposite sex, it doesn’t mean a sly innuendo, pat on the rear, or kiss on national television is in any way appropriate.”

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NBA Player Kisses Sideline Reporter, Calls Her the Wrong Name

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2014 Is on Pace to Be the Warmest Year Ever

by Russel31Zogaest Posted on September 20, 2014

Mother Jones

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

The Earth’s oceans have never been this far beyond the bounds of normal.

New data released Thursday by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration showed that Earth’s oceans reached a level last month not seen since humans have been keeping comprehensive records. Global ocean temperatures in August 2014 warmed to “the largest departure from average for any month on record” according to a NOAA statement. The previous record was set just two months ago, in June 2014.

Records date back to 1880, though there’s ample evidence that the new record hasn’t been matched in much longer than that.

Climate scientists took the news with a sense of foreboding:

The NOAA data also showed the temperature of the Earth as a whole hit a new all-time August record last month, confirming similar results earlier this week from NASA and the Japanese Meteorological Agency, which use slightly different ways of crunching the numbers.

Additionally, the combined temperature of June, July, and August was also unprecedented in historical records. According to the JMA, four of the last five months have now been record-breaking for that particular month. (July was No. 2, just a hair behind the super-charged El Niño year of 1998.) The eastern United States is among the only land areas on Earth still running below normal for 2014, a legacy of the polar vortex outbreaks of earlier this year.

Later Thursday morning, NOAA expanded on the implications of the new records in a conference call, saying that on its current pace—and with the help of a newly resurgent El Niño—2014 is poised to become the warmest year ever measured.

“If the next four months rank among the five warmest on record, 2014 will be the warmest on record for the globe,” said Jake Crouch of the National Climatic Data Center.

The warming effect of El Niño, which boosts temperatures in the tropical Pacific Ocean, appears to have begun finally kicking into gear over the last week or so. In a separate announcement Thursday, the International Research Institute for Climate and Society declared that “borderline El Niño conditions have now returned in both ocean and atmosphere.” The El Niño is expected to persist until at least March 2015, affecting a range of weather patterns around the globe over the coming months.

Should 2014 become the new warmest year, a lingering El Niño means the record may not last long.

“Having an El Niño would increase the chances of 2015 at least starting out much warmer than average, and approaching record or near record warmth,” said Crouch.

The news came just days before a planned march in New York City, which organizers expect to be the largest ever mass demonstration on global warming in the world. More than 100,000 people are expected to attend, including UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon.

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2014 Is on Pace to Be the Warmest Year Ever

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Scotland Should Plan On Having Its Own Currency

by Tabitha92B Posted on September 17, 2014

Mother Jones

When provinces propose a split with the mother country, they usually insist that they’ll continue to use the old currency. This is odd on its face since having your own money is usually considered one of the key attributes of a sovereign state. So what’s the appeal of keeping the old country’s currency? Greg Ip ponders the question:

Facilitating trade and capital movements is only one part of the story. Another, I think, is political and emotional. Forming a new country is fraught with risk. For savers, in particular the elderly, one risk looms especially large: that one’s retirement savings are suddenly redenominated in a new currency whose value is then inflated away. In both Quebec and Scotland, independence is mostly a movement of the left, and a separate currency would create the ever-present temptation to use the printing press to accommodate fiscal expansion and industrial policy. By promising to keep the old currency, separatists are reassuring savers that they will not succumb to the temptation of inflation.

I wonder if this is true? I hope it’s not. I don’t have a strong opinion about Scottish independence, but I do have a strong opinion about this. Here it is: if you favor independence, but only if Scotland holds onto the British pound, you’re an idiot. If you don’t trust a Scottish government to run its own monetary policy, then you don’t trust a Scottish government. Period.

There are other arguments for currency union, of course, but I don’t think they add up to much. Nor do I truly believe them. They mostly seem like post hoc rationalizations to provide people with a more palatable reason for keeping the British pound than fear of a reckless Scottish monetary authority. Generally speaking, the history of currency unions is simply too fraught for anyone who’s paying attention to really think it’s a good idea. And as Ip points out, they rarely last very long anyway.

An independent Scotland should have its own currency and its own monetary policy. If this makes you nervous, then the whole idea of independence should make you nervous.

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Scotland Should Plan On Having Its Own Currency

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Obama May Soon Send This Reporter to Jail. Here Are the Embarrassing Secrets He Exposed.

by SantosSolis Posted on August 19, 2014

Mother Jones

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The Obama administration has fought a years-long court battle to force longtime New York Times national security correspondent James Risen to reveal the source for a story in his 2006 book State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration. Risen may soon serve jail time for refusing to out his source. The fight has drawn attention to Obama’s less-than-stellar track record on press freedom—in a recent interview, Risen called the president “the greatest enemy to press freedom in a generation.” But lost in the ruckus are the details of what Risen revealed. Here’s what has the government so upset.

In State of War, Risen revealed a secret CIA operation, code-named Merlin, that was intended to undermine the Iranian nuclear program. The plan—originally approved by president Bill Clinton, but later embraced by George W. Bush—was to pass flawed plans for a trigger system for a nuclear weapon to Iran in the hopes of derailing the country’s nuclear program. “It was one of the greatest engineering secrets in the world,” Risen wrote in State of War, “providing the solution to one of a handful of problems that separated nuclear powers such as the United States and Russia from the rogue countries like Iran that were desperate to join the nuclear club but had so far fallen short.”

The flaws in the trigger system were supposed to be so well hidden that the blueprints would lead Iranian scientists down the wrong path for years. But Merlin’s frontman, a Russian nuclear scientist and defector then on the CIA’s payroll, spotted the flaws almost immediately. On the day of the handoff in Vienna in winter 2000, the Russian, not wanting to burn a bridge with the Iranians, included an apologetic note with his delivery, explaining that the design had some problems. Shortly after receiving the plans, one member of the Iranian mission changed his travel plans and flew back to Tehran, presumably with the blueprints—and the note—in hand. Merlin did not wreck the Iranian nuclear program—in fact, Risen wrote, the operation could have accelerated it.

In a sworn affidavit filed in 2011, and in a recently rejected appeal to the US Supreme Court, Risen has argued that his reporting served the public good. Published at a time when military action in Iran seemed possible, State of Fear revealed how much of the effort to gather information on Iran’s nuclear capability was not just shoddy but dangerous—even, in the case of Operation Merlin, helping Iran get closer to building a nuclear weapon.

The Bush administration did not see it that way. In 2008, Bush’s Justice Department subpoenaed Risen, demanding that he reveal his source—or face jail time for contempt of court. After taking office in 2009, the Obama administration renewed the Bush-era subpoena and continued to try to identify and prosecute Risen’s source. Justice Department staff believe they know who the source was—an ex-CIA operations officer named Jeffrey Sterling, who was previously an on-the-record source for Risen—but they want Risen to confirm their hunch and fill in a few details. In legal filings, Justice Department lawyers have called Risen a witness to “serious crimes that implicate the national security of the United States” and argued that “there are few scenarios where the United States’ interests in securing information is more profound and compelling than in a criminal prosecution like this one.”

If Risen is called to court to testify but fails to show up or refuses to talk, he’s likely to become the first reporter since Judith Miller in 2005 to be sentenced to jail time for refusing to divulge a source.

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Obama May Soon Send This Reporter to Jail. Here Are the Embarrassing Secrets He Exposed.

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