Category Archives: Vintage

Do Small Businesses Deserve Exemptions From the Minimum Wage?

by RubyeMcCants Posted on May 7, 2015

Mother Jones

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Brian Hibbs, a Mother Jones reader and owner of Comix Experience, wrote in to object to San Francisco’s plan to raise its minimum wage. Conservatives who argue against the minimum wage often point to jobs lost and heavy burdens on small businesses, and progressives largely brush off those arguments as so much Chamber of Commerce propaganda. And then you have guys like Hibbs. Read what he has to say, and then we’ll discuss.

I own two comic book stores in SF, and while we’re a profitable business and have been for 26 years, we’re only modestly profitable, y’know? When you calculate my own salary on a per-hour basis, given that 70-hour weeks are not at all uncommon for me, I don’t make much more than the high-end of SF’s new minimum wage law.

Raising the minimum wage by 43 percent (from $11.05 today to $15 in 2018) means that we need to generate at least another 80 grand in revenue. Eighty grand. I don’t personally make eighty grand in a year. I’m not some kind of fat cat getting rich off the exploitation of my workers or something. And look, if I did manage to increase sales by that amount, I’d sure be hoping that I got to keep a tiny little percentage of it myself.

Just so we’re clear: The hole I find myself soon facing isn’t one created by escalating San Francisco rents (my landlord is awesome!), or because of competition from the internet (in fact, our sales consistently grow year-over-year, and sales growth has accelerated since the introduction of digital comics), but one solely and entirely created by the increase of the minimum wage.

I’m a progressive; I support fair labor practices, and I try, above all else, to give the folks who work for me absolute agency in their jobs. I have multiple employees who quit higher paying jobs for corporate owners to come work for me, because I actively valued their passions. I don’t own a comic book store to make money as my primary goal, right? The primary goal is to wake up the morning and be excited by what you do, to feel like you’re spreading your passion, that you’re promoting art, and creators and joy—and my staff feels much the same way.

I have staff who are supported by a spouse and are working for me to essentially make pocket money; I have staff who want to be full-time artists, and this helps them get closer to their goal by exposing them to the form and helping them make contacts. I have staff who are actively working toward having their own stores, and I’m basically paying them to get a master’s class (though I am fine with that!). I have staff who are full-time students living at home.

I’m not exploiting any of them, I don’t think. They all have options, and they all work for me because they want to.

If I can’t increase sales by $80,000—which is not something that seems likely, given historical year-over-year gains—then I have to start firing people, or trimming hours of operation. We don’t run extravagant overlaps—nearly 60 percent of the hours the stores are open we only have one person on deck; nor do we have a lot of waste or absurd inventory or anything like that. I’ve survived in a kind of marginal business for 26 years by being a savvy businessperson, and a relatively nimble and predictive one. But firing people, cutting hours…how does that help the employees? How does that help the business expand so I can eventually hire more people?

I have the largest staff of any SF comics business (because I have two locations), and, in point of fact, my two closest competitors have zero employees. Not being impacted by this mandate, they’d have no reason to raise prices in tandem…and really, every reason to not do so. If I raised prices by, let’s say, 10 percent to meet this mandate, I’m absolutely positive we’d lose at least 20 percent of our business to stores that didn’t raise their prices—thereby putting us at a net negative.

We’re trying to solve this problem by growing our way out of it with a new national, curated Graphic-Novel-of-the-Month Club, but I think that if we’re able to succeed from that (and I am not at all sure we will) it will be because of years of building our exceptional reputation. As a result, I do not at all think that this type of solution is scalable for the average small business. The City of San Francisco’s own Office of Economic Analysis believes the minimum wage hike will cost 15,270 jobs, or 2 percent of the private workforce!

Honestly, if San Francisco had voted for “Minimum Wage must be at least equal to X percent of your net profit” or “Every person in America gets a guaranteed income of $20,000/year paid for by progressive taxes” or some other scheme where you know that people being asked to contribute more can afford it, then maybe we’d be on sounder ideological ground…But I think that the higher minimum wage, the higher you’re making the barriers for low-income people and marginal-but-promising businesses to even have a chance to enter the marketplace and to survive in the first place, let alone legacy businesses like ours.

Here’s my personal take: It’s hard not to feel sympathy for Hibbs, yet it would be a mistake to take his situation as a case for abolishing or making exceptions to the city’s minimum wage law. As I’ve noted elsewhere, raising the minimum wage doesn’t tend to decrease overall employment; in general, businesses find new efficiencies and their workers find themselves with more disposable income to spend on things like comics.

Of course, that’s probably little comfort to Hibbs, who faces competition from smaller comics stores whose sole proprietors are the ones manning the cash registers. Hibbs may well be able to keep his doors open by downsizing, bringing in volunteers, or drumming up donations from devoted customers (as one local bookstore has done), but when it comes down to it, there simply may not be much of a future for bricks-and-mortar comics stores in a city with astronomical real estate prices.

“I super commiserate with him because we are in almost the identical situation,” says Lew Prince, a member of the group Business for a Fair Minimum Wage and the owner of Vintage Vinyl, a record store in St. Louis. Dwindling sales and rising labor costs forced Prince to consolidate his two Vintage Vinyl locations into one. He nonetheless supports increasing Missouri’s minimum wage from $7.65 to $12 an hour because he thinks it’s the right thing to do. “The job of the business owner is to prepare for the future,” he told me. “I have great empathy and sympathy for Hibbs, but you have to do the job every day, and sometimes the marketplace defeats you.”

But maybe that point of view is too harsh. I’d love to hear, in the comments, what Kevin’s readers think about all of this.

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Do Small Businesses Deserve Exemptions From the Minimum Wage?

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Re-live the Kingbees’ Rockabilly Revival

by KashaLuciano Posted on May 4, 2015

Mother Jones

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The Kingbees
self-titled
Omnivore

The rise of punk and new wave back in the late ’70s and early ’80s was accompanied by a mini-rockabilly revival, the most notable commercial success being Brian Setzer’s Stray Cats. Another eminently satisfying act was Los Angeles’ Kingbees, a spunky trio fronted by Jamie James, a spirited dude seemingly possessed by the ghost of Buddy Holly. There’s nothing profound on the expanded edition of this crisp 1980 debut album—just a bunch of snappy originals, including the semi-hit “My Mistake” and deft covers of Don Gibson (“Sweet Sweet Girl to Me”), Eddie Cochran (“Somethin’ Else”) and Buddy himself (“Not Fade Away”). But if you need a quick pick-me-up, check out “Shake-Bop” or “Ting-a-Ling.” They’ll put a spring in your step, guaranteed.

From:  

Re-live the Kingbees’ Rockabilly Revival

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Film Review: Don’t Think I’ve Forgotten Cambodia’s Lost Rock and Roll

by Edmundo71I Posted on April 22, 2015

Mother Jones

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Don’t Think I’ve Forgotten: Cambodia’s Lost Rock and Roll

ARGOT PICTURES

On the surface, Don’t Think I’ve Forgotten is a film about the flourishing rock movement that emerged following Cambodia’s independence from France in 1953. Director John Pirozzi saturates the first half with vintage footage of Cambodia’s ’50s and ’60s music scene, interspersing it with interviews with musicians who survived the ensuing horrors and relatives of those who didn’t. The infectious music blends Chuck Berry-like riffs with haunting traditional melodies. And even though you know it’s coming, the progression of coups, bombings, and genocide is shattering. “If you want to eliminate values from past societies,” notes a member of the Cambodian royal family ousted in a US-sponsored coup, “you have to eliminate the artists.”

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Film Review: Don’t Think I’ve Forgotten Cambodia’s Lost Rock and Roll

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Toni Morrison Knows All About the "Little Drop of Poison" in Your Childhood

by DewayneScheffel Posted on April 21, 2015

Mother Jones

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Photo: Timothy Greenfield-Sanders

Toni Morrison is no stranger to historical fiction. Her last novel, Home, whisked readers into the shoes of a struggling Korean War veteran. A Mercy, the one before that, pictured life through the eyes of teenage bondswomen on a 17th-century Anglo-Dutch farm. And who could forget Beloved, her wrenching tale of a mother’s radical attempt to save her child from slavery in the mid-1800s?

But when the octogenarian author sat down to compose her 11th and latest novel, God Help the Child, she faced a new challenge. “I was nervous because I didn’t have a handle on the contemporary,” she told me. “It’s very fluid.” Leave it to Morrison, a recipient of the 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, to find a way. Through Bride, her “blue-black” protagonist—who shines in the beauty industry but flails in her relationships—Morrison boldly examines the ways in which a hellish childhood undermines a person’s sense of self.

Mother Jones: How did the Bride character come to you?

Toni Morrison: I started the book before I wrote Home, but I was unsure of how to do it. And then I began to just look around at what people were doing and saying about themselves: You know, everybody’s naked, everybody’s gorgeous. I was very keenly aware of the new, wide-open, in many cases very healthy but certainly very aggressive sexuality. That becomes the success, particularly of a woman. Having looked at part of the Oscars, it was even more obvious. Laughs.

MJ: What about them?

TM: The clothes. The slits are higher, the breasts are prominent, which they always were, but now it’s just about nipples—the only part you cannot show. It just seems hysterical, because that’s the first thing any human gets in his mouth! I don’t know. I’m 84, so you can imagine how many phases of this I have witnessed.

MJ: Bride capitalizes on her unique looks to get ahead, but under the surface something’s not right.

TM: She’s very successful—you know, the “panther in snow.” But in her brain, she’s returning to that despised little black girl her mother didn’t even like.

MJ: Her “You Girl” makeup line is marketed for “girls and women of all complexions, from ebony to lemonade to milk.” Which seems empowering, and yet people fetishize Bride’s blackness. Was this an intentional jab at the beauty industry?

TM: In a way, but the interesting thing for me was that she was instructed by an industry mentor to never wear makeup. Her beauty is beyond makeup—and so she feels perfect. That’s not enough for me. You have to be a complete human being, and that has to do with your generosity. That’s what I wanted for her to encounter.

MJ: Bride’s mother thinks her daughter’s dark skin will be her doom. But didn’t your own dark great-grandmother view herself as purer than you light-skinned kids?

TM: She was very, very black. What she said was we were impure and tampered with. And we were little girls! The only other time I noticed what we call skin privileges was at Howard University. It’s a brilliant school. However, there was something called the “paper bag test”—whether your skin is darker or lighter than a paper bag. There were whole sororities that were proud that they had the lightest skin color. It was shocking to me. I wanted Bride’s mother Sweetness to make explicit the advantages of being a light-skinned Negro. She was under the impression that she had to protect her very black child from these insults. But inside, she shared that kind of revulsion.

MJ: Sweetness says: “Nowadays blue blacks are all over TV and fashion magazines, commercials, even starring in movies.” Do you see Hollywood growing up, featuring more dark-skinned women?

TM: I think the audiences have grown up in making demands, so Hollywood has followed. They don’t much care, so long as it works.

MJ: The new book contains moments of magical realism. What inspired your literary fondness for the magical and the supernatural?

TM: My childhood was full of ghost stories, and I was very taken with Gabriel García Márquez’s first book, One Hundred Years of Solitude. It was a revelation that you can do those things—that you could have ghosts. That made a big difference in the way I could conceive of characters, so that it was perfectly logical for the dead girl in Beloved to come back. She was the only one who could judge her mother. None of us could.

MJ: I’m curious whether the title of your new book is an allusion to Billie Holiday’s “God Bless the Child”?

TM: No. I had an entirely different title, which everyone hated. I’m not even gonna tell you what it was.

MJ: What was it?

TM: Laughs. No, I’m not going to tell you! I ended up with God Help the Child because Sweetness has the last word, which is, “You’re gonna be parents? Uh-huh, okay.” Parenting changes you. You have different concerns. It’s not all kitchy-kitchy-koo.

MJ: Why did you decide to focus on childhood trauma?

TM: The ideas come to me, I don’t search for them. In the process of putting together characters and their language and their interior lives, it shapes itself. I just began with a vague notion of what it must be like to be traumatized for something that has nothing to do with you. I mean, you didn’t kill anybody. You didn’t drop somebody on their head. You’re innocent. But you still have to deal with it—and how do you deal with it?

Even when you think you’ve had a wonderful childhood, I suspect there’s always some little drop of poison—that you can get rid of, but sometimes it just trails in the blood and it determines how you react to other people and how you think.

MJ: You evoke some disturbing, violent, sexual crimes in this novel and others. Does writing about such things affect you emotionally?

TM: It does, but I have the wonderful pleasure of finishing the book and closing it. And I don’t read them later.

MJ: Have you ever wanted to write more about your own life?

TM: My editor suggested that I change a two-book contract to one novel and a memoir. And I said okay, and then I thought, “I don’t think so.” A memoir? What’s interesting is the invention, the creative thing. Writing about myself was a yawn.

MJ: You’ve worked on operas, children’s books, lyrics, and plays. Is there any other form you’re eager to try?

TM: When you say it like that, I get suddenly exhausted! Laughs. I don’t think so. I think I’ll do what pleases me most, and what most challenges me, which is the novel.

MJ: How about a novel set in the future?

TM: No. I can barely deal with now.

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Toni Morrison Knows All About the "Little Drop of Poison" in Your Childhood

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Welfare Reform and the Decline of Work

by UnitedCashLoans Posted on April 18, 2015

Mother Jones

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A recent paper suggests that over the past two decades there’s been a decline in the desire of people outside the labor force to ever get jobs. Why?

We conjecture that two mechanisms could explain these results. First, the EITC expansion raised family income and reduced secondary earners’s (typically women) incentives to work. Second, the strong work requirements introduced by the AFDC/TANF reform would have, through a kind of “sink or swim” experience, left the “weaker” welfare recipients without welfare and pushed them away from the labor force and possibly into disability insurance.

This comes via Tyler Cowen, who attended an NBER session this morning conducted by the authors of this study. He came away thinking they probably hadn’t made a strong case. Still, an interesting hypothesis that probably deserves followup.

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Welfare Reform and the Decline of Work

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Are Republicans Finally Giving Up on Killing Obamacare?

by ShaneLanglais Posted on April 18, 2015

Mother Jones

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Let me say right up front that I’m skeptical of the following report. But then, maybe I’m blinded by partisanship. Who knows? In any case, here is Noam Levey writing in the LA Times today:

After five years and more than 50 votes in Congress, the Republican campaign to repeal the Affordable Care Act is essentially over. GOP congressional leaders, unable to roll back the law while President Obama remains in office and unwilling to again threaten a government shutdown to pressure him, are focused on other issues, including trade and tax reform.

Less noted, senior Republican lawmakers have quietly incorporated many of the law’s key protections into their own proposals, including guaranteeing coverage and providing government assistance to help consumers purchase insurance.

….At the same time, the presumed Republican presidential front-runner, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, has shown little enthusiasm for a new healthcare fight. Last year, he even criticized the repeal effort….“Only 18% of Americans want to go back to the system we had before because they do not want to go back to some of the problems we had,” Whit Ayres, a veteran Republican pollster said….”Smart Republicans in this area get that,” he added.

Well, maybe. Levey concedes that there will still be plenty of calls to repeal Obamacare during the 2016 presidential campaign, but he believes that in practice, Republicans will be unwilling to seriously gut a program that’s now providing health coverage for 20 million Americans, a number that will only increase over the next two years.

This is an argument I’ve made myself on multiple occasions, so I ought to be sympathetic to it. And I guess I am. On the other hand, I’ve been repeatedly astonished at the relentlessness of the GOP base’s hatred of Obamacare. Over and over, I thought it would fade out. Maybe when the Supreme Court ruled it was constitutional. Maybe when Obama won in 2012. Maybe when the law finally took full effect in 2014. But like the Energizer bunny, their unholy enmity toward the law just kept going and going and going.

So is Obamacare Derangement Syndrome finally burning itself out? I guess I’ll believe it when I see it. But maybe.

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Are Republicans Finally Giving Up on Killing Obamacare?

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No Wonder Teens Are Huffing Nicotine

by IvaHartigan Posted on April 18, 2015

Mother Jones

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You thought Big Tobacco was on the wane in the United States?

(Insert cartoon villain voice:) “Mwa-ha-ha-ha-haaaaa!”

Not. Friggin’. Likely. In fact, the domestic tobacco industry is on the rebound thanks to its heavy investment in smoking “alternatives”—a.k.a. e-cigarettes, a.k.a. nicotine-delivery devices marketed in a variety of kid-friendly flavors. (Marketing flavored tobacco cigarettes has been banned since 2009.)

Kevin had a post on Thursday about the soaring numbers of kids who’ve tried e-cigs. On Friday the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention officially announced the results of a new CDC study in the journal Nicotine and Tobacco Control.

From 2011 to 2013, the researchers reported, the number of middle- and high-school students using e-cigs tripled. In 2013, more than 250,000 kids who had never smoked tobacco reported using e-cigarettes, and 44 percent of those kids said they had “intentions” of trying regular cigarettes in the next year. (About 1 in 5 American adults currently smoke.) Not surprisingly, kids who had more exposure to tobacco advertising were more likely to say they intended to try smoking.

You’ll often hear vaping proponents argue that e-cigs help smokers kick the tobacco habit, thereby saving lives. And that may be true: Inhaling tobacco smoke, which still kills more than 400,000 Americans every year, is almost certainly more deadly than huffing nicotine vapors.

The one group you won’t hear the smoking cessation argument from is e-cig manufacturers. That, ironically, is because products intended to help people quit tobacco products are regulated far more strictly than the tobacco products themselves. The same goes for drug-delivery devices, which is why manufacturers fought very hard to make certain the FDA didn’t put e-cigarettes in that category.

Not that the agency didn’t try. The FDA initially sought to regulate e-cigs as drug-delivery devices, for what else could they be? But the manufacturers promptly sued, and were handed a huge win. Tobacco-friendly judges bought the industry’s argument that, under the 2009 Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act, any product that contains nicotine derived from tobacco and makes no therapeutic claims must be regulated as a tobacco product—which makes it, presto, not a drug delivery device.

Just think about how crazy this is: Nicotine is highly addictive. At low doses it’s a stimulant, at higher doses a serious poison. (The tobacco plant and other nightshades actually produce it as an insecticide, and it’s sold for that use, too, with a stringent warning label.) If nicotine were sold as medicine—which it can’t be because it has no medical value—you couldn’t just buy it at the corner store in a dozen alluring flavors. Yet because the manufacturers make no medical claims, they can do what they want. Never mind that the 2009 law was written before e-cigarettes were invented.

Ah, screw it. Just give me the Piña Colada.

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No Wonder Teens Are Huffing Nicotine

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Mike Huckabee Has Launched a 2016 Exploratory Committee. Read These 6 Stories About Him Now.

by Kelvin85Yxpqhdj Posted on April 17, 2015

Mother Jones

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On Friday, Mike Huckabee, the Baptist preacher and former Republican governor of Arkansas, let it slip that he recently formed an exploratory committee in anticipation of a potential presidential bid. He followed up by appearing on Bret Baier’s evening Fox News show to announce that… he will soon be announcing whether or not he will run for president.

The 59-year-old has hinted for over a year that he might run in 2016 after he sat out the 2012 race and failed to win the nomination in 2008. Since leaving office in 2007, Huckabee has maintained a high profile, hosting a Fox show for several years and writing books, including the 2015 manifesto God, Guns, Grits, and Gravy.

Huckabee would face tough competition in a field that could draw plenty of social conservatives—think Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, and former Texas Gov. Rick Perry—but he has had some success before, having taken the 2008 Iowa GOP caucuses decisively.

Here’s some of the best of Mother Jones‘ coverage of Mike Huckabee.

His leadership PAC didn’t give much to fellow Republicans, but it gave nearly $400,000 to his family.
Huckabee criticized Hillary Clinton over the email scandal. Maybe he shouldn’t have, considering his administration’s hard drives were destroyed on his way out of office.
He made some serious dough while he was toying with a presidential run.
Could Huckabee beat Rick Santorum in the Duggar Primary?
When he ran in 2008, did Huckabee the candidate shun Huckabee the pastor?

If you need a good chaser after that, read up on the fringe historian beloved by social conservatives, including Huckabee.

See the article here:

Mike Huckabee Has Launched a 2016 Exploratory Committee. Read These 6 Stories About Him Now.

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Friday Catblogging – April 17 2015

by cfg2nx26 Posted on April 17, 2015

Mother Jones

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Friday catblogging is, of course, a core tradition around these parts. And as the blog welcomes new names and faces while Kevin concentrates on getting better, who said they all have be human? The door’s always open for Hilbert and Hopper to drop in, but we’re going to round out the feline mix with a smattering of cats who are blessed to have a Mother Jones staff member as their human companion.

First up? The Oakland-based menagerie of creative director Ivylise Simones, who oversees all of MoJo‘s lovely art and photography.

On the right is seven-year-old Inspector Picklejuice, a shelter acquisition picked up by Ivylise when she was living in Brooklyn. On the left you’ll find Frankie the Cat. This affectionate two-year-old also came from a shelter, joining the Simones household in 2014.

I’m told these two get along splendidly. Sure looks like it!

If you recognize Picklejuice’s handsome features, it may be from his widely acclaimed Instagram feed, or perhaps from his star turn in our September/October 2014 issue: click through to see him—he’s the looker playing in the box on the far right. (How’d he end up in a magazine illustration? I’ll just say that it helps to have friends in the right places.)

Here’s another of the good Inspector, keeping a close eye on happenings from a favored perch high in the loft. It’s an ideal spot to partake in two of his favorite hobbies: sleeping, and sitting around while awake.

It takes a good five foot vertical hop over open space to get up there. Impressive!

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Friday Catblogging – April 17 2015

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Why the Euro Is a Selfish Jerk

by DeclanHSUlbce Posted on April 17, 2015

Mother Jones

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While Kevin Drum is focused on getting better, we’ve invited some of the remarkable writers and thinkers who have traded links and ideas with him from Blogosphere 1.0 through today to pitch in posts and keep the conversation going. Here’s a contribution from Keith Humphreys, a professor of psychiatry at Stanford University whose sharp insights on addiction, drug policy, and many other topics have helped make the Reality-Based Community group blog a must read.

The Euro is the Windows 8 of the economic policy design world: In both cases, it’s very hard to understand how putatively smart people worked so hard to create a product so ill-suited to the needs of those who were supposed to rely on it. At this point, this isn’t much of a secret: as Kevin Drum pointed out back in 2011, a common currency deprives markets and nations of tools that normally ameliorate the effects of capital flow imbalances, inflation spikes, and crushing debt payments. Kevin and other people who understand fiscal policy better than I ever will (e.g., Matt O’Brien and Paul Krugman) convinced me long ago that the Euro was designed with a lack of understanding of (or an unwillingness to grapple with) basic lessons of economics.

But speaking as a psychologist, the common currency’s fundamental design flaws don’t end there: the Euro creators should have thought harder about what social scientists have learned about how compassion and cultural identity interact.

In asking nations to entrust their economic fate to the Euro, its designers were assuming that Europeans have a reservoir of goodwill among them. That goodwill was supposed to ensure, for example, that no prospective member had to worry that a powerful member would use its Euro-derived leverage to turn the screws on a weaker member which was—to pick an example out of thin air—wracked by colossal levels of debt, unemployment and economic misery.

But that’s exactly what the Germans have done to the Greeks. Why aren’t the Germans overcome with sympathy for the Greeks? It’s not that Germans are selfish or hard-hearted: after all, they have spent ten times the current GDP of Greece helping the economically struggling people of the former East Germany.

Social psychology researchers have identified a powerful in group bias in willingness to help others, whether it’s hiring someone for a job or supporting social welfare programs for the poor. Human beings are, in short, more inclined to help other people whom we perceive as being a member of our tribe.

Human psychology wouldn’t cause as many problems for the Euro if there was a strong European identity, if a West German was as likely to consider an East German a tribe member as they would a Greek or a Spaniard or an Italian. But when most Germans and Greeks look at each other, they fundamentally see someone who speaks a different language and hails from a different culture with a different history—and for that matter was a military enemy within living memory.

With no shared sense of tribe comes a sharp reduction in compassion and attendant willingness to help. The elites who designed the Euro may genuinely have believed and even felt a sense that Europe is all about “us”, but the currency’s recent struggles show that for too many Europeans, it’s more about us and them.

See original article here – 

Why the Euro Is a Selfish Jerk

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