Tag Archives: charts

Dan Snyder to Native Americans: We’re Cool, Right? Native Americans to Dan Snyder: Redacted

by ztx6uu6c Posted on October 10, 2013

Mother Jones

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Dan Snyder, the owner of Washington’s pro football team, wrote a letter to season ticket holders yesterday to once again defend the franchise’s racist name. Snyder, who in May said he’d “never” change the moniker, focused on the team’s long history—mentioning three times that it has been in existence for 81 years—and argued that it “was never a label. It was, and continues to be, a badge of honor.” He also argued, in a bit of marketing wizardry, that the name “is a symbol of everything we stand for: strength, courage, pride, and respect.”

Snyder went beyond lauding the positive symbolism of the Redacted brand, though. Like ESPN columnist Rick Reilly before him, Snyder cited a poll from the Annenberg Public Policy Center that found that 90 percent of Native Americans didn’t find the team’s name offensive. He also pointed to a Richmond Times-Dispatch story in which a writer contacted three Native American tribal leaders in Virginia; none of them was offended by the name.

“I’ve listened carefully to the commentary and perspectives on all sides, and I respect the feelings of those who are offended by the team name,” Snyder wrote. “But I hope such individuals also try to respect what the name means, not only for all of us in the extended Washington Redskins family, but among Native Americans too.”

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Dan Snyder to Native Americans: We’re Cool, Right? Native Americans to Dan Snyder: Redacted

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Charts: Income Growth Has Stalled For Most Americans

by trqe9vwyqm Posted on September 18, 2013

Mother Jones

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Yesterday the Census Bureau released its latest income data, confirming what millions of Americans already know: the recession may be over, but the recovery has yet to trickle down. Specifically, the Census reported that median household incomes didn’t budge between 2011 and 2012.

Digging deeper into the new data reveals more evidence of the widening income gap between the rich and the rest.

The only bright side of stalled incomes is that they are no longer experiencing the steep decline that started in 2007 before the recession hit. But that’s hardly cause for celebration: At $51,017, the real median household income in 2012 is even less than it was at the end of the ’80s, and it’s down 9 percent from its high in 1999.

This loss of real income hasn’t affected all Americans equally. For the top 20 percent of earners, average incomes grew 70 percent since 1967, and they grew 88 percent for the top 5 percent. Meanwhile, middle-income households have seen their earnings grow just 20 percent in the past four decades.

This translates into a greater share of total income going to top earners. In 2012, the top 20 percent took in more than half of all income in the United States, according to the Census.

To put that into sharper focus, I’ve charted how each percentile’s share of total income has changed since the late ’60s. After experiencing significant growth in the mid-1970s, the bottom 20% of earners have seen their share steadily drop. Compare that with the top 5 and 20 percent, which have seen their piece of the pie expand in the past two decades while all other Americans’ shrunk.

This trend is also seen in the latest income data complied by economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, which shows that the top 10 percent of earners now hold their largest share of total income since the eve of the Depression.

The new Census data on the bleak state of the American Dream came one day after Forbes released its latest list of 400 wealthiest Americans. Together, they are worth more than $2 trillion. The past year has been very good to them:

The average net worth of list members is a staggering $5 billion, $800 million more than a year ago and also a record. The minimum net worth needed to make the 400 list was $1.3 billion. The last time it was that high was in 2007 and 2008, before property and stock market values began sliding. Because the bar is so high, 61 American billionaires didn’t make the cut.

As Piketty and Saez report, 95 percent of all income growth between 2009 and 2012 went to the 1 percent.

Sources: Chart 1: Census Bureau, “Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2012″ (PDF); charts 2-4: Census Bureau historical income data; chart 5: Emmanuel Saez, UC Berkeley (Excel)

Front page image: rangizzz/Shutterstock

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Charts: Income Growth Has Stalled For Most Americans

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What Does Aaron Alexis’s Race Say About the Navy Yard Shooting?

by dla@kk2.pl Posted on September 17, 2013

Mother Jones

The details emerging about Aaron Alexis, the now-dead 34-year-old suspected of killing 12 people and injuring more at the Washington Navy Yard Monday morning, paint the picture of a complicated and troubled man. He loved Thai culture and went to a Buddhist temple. He served in the Navy from February 2008 to January 2011, most recently as an Aviation Electrician’s Mate, 3rd Class. In 2010, prior to leaving the Navy, he was arrested by Fort Worth police after being accused of recklessly discharging a gun; no charges were brought. Prior to enlisting, he shot the tires out of someone’s car in an “anger-fueled ‘blackout'”; Seattle detectives referred the case the DA’s office, which never filed charges.

But one detail, like a shiny object to a magpie, has captivated a certain segment of the population: Alexis’ race. A few enterprising Twitter users have even found a way to loop both Barack Obama and Trayvon Martin into their commentary on the shooter’s skin color, using a tragedy to further a political viewpoint or validate a convenient narrative about race and violence. But the facts on mass shootings in the US tell a much different tale than the one some are spinning.

A look at the data compiled by Mother Jones on mass shootings shows that 16 percent of the 67 mass shootings that have occurred since 1982 were committed by black shooters, including the alleged Navy Yard shooter, while 66 percent were committed by whites. Monday’s shooting, and all the others that have occurred in the last 30 years, does tell a story—about guns and safety and violence in the US. But if you’re looking at Aaron Alexis’ skin color, you’re missing the point.

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What Does Aaron Alexis’s Race Say About the Navy Yard Shooting?

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Your Half-Eaten Sandwich’s Dirty Secret

by Justin Thomas Posted on September 16, 2013

Mother Jones

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A full third of the world’s food is wasted. According to a new report from the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, discarded food accounts for a staggering amount of planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions. In fact, if food waste was a country, its 3.3 gigatonnes of emissions would make it the third highest-emitting country in the world, after China and the United States:

All charts reproduced with permission from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations

(LULUCF refers to “land use, land-use change, and forestry”—so this chart doesn’t take into account all of the carbon emitted when a rainforest is converted to a farm, for example.)

What exactly makes all that waste and its emissions? It’s not just consumers throwing dinner scraps away. Some food spoils before farmers can harvest it, other food goes bad on its way from the farm to the market, and still more food ends up rotting on supermarket shelves. Looking at emissions of uneaten food from farm to table, the researchers found that food wasted at the consumer phase had the highest carbon footprint. That’s because by the time food gets to that stage, it’s already accumulated emissions from production, harvest, and distribution. In other words, when chuck food that you buy at the supermarket, you’re throwing away every part of the process that has gotten it there, as well:

Some kinds of food waste create more emissions than others. Wasted fruit, for example, has a relatively small ratio of food waste to carbon emitted. Meat’s ratio is much larger. That’s because meat production is exceptionally carbon intensive.

Food waste and emissions also vary by region. This graph shows that industrialized Asia (China, Japan, and South Korea) is far and away the largest contributor to both food waste and carbon emissions in the world:

But if you look at food waste’s carbon footprint per person, North America and Oceania (United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) is the winner—meaning the uneaten food produced by each citizen of North America and Oceania is responsible for more carbon emissions than that of each person in industrialized Asia. The report authors don’t go into the reasons for this, but I’m guessing it has to do with the fact that North Americans waste more food overall—especially in the carbon-instensive consumer phase—than people most other regions.

Of course, carbon emissions are not the only way in which wasted food harms the environment. The report finds that wasted food consumes an amount of water almost three times as large as Switzerland’s Lake Geneva—that’s 60 percent more than Lake Tahoe. The authors also note that uneaten food could cover nearly 30 percent of the world’s arable land.

And that’s to say nothing of the human impact of all this food waste. By 2020, the global population is expected to hit 8 billion. How are we going to feed everyone? Some argue that we should use biotechnology to design higher yielding crops, while others believe that we simply must redistribute the food we already grow—enough to feed 12 billion people, my colleague Tom Philpott reports—more evenly. But surely figuring out how to eat the food that we produce instead of throwing it away would help, too.

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Your Half-Eaten Sandwich’s Dirty Secret

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Offensive Lines: How Bad Is Your NFL Team’s Owner?

by Zack Leverett Posted on September 15, 2013

Mother Jones

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Some were born in the red zone, inheriting teams from their wealthy families. Some are lifetime businessmen who bought a franchise as a midlife vanity project. One is married to a Walmart heiress. Yet on the whole, NFL owners have one thing in common: their relative anonymity.

That’s because, for years, they’ve had a hired hand to do their dirty work: NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell has kept busy negotiating a contract that reduces players’ cut of the pie, locking out unionized referees, and fighting the fallout of a $765 million concussion lawsuit. The owners who pay Goodell’s $29-million-plus salary were rewarded last year with $9.5 billion in revenue.

Here’s your chance to take your eyes off Goodell for a sec, and look at the public-financing hogs and brain-trauma deniers occupying luxury suites across America. In the vein of Major League Assholes, we took a stab at matrix-ifying NFL owners based on their political giving and their relative assholery. Look down below the chart to get the skinny on all the owners you love to hate.

Arizona
Atlanta
Baltimore
Buffalo
Carolina
Chicago
Cincinnati
Cleveland
Dallas
Denver
Detroit
Green Bay
Houston
Indianapolis
Jacksonville
Kansas City
Miami
Minnesota
New England
New Orleans
NY Giants
NY Jets
Oakland
Philadelphia
Pittsburgh
San Diego
San Francisco
Seattle
St. Louis
Tampa Bay
Tennessee
Washington

AFC

Baltimore Ravens: According to the Washington Post, Steve Bisciotti “is, in many ways, a regular guy who happens to be very rich.” Like $1.8 billion rich. He sits courtside at University of Maryland basketball games and flies in his buddies on his private jet to join him. Bisciotti made his fortune by founding the country’s largest staffing company, Aerotek (now the Allegis Group), which in 2009 settled a class action suit with more than 1,000 former employees who claimed the company didn’t pay them for accrued leave time. (Aerotek paid out $1.2 million.)

When Baltimore made the Super Bowl last year, former Ravens coach Brian Billick had this to say of his old boss: “He’s a man’s man. He’ll go drink for drink, cigar for cigar.” And, apparently, arm caress for arm caress:

Buffalo Bills: When Ralph Wilson bought an AFL franchise in 1959, he finally settled on Buffalo, New York, after meeting with a local newspaper editor who promised to cover the new team every single day. Known as much for his outspoken views on revenue sharing as he is for whisking players from practice for a midday tuna melt, Wilson has come to rely on this sort of local support: In December, Erie County and the state agreed to pony up a combined $226 million of the $271 million in future renovations to Ralph Wilson Stadium. (In return, the Bills promised not to leave Buffalo for Los Angeles or Toronto or wherever else they could possibly go for seven years.) Shortly thereafter, Wilson gave up his title as team president—at 94.

Cincinnati Bengals: The late Paul Brown was one of modern football’s major innovators, helping popularize things like the forward pass and sideline play calling. His son, current Bengals owner Mike Brown, has innovated in his own, small way. In the mid-1990s he used the old “I might move the team to Baltimore” line to put Hamilton County, Ohio, on the hook for hundreds of millions of dollars in financing for a new stadium—which he named after dear old dad. (As one county official told the Wall Street Journal, “It’s the monster that ate the public sector.”) That Brown would ask taxpayers to pick up the tab is no surprise; for years he ran what Sports Illustrated called “the leanest mom-and-pop shop in the league,” a nice way of saying that he didn’t employ as many scouts as other teams did. More recently, he’s been on the cutting edge of making loud-mouthed, uninformed comments about the long-term neurological effects of concussions—even after one of his ex-players, Chris Henry, was found to have degenerative brain damage after his death in a December 2009 car accident.

Cleveland Browns: Truck stop magnate Jimmy Haslam once told a reporter that he’d been approached by the TV show Undercover Boss but had to turn the producers down: Everyone at his multibillion-dollar company, Pilot Flying J, knew the hands-on CEO too well for the premise to work. NFL fans were just starting to know Haslam, who last year gave up his stake in the Pittsburgh Steelers to purchase the Browns for $1 billion, when Pilot Flying J came under federal investigation for allegedly defrauding its customers. Worse, a confidential informant told the FBI that Haslam knew (PDF) it was happening. It wasn’t the first time Pilot Flying J had come under legal scrutiny. From the New York Times:

In 2005, the United States Department of Labor announced an agreement in which the company would pay 110 assistant managers $720,000 in back wages and damages to resolve violations of the overtime provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act, according to The News Sentinel. And the company settled price-gouging allegations in three states by paying fines in the wake of Hurricane Ike in 2008.

Oh, and did we mention the company is allegedly $4 billion in debt?

Denver Broncos: Despite his shrinking role with the Broncos, owner Pat Bowlen still makes a point to reach out to fans—last month, he actually said his team belongs to them. Back in January, he sent season ticket holders apologetic emails following Denver’s last-second playoff exit. Whether or not that excuses his greatest sin depends on your point of view.

Houston Texans: According to a 2011 story in ESPN the Magazine, Bob McNair’s “game-day mornings probably aren’t too different from yours.” Right, because you, too, leave your 12,000-plus-square-foot home each day, and head over to your 3,620-square-foot owner’s suite at the local stadium. McNair, the NFL’s biggest political donor (he’s given $4.2 million since 2008, including $2 million last fall to the pro-Mitt Romney super-PAC Restore Our Future and $1 million to Karl Rove’s American Crossroads), cleaned up by selling his Cogen Technologies to Enron in 1999—not long before Ken Lay & Co. imploded. Maybe it’s that kind of timing that led Cowboys owner Jerry Jones to once call McNair the best owner in football. Meanwhile, his heir apparent, son Cal, enjoys big-game hunting—lions, elephants, leopards, including one he’s got stuffed and mounted in his office. The Texans are still hunting for their own big game: They’ve never made it to the conference championships, let alone the Super Bowl, in their 12-year history.

Indianapolis Colts: We enjoy Twitter. But Jim Irsay—billionaire Colts owner, son of Baltimore-crushing Robert Irsay, recovering addict, guitar aficionado, and Kerouac scroll owner—adores Twitter. Here’s one of his first tweets, from 2010:

Here’s another, lamenting a poor preseason performance:

And this one, on ticket pricing:

Don’t let Irsay’s Twitter antics fool you, though: He’s a killer at the negotiating table, as evidenced by Indianapolis’ heavily subsidized Lucas Oil Stadium. And he can be quite coherent in person, like when he was asked about Rush Limbaugh’s reported bid for the St. Louis Rams: “There are certain privileges for certain things in life that you might want to pursue that may not be appropriate. I myself couldn’t be in favor of voting for him.” With a few of Irsay’s punctuation tweaks, that would easily fit within 140 characters.

Jacksonville Jaguars: In 2011, Shad Khan bought the Jaguars for $770 million, making him the NFL’s first ethnic minority owner. The Pakistani-born, Muslim billionaire with the epic facial hair (60 Minutes: “His rakish mustache has become a must-have accessory for any self-respecting Jags fan”) wasn’t the first choice of some racist Jacksonville fans, but his approval rating reached nearly 80 percent a year and a half ago. Khan got rich as owner of Flex-N-Gate, which manufactures bumpers for Toyota but was cited for nine serious OSHA violations and fined $57,000 in 2012 “for failing to monitor workers’ exposure to nickel, chromium, and hydrochloric and sulfuric acid.” (No word on whether star running back Maurice Jones-Drew is considering his own occupational hazard suit after years of carrying an anemic offense.)

Kansas City Chiefs: Clark Hunt owns a football team, and another football team. His family’s company recently sold a third football team.

Miami Dolphins: Even though Miami Marlins owner Jeffrey Loria detonated the Miami-Dade budget and turned South Florida against publicly funded stadiums with the debtapalooza known as Marlins Park, Dolphins frontman Stephen Ross didn’t let that stop him from trying to get some public dollars of his own. After the cancellation of a special election involving $350 million in proposed stadium renovations, Ross went on the offensive, creating a PAC called Florida Jobs First to campaign against the politicians he believed sunk the project. (One attack ad featured frowning men in hardhats.) But don’t worry about Ross: He recently found $200 million to donate to his alma mater, the University of Michigan. In true form, he stipulated that it could only be spent on the athletic department or UM’s Stephen M. Ross School of Business.

New England Patriots: Robert Kraft has long been the suited, pocket-squared business face of the so-called Patriot Way. But he slipped back in July, when he insisted that Russian President Vladimir Putin stole his $25,000 Super Bowl ring from 2005—a charge a Kremlin spokesman called “weird.” Since then, Kraft has said that the ring was, in fact, a present, and invited Putin to a Patriots home game so the Russian president could present him with a ring Putin was supposedly making for Kraft. That the Patriots owner might bend the truth is no surprise to folks in Hartford, Connecticut, where Kraft had a handshake deal to move the franchise in 1998; turns out it was just a ploy to extract concessions from Massachusetts taxpayers. Even former Connecticut Gov. John Rowland, who was convicted for corruption, got in a dig after the move fell through: “I am a New York Jets fan, now and possibly forever.”

New York Jets: Robert Wood Johnson IV, known to all as Woody, is the 66-year-old heir to the Johnson & Johnson fortune. A veteran GOP money man who earned Ranger fundraiser status in the George W. Bush days, he reportedly helped raise $7 million for John McCain in a single night in 2008. Johnson gave in the high five figures during the 2012 cycle—an election he called more important than a Jets winning season. All the while, he has tried to keep a low profile—even in the face of his socialite daughter’s 2010 death at age 30. According to “many of Johnson’s famous friends,” Adam Sternbergh wrote in a New York magazine profile, “he’s long been a private wild man…

Jann Wenner might tell you about the time they took a cross-country motorcycle trip with a bunch of dudes (including Michael Douglas), from the Tavern on the Green to the Golden Gate Bridge, and Johnson wore a helmet with fake black hair streaming out the back. Or Mitt Romney might relate the story of how Johnson visited his estate and, when no one else would test a rope-swing into a swimming hole, grabbed the rope and hurtled himself into the drink.

Dunno. Maybe Tim Tebow would consider that stuff wild.

Oakland Raiders: Ranking the NFL’s worst owners without Al Davis is like trying to celebrate Christmas without Santa Claus. Al’s son, Mark Davis, has been looked to as a breath of fresh air for the franchise, though earlier this year he fired the team’s PR director over an article he found unflattering. He has also threatened to move the Raiders to Los Angeles (again) as the team hunts for a new stadium. His latest proposal: Tear down the current stadium and build a new one on the exact same site.

Pittsburgh Steelers: The Rooney family has been involved with the NFL since 1933, when Art Rooney bought the newly minted Pittsburgh Pirates franchise for $2,500—he renamed it the Steelers in 1940. Dan Rooney, Art’s oldest son and the current team president, is best known for two things: serving as America’s ambassador to Ireland from 2009-2012 and being the driving force behind what’s known as the Rooney Rule, which requires teams to interview a minority candidate for every head coach and general manager opening. (Not that it did much good this past offseason: Despite 15 open positions, no black candidates were hired.)

San Diego Chargers: Alex Spanos is a Republican heavy hitter—he hosted a Mitt Romney fundraiser in March 2012, and Rush Limbaugh wrote the foreword to his autobiography (which was titled, oddly enough, Spreading the Wealth). The biggest black mark on his reign is probably keeping team doctor David Chao around for 15 years despite dozens of accusations of malpractice, negligence, personal injury, and fraud—though Spanos’ company also had to pay a big settlement after the government sued it for not making apartments accessible to the disabled.

Tennessee Titans: Oilman Bud Adams moved his Houston Oilers into the publicly funded Astrodome in 1965. After 22 years, Adams decided that the ballyhooed stadium wasn’t all that wondrous anymore and asked Houston for $67 million in upgrades. When the city balked, he threatened a move to Jacksonville, Florida, which was enough to get him his renovations. Six years later, Adams started kicking the tires on a new dome. Houston rebuffed him, so Adams took his team north to Nashville, whose officials were happy to give him what he wanted. (Eventually, a shiny new stadium was built for an expansion team in Houston—with plenty of public funding.)

NFC

Arizona Cardinals: No team has gone longer without a championship than Bill Bidwill’s Cardinals; they last won in 1947 when the team shared Chicago with the Bears. And last year, the hapless Cardinals became the first NFL team to lose 700 games all told. Bidwill became known as “Dollar Bill” for his cheapness, amid rumors that he made players buy their own cleats and deducted lunch from their paychecks. Despite his fondness for screaming, Bill’s son, team president Michael Bidwill, is viewed more a bit more favorably.

Atlanta Falcons: Home Depot cofounder Arthur Blank (not to be confused with fellow cofounder and GOP megadonor Ken Langone, who was profiled by Andy Kroll in our March/April 2012 issue) has finally seen things turn around in Atlanta. Years after the Michael Vick and Bobby Petrino fiascoes, Blank has a winning team, a complimentary general manager, and a new stadium on the way—a futuristic looking thing that Deadspin‘s Barry Petchesky dubbed “The Sphincter.” All it took was moving a couple of churches off of the proposed construction site—at a cost of $19.5 million for one and $14.5 million for the other.

Carolina Panthers: When Jerry Richardson met with his fellow owners during NFL labor negotiations in 2010, he was emphatic about getting a more favorable revenue split with players. According to one witness, Richardson told the other NFL execs, “We signed a expletive deal last time, and we’re going to stick together and take back our league and expletive do something about it.” His main argument for holding the line was the unsustainability of it all—an argument Deadspin blew out of the water when it learned that Richardson’s Panthers turned a $112 million profit in 2010 and 2011. This year, the tattoo-hating Richardson asked taxpayers to cover about two-thirds of the cost of a proposed stadium renovation. The city of Charlotte decided to kick in some money, but the state refused.

Chicago Bears: Virginia Halas McCaskey and her kin have been taken to task for their poor business acumen. (The Bears are worth only $1.19 billion). McCaskey only ever wanted to be the team’s board secretary—a title she still retains—but ended up running the show after her brother died of a heart attack, setting off a public battle over the estate.

Dallas Cowboys: Long lambasted for favoring the Cowboys’ brand and massive stadium over the quality of the team (Dallas is .500 since 1997), Jerral “Jerry” Jones is one of the league’s most reviled owners, and not just outside of Texas: Last November, fans actually petitioned President Obama to oust the Cowboys’ “controlling, delusional, oppressive dictator.” If the self-appointed GM can’t field a winning team, the least he can do is make sure his gaudy scoreboard doesn’t cost Dallas any more touchdowns.

Detroit Lions: Since William Clay Ford bought the Lions in 1963, the team has won only one playoff game. Detroit capped off with the league’s first ever 0-16 season in 2008, after which Forbes declared Ford the worst owner in the NFL. His son, at least, thinks things are looking up. They won their first game this season, in any case. Oh, wait, that was against the Cardinals.

Green Bay Packers: Green Bay is the country’s only major publicly owned nonprofit professional sports team. CEO Mark Murphy, a former union rep and safety for Washington once deemed a communist by then-Redacted owner Jack Kent Cooke, recently returned the favor by acknowledging that Washington’s nickname is “very derogatory to a lot of people.” The Packers’ only blemish? The $250-per-share stock it sold to raise money for a Lambeau Field expansion. Sorry Cheeseheads—those certificates are worthless.

Minnesota Vikings: Zygi Wilf was found guilty of racketeering this year after a New Jersey judge found that he and family members cheated business partners out of millions in revenue from an apartment complex. In the meantime, the Vikings owner has threatened to move the team in a squabble over a planned billion-dollar stadium—even though he rejected an offer in which state and local governments would pick up more than 60 percent of the tab. He claims that making his net worth public would hurt the team in those negotiations.

New Orleans Saints: How you feel about billionaire car salesman/investor/Saints owner Tom Benson basically depends on how you feel about an owner using a natural disaster (Hurricane Katrina) to flirt with moving to another city (San Antonio). Eventually, in 2006, he decided to stay in NOLA, a decision that was rewarded three years later by a Super Bowl, state approval of $85 million in Superdome upgrades, and a pretty sweet lease agreement.

In any case, people sure did love the way Benson second-lined on the sidelines…

New York Giants: Called “the first family of football,” the Maras have earned plenty of recent goodwill from two Giants Super Bowl wins in the past decade. On the social front, John Mara publicly admitted that the league has forsaken players with brain injuries and other game-related health problems. And in 2001, co-owner Steve Tisch cut a video supporting marriage equality in New York.

Philadelphia Eagles: The Eagles’ Jeff Lurie retrofitted Philly’s Lincoln Financial Field with 80 wind turbines, 2,500 solar panels, and a 7.6-megawatt biodiesel power plant in a greening effort that drew praise from President Obama. Now he just needs to work on his high fives—for the sake of his wife.

St. Louis Rams: Sports Illustrated has called Stan Kroenke “the most powerful man in sports.” The Missouri real estate tycoon, who is married to Walmart heiress Ann Walton Kroenke, owns the Rams, the English Premier League’s Arsenal, and five other major sports teams with a combined valued of around $4 billion. While the notoriously tight-lipped Kroenke tends to avoid the spotlight, that may become harder to do as the team negotiates a deal for a new stadium. (The Rams’ first request, a $700 million monstrosity, was summarily rejected.) Let’s hope whatever deal they reach is up to Kroenke’s standards—after buying a vineyard, he once dumped $3.3 million worth of cabernet down the drain, deciding it was low-grade.

San Francisco 49ers: Jed York, the Niners’ youthful owner, is riding high on goodwill after the team’s recent resurgence. York is generally low-key (or as low-key as you can be surrounded by confetti at the groundbreaking of your billion-dollar stadium). While York supposedly sewed jerseys and wrapped ankles when he officially joined the team in 2005, he didn’t exactly come from humble beginnings—he spent plenty of time in the owner’s box as a kid back when his grandfather ran the team—and mom owned pro hockey’s Pittsburgh Penguins.

Seattle Seahawks: In addition to the Seahawks, Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen runs basketball’s Portland Trail Blazers, and part of Major League Soccer’s Seattle Sounders—at least when he’s not busy sniffing out tech investments or taking credit for most of Microsoft’s breakthroughs. He’s also the NFL’s richest owner, valued at $15 billion—which is $10 billion more than the second-richest owner, Stan Kroenke. It can be nice to have an owner whose personal bottom line doesn’t hinge on reining in the team’s costs. No stranger to vanity projects, Allen donated $1.6 million last year to pass a ballot initiative allowing public charter schools in Washington state.

Tampa Bay Buccaneers: Longtime corporate raider Malcolm Glazer bought the Buccaneers in 1995. Shortly thereafter, the team was winning games and playing for packed crowds at a brand-new, taxpayer-subsidized stadium—one that includes a $3 million fake pirate ship. What kind of fan wouldn’t want that? A British soccer fan, that’s who. Glazer’s 2005 takeover of Manchester United sent shock waves through the Premier League, but mostly because of the highly leveraged way he went about doing it.

Washington Redacted: In 2010, Washington City Paper published an entire A to Z guide of reasons to hate Dan Snyder. He sued the alt-weekly without even reading it. He also sued a 72-year-old season ticket holder who couldn’t afford the payments on her seats, and banned signs from the stadium during a particularly rough 2009 season. But Snyder’s worst move yet? His steadfast defense of his team’s racist nickname. (Don’t worry, a fake “American Inuit chief” says it’s okay.)

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Offensive Lines: How Bad Is Your NFL Team’s Owner?

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9 Surprising Foods With More Sugar Than a Krispy Kreme Doughnut

by biglermyrta910 Posted on September 13, 2013

Mother Jones

It’s Friday! After a long week of work, you’re probably ready to curl up on the couch with a big box of doughnuts. But having read Gary Taubes’ expose in Mother Jones on the sugar industry’s terrifying campaign to convince the American public that sugar won’t kill you, maybe you’ll reach for a “healthier” option instead—like a green Odwalla “Super Food” smoothie.

Not so fast. According to a new report by Credit Suisse, you might be better off eating a doughnut than some of the stuff marketed as healthy. Here are nine surprising foods that have more sugar than a Krispy Kreme doughnut, which, at 10 grams, seems saintly in comparison:

1. Luna Bar: 11 grams

2. GRANDE STARBUCKS latte: 17 grams

3. Subway 6″ Sweet Onion Teriyaki Chicken Sandwich: 17 Grams

4. 8 oz Tropicana 100% Orange Juice: 22 Grams

5. Yoplait Original Yogurt: 27 Grams

6. 20 oz Vitamin Water: 33 Grams

7. Sprinkles Red Velvet Cupcake: 45 Grams

8. California Pizza Kitchen Thai Chicken Salad: 45 Grams

9. Odwalla Super Food Smoothie (12 oz): 50 Grams

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9 Surprising Foods With More Sugar Than a Krispy Kreme Doughnut

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Why the Positive August Jobs Report Is Not Actually Positive

by gt67dx1 Posted on September 6, 2013

Mother Jones

The US economy added 169,000 jobs last month, according to new numbers released Friday by the Labor Department, and the unemployment rate fell a tenth of a percent to 7.3 percent. But don’t be fooled. As has been the case in recent months, the unemployment rate fell mostly because more Americans stopped looking for work, and so were not officially counted as unemployed by the government. The jobs situation may actually be even worse than it was earlier this year.

In August, there were 312,000 fewer people in the labor force—defined as people who are either looking for a job or have a job; the size of the labor force is at its lowest level since 1978. And as of last month, 7.9 million Americans who wanted full-time work could find only part-time gigs. When you include these workers and those who have stopped looking for work, you get an underemployment rate of 13.7 percent.

The number of new jobs added to the economy per month has been on a downward trend over the past year. We averaged 148,000 new jobs a month for the last three months, but 160,000 jobs a month for the last six months, and 184,000 a month over the last year, Neil Irwin points out at the Washington Post. In order to make up for the jobs gap created by the recession within the next four years, about 300,000 jobs would need to be created per month, according to the Brookings Institution.

The jobs we are adding to the economy are of pretty poor quality; they are largely low-wage, service sector jobs in the health care, retail and food industries.

The unemployment rate for minorities remains disproportionately high: 13 percent for blacks, and 9.3 percent for Hispanics.

And yet the administration has been pointing to the falling unemployment rate as evidence of a recovery, and the Federal Reserve is expected to soon pull back on its stimulus measures in response to the superficially sunny jobs numbers. As Irwin writes, the administration seems to be ignoring the big picture: “This job report has enough signs of weakness embedded in enough places that it has to make economy-watchers—including those at the Federal Reserve who meet in less than two weeks—reassess their confidence that a solid, steady jobs recovery is underway… You don’t have to squint hard to see evidence that the ‘nice, steady improvement’ theme that has been the conventional wisdom is missing part of the story.”

It doesn’t look like jobs will come rushing back any time soon. The across-the-board budget cuts known as sequestration that went into effect in March are one reason. As my colleague Kevin Drum pointed out in July, “a rough horseback guess suggests that the total effect of our austerity binge has been a GDP reduction of 2 percent and an employment reduction of nearly 3 million.”

And the coming fiscal battle in Congress could make matters worse. Republicans are threatening to refuse to raise the nation’s debt ceiling when we reach our borrowing limit in mid-October unless President Barack Obama agrees to more spending reductions. Last month, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew warned against this tactic. “What we need in our economy is some certainty,” he said. “We don’t need another self-inflicted wound.”

Especially because there isn’t much justification to continue shrinking spending—the deficit has shrunk by hundreds of billions of dollars in recent years. Via Drum:

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Why the Positive August Jobs Report Is Not Actually Positive

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Science Confirms: Politics Wrecks Your Ability to Do Math

by Roger Frost Posted on September 4, 2013

Mother Jones

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Everybody knows that our political views can sometimes get in the way of thinking clearly. But perhaps we don’t realize how bad the problem actually is. According to a new psychology paper, our political passions can even undermine our very basic reasoning skills. More specifically, the study finds that people who are otherwise very good at math may totally flunk a problem that they would otherwise probably be able to solve, simply because giving the right answer goes against their political beliefs.

The study, by Yale law professor Dan Kahan and his colleagues, has an ingenious design. At the outset, 1,111 study participants were asked about their political views and also asked a series of questions designed to gauge their “numeracy,” that is, their mathematical reasoning ability. Participants were then asked to solve a fairly difficult problem that involved interpreting the results of a (fake) scientific study. But here was the trick: While the fake study data that they were supposed to assess remained the same, sometimes the study was described as measuring the effectiveness of a “new cream for treating skin rashes.” But in other cases, the study was described as involving the effectiveness of “a law banning private citizens from carrying concealed handguns in public.”

The result? Survey respondents performed wildly differently on what was in essence the same basic problem, simply depending upon whether they had been told that it involved guns or whether they had been told that it involved a new skin cream. What’s more, it turns out that highly numerate liberals and conservatives were even more—not less—susceptible to letting politics skew their reasoning than were those with less mathematical ability.

But we’re getting a little ahead of ourselves—to fully grasp the Enlightenment-destroying nature of these results, we first need to explore the tricky problem that the study presented in a little bit more detail.

Let’s start with the “skin cream” version of this brain twister. You can peruse the image below to see exactly what research subjects read (and try out your own skill at solving it), or skip on for a brief explanation:

Full text of one version of the study’s “skin cream” problem. (Click here to enlarge.) Dan Kahan

As you can see above, the survey respondents were presented with a fictive study purporting to assess the effectiveness of a new skin cream, and informed at the outset that “new treatments often work but sometimes make rashes worse,” and that “even when treatments don’t work, skin rashes sometimes get better and sometimes get worse on their own.” They were then presented with a table of experimental results, and asked whether the data showed that the new skin cream “is likely to make the skin condition better or worse.”

So do the data suggest that the skin cream works? The correct answer in the scenario above is actually that patients who used the skin cream were “more likely to get worse than those who didn’t.” That’s because the ratio of those who saw their rash improve to those whose rash got worse is roughly 3:1 in the “skin cream” group, but roughly 5:1 in the control group—which means that if you want your rash to get better, you are better off not using the skin cream at all. (For half of study subjects asked to solve the skin cream problem, the data were reversed and presented in such a way that they did actually suggest that the skin cream works.)

This is no easy problem for most people to solve: Across all conditions of the study, 59 percent of respondents got the answer wrong. That is, in significant part, because trying to intuit the right answer by quickly comparing two numbers will lead you astray; you have to take the time to compute the ratios.

Not surprisingly, Kahan’s study found that the more numerate you are, the more likely you are to get the answer to this “skin cream” problem right. Moreover, it found no substantial difference between highly numerate Democrats and highly numerate Republicans in this regard. The better members of both political groups were at math, the better they were at solving the skin cream problem.

But now take the same basic study design and data, and simply label it differently. Rather than reading about a skin cream study, half of Kahan’s research subjects were asked to determine the effectiveness of laws “banning private citizens from carrying concealed handguns in public.” Accordingly, these respondents were presented not with data about rashes and whether they got better or worse, but rather with data about cities that had or hadn’t passed concealed carry bans, and whether crime in these cities had or had not decreased.

Overall, then, study respondents were presented with one of four possible scenarios, depicted below with the correct answer in bold:

The four problem scenarios from the study (each respondent received just one of these). Dan Kahan

So how did people fare on the handgun version of the problem? They performed quite differently than on the skin cream version, and strong political patterns emerged in the results—especially among people who are good at mathematical reasoning. Most strikingly, highly numerate liberal Democrats did almost perfectly when the right answer was that the concealed weapons ban does indeed work to decrease crime (version C of the experiment)—an outcome that favors their pro-gun-control predilections. But they did much worse when the correct answer was that crime increases in cities that enact the ban (version D of the experiment).

The opposite was true for highly numerate conservative Republicans: They did just great when the right answer was that the ban didn’t work (version D), but poorly when the right answer was that it did (version C).

Here are the results overall, comparing subjects’ performances on the “skin cream” versions of the problem (above) and the “gun ban” versions of the problem (below), and relating this performance to their political affiliations and numeracy scores:

Full study results comparing subjects’ performance on the skin cream problem with their performance on the gun ban problem. Vertical axes plot response accuracy Horizontal axes show mathematical reasoning ability. Dan Kahan

For study author Kahan, these results are a fairly strong refutation of what is called the “deficit model” in the field of science and technology studies—the idea that if people just had more knowledge, or more reasoning ability, then they would be better able to come to consensus with scientists and experts on issues like climate change, evolution, the safety of vaccines, and pretty much anything else involving science or data (for instance, whether concealed weapons bans work). Kahan’s data suggest the opposite—that political biases skew our reasoning abilities, and this problem seems to be worse for people with advanced capacities like scientific literacy and numeracy. “If the people who have the greatest capacities are the ones most prone to this, that’s reason to believe that the problem isn’t some kind of deficit in comprehension,” Kahan explained in an interview.

So what are smart, numerate liberals and conservatives actually doing in the gun control version of the study, leading them to give such disparate answers? It’s kind of tricky, but here’s what Kahan thinks is happening.

Our first instinct, in all versions of the study, is to leap instinctively to the wrong conclusion. If you just compare which number is bigger in the first column, for instance, you’ll be quickly led astray. But more numerate people, when they sense an apparently wrong answer that offends their political sensibilities, are both motivated and equipped to dig deeper, think harder, and even start performing some calculations—which in this case would have led to a more accurate response.

“If the wrong answer is contrary to their ideological positions, we hypothesize that that is going to create the incentive to scrutinize that information and figure out another way to understand it,” says Kahan. In other words, more numerate people perform better when identifying study results that support their views—but may have a big blind spot when it comes to identifying results that undermine those views.

What’s happening when highly numerate liberals and conservatives actually get it wrong? Either they’re intuiting an incorrect answer that is politically convenient and feels right to them, leading them to inquire no further—or else they’re stopping to calculate the correct answer, but then refusing to accept it and coming up with some elaborate reason why 1 + 1 doesn’t equal 2 in this particular instance. (Kahan suspects it’s mostly the former, rather than the latter.)

The Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume famously described reason as a “slave of the passions.” Today’s political scientists and political psychologists, like Kahan, are now affirming Hume’s statement with reams of new data. This new study is just one out of many in this respect; but it provides perhaps the most striking demonstration yet of just how motivated, just how biased, reasoning can be—especially about politics.

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Science Confirms: Politics Wrecks Your Ability to Do Math

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Charts: How Big Debt on Campus Is Threatening Higher Ed

by Michalak876 Posted on September 3, 2013

Mother Jones

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The explosion of college tuition and student debt is leaving more grads with big bills and doubts about their futures. Some back-to-school stats:

1. College costs a lot more than it used to.

The good news: College grads earn 84% more than high school grads.

The bad: Getting that sheepskin is getting a lot more expensive.

Between 2000 and 2012:

• Consumer Price Index increased 33%.

• Median household income (adjusted for inflation) dropped 9%.

• Average four-year college tuition increased 44%.

• Private for-profit tuition increased 19%.

• Private nonprofit college tuition increased 36%.

• Public college tuition increased 71%.

Between 2000 and 2012:

• Public spending on public education has dropped 30% even as enrollment at public colleges has jumped 34%.

2. So we’re borrowing more to go to school.

As college costs have shot up, so has student debt. Americans owe almost $1 trillion on their student loans, 310% more than a decade ago.

In 1989, 9% of households had student debt. Today nearly 20% do.

The average amount of student loan debt has increased 177% since 1989.

3. But we can’t pay it off.

Debt is increasing fastest for those who have the least money to pay it back.

56% of all student loan debt is owed by households headed by people 35 or older.

47% of total student loan debt is held by households with incomes below $60,000.

4. And we’re putting our dreams on hold.

Nearly half of college graduates with student debt say it has made it more difficult for them to make ends meet. 24% say it has affected their career choices.

25% of recent grads say student loan debt has made them take unexciting jobs just for the money.

Student debt’s impact on borrowers’ long-term plans:

• For every $10,000 in student debt: Borrowers’ likelihood of taking a nonprofit, government, or education job drops more than 5 percentage points. Their long-term probability of getting married drops at least 7 percentage points.

• Student loans affect the housing market: Larger student debt burdens are making it harder for recent college graduates to get home loans, according to the National Association of Home Builders.

• Student loans affect the entire economy: The Financial Stability Oversight Council reports that high student debt levels could “lead to dampened consumption,” and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau warns that unpaid student loans “could be a drag on the recovery.”

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Charts: How Big Debt on Campus Is Threatening Higher Ed

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Has the World Reached Peak Chicken?

by John Graham Posted on September 2, 2013

Mother Jones

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On Wednesday, the Northern California animal sanctuary Animal Place will airlift—yes, you read that right: airlift—1,150 elderly laying hens from Hayward, California, to Elmira, New York, in an Embraer 120 turbo-prop.

The pricetag? $50,000.

Right. So obviously, this isn’t the most efficient way to spend your chicken-helping money. It didn’t take me very long to think of some alternatives: For example, you could couple all 1,150 hens off and buy each pair its own home. You could feed 758 chickens fancy organic food for an entire year. You could feed 157 people the very fanciest, most coddled, free-rangest, organic-est eggs ever for a year. You could buy flocks of chicks for 2,500 farmers in the developing world through the charity Heifer International.

Don’t get me wrong—it’s not that I think that these soon-to-be-airborn hens don’t deserve a better life. They come from an undisclosed California battery cage egg operation, and as most people know by now, that is no picnic. Animal Place’s Marji Beach explained to me that once laying hens reach the age of about 18 months, their egg production slows, and it’s no longer economically feasible for egg operations to keep them around. The result is that each plant has to get rid of thousands of “spent” hens every year. What happens to those hens? In most cases, they don’t end up in your chicken soup broth, or even in your cat or dog’s food. That’s because most slaughterhouses don’t accept them—they have too little meat on their bones to turn a profit. Instead, egg producers often kill spent hens with highly concentrated carbon dioxide gas. (That probably costs far less than flying the hens across the country, but it doesn’t appeal to Animal Place, whose website urges visitors over and over again to go vegan.)

When a few other Mother Jones staffers and I heard about all those spent-hens problem, it got us wondering: Has the world reached peak chicken? Considering the fact that Americans eat 79 billion eggs a year, that’s an awful lot of laying hens. And that’s to say nothing of the so-called broiler operations that make chickens for supermarket shelves and fast-food sandwiches and nuggets.

According to UC Davis professor and poultry expert Dr. Rodrigo Gallardo, there are several reasons why the world is eating more chicken than ever these days. “If you think about several years ago, most people at beef or pork because there was more availability and because it was cheaper,” Gallardo says. But chickens have become more attractive as options over time: they’re lean, they’ve been bred over time to produce more meat, and raising them takes up much less land than raising cows or pigs.

That’s not to mention eggs. “If you think about eggs, eggs are cheap, they are easy to consume, they are fun—people can cook them in different ways,” Gallardo explains. “Kids always like them, and they are the cheapest protein you can get from an animal source.”

Exactly how many chickens does the world have these days? we wondered. The answer, we found, is a whole lot—and it’s increasing. Here are a few charts that will give you a sense of the scale of the chicken explosion:

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Has the World Reached Peak Chicken?

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