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The Donald Trump Firestorm Comes to Pennsylvania Avenue

by Trena5523i Posted on July 9, 2015

Mother Jones

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Loose lips sink ships—or in the case of the Donald Trump’s latest controversy, they sink lucrative business partnerships. Macy’s, ESPN, and NBC are among the businesses that have severed ties with the tycoon/reality TV star running for president after his comments denigrating Mexican immigrants as rapists and drug traffickers. And now the fallout is hitting closer to the place he’d like to call home.

Trump is currently transforming Washington, DC’s Old Post Office Pavilion—which is a mere five blocks from the White House—into a luxury hotel. But politics is getting in the way of business. On Wednesday, acclaimed restaurateur José Andrés announced he would no longer be opening a planned restaurant in the hotel, citing Trump’s offensive remarks. On Thursday, the New York Times reported that Geoffrey Zakarian, a chef and partner at several Manhattan restaurants, decided to cancel his plans to open a branch of his brasserie-style restaurant the National in the new hotel, explaining that Trump’s statements “do not in any way align with my personal core values.” Hours later, close to one hundred community leaders and Washington residents converged on the hotel site to protest Trump’s remarks, and they demanded that his name be removed from the development, which bears a gigantic blue sign bearing his name.

The protest brought out a number of local elected officials. Franklin Garcia, the district’s “shadow representative” in Congress (which has no voting representative from DC) said that the aim of the protest was to pressure additional companies to sever ties with Trump and to urge Trump to apologize for his remarks.

“We all share the same passions for making America as great as it is,” Garcia told the crowd near the hotel. “We want to send a strong message that we are against hatred and xenophobia.”

D.C shadow senator Paul Strauss issued a plea to the Department of the Interior, given that the land under the hotel is owned by the government: “We ask the DOI to take that logo off that scaffolding, on the building that belongs to the people.”

The logo is causing its own problems. The facade of the hotel is covered in a placard that reads, “COMING 2016: TRUMP,” with his name in characteristically huge letters. (Trump’s team has said that the project, conveniently, is expected to be completed near the time of the presidential election next fall.)

That prominently displayed sign has led some residents to wonder if Trump is using the hotel project as advertising for his campaign. “Because this is trumphotel.com, and because presumably this is an accurate estimate of when the hotel would be done, I’m assuming this would be legitimate signage,” says Paul Ryan of the Campaign Legal Center, casting doubt on the notion that the sign violates any laws. “But if I were at the FEC and we got a complaint about this, I would want to know if other developments had similar signage.” And in fact, other Trump buildings opening next year don’t share that language on their signage. In Vancouver, a Trump Hotel is set to open in 2016, but the signs do not say “Coming 2016.” At Trump’s most recently completed Chicago project, there was also no such message.

Even if Trump didn’t intend to link the signage to his bid to inhabit the building down the street, Strauss’ fellow shadow senator, Michael Brown, is making that connection. “We don’t want his name on our building,” Brown said at the protest, “and we certainly don’t want him at 1600 Penn.”

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The Donald Trump Firestorm Comes to Pennsylvania Avenue

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Capture the Flag: A Brief History of Defacing Confederate Banners

by TimNIYCoxxwclyjq Posted on June 29, 2015

Mother Jones

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Bree Newsome was tired of watching the Confederate battle flag fly on the grounds of the South Carolina statehouse. So on Saturday morning, the 30-year-old African American activist and singer-songwriter from North Carolina put on a harness, climbed 30 feet, and took down the flag herself. She was arrested and charged with defacing a state monument, while the flag was promptly returned to its place atop the pole. But at the end of a week in which the Confederate flag was removed for good from the Alabama statehouse, banned by many retailers, and condemned by politicians in Mississippi and South Carolina, the symbolism of Newsome’s ascent was hard to miss. An IndieGoGo account for her bail and legal defense fees raised $113,000 in three days. The internet quickly did its thing:

The photo of Newsome perched atop the pole may beckon to historians for another reason—deja vu. For about as long as the Confederate flag has flown, people have been trying to tear it down.

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Capture the Flag: A Brief History of Defacing Confederate Banners

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Michelle Obama Delivers Powerful Call for Chicago Students to Rise Above City’s Tragedies

by OdessaSeal Posted on June 10, 2015

Mother Jones

More than two years after the death of Hadiya Pendleton, the 15-year-old student who was fatally shot in a Chicago park just a week after participating in a march in Washington to celebrate President Obama’s second inauguration, Michelle Obama delivered a powerful speech to the girl’s graduating class on Tuesday.

In her commencement speech at Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. College Preparatory, the first lady, who attended Pendleton’s funeral in 2013, honored the girl’s memory and urged students to rise above the city’s rampant gang violence. An empty chair decorated with flowers and Pendleton’s favorite color purple sat as a tribute to Pendleton in Tuesday’s ceremony.

“I know the struggles many of you face, how you walk the long way home to avoid the gangs; how you fight to concentrate on your schoolwork when there’s too much noise at home; how you keep it together when your family’s having a hard time making ends meet,” Obama said. “But more importantly, I know the strength of this community.”

Obama grew up in Chicago’s south side where the school is located and she spoke about being raised in the neighborhood because she wanted “people across this country to know that story; the real story of the South Side.” She described the “quiet majority of good folks—families like mine and young people like all of you who face real challenges but make good choices every single day.” Obama told the graduates, “I’m here tonight because I want you all to know, graduates, that with your roots in this community and your education from this school, you have everything you need to succeed.”

“Hadiya’s memory is truly a blessing and an inspiration to me and to my husband, and to people across this country and around the world, and we are so grateful for her family’s presence here tonight,” she added. “Love you all. Love you so much.”

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Michelle Obama Delivers Powerful Call for Chicago Students to Rise Above City’s Tragedies

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Diverse cities don’t always have diverse neighborhoods

by EpifaniBellamy Posted on May 22, 2015

Diverse cities don’t always have diverse neighborhoods

By on 22 May 2015commentsShare

It’s not a new idea, perhaps, but it bears repeating: Even if you live in a city that is “racially diverse,” that doesn’t mean you live cheek-by-jowl with people of other colors and ethnicities.

Take Chicago, for example, which is among the most diverse cities in the nation. But a FiveThirtyEight analysis, based on data from Brown University’s American Communities Project, found that Chicago is by far the most segregated city in the U.S.

That’s because if you look at Chicago’s racial makeup on a smaller scale – census tracts of about 4,000 people – it gets pretty darn homogenous (here called the “neighborhood diversity index”). If you then look at the diversity of those neighborhoods in relationship to Chicago’s overall diversity, it gets very homogenous (the “integration-segregation index”).

According to FiveThirtyEight, the American city with the most racially diverse neighborhoods is Sacramento, Calif., but the most effectively integrated city of all – if you look at how racially integrated a city theoretically could be, based on its overall racial makeup – is Irvine, Calif. Here are the rankings:

(Read it all nicely explained here.)

Segregation is something we all know and experience, but it does pop the eyebrows to see it broken down into numbers like this – or beautifully, hauntingly portrayed, as with Dustin Cable’s interactive, color-coded Racial Dot Map that uses data from the 2010 Census to depict just how tightly clustered racial groups are across the country. Portland, Ore., “the whitest city in America,” looks like a dusting of red, green, and yellow (Asian, black, and Hispanic) on the outskirts of a blue sea (white):

UVA Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service

Of course, segregation has big implications when it comes to equity (duh) and to environmental justice: The black and brown areas of a city are far more likely to face off with a refinery, a waste incinerator, or a toxic dump, and therefore have lower-quality air and water and higher rates of asthma and cancer and poor birth outcomes than white areas. And segregation could be a big part of why black, Latino, and Asian Americans have longer, shittier commutes, too.

What gives, America? Oh, just a long, fraught, history of brutality and oppression that isn’t really history. Right. I’m moving to Irvine.

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Diverse cities don’t always have diverse neighborhoods

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School Lunches Just Got Way Better in These Six Cities (and It’s Not the Food)

by LesliPlunkett Posted on May 21, 2015

Mother Jones

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School lunches may be healthier than when you were a kid, but the wasteful and polluting materials that cafeterias serve them on have actually gotten worse. In an effort to save on labor and equipment costs, many schools switched from washable trays to disposable foam ones over the past couple of decades. But this trend is now beginning to change.

The school districts of six major cities—New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas, Miami, and Orlando— announced today that they will stop using polystyrene foam trays, and begin serving lunch on compostable plates.

The Urban School Food Alliance, which counts the country’s largest school districts among its members, coordinated the change after developing an affordable compostable plate made from recycled newspaper that costs just a penny more than its foam counterpart.

“Shifting from polystyrene trays to compostable plates will allow these cities to dramatically slash waste sent to landfills, reduce plastics pollution in our communities and oceans, and create valuable compost that can be re-used on our farms,” said Mark Izeman, a senior attorney for the National Resources Defense Council, which partners with the Alliance.

This shift to compostable plates by more than 4,000 schools will save an estimated 225 million petroleum-based plastic trays from going into landfill each year.

What’s next? The Alliance hopes to introduce compostable cutlery by next school year.

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School Lunches Just Got Way Better in These Six Cities (and It’s Not the Food)

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This Map Shows the Freddie Gray Protests Across the Country

by EleanorFitzRoy Posted on May 1, 2015

Mother Jones

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Thousands took to the streets in Baltimore earlier this week following the funeral of 25-year-old Freddie Gray, a black man who died after his spine was nearly severed while riding in a police van. Demonstrators have also gathered in New York, Philadelphia, Washington D.C., and nearly a dozen other cities. Baltimore State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby announced Friday that the six officers involved in Gray’s death will face criminal charges. Protests are planned around the country through the weekend.

Here’s a map of the latest demonstrations (tell us if we’ve missed any):

New York City

Philadelphia

Baltimore

Los Angeles

Houston

Oakland

Boston

San Diego

Minneapolis

Denver

Albequerque, New Mexico

Washington, D.C.

Ferguson, Missouri

Seattle

San Antonio

Chicago

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This Map Shows the Freddie Gray Protests Across the Country

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White People Could Learn a Thing or Two About Talking About Race From the Orioles’ Manager

by BessieHatley Posted on April 30, 2015

Mother Jones

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On Wednesday, after the Baltimore Orioles trounced the Chicago White Sox in front of over 48,000 empty seats at Camden Yards, Orioles’ manager Buck Showalter offered a blunt assessment of the ongoing protests happening just beyond the stadium gates.

More coverage of the protests in Baltimore.


Eyewitnesses: The Baltimore Riots Didn’t Start the Way You Think


Obama: It’s About Decades of Inequality


Rand Paul: Blame Absentee Fathers


What MLK Really Thought About Riots


Photos: Residents Help Clean Up


Orioles Exec: It’s Inequality, Stupid


These Teens Aren’t Waiting Around for Someone Else to Fix Their City


Ray Lewis: “Violence Is Not the Answer”


Bloods and Crips Want “Nobody to Get Hurt”

When a Baltimore resident asked what advice Showalter would give to young black residents in the community, the manager explains emphasis added:

You hear people try to weigh in on things that they really don’t know anything about. … I’ve never been black, OK? So I don’t know, I can’t put myself there. I’ve never faced the challenges that they face, so I understand the emotion, but I can’t. … It’s a pet peeve of mine when somebody says, ‘Well, I know what they’re feeling. Why don’t they do this? Why doesn’t somebody do that?’ You have never been black, OK, so just slow down a little bit.

I try not to get involved in something that I don’t know about, but I do know that it’s something that’s very passionate, something that I am, with my upbringing, that it bothers me, and it bothers everybody else. We’ve made quite a statement as a city, some good and some bad. Now, let’s get on with taking the statements we’ve made and create a positive. We talk to players, and I want to be a rallying force for our city. It doesn’t mean necessarily playing good baseball. It just means doing everything we can do. There are some things I don’t want to be normal in Baltimore again. You know what I mean? I don’t. I want us to learn from some stuff that’s gone on on both sides of it. I could talk about it for hours, but that’s how I feel about it.

Fans watched from outside the stadium gates after demonstrations in response to the death of Freddie Gray forced the team to play the first game behind closed doors in Major League Baseball history. At Wednesday’s press conference, outfielder Adam Jones, who related to the struggles of Baltimore’s youth as a kid growing up in San Diego, called on the city to heal after the unrest.

Jones goes on to say:

The last 72 hours have been tumultuous to say the least. We’ve seen good, we’ve seen bad, we’ve seen ugly…It’s a city that’s hurting, a city that needs its heads of the city to stand up, step up and help the ones that are hurting. It’s not an easy time right now for anybody. It doesn’t matter what race you are. It’s a tough time for the city of Baltimore. My prayers have been out for all the families, all the kids out there.

They’re hurting. The big message is: Stay strong, Baltimore. Stay safe. Continue to be the great city that I’ve come to know and love over the eight years I’ve been here. Continue to be who you are. I know there’s been a lot of damage in the city. There’s also been a lot of good protesting, there’s been a lot of people standing up for the rights that they have in the Constitution, in the Bill of Rights, and I’m just trying to make sure everybody’s on the same page.

…

It’s not easy. This whole process is not easy. We need this game to be played, but we need this city to be healed first. That’s important to me, that the city is healed. Because this is an ongoing issue. I just hope that the community of Baltimore stays strong, the children of Baltimore stay strong and gets some guidance and heed the message of the city leaders.

Like team exec John Angelos, Showalter, Jones and the rest of the Orioles organization get it.

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White People Could Learn a Thing or Two About Talking About Race From the Orioles’ Manager

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New Analysis: Giving Consumers Access to Renewable Fuel Yields Environmental Benefits

by Posted on March 20, 2015

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New Analysis: Giving Consumers Access to Renewable Fuel Yields Environmental Benefits

Posted 20 March 2015 in

National

A new analysis produced by the University of Illinois at Chicago’s principal research economist Dr. Stefen Mueller found that giving consumers more access to cleaner fuel options like E15 would provide significant environmental benefits. E15 is a cleaner burning, high-octane, high-performance fuel that also costs about 5 cents less per gallon than regular gasoline.

In Kansas, giving consumers the choice to use E15 would reduce carbon pollution by 184,226 metric tons per year.
In North Carolina, offering E15 would reduce carbon pollution by 617,870 metric tons per year.
In Ohio, offering E15 would reduce carbon pollution by 711,179 metric tons per year.
In Michigan, offering E15 would reduce carbon pollution by 661,051 metric tons per year.
In Wisconsin, offering E15 would reduce carbon pollution by 351,272 metric tons per year.
In Iowa, offering E15 would reduce carbon pollution by 220,821 metric tons per year.
In Illinois, offering E15 would reduce carbon pollution by 663,646 metric tons per year.

While regular gasoline contains about 10% ethanol as a way to deliver added octane and limit emissions, E15 fuel contains 15% renewable, American made ethanol — helping to create jobs across the country and lower our dependence on foreign oil.

Because it improves engine performance and burns with fewer emissions, E15 has been adopted throughout professional auto racing.

Under the commonsense, bipartisan Renewable Fuel Standard, clean burning E15 is expected to become more widely available to consumers alongside regular gasoline — giving consumers an additional choice and the opportunity to save money each time they fill up. Maintaining a strong Renewable Fuel Standard is a smart and effective way to substantially reduce our greenhouse gas emissions.

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New Analysis: Giving Consumers Access to Renewable Fuel Yields Environmental Benefits

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O Glory! Pops Staples Was Magnificent—and Rockin’

by HeriberDarker Posted on March 2, 2015

Mother Jones

The Staple Singers
Freedom Highway Complete – Recorded Live at Chicago’s New Nazareth Church
Legacy

Pops Staples
Don’t Lose This
dBpm/Anti-

What a monumental legacy Roebuck “Pops” Staples left behind! From the mid-1950s on, his family group, the Staple Singers, was a premier gospel act. In the ’70s, they scored a number of uplifting R&B hits, including “Respect Yourself” and “I’ll Take You There.” Up until his death in 2000, Pops Staples continued making compelling, moving music.

Freedom Highway Complete, recorded in April 1965, captures Pops and his kids, Mavis, Yvonne and Pervis, at the height of their testifying powers, electrifying a churchgoing audience the month after Dr. King’s history-changing marches from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. From the exuberant title track to the foot-stomping “Samson and Delilah,” it’s a thrilling concert, thanks to the interplay of the Staples’ robust voices, Pops’ shimmering, pithy guitar licks, and spirit-lifting rhythms. It’s magnificent—and rockin’!

Don’t Lose This collects 10 songs that Pops recorded in 1999 but never finished. Last year, daughter Mavis took the incomplete recordings to Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy, who worked on her more recent solo albums, and together they turned the tracks into a proper album, adding voices and instrumentation. (If Tweedy took the liberty of mimicking Pops’ distinctive guitar in places, he did a great job.) Mavis’ rousing voice is prominent, but it’s still her dad’s show. His tender yet forceful singing on “Somebody Was Watching Me” and on Bob Dylan’s “Gotta Serve Somebody” is sure to inspire. The album is a fitting memorial to this endearing genius.

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O Glory! Pops Staples Was Magnificent—and Rockin’

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Here’s How Much You Should Tip Your Delivery Guy During A Blizzard

by PedroVerdon Posted on January 26, 2015

Mother Jones

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As you may have heard, a blizzard is about to destroy life as we know it on the Eastern seaboard. Your children, your children’s children, their children’s children will all learn of this snowfall in stories. If a normal snowstorm is, as the wise men used to say, “God shedding a bit of dandruff,” then what we are about to experience can only be described as, well, God shedding…a lot of dandruff? An avalanche of dandruff? One or two revelations of dandruff? We’re going to be knee-deep in God’s dandruff, is what I’m saying.

If, like mine, your fridge is bare of everything but the essentials (Tabasco, old Bloody Mary mix, a few jars of pickles) then you’re probably hoping to make it through this thing via one of two ancient ways: 1) master-cleanse or, 2) Seamless. Assuming you take the second door, the question becomes: What do you tip a delivery man during a blizzard? What is morally acceptable?

Let’s first dispense with the question of whether or not it is ever acceptable—regardless of gratuity—to order delivery during a blizzard. Leave that to the poets and the ethicists. It doesn’t matter in the real world. People order delivery more during bad weather. Them’s the facts. You are going to order delivery in bad weather.

During really bad weather like blizzards and apocalypses, a lot of restaurants nix their delivery offerings altogether—and NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio has banned all non-emergency vehicles, including delivery bikes, after 11pm Monday night. But the ones that manage to stay open—and in this case are willing to deliver on foot well into the night—reap the benefits of constrained supply. If this were Uber, it would result in surge pricing to get more restaurants delivering. But since GrubHub and its parent company Seamless don’t do that—and they shouldn’t unless there is some way of ensuring that the increase goes to the delivery person and isn’t pocketed by the owner—we’re thrown into this sort of state of moral worry. You know in your bones that the guy who brings you pizza in sub-zero weather should get more than the guy who brings you pizza when it’s 68 degrees and sunny. But how much more?

GrubHub Seamless crunched the numbers on tips during last year’s polar vortex and found that residents in some zip codes increased their tips by as much as 24 percent, but on the whole, New Yorkers raised their normal tipping amount by a meager 5 percent. In the Midwest, however, where the temps dipped especially low, gratuities rose higher, to 14 percent in Chicago and 15 percent in Detroit and Minneapolis. Maybe the stereotypes are true and Midwesterners really are the nicest people in the country.

So, more. Tip more. How much should you tip a delivery man in a blizzard? More. More than you usually tip. Whatever you usually tip, tip better. Are you a good tipper normally? Become a great tipper. Are you an awful tipper? Become a just-bad tipper. (Also, you’re a very bad person, and no one likes you very much.)

Want a strict system? Don’t trust your heart to lead you to the right amount? New York magazine can help. Last year they spoke to Adam Eric Greenberg, a UC San Diego Ph.D. who co-authored an empirical analysis on the relationship between weather and tipping. Here’s what he told them:

When the weather is bad, be a bit more generous by tipping 20 to 22 percent. If it’s raining outside, tip 22 to 25 percent. If there’s any snow accumulation, add a dollar or two on top of what you’d tip if it were raining. Having to work as a delivery guy during a blizzard is similar to getting stuck with a party of 20 as a restaurant server, so if you hear weather forecasters promising a “polar vortex, ” a 30 percent tip is not outrageous.

So, there you have it: 30 percent. Anything under 25 percent and you go to Hell.

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Here’s How Much You Should Tip Your Delivery Guy During A Blizzard

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