Tag Archives: country

Needed: A New Marketing Strategy For Defending the Indefensible

by NealHannell Posted on September 3, 2014

Mother Jones

Richard Fink, the Koch brothers’ top political strategist, explained recently why they’re having trouble reaching the “middle third” of the country that’s relatively non-ideological:

“Yeah, we want to decrease regulations. Why? It’s because we can make more profit, OK? Yeah, cut government spending so we don’t have to pay so much taxes,” said Fink. “There’s truth in that….But the middle part of the country doesn’t see it that way.”

“When we focus on decreasing government spending, over-criminalization, decreasing taxes, it doesn’t do it, OK? We’ve been reaching the middle third by telling them what’s important — what we think is important should be important to them. And they’re not responding and don’t like it, OK? Well, we get business — what do we do? We want to find out what the customer wants, right, not what we want them to buy,” he said.

Imagine that. When the middle third of the country hears the message that regulations should be cut back so that corporations can make more money, it doesn’t respond well. So what’s the answer? Find out what they do respond to and use that as an excuse for less regulation instead. Ixnay on the ofitpray!

As Fink says, this is pretty ordinary marketing. Still, it’ll be interesting to see what they come up with. Obviously the Kochians feel like they need a new set of selling points for reduced corporate regulation, and it needs to be something that Joe and Jane Sixpack can identify with. I wonder what it’s going to be?

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Needed: A New Marketing Strategy For Defending the Indefensible

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Russia Is Going After McDonald’s. (Can We Give Them Jack in the Box?)

by Brain5176z Posted on August 29, 2014

Mother Jones

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Russia’s health inspection agency is scrutinizing more than 100 McDonald’s locations and has forced the company to temporarily close multiple others in the country. The agency says McDonalds outlets are getting inspected because some have violated sanitary regulations— but others see retaliation for US sanctions on Russia.

“This is a prominent symbol of the U.S. It has a lot of restaurants and therefore is a meaningful target,” Yulia Bushueva, managing director for Arbat Capital, an investment advisory company, told Bloomberg. “I don’t recall McDonald’s having consumer-safety problems of such a scale in over more than two decades of presence in Russia.”

McDonald’s was the first fast food chain to enter Russia, and it holds some symbolic importance in the country. The first location opened in Pushkin Square in Moscow in January 1990 to one utterly massive line (see video below). This was shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall but nearly two years before the dissolution of the Soviet Union when Western brands of any stripe were a rare sight in Russia. At the time, the site of the Golden Arches in the center of Moscow signaled the arrival of a new era of prosperity and integration with the world economy.

Today, there are more than 400 McDonald’s outlets in the country. Many are owned locally. The company employs more than 37,000 people in Russia and sources 85 percent of its products from Russian suppliers, according to its website.

But as Russia and the West began facing off over Ukraine this spring, McDonald’s has fallen victim to their power struggle. In April, McDonald’s announced it would close it’s three company-owned locations in Crimea “due to operational reasons beyond our control,” according to their statement to Reuters.

That decision was praised by Vladimir Zhirinovsky, a prominent legislator and Putin supporter, who suggested the chain should leave Russia as well. “It would be good if they closed here too, if they disappeared for good,” he said in Russian media. “Pepsi-Cola would be next.” Zhirinovsky also proposed instructing members of his Liberal Democratic party to picket outside McDonald’s until they closed.

Since August 20, McDonald’s has temporarily closed 12 locations throughout Russia, including four in Krasnodar, near the black sea, and the iconic first-ever location in Moscow. Burger King, Subway, and KFC— which have all seen big expansions in Russia in recent years— have remained unscathed.

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Russia Is Going After McDonald’s. (Can We Give Them Jack in the Box?)

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Fuels America Celebrates Labor Day

by Posted on August 28, 2014

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Fuels America Celebrates Labor Day

Posted 28 August 2014 in

National

This weekend, Americans across the country will celebrate the achievements of American workers — including the workers that support the US biofuels industry.

Since the passage of the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) in 2005, the renewable fuel industry has grown by leaps and bounds. Today the renewable fuel sector supports more than 850,000 jobs and generates $46.2 billion in wages annually in the United States. Altogether, the biofuels sector creates $184.5 billion each year in total economic activity for the United States — amazing progress in just a few short years.

But these numbers don’t represent the full picture. With more than 840 facilities supporting renewable fuel production, distribution, and research throughout the country, this growing industry supports workers in cities and states from coast-to-coast. Did you know that:

In Iowa, the biofuels industry supports more than 73,371 jobs and $5.0 billion in wages each year.
In Nebraska, the biofuels industry supports 39,629 jobs, and $2.9 billion in wages annually.
In Colorado, the biofuels industry supports 10,619 jobs and $642.2 million in wages each year.
In Michigan, the biofuels industry supports 22,794 jobs and $1.1 billion in wages annually.
In California, the biofuels industry supports 59,665 jobs and $3.7 billion in wages each year.
In New Hampshire, the biofuels industry supports 2,156 jobs and $138.7 million in wages annually.
In North Carolina, the biofuels industry supports 13,687 jobs and $692.9 million in wages each year.

As the Obama Administration prepares to issue the 2014 Renewable Fuel Standard, it’s important to know that the renewable fuels sector supports billions in economic activity across our country — thanks in no small part to investments in the biofuels industry made possible by the Renewable Fuel Standard.

Find out how the biofuels industry impacts your community — read our economic report.
 

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Fuels America Celebrates Labor Day

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How the Defense Industry Convinced Congress to Militarize Local Cops

by CassieHigh Posted on August 18, 2014

Mother Jones

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The Ferguson, Missouri, police department’s display of armored cars, officers in riot gear, and assault rifles over the past week shocked Americans who didn’t realize how much military equipment is now available to local police departments. But since the 1990’s, more than 8,000 federal, state, tribal, and local police agencies across the country have armed themselves with the military’s excess gear, free of charge. The inventory includes everything from office furniture and first aid kits to aircraft, armored cars, rifles and bayonets, according to the Defense Logistics Agency, the Department of Defense office that manages the transactions under an initiative called Program 1033.

In June, Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.) introduced an amendment to de-fund aspects of the program. Grayson’s bill would have exempted certain military equipment, including planes and armored cars, from Program 1033. That effort failed; just 62 members of the House of Representatives voted for the measure, with 355 voting no. Maybe the outcome shouldn’t have been a surprise: According to a new analysis of campaign finance data, the politicians who voted against Grayson’s bill received, on average, 73 percent more campaign donations from defense industry sources from 2011 through 2013 than their peers who voted for it.

The analysis—conducted by the Berkeley-based research group MapLight using data provided by the Center for Responsive Politics—also found that of 59 representatives who received more than $100,000 from the defense industry from 2011 through 2013, all but three voted against the amendment.

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How the Defense Industry Convinced Congress to Militarize Local Cops

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6 Good Reasons a Black Person Might Resist Arrest

by BraydenDethridg Posted on August 15, 2014

Mother Jones

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At least four black men were killed by police in the past month, via chokehold, tasing, and shootings, after being confronted for reasons ranging from selling untaxed cigarettes to picking up a BB gun off a shelf in Wal-Mart.

In at least two of these cases—Dante Parker and Eric Garner—the victims allegedly resisted arrest. Some political leaders, witnesses at the scene, and Internet commenters have placed blame on the victims for this reason, saying their refusal to go quietly with the cops is what ended their lives.

More MoJo coverage of the Michael Brown police shooting


Ferguson Is 60 Percent Black. Virtually All Its Cops Are White.


“Hands Up, Don’t Shoot:” Peaceful Protests Across the Country Last Night


Exactly How Often Do Police Shoot Unarmed Black Men?


4 Unarmed Black Men Have Been Killed By Police in the Last Month


A Few Horrifying Pictures From Ferguson Last Night


Anonymous Posts St. Louis Police Dispatch Tapes From Day of Ferguson Shooting


Incredibly Powerful Photo of Black Students at Howard University


The Ferguson Shooting and the Science of Race and Guns

“For FUCKS SAKE stop struggling and resisting like this and deal with it at the precinct!! Resisting arrest, even if the police have the wrong guy, is a TERRIBLE idea!! God why don’t people get this?” writes one commenter at Gawker. At a press conference on gun control in Harlem yesterday, New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio said that “once an officer has decided that arrest is necessary, every New Yorker should agree to do what they need to do as a citizen and respect the police officer and follow their guidance. And then there is a thorough due-process system thereafter.”

And how about in the tasing death of Dante Parker? A San Bernadino county newspaper employee and married father of five with no criminal record, Parker was out riding his bike for exercise on Tuesday when he was approached by sheriff’s deputies as a robbery suspect. A witness relayed what he saw:

He was super strong…it took about two or three guys to get his hands behind him. They went to try to get him to stand up, but he wouldn’t do it…He kept kicking and kicking and kicking. He was very uncooperative.”

So why would someone like Dante Parker or Eric Garner resist arrest? Here are six good reasons:

  1. The idea that “if you didn’t do anything wrong, you don’t have anything to fear” does not hold true for black people. Most people who end up being exonerated for crimes they served time for, but didn’t commit, are people of color.
  2. Blacks routinely serve higher sentences than whites—for the same crimes.
  3. Once in custody, black men are rough-handled by police more often than whites.
  4. Racial profiling and bias in police departments across the country is well–documented.
  5. There are many well-known cases of police torture directed at blacks in prison, such as the dozens of black Chicago inmates who were systematically tortured over a span of 20 years.
  6. Scientific studies shed light on how racial bias can influence witness testimony, like this finding that race can make people “see” guns, or a reach for a gun, where no weapon was present.

Asking why a black man with even the slightest bit of awareness of these facts wouldn’t fully cooperate with the cops is a bit like asking why William Wallace didn’t simply extend a warm welcome to the invading English forces. Here’s a better question: What are law enforcement agencies doing to heal their relationships with the black communities they’re supposed to protect and serve?

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6 Good Reasons a Black Person Might Resist Arrest

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"Hands Up, Don’t Shoot:" Peaceful Protests Across the Country Last Night

by Dolores7899 Posted on August 15, 2014

Mother Jones

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After four nights of heavy-handed police response, a missing-in-action governor and the general appearance of a war zone, things were much calmer in Ferguson, MO, Thursday night. Missouri Highway Patrol Capt. Ronald Johnson was put in charge, and he pledged to strike a more respectful tone with protesters. It showed in the images that poured out of the small town north of St. Louis and other rallies around the country, many using the #NMOS14 hash tag to honor victims of police brutality.

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"Hands Up, Don’t Shoot:" Peaceful Protests Across the Country Last Night

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Republicans Hate Obama, Therefore Obama Should Avoid Making Them Even Madder

by Georgia3464 Posted on August 7, 2014

Mother Jones

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Ron Fournier ponders the wisdom of President Obama issuing executive orders on immigration and tax inversions:

For argument’s sake, let’s say Obama is right on the issue and has legal authority to act. The big question is …

Would it be wrong to end-run Congress? Another way to put it might be, “Would more polarization in Washington and throughout the country be wrong?” How about exponentially more polarization, gridlock, and incivility? If the president goes too far, he owns that disaster.

Wait a second. If you think Obama is wrong on the merits, then naturally you’ll oppose any new executive action. If you think he’s right, but unfortunately lacks the constitutional authority to do anything about it, you’ll also oppose any new executive action.

But what if he’s both right and has the proper authority? That certainly sounds like the right formula for supporting executive action. But no. Obama still shouldn’t do anything because….wait for it….it would cause more polarization, gridlock, and incivility.

I frankly doubt it, but leave that to one side for the moment. What Fournier is saying is that President Obama shouldn’t do anything that might make Republicans mad. But this means the president is literally helpless: No proposal of his has any chance of securing serious Republican engagement in Congress, but he’s not allowed to take executive action for fear of making them even more intransigent. Obama’s only legitimate option, apparently, is to persuade Republicans to support his proposals, even though it’s no secret that Republicans decided years ago to obstruct everything, sight unseen, that was on Obama’s agenda. So that leaves Obama with no options at all.

And that means the next column will be all about Obama’s lack of leadership. Count on it.

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Republicans Hate Obama, Therefore Obama Should Avoid Making Them Even Madder

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Can Obama Order Immigration Amnesty All By Himself?

by CharlaG24w Posted on August 3, 2014

Mother Jones

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Normally, says Ross Douthat, all the recent alarmist liberal chatter about impeachment “would simply be an unseemly, un-presidential attempt to raise money and get out the 2014 vote.” But not this time:

Even as his team plays the impeachment card with gusto, the president is contemplating — indeed, all but promising — an extraordinary abuse of office: the granting of temporary legal status, by executive fiat, to up to half the country’s population of illegal immigrants.

Such an action would come equipped with legal justifications, of course….But the precedents would not actually justify the policy, because the scope would be radically different. Beyond a certain point, as the president himself has conceded in the past, selective enforcement of our laws amounts to a de facto repeal of their provisions. And in this case the de facto repeal would aim to effectively settle — not shift, but settle — a major domestic policy controversy on the terms favored by the White House.

….In defense of going much, much further, the White House would doubtless cite the need to address the current migrant surge, the House Republicans’ resistance to comprehensive immigration reform and public opinion’s inclination in its favor.

But all three points are spurious. A further amnesty would, if anything, probably incentivize further migration, just as Obama’s previous grant of legal status may well have done. The public’s views on immigration are vaguely pro-legalization — but they’re also malleable, complicated and, amid the border crisis, trending rightward. And in any case we are a republic of laws, in which a House majority that defies public opinion is supposed to be turned out of office, not simply overruled by the executive.

It’s worth pointing out at the start that we don’t know what Obama has in mind. It’s entirely possible that he’s deliberately leaking some fairly extreme ideas merely to get people like Douthat wound up. If and when he does issue executive orders over immigration, they might turn out to be a lot more moderate than anything the Fox News set is bellowing about. It wouldn’t surprise me.

But suppose Obama does issue an unusually bold executive order, one that halts immigration enforcement against a very large segment of the undocumented immigrants currently in the country. What then?

Well, it would depend on exactly what the order entails and what the legal justification is, but if it really does have a broad scope then I agree that it might very well represent presidential overreach. And, as Douthat says, congressional inaction wouldn’t be any kind of defense. Congress has every right not to act if it doesn’t want to. Aside from genuine emergencies, that provides not even the slightest justification for presidential action.

So I’ll just repeat what I said on Thursday: an executive order is hardly the end of the game. For starters, Republicans can take their case to the public, using Obama’s actions as a campaign weapon in 2016 to spur the election of a president who will reverse them. They can also go to court. In a case like this, I suspect they wouldn’t have much trouble finding someone with standing to sue, so it it would be a pretty straightforward case.

As it happens, I think the current Republican obsession with presidential overreach is fairly pointless because their examples are so trivial. Extending the employer mandate might very well go beyond Obama’s powers, but who cares? It’s a tiny thing. Alternatively, the mini-DREAM executive action is fairly substantial but also very unlikely to represent any kind of overreach. Ditto for recent EPA actions.

Presidents do things all the time that push the envelope of statutory authority. To be worth any serious outrage, they need to be (a) significant and (b) fairly clearly beyond the scope of the president’s powers. I don’t think Obama has done anything like this yet, but if Republicans want to test that proposition in court, they should go right ahead. That’s what courts are for.

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Can Obama Order Immigration Amnesty All By Himself?

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Color Me Skeptical About a Guaranteed Income for All

by HumbertKvy Posted on July 29, 2014

Mother Jones

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Should we have a guaranteed minimum income in the United States? Something nice and simple that would replace nearly our entire current alphabet soup of means-tested welfare programs?1 Dylan Matthews posts about this frequently, and others chime in occasionally as well. It even has some support among conservatives.

I am not so sure, myself. Keith Humphreys makes a couple of good points here, but I want to step back a bit. At a bare minimum, I need answers to four questions:

  1. How big would it be?
  2. Is it a family benefit or a personal benefit?
  3. Is it for adults only, or would children also qualify for a benefit?
  4. How would it phase out with income?

There are many more details to work out, all of them important, but I don’t think you can even begin to talk about this without answers to these four basic questions.

I’m skeptical about the whole thing because I don’t think you can make the details work out. Nor do I think that it’s politically feasible either now or in the future.2 What’s more, I’m always skeptical of ideas like this that haven’t been adopted by any other country, even the ones with far more liberal welfare states than ours. I figure there must be a reason for this.

But I’m happy to be proven wrong. Just give me a policy skeleton to work with. What exactly are we talking about here?

1Proponents usually (but not always) make exceptions for education and health care, which are too variable and too expensive to be handled by a simple minimum income.

2Perhaps it’s feasible in our far-distant robot future. Maybe even necessary. For now, though, let’s stick to the medium-term future.

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Color Me Skeptical About a Guaranteed Income for All

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Idaho Tribe Cancels Ted Nugent Concert Because of His Support for Washington Football Team Name

by JeanaLNLpec Posted on July 24, 2014

Mother Jones

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Ted Nugent doesn’t have a racist bone in his body. But sometimes racist words just happen to come out of it. On Monday, tribal officials in Idaho canceled the aging rock-and-roller’s scheduled concert at a Coeur d’Alene casino over his past rhetoric. Per Indian Country Today:

Later in the day, tribe spokeswoman Heather Keen said in a statement, “Reviewing scheduled acts is not something in which Tribal Council or the tribal government participates; however, if it had been up to Tribal Council this act would have never been booked.”

Then, Monday evening, Keen announced the concert was being canceled, explaining that “Nugent’s history of racist and hate-filled remarks was brought to Tribal Council’s attention earlier today.” Tribal Chief Allan added that “We know what it’s like to be the target of hateful messages and we would never want perpetuate hate in any way.”

Among the racist issues brought to the tribe’s attention: Referring to President Obama as a “subhuman mongrel,” and his wholehearted support for the Washington football team name, which he outlined in a 2013 op-ed for the conservative conspiracy site WorldNetDaily, titled “A tomahawk chop to political correctness.” The first line of the piece is, “Every so often some numbskull beats the politically correct war drum…” and it continues at pace from there, nodding to “Native Americans whose feathers are ruffled” and, “wafting smoke signals of real distress.”

Nugent responded to the canceled event at the Coeur d’Alene casino and calls for similar cancellations elsewhere by calling his critics “unclean vermin,” thereby refuting any further claims of racism.

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Idaho Tribe Cancels Ted Nugent Concert Because of His Support for Washington Football Team Name

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