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Uplifting, Heartbreaking, Enormous Crowds at Women’s Marches Around The World

by JaxonChong7701 Posted on January 20, 2017

Mother Jones

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Dramatically larger than expected crowds showed up Saturday at women’s marches in Washington, DC, and more than 600 cities around the world. Mother Jones reporters have been on the scene all day, interviewing protesters and gathering photos and video. In this roundup we’ve collected some of what they saw, as well as highlights from across social media.

10:46 p.m. EST: And with that, we’re signing off for now.

9:00 p.m. EST: Safe travels home everyone!

7:40 p.m. EST: Another large crowd in San Francisco:

5:50 p.m. EST: President Trump, speaking at CIA headquarters in Langley, insisted (falsely) that his inauguration drew the largest crowd ever for such an event. “As you know, I have a running war with the media,” the president noted. His press secretary, Sean Spicer, followed up by warning that the press would be held “accountable.” Neither man mentioned the massive marches around the nation.

4:50 p.m. EST: From the march in Oakland, California:

4:09 p.m. EST:

3:55 p.m. EST: Here’s footage of women marching in five states where Donald Trump won:

3:45 p.m. EST: Even more signs (and chants!):

3:40 p.m. EST:

3:20 p.m. EST: Updates from New York City’s march:

3:16 p.m. EST: Lol.

3:07 p.m. EST: The Associated Press reports that city officials have said that because the planned route for the march in Washington, DC, “is filled with protesters, a formal march is no longer possible.” Marchers have been diverted along a different route.

2:34 p.m. EST: We’re hearing reports that attendance at marches nationwide has far surpassed predictions:

1:30 p.m. EST: Signs, signs, and more signs:

Hair made of Cheetos. Jeremy Schulman

1 p.m. EST: More than 500,000 marchers are now in Washington, DC, according to new estimates:

12:45 p.m. EST: Crowds swell at marches around the world:

12:25 p.m. EST: Well, this happened.

12:15 p.m. EST:

11:29 a.m. EST:

11:05 a.m. EST:

10:04 a.m. EST:

9:57 a.m. EST: The DC Metro is packed with attendees headed to the march.

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Uplifting, Heartbreaking, Enormous Crowds at Women’s Marches Around The World

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Sprint Update: 5,000 New Jobs, But They Still Don’t Know What They’re For

by AlfredoParnell Posted on December 30, 2016

Mother Jones

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Last April, Sprint announced that it planned to hire 5,000 workers to deliver cell phones to customers at their homes. A few days ago it announced it would be hiring 5,000 new workers for…something. I surmised that these were actually the same 5,000 workers, and Sprint wasn’t doing anything new. But apparently I was wrong. Max Ehrenfreund reports:

Representatives of Sprint have said the company will create positions for about 5,000 more people in the United States, counting both new employees and workers at Sprint’s contractors.

….Spokesman David Tovar said that the new positions would be in addition to Sprint’s previously announced plans to expand its presence on the street with 2,500 new stores and a fleet of vehicles for delivering phones. However, he added, the company has not yet determined exactly what the new workers will do or how many of them will work for Sprint as opposed to contractors.

Well…OK. But this is damn peculiar. We’re going to hire 5,000 new people, but we don’t really know what they’re going to do. What kind of company does something like that? It’s nuts. But they do know that a bunch of them will work for contractors. How do they know that? It’s all very mysterious. But I guess Masayoshi Son wanted to suck up to Donald Trump, so he sent down word to hire 5,000 people and find something for them to do. Welcome to free enterprise, Trump style.

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Sprint Update: 5,000 New Jobs, But They Still Don’t Know What They’re For

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A Fresh Start?

by TammaraSavoy Posted on November 12, 2016

Mother Jones

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David Frum is persuading me this morning that the tweetstorm can be a valuable medium after all. He is not buying Michael Smerconish’s suggestion that we should all give Donald Trump a fresh start:

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A Fresh Start?

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Airbnb is trying to address its racism problem.

by Cassandra8614 Posted on September 9, 2016

Australian architect James Gardiner wants to use 3D-printing technology to build structures for coral to grow on in places where reefs are decimated by disease, pollution, dredging, and other maladies (looking at you, crown o’ thorns).

Right now, artificial reefs are built out of uniform, blocky assemblages of concrete or steel. Those are cheap and easy to make, but don’t look or work like the real thing — for starters, because “the marine life that colonizes these reef surfaces can sometimes fall off,” one biologist told the Sydney Morning Herald.

Gardiner worked with David Lennon of Reef Design Lab to design new shapes with textured surfaces and built-in tunnels and shelters. The computer models are turned into wax molds with the world’s largest 3D printer, and then cast with, essentially, sand. It’s a cheap and low-carbon way to manufacture custom, modular pieces of reef.

Reef Design Lab installed the first 3D-printed reef in Bahrain in 2012 — and, eight months later, it was covered with algae, sponges, and fish.

Mandatory disclaimer: Rebuilding all of the world’s coral reefs by hand is impossible, and climate change is still the biggest threat facing coral reefs, so let’s not forget to save the ones we’ve got.

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Airbnb is trying to address its racism problem.

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Way too many Americans have to worry about feeding themselves.

by HesterChewning Posted on September 8, 2016

Australian architect James Gardiner wants to use 3D-printing technology to build structures for coral to grow on in places where reefs are decimated by disease, pollution, dredging, and other maladies (looking at you, crown o’ thorns).

Right now, artificial reefs are built out of uniform, blocky assemblages of concrete or steel. Those are cheap and easy to make, but don’t look or work like the real thing — for starters, because “the marine life that colonizes these reef surfaces can sometimes fall off,” one biologist told the Sydney Morning Herald.

Gardiner worked with David Lennon of Reef Design Lab to design new shapes with textured surfaces and built-in tunnels and shelters. The computer models are turned into wax molds with the world’s largest 3D printer, and then cast with, essentially, sand. It’s a cheap and low-carbon way to manufacture custom, modular pieces of reef.

Reef Design Lab installed the first 3D-printed reef in Bahrain in 2012 — and, eight months later, it was covered with algae, sponges, and fish.

Mandatory disclaimer: Rebuilding all of the world’s coral reefs by hand is impossible, and climate change is still the biggest threat facing coral reefs, so let’s not forget to save the ones we’ve got.

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Way too many Americans have to worry about feeding themselves.

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Pence Isn’t Going to Solve Trump’s Money Problems

by HenrietTKQ Posted on July 15, 2016

Mother Jones

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Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, known for his staid manner and his short-sleeved-shirt-and-tie combinations, might have been chosen as a steady counterweight to Trump’s flamboyant provocative style. But when it comes to adding weight to the Trump campaign’s wobbling fundraising operation, he might have been the worst pick Trump could have made. Newt Gingrich, for instance, has a devoted backer in Las Vegas billionaire Sheldon Adelson, the single biggest source of cash for Mitt Romney’s efforts in 2012 who has yet to commit significantly to Trump’s operation. And New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie is known to have been a darling of some of Wall Street’s biggest names.

But Pence? He isn’t exactly a star with the party’s regular fundraisers and donors—the people who have always been the backbone of GOP financial support. It’s true that Pence has ties to both the political empire of the conservative billionaire Koch brothers and some tea party grassroots organizations. But if Trump thought he could tap into those connections to fuel his presidential campaign, he might have been mistaken.

Over the course of his career, Pence’s biggest source of campaign cash has been the Republican Governors Association, which has put more than $2.6 million into supporting his gubernatorial aspirations. The RGA’s main job is to funnel money from wealthy Republicans nationwide into potentially pivotal governor’s races, and much of the organization’s success in doing that hinges on the connections and interests of the RGA’s executive director. In 2012, the director was a party operative named Phil Cox, who went on to become a close Christie ally, running the presidential super-PAC that raised more than $20 million this year. If Cox stays with Trump, it won’t be because of Pence. (Christie’s relationship with Trump, meanwhile, may be going through a rocky stretch.)

Pence did spend 12 years in Congress, but he never really made his mark as a fundraiser there. His largest source of support, according to the campaign finance tracker OpenSecrets.org, were donations fundraised on his behalf by the Club for Growth, the tea-party-aligned group that relies heavily on its expansive grassroots fundraising operation. It’s an organization that has devoted a great deal of time and energy this election to trying to destroy Donald Trump. Almost immediately after kicking off his presidential campaign, Trump picked a fight with the group, accusing it of trying to extort him for $1 million. That’s a rift that all of Pence’s past goodwill with the group probably won’t be able to overcome.

If Trump can’t rely on Pence to hook him up with any fundraising networks, perhaps he can call on some of Pence’s sugar-daddy donors? Notably, Pence has had two billionaires backing his political aspirations, Indiana businessman Dean White and industrialist David Koch, but neither looks promising for Trump.

Koch personally contributed $300,000 to Pence’s war chest, a much more direct investment in a candidate than he usually makes. (David and his brother Charles are known to be major backers of dark-money groups that operate independent of any candidate, and their direct contributions to candidates are generally not so large.) But if part of the Trump campaign’s calculation in picking Pence is that he could rope in the Kochs, it’s probably not going to happen. Both brothers have expressed serious doubts about Trump, and almost immediately after word leaked that Pence was the choice, the Koch organization threw cold water on the idea that the move would endear them to Trump.

White, who is not a household name like Koch, is actually the individual who has done more for Pence’s political career than anyone else, according to campaign finance filings. White has shoveled at least $775,000 into Pence’s two bids for governor of Indiana, including $350,000 already this year. Those numbers, while eye-popping for the average American, are actually not that extraordinary for White, who has given hundreds of thousands of dollars in recent years to various Republican candidates in Indiana.

But despite being worth more than $2.3 billion, White is not a major player on the presidential level. The one noteworthy donation he’s made when it comes to presidential politics is a $1 million contribution in 2012 to Karl Rove’s American Crossroads super-PAC, which backed Romney. Rove’s animosity toward Trump and the fact that White also gave directly to Romney (who has spoken out against Trump) suggest that White will not automatically transfer his allegiances, or his deep pockets, to Trump.

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Pence Isn’t Going to Solve Trump’s Money Problems

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Donald Trump’s Son-In-Law Gets Blasted in Open Letter

by Dustin7008 Posted on July 5, 2016

Mother Jones

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The latest controversy to envelop Donald Trump has spurred furious critics to accuse the presidential candidate of anti-Semitism and to blast Trump’s son-in-law, who is Jewish, for refusing to condemn him.

Trump sparked outrage over the weekend when he tweeted—and later deleted—an image of Hillary Clinton that many have called anti-Semitic: a photo of Clinton against a background of cash, with the words “Most Corrupt Candidate Ever” emblazoned on a six-pointed star. Critics said the tweet drew on stereotypes of Jews and the star resembled the Star of David. Mic reported that the meme had originally been created on an internet forum for neo-Nazis, anti-Semites, and white supremacists.

Trump deleted the tweet and replaced it with a new image, using a circle instead of a star.

In response to the tweet and the Trump campaign’s response, a New York Observer reporter, Dana Schwartz, penned an open letter to Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and an owner of the Observer. A New York Times profile of Kushner on Monday described him as Trump’s “de facto campaign manager,” “involved in virtually every facet of the Trump presidential operation.”

Schwartz laid out the problems with Trump’s tweet and called out Kushner for not doing anything in response to Trump’s anti-Semitism:

You went to Harvard, and hold two graduate degrees. Please do not condescend to me and pretend you don’t understand the imagery of a six-sided star when juxtaposed with money and accusations of financial dishonesty. I’m asking you, not as a “gotcha” journalist or as a liberal but as a human being: how do you allow this? Because, Mr. Kushner, you are allowing this. Your father-in-law’s repeated accidental winks to the white supremacist community is perhaps a savvy political strategy if the neo-Nazis are considered a sizable voting block—I confess, I haven’t done my research on that front. But when you stand silent and smiling in the background, his Jewish son-in-law, you’re giving his most hateful supporters tacit approval.

Schwartz also pointed out that Trump failed to apologize for the tweet, instead blaming “dishonest media” for trying to depict the star as the star of David, rather than a sheriff’s star, or, in his words, a “plain star.”

And now, Mr. Kushner, I ask you: What are you going to do about this? Look at those tweets I got again, the ones calling me out for my Jewish last name, insulting my nose, evoking the holocaust, and tell me I’m being too sensitive. Read about the origins of that image and see the type of people it attracted like a flies to human waste and tell me this whole story is just the work of the “dishonest media.” Look at that image and tell me, honestly, that you just saw a “Sheriff’s Star.” I didn’t see a sheriff star, Mr. Kushner, and I’m a smart person. After all, I work for your paper.

The reporter’s open letter is in stark contrast to the Observer‘s editorial board’s stance on the presidential race. In April, the Observer published an editorial endorsing Trump that also acknowledged that Kushner, the paper’s publisher, was Trump’s son-in-law. The publication’s ties to the GOP presidential candidate played a role in at least two reporters’ resignations from the paper, according to Politico.

The Observer‘s editor-in-chief, Ken Kurson, told Politico that he supported publishing the letter but personally disagreed with Schwartz’s criticism of Kushner.

“All presidential candidates attract people whose support makes them uncomfortable,” said Kurson, who said that his mother had fled the Holocaust. “I think the effort to paint Donald Trump as an anti-Semite because some of his supporters are is like saying that Bernie Sanders hates the US because some of his supporters spit on American flags at his rallies.

He added, “In my opinion, Donald Trump is not a Jew hater.”

Read Schwartz’s full letter here.

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Donald Trump’s Son-In-Law Gets Blasted in Open Letter

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Donald Trump’s Love Affair With White Supremacists

by MarquisMuirden Posted on July 5, 2016

Mother Jones

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The big Donald Trump news over the holiday weekend was Stargate. This refers not to the TV show, but to the Star of David on top of a pile of money that he retweeted to symbolize how corrupt Hillary Clinton is. At first glance, retweeting this anti-Semitic trope seemed like it was probably due to the fact that Trump’s inner circle is almost exclusively a bunch of white men who just didn’t notice that this might be offensive. In other words, dumb and insular, but not malevolent.

Except for a couple of things. First: Trump deleted the tweet within a few minutes and photoshopped a circle on top of the star. Then he went on offense, claiming that the star was really a sheriff’s star, not a Star of David. This prompted an entire Twitter meme (sample: “I was born a conservative sheriff, but my folks converted to reformed sheriff when I was 12”) but also a serious question: If it was really a sheriff’s star, why delete the tweet?

Second and more important: Trump didn’t create this graphic himself. He retweeted it from the account of an obvious white supremacist who plainly meant this to be a Star of David. Was this just a mistake? Did Trump have no idea who this guy was? Perhaps. And yet, why was he—or someone on his staff—following this account in the first place? And why does this “mistake” seem to happen so often? This is hardly the first time Trump has retweeted something from a white supremacist. Here are Ben Kharakh and Dan Primack a couple of months ago in Fortune:

In late January, Donald Trump did something that would have sunk almost any other presidential campaign: He retweeted an anonymous Nazi sympathizer and white supremacist who goes by the not-so-subtle handle @WhiteGenocideTM. Trump neither explained nor apologized for the retweet and then, three weeks later, he did it again. This subsequent retweet was quickly deleted, but just two days later Trump retweeted a different user named @EustaceFash, whose Twitter header image at the time also included the term “white genocide.”

…It is possible that Trumpâ&#128;&#149;who, according to the campaign, does almost all of his own tweetingâ&#128;&#149;is unfamiliar with the term “white genocide” and doesn’t do even basic vetting of those whose tweets he amplifies to his seven million followers. But the reality is that there are dozens of tweets mentioning @realDonaldTrump each minute, and he has an uncanny ability to surface ones that come from accounts that proudly proclaim their white supremacist leanings.

Kharakh and Primack wanted a more quantitative analysis of this, so they hired a firm to perform a network analysis. They identified the 50 most influential “white genocide” Twitter accounts and then looked at Trump’s tweets. Here’s what they found:

Since the start of his campaign, Donald Trump has retweeted at least 75 users who follow at least three of the top 50 #WhiteGenocide influencers. Moreover, a majority of these retweeted accounts are themselves followed by more than 100 #WhiteGenocide influencers.

But the relationship isn’t limited to retweets. For example, Trump national campaign spokesperson Katrina Pierson (who is black), follows the most influential #WhiteGenocide account, @Genophilia, which is best known for helping to launch a Star Wars boycott after it became known that the new film’s lead character was black. (Below are some recent #WhiteGenocide tweets from @Genophilia.)

…Fortune also used Little Bird software to analyze the top 50 influencers of the Trump campaign slogan #MakeAmericaGreatAgain, and found that 43 of them each follow at least 100 members of the #WhiteGenocide network.

This could be just a coincidence. White supremacists love Trump, and Trump just accidentally happens to retweet a lot of their stuff. Unfortunately for Trump, you’d have to be an idiot to believe that, and he’s running out of idiots. Even Republicans weren’t trying to defend him over the weekend. Paul Ryan just sighed: “I really believe he’s gotta clean up the way his new media works,” he said diplomatically.

But Trump runs his new media himself. It’s one of his biggest claims to fame. To clean it up, he needs to clean himself up. And he shows no signs of being willing to do that.

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Donald Trump’s Love Affair With White Supremacists

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Donald Trump’s Beautiful Chinese Ties

by NancyTisdall55 Posted on June 30, 2016

Mother Jones

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Greg Sargent on Donald Trump’s continuing appeal:

One core assumption driving Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy is this: Voters will see even the seamier details of Trump’s business past as a positive, because even if he got rich by milking the corrupt system, Trump is now here to put his inside knowledge of the corrupt system to work on behalf of America — on your behalf. Trump has repeatedly said this himself in various forms.

In other words, he may be a bastard, but he’s our bastard. But Sargent wonders if he can survive stuff like the video excerpt on the right. “Where are the ties made?” David Letterman asks. From offstage comes the answer: “The ties are made in China.” Trump doesn’t even respond. He just smirks. Sargent: “This suggests once again that there is no reason to assume that the big debate over globalization and trade will necessarily play to Trump’s advantage. Democrats will be able to point out that Trump repeatedly profited off of foreign labor in ways that he himself now claims sell out American workers.”

Could be! It’s not clear at this point that Trump can do anything that his fans won’t forgive, but maybe this will do it. For more details, the New York Times has you covered.

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Donald Trump’s Beautiful Chinese Ties

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Let Us Now Figure Out Who to Blame for Brexit

by NorineAlison Posted on June 25, 2016

Mother Jones

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Brexit has passed, and now it’s time to find someone to blame. Sure, you can go with the pack and blame David Cameron or Nigel Farage, but that’s not much fun. Here are four plausible but not entirely obvious choices:

Ed Milliband

In order to keep peace within his own party, Prime Minister David Cameron promised a vote on Brexit in 2013. It seemed fairly harmless at the time: Cameron’s Conservative Party was about 20 seats short of an outright majority in Parliament, so he was governing in a coalition with the Liberal Democrats. The Lib Dems opposed the referendum, and as long as they remained in the coalition, there would most likely have been no vote. To maintain this status quo, neither the Lib Dems nor the opposition Labor Party even had to gain any seats in the 2015 election. They just had to hold their own.

But Ed Milliband proved to be such a hapless leader of the Labor Party that he lost 26 seats in the election. This was just enough to give the Tories a bare majority, and that paved the way for Brexit.

Alternatively, you could blame Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg, who managed his party’s coalition with Cameron poorly and lost an astounding 49 of its 57 seats in the 2015 election. But Labor was the primary opposition party and should have been able to pick up most of those seats, so let’s stick with Milliband on this one.

Angela Merkel

For all the praise she gets, Angela Merkel has been one of the most disastrous European leaders in my lifetime. She’s as responsible for Brexit as anyone I can think of, thanks to two catastrophic decisions she made.

The first was her insistence on punishing Greece following its collapse after the Great Recession. There’s plenty of blame to go around on all sides for the Greece debacle, but as the continent’s economic leader Germany held most of the high cards during negotiations over Greece’s fate. Merkel had a choice: (a) punish Greece for running up unsustainable debts and lying about them, or (b) accept that Germany bore much of the blame itself for the crisis and that Greece had no way of rescuing itself thanks to the straitjacket of the common currency. The former was a crowd pleaser. The latter was unpopular and would have required sustained, iron-spined leadership. In the event, Merkel chose to play to the crowds, and Greece has been a basket case ever since—with no end in sight. It hardly went unnoticed in Britain how Europe treated a country that was too entangled with the EU to either fight back or exit, and it made Britain’s decision to forego the common currency look prescient. And if that had been a good choice, maybe all the rest of “ever closer union” wasn’t such a great idea either.

Merkel’s second bad decision was more recent. Here is David Frum: “If any one person drove the United Kingdom out of the European Union, it was Angela Merkel, and her impulsive solo decision in the summer of 2015 to throw open Germany—and then all Europe—to 1.1 million Middle Eastern and North African migrants, with uncountable millions more to come.” It’s hard to fault Merkel for this on a humanitarian basis, but on a political basis it was a disaster. The barely-controlled wave of refugees Merkel encouraged has caused resentment and more all over Europe, and it unquestionably played a big role in the immigrant backlash in Britain that powered the Leave vote.

Paul Dacre

Paul Dacre is the longtime editor of the Daily Mail, and he’s standing in here for the entire conservative tabloid press, which has spent decades lying about the EU and scaring the hell out of its readership about every grisly murder ever committed by an immigrant. In a journalistic style pioneered by Boris Johnson—who we’ll get to next—the Mail and other tabloids have run hundreds of sensational stories about allegedly idiotic EU regulations and how they’re destroying not just Britain’s way of life, but its very sovereignty as well. These stories range from deliberately exaggerated to outright false, and they’re so relentless that the EU has an entire website dedicated to debunking British tabloid myths from A (abattoirs) to Z (zoos). The chart below, from the Economist, tots up all the lies, and the Mail is the clear leader.

The EU is hardly a finely-tuned watch when it comes to regulations, but the vast majority of the outrage over its rulings is based almost literally on nothing. Nonetheless, the outrage is real, and it was fueled largely by Dacre’s Daily Mail and its fellow tabloids.

Boris Johnson

Why Boris? After all, it was Nigel Farage, the odious leader of the openly xenophobic UKIP party, who led the charge to leave the EU. This is, perhaps, a judgment call, but I’ve long had a stronger disgust for those who tolerate racism than for the open racists themselves. The latter are always going to be around, and sometimes I even have a little sympathy for them. They’ve often spent their entire lives marinating in racist communities and are as much a victim of their upbringing as any of us.

But then there are those who should know better, and Boris Johnson is very much one of them. The usual caveat is in order here: I can’t look into Johnson’s heart and know what he really thinks. But he’s had a long journalistic career, and an equally long history of tolerating racist sentiments. As a longtime Euroskeptic—though probably more an opportunistic one rather than a true believer—it’s no surprise that he campaigned for Brexit, but in doing so he knowingly joined hands with Farage and his UKIP zealots, providing them with a respectability they wouldn’t have had without him. He knew perfectly well that the Leave campaign would be based primarily on exploiting fear of immigrants, but he joined up anyway.

Johnson is hardly the only British politician to act this way, of course. But he’s the most prominent one, so he gets to stand in for all of them.

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Let Us Now Figure Out Who to Blame for Brexit

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