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You Say You Hate Black Friday. Maybe You’re Just Lying to Yourself.

by AnyaDoughty Posted on November 26, 2015

Mother Jones

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Over the past five years, Black Friday has migrated steadily into Thanksgiving, with each new year bringing fresh examples of big box stores flinging their doors open on Turkey Day. But this year the trend hit the skids. Though Walmart and the other usual suspects will still open on Thanksgiving Day, many big retailers—Costco, Nordstrom, Marshalls, and Home Depot, for example—are holding the line. Outdoor superstore REI went even further, announcing that it will be closed not only on Thanksgiving, but all the way through Black Friday.

Are consumers finally starting to get fed up with the holiday shopping hype? And what motivates some stores to close on Thanksgiving even as others rake in the cash? To find out, I called up Curt Munk, a veteran consultant for big-box retailers and head of strategy for the renowned brand agency FCB Red.

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You Say You Hate Black Friday. Maybe You’re Just Lying to Yourself.

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To Protest Walmart on Black Friday, Organizers Are Seeking Food for Underpaid Workers

by RicardoUan Posted on November 25, 2015

Mother Jones

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The people who organized the largest-ever Black Friday demonstrations against Walmart last year are leaving their protest signs at home this year. Instead, they’re launching a campaign to support 1,000 food drives around the country to help struggling Walmart workers.

Making Change at Walmart’s “Give Back Friday” campaign kicked off on Tuesday with the launch of a national TV ad campaign urging people “to help feed underpaid workers” and to “help us tell Walmart that in America no hard-working family should go hungry.”

Some Walmart stores have implicitly acknowledged that their “associates” don’t make enough money to feed themselves. In 2013, a Walmart store in Ohio held a Thanksgiving food drive “for associates in need”—although well intentioned, the drive became a publicity nightmare for the retail giant after photos of the food collection bin went viral.

Walmart raised its wages this year, but an entry-level associate still makes just $9 an hour—less than $16,000 a year based on Walmart’s full-time status of 34 hours a week. (The federal poverty level is $24,250 for a family of four and $11,770 for an individual.) A 2013 report by congressional Democrats found that the company’s wages and benefits are sufficiently low that many employees turn to the government for help, costing taxpayers between $900,000 and $1.75 million per store.

“This holiday season, we have set the goal of feeding 100,000 Walmart workers and families,” the union-backed group Making Change at Walmart said in a press release. “It is unconscionable that people working for one of the richest companies in this country should have to starve.”

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To Protest Walmart on Black Friday, Organizers Are Seeking Food for Underpaid Workers

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It’s Cheaper for Airlines to Cut Emissions Than You Think

by HoracioScutt Posted on November 25, 2015

Mother Jones

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This story originally appeared in Wired and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Fuel economy is hardwired into the airline industry’s DNA. After all, fuel costs money, and using less of the stuff is an easy way to beef up the bottom line. Well…maybe not easy, but certainly worth doing. Saving fuel, by reducing carbon emissions, can help save the planet. And those cuts could come at little to no cost to the companies themselves.

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It’s Cheaper for Airlines to Cut Emissions Than You Think

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The State Deptartment Just Released an Email Showing How Hillary Clinton Learned to Use Emoji—and It’s Awwwww

by Christen6100 Posted on October 30, 2015

Mother Jones

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The State Department published more Hillary Clinton emails Friday afternoon from her time as secretary of state, adding an additional 7,000 pages to the public record, and marking the halfway point in the department’s release plan, according to ABC News.

Paige Lavender, senior politics editor at the Huffington Post, tweeted this genuinely adorable gem from the new collection, featuring an exchange between “H” and her senior adviser Phillipe Reines:

🙂 🙂 🙂

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The State Deptartment Just Released an Email Showing How Hillary Clinton Learned to Use Emoji—and It’s Awwwww

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Here’s Our Exclusive Recap of Tonight’s Republican Debate

by charlenedean Posted on October 28, 2015

Mother Jones

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Editor’s note: Mother Jones reporter Tim Murphy recently acquired a time machine. But he didn’t go back into the past and kill baby Hitler. Instead, he traveled forward in time to Boulder, Colorado, to watch Wednesday night’s Republican presidential debate. Here’s his report.

No one ever accused Donald Trump of bringing a knife to a gun fight. Wednesday’s showdown in Boulder was the first debate in which billionaire real-estate mogul Trump was not the Republican front-runner. Though he still holds double-digit leads in New Hampshire and South Carolina, Trump recently dropped into second place in Iowa, and on Tuesday, after leading the GOP pack for 100 days, he trailed Ben Carson in a national poll.

But if Trump had an intention of moderating his style, it didn’t show. He stayed on the offensive throughout the night. When CNBC moderator John Harwood asked Trump if he believed Congress should raise the debt ceiling, he pivoted to attack Carson for his Seventh-day Adventist beliefs (“China has eight days”). And he raised a childhood incident in which the former pediatric neurosurgeon tried to stab a friend with a knife. Carson’s blade became caught in his friend’s belt buckle—no harm was done—and Carson has long credited the lucky break with turning his life around.

“When I stab someone, I stab them in the belly, where the flesh is softest,” Trump said. “That is how you do it. That way you can get right to their organs, and do a really tremendous amount of damage, very serious bleeding. This guy was a surgeon?”

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Here’s Our Exclusive Recap of Tonight’s Republican Debate

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Ben Carson Is Taking a Break From Talking About Hitler to Sell His Book

by NoelZtvpprmvv Posted on October 15, 2015

Mother Jones

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Ben Carson, currently trailing only Donald Trump in the Republican presidential polls with just three months to go until the first votes are cast, is taking some time off. To sell his new book.

Per ABC News:

Republican presidential contender Dr. Ben Carson has put his public campaign events on hold for two more weeks to go on book tour for his new tome “A More Perfect Union” and catch up on fundraising events.

The campaign has been careful to separate campaign events and the book tour, and doesn’t want to classify the tour as related to the campaign in any way.

This week he is catching up on fundraising events and will be back on his book tour next week making stops in Texas, Oklahoma, Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska and Iowa. So for the next two weeks, Carson won’t be appearing at any public “campaign events.”

Put another way: he hasn’t held a campaign event since October 2, and won’t hold another until October 28.

National Review‘s Jim Geraghty asks the obvious question—”Why on Earth would any serious candidate for president decide to stop campaigning at a moment like this for some book-signings and readings?” A better question might be, why start running a real campaign now? Carson has more or less been on a book tour for the last three years, releasing a handful of books in quick succession that have built up his name recognition among conservative voters and given him ample free media at places like Fox News. He’s even continued to deliver paid speeches during the campaign.

It’s unconventional, sure, but it’s made him a lot of money and propelled him to near the top of the GOP field. You can’t argue with the results.

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Ben Carson Is Taking a Break From Talking About Hitler to Sell His Book

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Needed: Better Debate Moderators

by CortezKiddle197 Posted on October 14, 2015

Mother Jones

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Ed Kilgore notes this morning that “the media appetite for naming a clear winner has fed a post-debate trend towards labeling HRC as a gigantic, titanic, overwhelming cham-peen.” True enough, and you can blame that on a sort of self-feeding bandwagon loop among the campaign press. Still, in this case I think it’s probably justified. Sure, O’Malley did OK, and so did Sanders, but let’s face it: Nobody cares much about O’Malley, and Sanders probably didn’t change the dynamics of the race in his favor despite a decent performance. What’s more, my own personal reaction is that Sanders made it even clearer than ever that he doesn’t really want to be president. He just wants to move the race to the left.

But the fact that Hillary did well really does matter. She showed Democrats why they’ve always liked her in the past. She showed off her debating skills. She put to rest all the Benghazi/email nonsense. She almost certainly halted her slide in the polls. She basically made herself the inevitable winner yet again. Plus this:

And that leads to the aspect of the debate that struck me apparently more than most observers: the exceptional hostility of the questioning from moderator Anderson Cooper, who seemed to be trying to defy expectations that he’d be less savage than Jake Tapper was in CNN’s GOP debate. Pretty quickly, Cooper became a stand-in for all the media folk trying to make the Democratic contest about emails and Benghazi! and “socialism,” and you got the sense the candidates and the immediate audience united in disdain for the superficiality of where the hosts wanted the discussion to go. The feral roar that greeted Bernie Sanders’ statement that Americans were tired of “hearing about Clinton’s damn emails”—followed by HRC shaking Bernie’s hand—was the signature moment of the night. And this wasn’t just some “gift” from Sanders to Clinton, as it was called by several talking heads last night. It was a party-wide rebuke to the MSM for how they are covering this campaign.

I didn’t get the sense that Cooper was especially hostile. But Kilgore is right that debate moderators generally try to focus on superficial “toughness” instead of asking either genuinely tough questions or genuinely interesting policy questions. In a way, this is justified: you don’t want candidates to get away with just making stump speeches. You want to challenge them. You want to see how they perform under pressure. Unfortunately, when you take this too far it becomes obvious that you’re just desperately trying to gin up controversy for its own sake. Debate moderators need to understand that the show isn’t about them. It’s about genuinely digging out answers from candidates on subjects they might prefer to fudge. That’s genuine toughness. But that takes a deep knowledge of policy and the willingness to engage with it. That’s too often missing from these events.

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Needed: Better Debate Moderators

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It Looks Like We’re Stuck With Low Inflation

by HannahLombardo Posted on October 13, 2015

Mother Jones

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Back in August I agreed with Brad DeLong that 4 percent inflation would be a good thing right now, but I was skeptical that the Fed could engineer this given current conditions. So I asked him what it would take. Today, I apparently made it to the top of the question pile:

I think the answer is: We don’t know whether it is in fact possible for a central bank today to hit a 4%/year average inflation target via conventional ordinary quantitative easing. It might well require other tools. For example:

  1. Miles Kimball’s negative interest rates.
  2. Helicopter drops–that is, allowing everyone with a Social Security number to incorporate as a bank, join the Federal Reserve system, and borrow at the discount window, with the loan discharged by the individual’s death.
  3. The Federal Reserve as infrastructure bank–an extra $500 billion/year of quantitative easing buying not government or mortgage bonds but directly-financing public investments.
  4. Extraordinary quantitative easing–buying not the close substitutes for money that are government bonds but rather the not-so-close substitutes that are equities.

I say: If we could win the argument about what the goal is, we could then begin the discussion about what policies would be needed to get us there.

That’s pretty discouraging. Of these, #2 and #3 are almost certainly illegal, and undesirable in any case. I may not like what Congress is doing, but disbursing money is certainly under their purview—and should be. I don’t want the Fed mailing out checks or contracting for new roads and bridges.

I don’t know if #4 is illegal. Probably not. But I’m not crazy about this either. The Fed shouldn’t be in the business of directly propping up the stock market, and certainly shouldn’t be in the business of directly propping up specific stocks.

So that leaves only #1. This one is perfectly OK, and a few European countries have adopted negative rates recently. But there’s probably a limit to how negative these rates can be. Individuals could avoid negative rates by deciding to hold physical cash, which pays zero percent, but banks and corporations almost certainly couldn’t. I’m not sure how long it’s sustainable to essentially have two different interest rates like that.

This is why DeLong mentions “Miles Kimball’s” negative interest rates. Kimball’s version depends on making the e-dollar into the unit of account, and this would allow negative rates of any level for any period of time. However, it would also require many years to make this transition. It’s not an option in the short term.

So if I’m reading DeLong right, it’s not clear that the Fed could engineer 4 percent inflation at all right now. Maybe Scott Sumner has a bright idea about how we could do this.

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It Looks Like We’re Stuck With Low Inflation

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Another Long, Hot Summer of Catcalling Is Coming to a Close

by ChelseyUyc Posted on October 12, 2015

Mother Jones

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Hannah Giorgis writes about the endless struggle with catcalling in New York City:

After another summer spent shrugging off men’s loud assessments of my body any time I left my apartment, I am exhausted. And as the streets thin out and the weather cools to a temperature less accommodating of men who consider catcalling a leisure sport, I am increasingly able to pause and feel the depth of my own fatigue.

….Every outing involves dozens of split-second decisions. The short, loose dress or the long, form-fitting one? The almost-empty subway car or the crowded one? The shorter route or the more well-lit one?….My mind can only make so many daily calculations before it slips into what social psychologist Roy F. Baumeister calls “decision fatigue.” Processing each of these useless equations takes a biological toll on my brain, leaving it more inclined, as the day wears on, to look for shortcuts.

Read the whole thing. Or, if you’d prefer a video dramatization of what it’s like, check out the YouTube below.

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Another Long, Hot Summer of Catcalling Is Coming to a Close

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No, Your Eco-Vacation Is Not Actually Doing Animals Any Favors

by ShelliHollars Posted on October 12, 2015

Mother Jones

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Ecotourism—the practice of visiting natural places not just to observe wildlife, but to actively conserve it—has seen dramatic growth in recent years: 7 percent annually, says the International Ecotourism Society, making it the fastest growing segment of the travel market. It’s not hard to understand why when you consider the promise of fun and charitable rewards in equal measure: In one fell swoop, zip-line through the cloud forest and save the orangutans that swing through it, too.

But new research may give travelers pause before dusting off the binoculars or snorkels for their next ecotourism adventure.

A paper published Friday in Trends in Ecology and Evolution suggests that visitors to protected wildlife areas may be harming the local fauna, no matter how good their practices and intentions. In an analysis of 100 studies on animal behavior, researchers found evidence that animals let down their guard in environments where human activity makes predators scarce. Those behaviors could spill into interactions with poachers and natural predators—particularly at night or in the off-season, when the din of humanity abates—to potentially lethal effect.

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No, Your Eco-Vacation Is Not Actually Doing Animals Any Favors

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