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Friday Catblogging – April 17 2015

by cfg2nx26 Posted on April 17, 2015

Mother Jones

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Friday catblogging is, of course, a core tradition around these parts. And as the blog welcomes new names and faces while Kevin concentrates on getting better, who said they all have be human? The door’s always open for Hilbert and Hopper to drop in, but we’re going to round out the feline mix with a smattering of cats who are blessed to have a Mother Jones staff member as their human companion.

First up? The Oakland-based menagerie of creative director Ivylise Simones, who oversees all of MoJo‘s lovely art and photography.

On the right is seven-year-old Inspector Picklejuice, a shelter acquisition picked up by Ivylise when she was living in Brooklyn. On the left you’ll find Frankie the Cat. This affectionate two-year-old also came from a shelter, joining the Simones household in 2014.

I’m told these two get along splendidly. Sure looks like it!

If you recognize Picklejuice’s handsome features, it may be from his widely acclaimed Instagram feed, or perhaps from his star turn in our September/October 2014 issue: click through to see him—he’s the looker playing in the box on the far right. (How’d he end up in a magazine illustration? I’ll just say that it helps to have friends in the right places.)

Here’s another of the good Inspector, keeping a close eye on happenings from a favored perch high in the loft. It’s an ideal spot to partake in two of his favorite hobbies: sleeping, and sitting around while awake.

It takes a good five foot vertical hop over open space to get up there. Impressive!

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Friday Catblogging – April 17 2015

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It’s Spring Fundraising Time!

by TwylaFields Posted on April 17, 2015

Mother Jones

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Our annual Spring Fundraising Drive is wrapping up at the end of the month, but as you all know, I’ll be recuperating from my final round of chemotherapy in lovely Duarte, California, right about then. But I didn’t want to be left out, so I asked if I could post my note a little earlier than I usually do.

I figure if there’s ever been a time when I’m allowed to get slightly more maudlin than usual, this is it. (But just slightly. I have a reputation, after all.) I’ve been writing for Mother Jones since 2008, and it’s been such a great job that it’s almost getting hard to remember ever working for anyone else. They’ve provided me with more freedom to write whatever I want than anyone could hope for. That’s been great for me, and I hope for all of you too.

Writing for the print magazine has been a huge gift as well, and it’s something I dearly hope to return to when all the chemotherapy is over and my strength is back to normal. It’s been a privilege to share pages with such an amazingly talented bunch of journalists.

Truthfully, I’ve been blessed to have such a great editorial team over the past few months, as well as such a great readership. You guys are truly the best to go through something like this with.

So here’s the ask: Mother Jones has done a lot for me and lot for you over the past few years, and when I get back they’re going to keep right on doing it. That makes this fundraising request a little more personal than usual, but if there’s ever been a time for you to show your appreciation, this is it. If you can afford five dollars, that’s plenty. If you can afford a thousand, then pony up, because you’re pretty lucky, aren’t you? Either way, when I get back I sure hope to see that my readers have really stepped up to the plate.

Readers like you are a big part of what makes Mother Jones such a unique place. Your support allows me to write about what’s truly important, rather than obsessing over whatever generates the most clicks and advertising revenue. And it’s not just me. It gives all of us the independence to write about issues that other places won’t touch. It means that we ultimately answer to you, our readers, and not a corporate parent company or shareholders (and you’ve never been shy about letting us know what you think!).

Thanks for helping make Mother Jones what it is, and for making the last seven years some of the best of my life. And thanks in advance for whatever you can give to keep both me and Mother Jones going strong. Here are the links for donations:

Donate by credit card here.

Donate by PayPal here.

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It’s Spring Fundraising Time!

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Corporate Lobbyists Outspend the Rest of us 34 to 1

by JerilynPrell Posted on April 16, 2015

Mother Jones

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Lee Drutman looks at the real problem with lobbying in the American political system:

Looking at lobbying in the aggregate, what jumps out is the stark imbalance in resources. Corporations blow everyone else out of the water. Business accounts for roughly 80 percent of all reported lobbying expenditures, about $2.6 billion dollars a year now.

….Meanwhile, the types of organized interests who we might expect to provide a countervailing force to business — labor unions, groups representing diffuse public like consumers or taxpayers — spend $1 for every $34 businesses spend on lobbying, by my count. Of the 100 organizations that spend the most on lobbying annually, consistently 95 represent business. In interviewing 60 corporate lobbyists for my book The Business of America is Lobbying, I asked them to identify the leading opposition on an issue on which they were currently working. Not a single lobbyist volunteered a union or a “public interest” group.

….This growing imbalance has had two major effects on the political system. First, it is increasingly difficult to challenge any existing policy that benefits politically active corporations….Second, the sheer amount of lobbying has created a policymaking environment that now requires significant resources to get anything done. Which means that, with increasingly rare exceptions, the only possible policy changes on economic policy issues are those changes that at least some large corporations support.

Lobbying is inevitable. You might even say that it’s nothing more than politics in its purest form. But if that’s true, American politics has become almost purely a game played by big corporations and their allies. The rest of us—which is to say, practically all of us—are left with nearly no say in what happens.

Excerpt from – 

Corporate Lobbyists Outspend the Rest of us 34 to 1

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Health and Logistical Update

by MyrtisFrith Posted on April 16, 2015

Mother Jones

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Howdy everyone. I’m back. But I’ll bet you didn’t even know I was gone.

I spent most of the day up at City of Hope in Duarte getting a few final tests plus a final visit with my transplant physician before I go up next week for the final stage of chemo. For those who are interested, here’s my final and (hopefully) firm schedule.

On Monday I go up to CoH and check in to the Village. This sounds like something from The Prisoner, but it’s actually just a small collection of houses on the grounds of the campus. Unless something goes wrong that requires round-the-clock observation and care, this is where I’ll be staying. It’s obviously nicer and more convenient than being cooped up in a hospital room, and it comes complete with its own kitchen so I’m free to make my own meals if I want. (I can also order out from the hospital cafeteria if I don’t feel like cooking my own stuff.)

On Tuesday and Wednesday I go into the Day Hospital for an infusion of high-dose Melphalan, a powerful chemotherapy drug. This will kill off all my remaining cancerous bone marrow stem cells, and, along the way, kill off all my healthy stem cells too. So on Thursday they’ll pump my own frozen stem cells back into me.

And that’s about it. Within a few days of all this I’ll be laid low with fatigue, mouth sores, and loss of hair—and hopefully not much more, since that would require transfer to the hospital, which I’d sure like to avoid. For the two weeks after that, I’ll take a wide variety of medications and check into the Day Hospital every morning for testing and whatever else they deem necessary (for example, IV fluids if I’m not drinking enough). The rest of the time I spend in my little house, waiting for my immune system to recover enough for me to be sent home.

That will take me through the middle of May, at which point I should be in fairly reasonable shape. Full and complete recovery will take longer—possibly quite a bit longer—but that’s unknowable at this point. I’ll just have to wait and see.

The next time you see me after this weekend I’ll be bald as an egg, as any true cancer patient should be. Yes, there will be pictures. I wouldn’t deprive you of that. Between now and then, wish me luck.

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Health and Logistical Update

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A Simple Chart That Shows We’ve Locked Up Too Many People

by CarenRubensohn Posted on February 16, 2015

Mother Jones

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Correlation is not causation. This has recently become something of an all-purpose comeback from people who want to sound smart without really understanding anything about a particular research result. Still, whether it’s overused or not, it’s a true statement. When two things move up and down together, it’s a hint that one of them might be causing the other, but it’s just a hint. Sometimes correlation implies causation and sometimes it doesn’t.

The inverse statement, however, is different: If there’s no correlation, then there’s no causation. With the rarest of exceptions, this is almost always true. Dara Lind provides an example of this as it relates to crime and mass incarceration.

The chart on the right shows the trend in various states at reducing incarceration. If reducing incarceration produced more crime, you’d expect at least some level of correlation. The dots would line up to look something like the red arrow, with lots of dots in the upper left quadrant.

Obviously we see nothing like that. In fact, we don’t appear to see any significant correlation at all. As Lind says, the scatterplot is just a scatter.

It’s possible that a more sophisticated analysis would tease out a correlation of some kind. You can show almost anything if you really put your mind to it. But if a simple, crude scatterplot doesn’t show even a hint of a correlation, it’s almost a certainty that there’s nothing there. And in this case it demonstrates that we’ve locked up too many people. Mass incarceration hit the limit of its effectiveness in the late-80s and since then has been running dangerously on autopilot. It ruins lives, costs a lot of money, and has gone way beyond the point where it affects the crime rate. It’s well past time to reverse this trend and get to work seriously cutting the prison population.

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A Simple Chart That Shows We’ve Locked Up Too Many People

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We Put Way Too Many People in Prison

by AzucenaBuchanan Posted on February 12, 2015

Mother Jones

Earlier this morning I mentioned the Brennan Center’s new report on the decline in crime over the past two decades, and one of its prime focuses is on incarceration. One of the authors of the report explains at 538 what they found. Basically, it turns out that locking up more people does have a deterrent effect, but that effect plummets when you start locking up people at huge rates—as we’ve done:

It’s because of these elevated levels that we’re likely to see diminishing returns. If we assume — fairly! — that the criminal justice system tends to incarcerate the worst offenders first, it becomes clear why. Once the worst offenders are in prison, each additional prisoner will yield less benefit in the form of reduced crime. Increased incarceration — and its incapacitation effect — loses its bite.

….And diminishing returns are what we saw. Crime rates dropped as incarceration rates rose, for a time, but incarceration’s effect on crime weakened as more people were imprisoned. An increase in incarceration was responsible for something like 5 percent of the decrease in crime in the 1990s, when its levels were lower, but has played no meaningful role since. If I were speaking to a fellow economist, I’d say the incarceration elasticity of crime is not distinguishable from zero. At a cocktail party, I’d say that crime no longer responds to changes in incarceration.

That sounds about right to me. The 5 percent number might be debatable, but the basic idea that we went way overboard on incarceration is hard to argue with. It was pretty reasonable to believe that incarceration rates were too low in the 60s and early 70s, and that tougher sentencing laws would help deter crime. So we passed tougher laws and built more prisons. But by the end of the 80s, we’d almost certainly gone as far as we needed to. Locking up ever more people just wasn’t having much of an effect. But we did it anyway. We didn’t just double prison capacity, we doubled it again and then built even more after that. I’d say it’s almost a dead certainty that the last doubling was simply wasted money that had no effect on crime rates at all.

It’s also worth noting that this is an inherently hard subject to study. After all, crime rates did skyrocket during the 70s and 80s. And if you have twice as much crime, then you’re likely to lock up twice as many people. Needless to say, that doesn’t necessarily mean that higher incarceration rates had an effect on anything. It was the other way around: higher crime led to higher incarceration rates. That’s perfectly natural, but it makes it hard to then work backwards and try to estimate the effect in the other direction.

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We Put Way Too Many People in Prison

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There’s a Labor Dispute at West Coast Ports, But No One Will Say What It’s About

by RoseannStrempel Posted on February 12, 2015

Mother Jones

West Coast port operators are shutting down for a few days because “they don’t want to pay overtime to workers who, they allege, have deliberately slowed operations to the point of causing a massive bottleneck.” This is part of an increasingly rancorous labor dispute, but as usual, we really have no idea what the dispute is about:

Dockworkers are among the best paid blue-collar workers in the country, earning between $26 and $41 an hour, depending on experience and skill.

Union spokesman Craig Merrilees has said the two sides are very close to a deal, but has declined to say what is tying up the talks….According to employers, a major hurdle is a union demand that both sides have the ability to unilaterally remove local arbitrators at the end of a labor contract….Employers say that if such a change is made, alleged union slowdown tactics would become constant, because the union could “fire judges who rule against them.”

The union said Wednesday that employers are “grossly” mischaracterizing its current bargaining position. “It seems to us that the employers are trying to sabotage negotiations,” union President McEllrath said.

This is pretty normal, and it’s one of the things that makes it hard to unilaterally support either side in labor disputes like this. We already know that dockworkers are very well paid, and that’s apparently not a bone of contention. But what’s the deal with the arbitrators? Who has the better of the argument? There’s no telling.

The public probably doesn’t care much about this unless it eventually gets nasty enough that it affects the ability of stores to keep stuff in stock. So maybe public opinion doesn’t matter. But to the extent it does, it sure seems like unions would have a better chance of getting public support if they were more forthcoming about exactly what it is they’re holding out for.

(Or maybe not. One of the big problems with the huge decline in union density over the past few decades is that the public no longer has much of a stake in supporting unions. In the past, there was some sense of solidarity. If one union negotiated a healthy raise, it increased the odds of everyone else getting a healthy raise too. But not anymore. If the dockworkers do well, they’re just the last of the lucky bastards with good union jobs. The rest of us get nothing from it except maybe higher prices for the goods and services we buy. It’s hard to see a way out of this dynamic.)

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There’s a Labor Dispute at West Coast Ports, But No One Will Say What It’s About

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By Age 40, Your Income Is Probably as Good as It’s Going to Get

by BrentP59cdnn Posted on February 11, 2015

Mother Jones

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By age 40 you’re done. That’s the conclusion of a report from the New York Fed that looks at lifetime earnings from age 25 through retirement. The charts on the right tell the story.

The top chart shows average earnings by age. It’s a little hard to immediately see how dramatic the income peak is since the y-axis shows the log of earnings, but if you do the arithmetic it demonstrates that, on average, by age 40 you’re within about $1,000 of your peak earnings. You’ll get inflation adjustments after that, but for the bulk of us, that’s it. Real earnings pretty much plateau after age 40.

The bottom chart illustrates this in a different way. The yellow rectangle shows earnings growth for the bottom 80 percent. The blue line is for ages 25-35, and there’s a fair amount of earnings growth except at the very bottom. The red line is for ages 35-45, and it’s pretty close to zero. There’s virtually no earnings growth for anyone. And the green line is for ages 45-55. It’s actually negative. If you put the latter two age groups together, the report concludes that “average earnings growth from ages 35 to 55 is zero.”

Now, outside the yellow box we have the top 20 percent: the well off and the rich. Those folks show a lot of earnings growth when they’re young, but they also show fairly healthy growth between ages 35-45.

And the top 1 percent? That’s on the very far right, and as you can see, they show earnings growth at every age level.

None of this will come as much of a surprise to anyone, but I thought it was interesting to see it in black and white, so to speak. If you’re planning to make your fortune, you’d better do it by age 40. With only a few exceptions—and those exceptions are mostly for people already making a lot of money—you’re done by then. Your income just isn’t likely to ever go up much after that.

(Via Wonkblog’s Danielle Paquette.)

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By Age 40, Your Income Is Probably as Good as It’s Going to Get

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Jon Stewart Picked a Good Time to Retire From the Daily Show

by KrystynaK18 Posted on February 11, 2015

Mother Jones

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I guess I’m curious about something. How many of you think Jon Stewart made the right decision stepping down from the Daily Show? I’m reluctant to say this because I’ve long been such a pretty devoted follower, but the truth is that Marian and I gradually stopped watching him last year. It wasn’t any single thing, or any big change in what he did. It was just a growing sense that we weren’t really laughing as much as we used to. There were still good bits, and the correspondents still had their moments, but they were fewer and farther between than in the past.

Are there others who feel the same way? I don’t want to turn this thread into a pile-on, especially if you happen to be someone who’s never liked Stewart’s brand of comedy. I’ve always been a big fan. But over the past year he seems to have lost a lot of his edge. Or is it just me?

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Jon Stewart Picked a Good Time to Retire From the Daily Show

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Quote of the Day: Who Would Be Dumb Enough to Trust Republicans With the Economy Yet Again?

by StellaAnderson Posted on February 9, 2015

Mother Jones

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From Kevin Hassett, a conservative economist who’s advised both John McCain and Mitt Romney, explaining what Hillary Clinton’s economic message should be in the 2016 presidential campaign:

The Republicans gave us a crappy economy twice, and we fixed it twice. Why would you ever trust them again?

Not bad, Kevin! Thanks. This comes via Ed Kilgore, who’s similarly impressed: “Wow, no kidding. Hillary Clinton should say that. It would almost fit on a bumper sticker, and with a few photos would make killer text for a 30-second ad.”

Originally posted here:

Quote of the Day: Who Would Be Dumb Enough to Trust Republicans With the Economy Yet Again?

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