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VW Loses About $20 Billion in Value in 2 Hours

by BryanGraziani Posted on September 21, 2015

Mother Jones

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Guess what happens when you concoct a contemptible scheme to secretly blow off emission rules on your cars—and then it suddenly becomes not so secret? Answer: your respected multinational corporation loses about $20 billion of value over the course of a few minutes. Your stock gets downgraded by pretty much every analyst on the planet. And the folks who put together the Dow Jones Sustainability Index start suggesting that maybe VW isn’t exactly a poster child for sustainability anymore.

By the way, it turns out that VW’s deception was actually discovered a year ago, but they doggedly denied any wrongdoing:

For nearly a year, Volkswagen officials told the Environmental Protection Agency that discrepancies between the formal air-quality tests on its diesel cars and the much higher pollution levels out on the road were the result of technical errors, not a deliberate attempt to deceive Washington officials.

….The company was evidently concerned that actually meeting the federal emissions standards would degrade the power of the engines, which it marketed as comparable in performance to gasoline engines. Meeting the standard would also undercut the fuel efficiency that is one of the main selling points of diesels.

Volkswagen finally fessed up only after the EPA said it planned to withhold approval for the carmaker’s new 2016 models. Until then, it was just deny, deny, deny.

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VW Loses About $20 Billion in Value in 2 Hours

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CNN Poll: Hillary Clinton Gains Ground on Bernie Sanders

by KenSanchez Posted on September 21, 2015

Mother Jones

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Yesterday I wrote about the new CNN/ORC poll taken after Wednesday’s Republican debate. Today CNN released the results of its polling on the Democratic race, and they have it at 42 percent for Hillary Clinton vs. 24 percent for Bernie Sanders. Joe Biden is at 22 percent, but no one even knows if he’s running yet, so take that with a big grain of salt. When he’s excluded from the poll, Hillary leads Bernie by 57 percent to 28 percent. In other words, if Biden officially drops out, it’s a big win for Hillary Clinton.

Compared to earlier this month, Sanders is down 3 points and Clinton is up 5 points. Sanders appears to be getting most of his support from liberals and Independent leaners—though this is a little confusing since the poll claims to be counting only registered Democrats.

In any case, I suppose this will all get lost in the mix amid Xi-mania and pope-mania. There’s always some excuse, isn’t there?

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CNN Poll: Hillary Clinton Gains Ground on Bernie Sanders

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Carly Fiorina: Is She America’s Next Millard Fillmore?

by RosalinShephard Posted on September 20, 2015

Mother Jones

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From George Colony, chief executive of tech research firm Forrester, judging Carly Fiorina’s tenure as head of Hewlett-Packard:

I’d put her at the top of the bottom third of C.E.O.s.

Good enough for me! In round numbers, this means she’s another Millard Fillmore. I suppose this also means we’ll soon be getting a rash of conservative essays telling us that we really need to reevaluate Fillmore’s place in history. Also, I guess I can expect some flak from residents of Buffalo and from fanciers of the Whig Party. Bring it on.

But that’s enough about Carly’s business record. How about her political record? She does have one, you know. In case you’ve forgotten, here is Carly’s greatest claim to political fame. Fast forward to 2:20 if you just want to see the good part.

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Carly Fiorina: Is She America’s Next Millard Fillmore?

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Fiorina, Rubio Are Big Winners of Second Debate

by ColumbuPartain Posted on September 20, 2015

Mother Jones

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As usual, I’m more interested in which candidates are moving up and down than in which candidates are ahead—with one exception that I’ll get to. After all, it’s still more than four months before the first primary ballot is cast.

A new CNN/ORC poll shows that there were two clear winners from Wednesday’s debate: Fiorina and Rubio. Trump was the biggest loser. And Scott Walker? I’ll make an exception for him. Not only was he down five points, but he was down five points from his previous level of five percent. In other words, his absolute level of support is now officially zero. This has to be one of the fastest, most dramatic flameouts of a top-tier candidate ever.

Trump, Fiorina, and Carson are now the top three candidates, but I simply don’t give any of them much chance of winning. So the next three are more interesting: Rubio, Bush, and Cruz. Of those, Rubio is not only in the lead, he’s the only one who gained any ground this week. This makes him officially one of the front runners, and should mean that he starts getting a lot more attention. We’ll see whether that’s good or bad for him.

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Fiorina, Rubio Are Big Winners of Second Debate

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Another Shot Fired in the Great Immigration vs. Wages War

by BlaineHightower Posted on September 17, 2015

Mother Jones

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Does illegal immigration suppress the wages of native-born workers? The evidence suggests that it doesn’t—or not much, anyway. One of the data points supporting this is a study done by David Card of the effect of the 1980 Mariel boatlift on workers in Miami. Even though Miami experienced a huge spike in immigrants during the boatlift, Card found no significant impact on wages.

Today George Borjas steps in with a different analysis. He’s been arguing for a long time that immigration has a bigger effect on wages than we think—especially the wages of unskilled workers. In a new working paper, he looks specifically at the wages of high school dropout and concludes that although overall wages in Miami were unaffected by the Mariel boatlift, the wages of dropouts were affected. In relative terms, they went down by 10 to 30 percent.

I wouldn’t be surprised if this were true, but Borjas’s paper does leave me with a few questions. Take a look at the chart on the right, which shows the wages of high school dropouts relative to high school graduates. Miami is the thick blue line. The other lines are various estimates of wages in cities that weren’t affected by the boatlift. There are a few oddities here:

Before 1980 and after 1990, the wages of high school dropouts in Miami are above zero, which means dropouts earned more than high school grads. That seems very peculiar, and none of the control cities show the same effect. Does this suggest there’s something wrong with the Miami data?
The Mariel boatlift produced a truly enormous spike in unskilled workers. Borjas estimates that it increased the number of working-age high school dropouts in Miami by about 18 percent in just a few weeks. I wonder if it’s really possible to extrapolate from this to the much more gradual increase in illegal immigrants nationwide over a span of two or three decades?
This is especially apropos because the chart shows that the impact on wages was fairly short lived. Even with such a huge labor shock, wages of high school dropouts were only affected for about six years. By 1988 they had recovered fully. Borjas acknowledges that this is hard to account for.

I’m no expert in this stuff, and I imagine the folks who are experts will weigh in soon enough. However, even if Borjas is basically right, the question we care about is what this tells us about the effect of illegal immigration on wages more generally. If a huge spike produces a short-lived wage depression of about 20 percent or so, what does a gradual increase over a wide geographic area produce? Unfortunately, Borjas says that there was more going on in Miami during this period than just a labor supply increase, which means “it is difficult to say much about the dynamics of the wage effect of immigration from the evidence generated by the Mariel supply shock.” Intuitively, though, it seems like it would be something far less dramatic. Maybe 5 percent or so? Less?

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Another Shot Fired in the Great Immigration vs. Wages War

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Obamacare Has Now Been MIA in Two Debates

by deqc16rl Posted on September 17, 2015

Mother Jones

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In the first Republican debate, Obamacare was barely mentioned. Over at National Review, Ian Tuttle notes that last night it was also MIA:

Beyond a few brief in media res mentions from candidates, a repeal line in Cruz’s closing address, and an allusion or two (e.g., the question about John Roberts), the president’s signature piece of legislation was a non-issue.

Which makes one wonder: Is it a non-issue?….I suspect that the anti-Obamacare fervor is in a period of quiescence. We have now seen Obamacare implemented sans “death spiral.” The website works. The Supreme Court has handed the Obama administration two affirmative Supreme Court decisions. And the president has made sure to do much in the interim — immigration executive actions and Iran deals, for example — to draw fire away from his healthcare law. Conservative heads have a limited supply of steam.

Tuttle is right. Obamacare has become a brief, pro forma applause line these days, but not much more. Partly this is for the reason Tuttle rather surprisingly concedes: It’s up, it’s running, and it’s working reasonably well. The nation still stands, and it’s hard to keep whipping up hysteria for years and years over something that, it turns out, just isn’t affecting all that many people.

I don’t think this means that Obamacare is going away as a political issue. But I do think that the repeal movement has lost a lot of steam as a winning issue for Republicans. The tea party types are starting to realize that nothing in their lives has changed, and the more moderate types realize—maybe via personal experience, maybe via news reports—that it’s doing a lot of good for poor and working class folks. So it’s become something of a wedge issue: Pounding on it loses about as many votes as it gains.

This is becoming a real problem for the GOP. A lot of issues that used to be pretty reliable winners have now turned into dangerous wedge issues: gay marriage, taxes, terrorism, illegal immigration, military adventurism, abortion, crime, education, global warming, Ukraine, free trade, Social Security cuts—the list goes on and on. And this is coming at the same time that their bread and butter, the angry white guy demographic, is declining. I’m not sure what they’re going to end up doing about this. The GOP has a tough decade ahead.

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Obamacare Has Now Been MIA in Two Debates

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Who Won the Fiction Sweepstakes in Last Night’s Debate?

by HFVLisette Posted on September 17, 2015

Mother Jones

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I just took a quick survey of all the various fact checks of last night’s debate and totted them up. The following list includes only items that I judged (a) fairly important and (b) pretty clearly wrong or misleading, which means I left out several close calls. Here they are:

Trump says Wisconsin is $2.2 billion in the hole
Trump denied lobbying Bush for casino gambling in Florida
Trump says he never went bankrupt
Trump says vaccines lead to autism
Trump says illegal immigration costs us $200 billion per year
Trump says Mexico doesn’t have birthright citizenship
Fiorina says HP doubled its revenue under her leadership
Fiorina says sting video showed baby “with its heart beating, its legs kicking”
Fiorina says Obama did nothing on immigration reform
Christie says Social Security will be insolvent in “seven or eight years”
Christie says he supported medical marijuana
Cruz says Planned Parenthood sells fetal body parts for profit
Cruz says Iran gets to inspect itself
Paul says vaccines lead to autism
Huckabee says Hillary Clinton is under investigation by the FBI
Carson says a better fence was responsible for cutting illegal immigration in the Yuma sector

So the final score is: Trump 6, Fiorina 3, Christie 2, Cruz 2, Paul 1, Huckabee 1, and Carson 1.

Apparently Bush, Rubio, Walker, and Kasich didn’t say a single thing that was badly wrong. Good for them.

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Who Won the Fiction Sweepstakes in Last Night’s Debate?

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Chart of the Day: World Trade Is Down 2% This Year

by LucySpurlock Posted on August 26, 2015

Mother Jones

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Here is your chart to ponder today. It shows the total level of world trade:

You can see the huge dip during the 2008-09 recession, followed by a steady recovery. Until this year, that is. During the past six months, world trade has declined by about 2 percent.

Most of this loss was made up in June, but monthly figures are volatile and June could be just a temporary artifact. Time will tell. Most likely, this is yet another indication of a weak global economy, one that’s going to get even weaker if China’s recent troubles portend a genuine recession.

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Chart of the Day: World Trade Is Down 2% This Year

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Hillary’s Email: Still No There There

by LelaSandoval Posted on August 26, 2015

Mother Jones

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The AP’s Ken Dilanian reports on the use of email in the State Department:

The transmission of now-classified information across Hillary Rodham Clinton’s private email is consistent with a State Department culture in which diplomats routinely sent secret material on unsecured email during the past two administrations, according to documents reviewed by The Associated Press.

….In five emails that date to Condoleezza Rice’s tenure as secretary of state during the George W. Bush administration, large chunks are censored on the grounds that they contain classified national security or foreign government information….In a December 2006 email, diplomat John J. Hillmeyer appears to have pasted the text of a confidential cable from Beijing about China’s dealings with Iran and other sensitive matters.

….Such slippage of classified information into regular email is “very common, actually,” said Leslie McAdoo, a lawyer who frequently represents government officials and contractors in disputes over security clearances and classified information.

What makes Clinton’s case different is that she exclusively sent and received emails through a home server in lieu of the State Department’s unclassified email system. Neither would have been secure from hackers or foreign intelligence agencies, so it would be equally problematic whether classified information was carried over the government system or a private server, experts say. In fact, the State Department’s unclassified email system has been penetrated by hackers believed linked to Russian intelligence.

….Clinton campaign spokesman Brian Fallon said State Department officials were permitted at the time to use personal email accounts for official business, and that the department was aware of Clinton’s private server….There is no indication that any information in Clinton emails was marked classified at the time it was sent.

Whatevs. Let’s spend millions of dollars and hundreds of hours of congressional committee time investigating this anyway. Maybe we’ll finally find that Whitewater confession we’ve been looking for so long.

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Hillary’s Email: Still No There There

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Breaking News: Kids Don’t Like to Eat Vegetables

by AdelePlatz Posted on August 26, 2015

Mother Jones

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Excellent news! We have new research on whether kids like to eat vegetables:

The Agriculture Department rolled out new requirements in the 2012 school year that mandated that children who were taking part in the federal lunch program choose either a fruit or vegetable with their meals.

….”The basic question we wanted to explore was: does requiring a child to select a fruit or vegetable actually correspond with consumption. The answer was clearly no,” Amin, the lead author of the study, said in a statement.

This will come as a surprise to exactly zero parents. You can (usually) make your kids eat vegetables if you refuse to let them leave the table until they do, but that’s what it takes. Ask my mother if you don’t believe me.1

I’m not actually making fun of the researchers here. Sometimes seemingly obvious things turn out to be untrue. The only way to find out for sure is to check. And in fact, the study actually did produce interesting results:

Because they were forced to do it, children took fruits and vegetables — 29 percent more in fact. But their consumption of fruits and vegetables actually went down 13 percent after the mandate took effect and, worse, they were throwing away a distressing 56 percent more than before. The waste each child (or tray) was producing went from a quarter of a cup to more than a 39 percent of a cup each meal. In many cases, the researchers wrote, “children did not even taste the fruits and vegetables they chose at lunch.”

Yep: when kids were required to plonk fruits and vegetables onto their trays, average consumption went down from 0.51 cups to 0.45 cups. Apparently sticking it to the man becomes more attractive when kids are forced to do something.

In any case, the researchers kept a brave face, suggesting that eventually the mandates would work. We just need “other strategies” to get kids to like eating vegetables:

Because children prefer FVs in the form of 100% fruit juice or mixed dishes, such as pizza or lasagna, one should consider additional factors, such as the types of whole FVs offered and how the cafeteria staff prepares them. Cutting up vegetables and serving them with dip and slicing fruit, such as oranges and apples, can positively influence students’ FV selection and consumption by making FVs more accessible and appealing.

I dunno. Cutting up veggies and serving them with dip decidedly doesn’t make them taste anything like pizza or lasagna. I speak from decades of pizza-eating experience here. Anyway, parents have been trying to get their kids to eat their vegetables for thousands of years, and so far progress has been poor. I’m not sure what the answer is. Shock collars? DNA splicing? GMO veggies that taste like candy bars?

1Yeah, yeah, some kids actually like vegetables. Little bootlickers.

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Breaking News: Kids Don’t Like to Eat Vegetables

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