Tag Archives: jobs

Why Are Big Retailers Trying to Kill Thanksgiving?

by s02xc3x Posted on November 27, 2013

Mother Jones

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Note: Some opening times may vary by region.

In case you haven’t noticed, Black Friday isn’t just on Friday anymore. The retail industry’s high-density mass of starry lights, Santa dioramas, and door-buster shopping deals really ought to be renamed the Black Hole—it just keeps sucking up everything around it. That holiday known as Thanksgiving? Pretty much gone. Especially if you work for one of the nation’s largest retailers.

In 2006, Bart Reed, Best Buy Co.’s consumer marketing director, told the Charleston Gazette that the company had decided not to open its stores any earlier than 5 a.m. on Black Friday because it wanted to give its employees a “work-life balance.” Then, five years later, Best Buy moved its Black Friday opening back to Thursday at midnight. This year, for the first time, it will open at 6 p.m. on Thanksgiving Day.

Best Buy is far from alone in its cold-hearted greed. The chart above shows how America’s biggest retailers have competed in recent years to appeal to crazed shoppers at the expense of their employees—not to mention the one holiday where we’re supposed to contemplate being grateful for what we’ve got, rather than just coveting more stuff.

The undisputed leader in the assault on Thanksgiving is cleary Kmart, which has opened its doors on Turkey Day for the past 22 years. Yet this sad legacy hasn’t stopped Kmart from finding ways to make its workers even more miserable. For Thanksgiving 2010, Kmart closed at the arguably reasonable hour of 9 p.m. In 2011, it closed at 4 p.m. and then reopened four hours later, before closing at 3 a.m. on Black Friday. That must not have been crazy enough, since this year Kmart will open at 6 a.m. on Thanksgiving Day and stay open for 40 hours straight, not closing until 11 p.m. on Black Friday.

That sounds pretty bad, until you consider that for years many Walmart stores have been open 24 hours a day, including Thanksgiving. This year Walmart will roll out its Black Friday specials at 6 p.m. on Thanksgiving, when it will presumably need to bulk up its stores with more associates who’d normally be eating turkey with their families. At least some 24-hour Walmarts used to close on Thanksgiving Day: “Local Wal-Marts open at 5 a.m. on Black Friday, with 24-hour stores closing for Thanksgiving and reopening then,” reads a 2006 story from California’s Inland Valley Daily Bulletin.

At least one mega-retailer has resisted the Black Hole: Costco. The unionized big box chain will remain closed on Thanksgiving and open on Friday at its regular hour of 10:00 a.m. The company wants it workers to be able to spend time with their families, Costco CFO Richard Galanti told me. “It’s pretty straightforward: It’s a major holiday with family and friends, our employees work hard, and it’s the right thing to do,” he said. “Black Friday used to open at 6 a.m., then at 3 a.m., then at 12:01 a.m.—when does it stop?”

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Why Are Big Retailers Trying to Kill Thanksgiving?

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Janet Yellen Is Now a Litmus Test for Right-Wing Sanity

by HartkePoundstone568 Posted on November 26, 2013

Mother Jones

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Steve Benen notes that the increasingly shrill and hyperbolic Heritage Foundation has decided to make opposition to Janet Yellen a “key vote.” That is, they’ll count it on their end-of-the-year scorecard that tells everyone just how conservative you are:

Thanks to the “nuclear option” there’s very little chance Yellen’s nomination will fail — Joe Manchin appears to be her only Democratic opponent — but it now seems likely that most Senate Republicans will oppose the most qualified Fed nominee since the institution was founded.

That’s true, which means this has become sort of a litmus test for wingnuttery. There’s simply no serious reason to oppose Yellen, who is outstandingly qualified to be Fed chair by virtually any measure. So opposition to Yellen is now a pretty simple proposition: you oppose her if you’re some kind of hard money lunatic or if you feel like you have to pander to the hard money lunatics. That’s it. Everyone else votes to support her confirmation. Should be an interesting roll call.

POSTSCRIPT: For more on the Heritage Foundation’s descent from a think tank beloved of Republicans to a bullying ideological cop now loathed on Capitol Hill, check out Julia Ioffe’s report here. It’s a precautionary tale that’s well worth a read.

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Janet Yellen Is Now a Litmus Test for Right-Wing Sanity

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The CIA Trained Gitmo Detainees as Double Agents at a Secret Facility Named After a Beatles Song

by abram Posted on November 26, 2013

Mother Jones

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Between 2003 and 2006, the CIA recruited and trained a small number of Guantanamo Bay detainees as double agents, according to an Associated Press report published on Tuesday. The program was run out of a clandestine facility near the military prison, and—according to US officials—was useful in gathering intel for targeting and killing Al Qaeda leaders. (CIA officers would typically meet with double agents in Afghanistan.)

“Jail time at Guantanamo is a new asset on the résumés of many double agents, security officials say—an ultimate sign of credibility that often makes them revered and trusted among senior operatives,” another AP story, from 2010, reads.

In 2009, President Obama ordered a review of the double agents recruited during the Gitmo program because the agents provided intel used in drone-strike operations, according to one of the officials interviewed. But perhaps the most attention-grabbing part of the AP‘s new investigation is that the CIA’s old double-agent facility was nicknamed after a Beatles song.

Here’s the relevant text from the AP (emphasis mine):

The program was carried out in a secret facility built a few hundred yards from the administrative offices of the prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The eight small cottages were hidden behind a ridge covered in thick scrub and cactus.

The program and the handful of men who passed through these cottages had various official CIA code names.

But those who were aware of the cluster of cottages knew it best by its sobriquet: Penny Lane.

It was a nod to the classic Beatles song and a riff on the CIA’s other secret facility at Guantanamo Bay, a prison known as Strawberry Fields.

Paul McCartney, the principal songwriter for “Penny Lane,” did not immediately respond to a request for comment on how he felt about this.

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The CIA Trained Gitmo Detainees as Double Agents at a Secret Facility Named After a Beatles Song

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Obamacare is a Done Deal

by LucasHarbin Posted on November 26, 2013

Mother Jones

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Ezra Klein gives us a progress report on Obamacare:

A spin through HealthCare.Gov this morning went smoothly. The site loaded quickly. The process progressed easily. There were no error messages or endless hangs….My experience isn’t rare. There are increasing reports that HealthCare.Gov is working better — perhaps much better — for consumers than it was a few short weeks ago. “Consumer advocates say it is becoming easier for people to sign up for coverage,” report Sandhya Somashekhar and Amy Goldstein in the Washington Post.

….Reports from inside the health care bureaucracy are also turning towards optimism. People who knew the Web site was going to be a mess on Oct. 1st are, for the first time, beginning to think HealthCare.Gov might work….The Obama administration is certainly acting like they believe the site has turned the corner. Somashekhar and Goldstein report that they’re “moving on to the outreach phase, which had taken a back seat as they grappled with the faulty Web site.

….It’s clear that HealthCare.Gov is improving — and, at this point, it’s improving reasonably quickly. It won’t work perfectly by the end of November but it might well work tolerably early in December. A political system that’s become overwhelmingly oriented towards pessimism on Obamacare will have to adjust as the system’s technological infrastructure improves.

I think the best translation of that last sentence is, “Republicans will soon have to find something else to gripe about.” But it won’t work. Conservatives have always known that once Obamacare is up and running, it will become a popular program that’s impossible to repeal. That’s one of the reasons they’ve been so frantic to stop it before January 1. And they’ve been right about this. People respond far more passionately to the prospect of losing something than they do to gaining something, and once they have Obamacare they’ll fight to keep it. In a few months, it will be nearly as enshrined in the American social welfare firmament as Social Security and Medicare.

Republicans have run out of time, and they know it. Their fixation on Obamacare already looks sort of balmy—this weekend’s deal with Iran was designed to draw attention away from Obamacare? Seriously?—and it’s only going to look loopier as time goes by. Getting Obamacare to the end zone wasn’t easy, and Obama almost fumbled the ball at the one-yard line, but he’s finally won. There’s nothing left for conservatives to do. Love it or hate it, Obamacare is here to stay.

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Obamacare is a Done Deal

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How Not to Argue With Your Crazy Relatives at Thanksgiving

by JannaLucero Posted on November 25, 2013

Mother Jones

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Can I waste some time venting about a teensy little pet peeve of mine? Thanks. Here’s a brief Twitter conversation I just had with Chris Hayes:

Hayes: Devoting our whole show on Wednesday to how to talk about politics, news with conservative family members. Should be fun!

Drum: Will be interesting if it’s real. Usually this stuff isn’t. Needs to be arguments that actually address conservative worldview.

Hayes: Oh, I don’t think it will be useful. No one ever persuades anyone of anything. But will be fun!

I don’t really mean to fire off any cruise missiles at Hayes or anyone else over this, but every year there’s a spate of blog/magazine pieces about how to discuss the political hot potato du jour with your crazy right-wing relatives at Thanksgiving. And every year they’re fake. Mostly they provide stock liberal responses to imaginary conservative talking points, and as Hayes says, they don’t really do any good.

Now, maybe there’s no help for this. Liberals and conservatives have been arguing for centuries, and so far neither side has convinced the other to surrender. Still, wouldn’t it be more interesting to at least try and write something real? That is, come up with the kinds of comments that your Fox-watching aunts and uncles are really likely to drop into the conversation, and then come up with replies that might actually persuade someone who’s a conservative. The downside is that this isn’t as much fun: there will be no killer facts and figures in this list that demolish Uncle Joe’s Obamacare tirade and leave a smoking crater in his place. (In our collective imaginations, anyway.) Instead, we’ll have a collection of items that turn the battleship a few degrees at best. No one’s going to suddenly decide that Paul Krugman has been right all along, but maybe you’ll be able to seed a few doubts about Sean Hannity’s commitment to the straight dope.

This would be hard work. You’d have to actually watch Fox News for a while to make sure you know what’s really on conservatives’ minds these days. Listening to a bit of talk radio and reading some chain emails would help too. And that’s not all. You’d almost certainly have to team up with an actual conservative to help you understand both the worldview at work and the kinds of arguments that might appeal to his ideological comrades-in-arms. And why would a conservative help you with this project? Beats me. Maybe you could trade: you get some arguments that appeal to actual conservatives and he gets some arguments that appeal to actual liberals.

Anyway, somebody ought to do this. I’m a hermit, and my entire family is pretty liberal, so I’m not a very good candidate. But someone out there is. Who wants to do the country a public service?

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How Not to Argue With Your Crazy Relatives at Thanksgiving

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The Kids Are Alright, Video Game Edition

by RochelleChewing Posted on November 25, 2013

Mother Jones

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This post comes with an even stronger warning than usual that a single study is just a single study; correlation is not causation; and even well-done studies can’t account for every possible confounding factor. In other words, You Have Been Warned.

And yet, this study is pretty interesting!

Typical daily hours viewing television and playing electronic games at age 5 years were reported by mothers of 11,014 children from the UK Millennium Cohort Study….Change in adjustment from age 5 years to 7 years was regressed on screen exposures; adjusting for family characteristics and functioning, and child characteristics.

RESULTS: Watching TV for 3 hours or more at 5 years predicted a 0.13 point increase [] in conduct problems by 7 years, compared with watching for under an hour, but playing electronic games was not associated with conduct problems. No associations were found between either type of screen time and emotional symptoms, hyperactivity/inattention, peer relationship problems or prosocial behaviour. There was no evidence of gender differences in the effect of screen time.

This comes via Aaron Carroll, who adds this comment: “Yes, these are young kids, and it’s unlikely that they have been playing much GTA 5 or Battlefield 4. So I’ll look forward to more data. But that this point, it’s hard to point to a large study like this and find a smoking gun. Figuratively or literally.”

In other words, if it’s a choice between letting your young kids watch more TV or play more video games, go with the video games. Until some other study comes out, anyway.

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The Kids Are Alright, Video Game Edition

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Western Powers Sign Historic Interim Nuclear Deal With Iran

by adndeu13da Posted on November 24, 2013

Mother Jones

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I wasn’t too bothered when negotiators failed to reach a deal with Iran over its nuclear program last week. An interim deal is only worthwhile if it’s clear that both sides are likely to progress to a final deal, and Iran’s position didn’t really inspire a lot of confidence on that front. Today, though, a deal was announced, and it appears to be a good one:

From the New York Times: “According to the agreement, Iran would agree to stop enriching uranium beyond 5 percent… All of Iran’s stockpile of uranium that has been enriched to 20 percent, a short hop to weapons-grade fuel, would be diluted or converted into oxide so that it could not be readily used for military purposes.” However, Iran can continue to enrich uranium to 3.5 percent.

From the Washington Post: “Iran also agreed to halt work on key components of a heavy-water reactor that could someday provide Iran with a source of plutonium. In addition, Iran accepted a dramatic increase in oversight, including daily monitoring by international nuclear inspectors, the officials said.” This was a key concern of the French last week, and with good reason. A deal on uranium isn’t much good if a plutonium reactor continues to run in the background.

From the Guardian: An Obama administration official said Iran has “agreed to intrusive inspections.”

In return, the Western allies have agreed to soften their existing economic sanctions to the tune of about $7 billion.

It’s too soon to tell whether this will lead to a permanent deal. Iran hasn’t agreed, even in principle, to stop enriching uranium, and for our part, the sanctions relief is fairly minor. Still, my sense is that this is the kind of interim deal you might see from two sides that genuinely want to reach a final deal, so we should take it as tentative good news.

It’s too early to have much in the way of reactions to this news, but I think we can assume that Benjamin Netanyahu is still unhappy about it. We can probably also assume that Republicans will be unhappy too. Because, you know, they’re Republicans. Steve Benen amusingly points out that Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), a man who obviously doesn’t ever want to be off message, tweeted this reaction: “Amazing what WH will do to distract attention from O-care.” Amazing indeed.

A State Department fact sheet on the deal is here. President Obama’s remarks are here.

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Western Powers Sign Historic Interim Nuclear Deal With Iran

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Do Governors Make the Best Presidents?

by Adriene56E Posted on November 22, 2013

Mother Jones

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Apparently the latest hot topic of conversation among our nation’s governors is the indisputable merit of electing a governor as our next president. I don’t have a lot to say about this. Instead, I offer only the brief table of postwar presidents below. If anyone can find any reason to prefer one column over the other, I’m all ears.

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Do Governors Make the Best Presidents?

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Here’s How Walmart Could Pay Workers a Decent Wage Without Raising Prices

by SuzanneBl Posted on November 20, 2013

Mother Jones

Walmart has gotten a lot of bad press this week over news of an Ohio store holding a food drive for its own workers, who were unable to buy Thanksgiving groceries on the retail giant’s paltry wages. The store managers deserve credit for their thoughtfulness, but wouldn’t it be better if Walmart simply paid its workers enough to feed themselves? A new report from Demos, a liberal think tank, suggests that doing so wouldn’t be as hard as you might think.

According to the report, “A Higher Wage Is Possible,” Walmart spends $7.6 billion a year buying back stock. Those purchases drive up the company’s share price, further enriching the Walton family, which controls more than half of Walmart stock (and for that matter, more wealth than 42 percent of Americans combined.) If Walmart instead spent that money on wages, it could give each of its 1.3 million US employees a $5.83 per hour raise—enough to ensure that all of them are paid a wage equivalent to $25,000 a year for full-time work.

Walmart and its defenders like to argue that raising wages would require it to raise prices, which would in turn hurt its low-income shoppers. But Demos disagrees: “Curtailing share buybacks would not harm the company’s retail competitiveness or raise prices for consumers,” the report says. “In fact…higher pay could be expected to improve employee productivity and morale while reducing Walmart’s expenses related to employee turnover.”

A spokesperson for Walmart did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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Here’s How Walmart Could Pay Workers a Decent Wage Without Raising Prices

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Are Cuts to Virginia’s Mental Health Programs Implicated in Creigh Deeds’ Son’s Attempted Murder/Suicide?

by Bart Jameson Posted on November 20, 2013

Mother Jones

Update (11/20/13): Despite initial reports that there were no hospital beds available for Austin Deeds, the Washington Post reported that at least three facilities did have room. This post has been updated to reflect this.

Austin “Gus” Deeds underwent a psychiatric evaluation Monday at the Rockbridge County Community Services Board in Virginia. While at least three hospitals had beds available, hospital officials told the Washington Post, Deeds was still turned away.

The next day he likely stabbed his father, Sen. Creigh Deeds (D-Va.), in the face and chest before shooting himself, police said. The elder Deeds is currently listed in good condition.

Between April 1, 2010 and March 31, 2011, about 200 people in Virginia met the criteria for a Temporary Detention Order—meaning a physician of clinical psychologist saw a substantial risk of them causing harm to themselves or to others, or that they was unable to defend themselves—but were put back on the streets, according to a report from the state Office of the Inspector General. The Commonwealth isn’t the only state dealing with such problems. States cut $1.8 billion from their mental health budgets from 2009-2011, according to a 2012 report from National Alliance on Mental Illness.

Also see our state-by-state interactive map of cuts to services for the mentally ill.

In a Mother Jones cover story six months ago, Mac McClelland wrote the harrowing story of her cousin Houston, who murdered his father after “a classic onset of schizophrenia.” When Houston’s violent outbursts started, his parents were told that calling the police was their only option—even though the local cops had killed two mentally ill men in the past six years.

It’s also part of a pattern of exchanging one kind of institution—state mental hospitals—for another: jails. “In the 1950s, more than a half million people lived in US mental institutions—1 in 300 Americans. By the late ’70s, only 160,000 did, due to a concerted effort on the part of psychiatrists, philanthropists, and politicians to deinstitutionalize the mentally ill. Today there’s one psychiatric bed per 7,100 Americans,” Mac writes. But there’s been a corresponding rise of incarcerated inmates who are mentally ill. Between 1998 and 2006, the number of mentally ill people incarcerated in federal, state, and local prisons and jails more than quadrupled to 1,264,300. Those numbers have only gone up in the face of cuts to mental health programs due to the recession and austerity programs. See our timeline on the politics of deinstitutionalization here.

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Are Cuts to Virginia’s Mental Health Programs Implicated in Creigh Deeds’ Son’s Attempted Murder/Suicide?

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