Tag Archives: jones

Quote of the Day: Billionaires Insist that Billionaire-Friendly Policies Don’t Actually Benefit Billionaires

Mother Jones

Americans for Prosperity, the Koch-fueled super-PAC, is doubling down this year after its failure to move the needle much in 2012. Politico’s Kenneth Vogel got hold of an internal strategy memo that outlines what they think went wrong in the last election:

To remedy the messaging disadvantage, AFP developed “a sophisticated new media message-testing strategy to target specific demographics in specific locations we need to move on our issues,” according to the memo….“If the presidential election told us anything, it’s that Americans place a great importance on taking care of those in need and avoiding harm to the weak,” reads the AFP memo….“We consistently see that Americans in general are concerned that free-market policy — and its advocates — benefit the rich and powerful more than the most vulnerable of society….We must correct this misconception.”

And what better way to correct this misconception than to collect hundreds of millions of dollars from America’s crankiest right-wing billionaires in order to fund the election of people dedicated to slashing every possible program that protects the weak and takes care of those in need? It’s hard to understand why America’s poor and working class are so obstinately misguided about what America’s moneyed class really wants.

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Quote of the Day: Billionaires Insist that Billionaire-Friendly Policies Don’t Actually Benefit Billionaires

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Charts: How Work Email Has Taken Over Our Personal Lives

Mother Jones

It’s dinnertime, and you know its just wrong to be checking your email. Your spouse and kids are giving you the stink-eye. But it’ll just take a minute. One minute. Seriously. There’s just this super-quick thing from the boss that you’ve gotta deal with.

American workers, especially white-collar workers, are becoming an army of smartphone addicts, and we beat ourselves up even as we indulge in the rudest of modern habits. But we’re not entirely to blame for our weakness, as Clive Thompson reports in the latest issue of Mother Jones. Much of the encroachment of technology into our lives is driven by work, and workplace demands are escalating as a direct result of the so-called convenience that Steve Jobs has placed in our pockets. As Thompson notes in his must-read essay, “You could view off-hours email as one of the growing labor issues of our time.” So here are a few stats that outline the issue, and one that suggests how smart companies might help address it.

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Charts: How Work Email Has Taken Over Our Personal Lives

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Roz Chast: The MoJo Years

Mother Jones

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While cartoonist Roz Chast is best known as a fixture in the pages of the New Yorker, back in the day she was also a regular contributor to Mother Jones. Below, we’ve collected Chast’s work from the pages of MoJo between 1983 and 1988.
Plus: Read an interview with Chast about her new cartoon memoir, Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?

August 1983

September/October 1983

November 1983

December 1983

January 1984

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February/March 1984

April 1984

May 1984

June 1984

July 1984

August/September 1984

November 1984

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December 1984

January 1985

February/March 1985

May 1985

June 1985

July 1985

August/September 1985

October 1985

January 1986

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February/March 1986

April/May 1986

June 1986

July/August 1986

September 1986

October 1986

November 1986

December 1986

January 1987

May 1987

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June/July 1987

August/September 1987

October 1987

November 1987

December 1987

January 1988

February/March 1988

April 1988

May 1988

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June 1988

July/August 1988

September 1988

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Roz Chast: The MoJo Years

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China Is Still Just a Jumbo Version of Albania

Mother Jones

I don’t want to pretend to some kind of faux naivete here, but can someone tell me why there’s suddenly a big frenzy about whether China is now the biggest economy in the world? China has 1.3 billion people. Of course they’re eventually going to eventually be bigger than the US. If not this year, then next year or the year after. Everyone knows this. Everyone has always known this. It’s no surprise, and it’s no big deal. They’ve still got about the per capita GDP of Albania, and it will be decades before they become even a middle-income country.

So who cares if they’re fudging the official numbers or the PPP calculations are being done wrong or whatever? Why does anyone even remotely care about this supposed milestone?

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China Is Still Just a Jumbo Version of Albania

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The NBA Just Hit Donald Sterling With a Lifetime Ban

Mother Jones

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The NBA is no longer OK with awful racist Donald Sterling’s awful racism.

Commissioner Adam Silver just announced that the Los Angeles Clippers owner has been banned from the NBA for life and fined $2.5 million. Sterling will be banned from all basketball operations and from attending any NBA games.

Further, Silver said he will be urging the NBA Board of Governors to force Sterling to sell the franchise.

Two-and-a-half million is the largest fine allowed by under the NBA’s constitution but, as Mother Jones‘ Ian Gordon points out, it’s really just pocket change for him.

“The discipline issued today is based on the Commissioner’s conclusion that Mr. Sterling violated league rules through his expressions of offensive and hurtful views, the impact of which has been widely felt though out the league,” the NBA said in a statement.

The announcement was immediately hailed by league players. The Clippers website right now:

This post has been updated.

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The NBA Just Hit Donald Sterling With a Lifetime Ban

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Friday Cat Blogging – 25 April 2014

Mother Jones

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If Vermeer painted cats, perhaps this is what a Vermeer cat would look like. All Domino needs is a pearl earring and a slightly more beguiling expression on her furry mug. Unfortunately, she’s sporting her all-too-common disdain for the stupid black box that I keep pointing in her direction while she’s trying to take a nice, peaceful nap.

And now for one last fundraising pitch. We’re getting close to the $100,000 goal for our investigative reporting fundraiser, and we have a few days left to get there. So how about a wee donation? If you value our reporting—or just want me to leave Domino alone so she can get her beauty rest—please donate $5 to the Mother Jones Investigative Fund. If you can afford it, make it $10. We’ll put it to good use. Here’s how to make a contribution:

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Friday Cat Blogging – 25 April 2014

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College Doesn’t Pay Off for Everyone

Mother Jones

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Why has college enrollment edged downward in recent years? After all, the college premium is still pretty handsome, which makes a university degree a pretty good investment. Dean Baker thinks the answer might lie in how the college premium is distributed:

Work by my colleague John Schmitt and Heather Boushey shows that a substantial proportion of college grads, especially male college grads, earn less than the average high school grad. They found that the lowest earning quintile of recent college grads (ages 25-34) earned less than the average high school grad. The implication is that many young people may be reasonably assessing their risks of not being a winner among college grads and therefore opting not to get additional education. To get more young people to attend college it is important that most can predictably benefit from the additional education, not just that the average pay of college grads rises.

I’m not sure I buy this. Schmitt and Boushey present the chart on the right, and sure enough, the lowest ten percent of college grads (red line) earn less than the average high school grad. But this has always been true. What’s more, it’s actually less true today than in the past. Among both men and women, even the lowest-achieving college grad is relatively better off now than in 1980.

Even if the bottom 10 percent are still worse off than an average high school grad, I’m not sure how a rising trend could lead to lower assessments of the value of college paying off. It seems like there must be more going on here than that.

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College Doesn’t Pay Off for Everyone

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Quote of the Day: Will Obamacare Deliver More Votes Than Medicare?

Mother Jones

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From Jonathan Bernstein, questioning whether Obamacare will ever be a vote winner for Democrats:

After Medicare passed in 1965, voters “rewarded” Democrats for Medicare with big midterm losses in 1966 and then by putting Republicans in the White House in five of the next six presidential elections.

Actually, that’s….true, isn’t it? Even granting that there was a lot of other stuff going on in 1966, let’s hope that history doesn’t repeat itself.

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Quote of the Day: Will Obamacare Deliver More Votes Than Medicare?

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Blood Moon!

Mother Jones

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It turns out that timing is everything with the blood moon. We had a thin little haze of clouds passing across the sky here in Irvine, so I couldn’t get a very sharp image, but at 11:24 pm, the moon was still disappointingly moon-colored. By 12:03 am, however, it was satisfyingly florid. Enjoy.

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Blood Moon!

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Nobody Cares What You Think Unless You’re Rich

Mother Jones

In a simple model of democratic politics, there are three basic drivers of political decisionmaking:

The collective opinion of average citizens
The collective opinion of the affluent
The lobbying of interest groups

But which of these really matter? Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page studied 1,779 policy outcomes over two decades and came to a pretty simple conclusion: the collective opinion of average citizens doesn’t matter a whit:

When the preferences of interest groups and the affluent are held constant, it just doesn’t matter what average folks think about a policy proposal. When average citizens are opposed, there’s a 30 percent chance of passage. When average citizens are wildly in favor, there’s still only a 30 percent chance of passage. Conversely, the odds of passage go from zero when most of the affluent are opposed to more than 50 percent when most of the affluent are in favor.

Interest group lobbying, it turns out, also has an effect on policymaking—but business interest groups matter a lot more than mass interest groups. This comes via John Sides, who has much more detail about the study here. But none of it should come as a surprise. We’ve seen plenty of results like this before.

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Nobody Cares What You Think Unless You’re Rich

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