Tag Archives: miami

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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How Top GOP Donors Got Jeb Bush to Facilitate a Hurricane Katrina Cruise-Ship Boondoggle

by Myrna Posted on August 28, 2015

A quarter billion dollars later, the ships sat half empty. Then Florida Gov. Jeb Bush visits the Miami-Dade Emergency Operations Center the Friday after Hurricane Katrina passed through in August, 2005. Lannis Waters/Palm Beach Post/ZUMA Trailing Donald Trump in the polls by a widening margin, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush is trying to use the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina on Saturday to highlight his successes in crisis response. On Tuesday, his presidential campaign released a two-minute ad promoting Bush’s handling of hurricanes as governor. Bush has been widely praised for his response to Katrina, in contrast with the criticism his brother, George W. Bush, faced as president in addressing the disaster. But one thing Jeb Bush is not likely to mention on the anniversary is how he helped Carnival Cruise Lines—via a major GOP donor—land a quarter-billion-dollar federal contract to house people displaced by the hurricane. The fast-tracked contract sent $236 million to the Florida-based cruise company, but the ships sat half empty for weeks, according to the Associated Press, which wrote in 2006 that the deal “has been criticized by lawmakers of both parties as a prime example of wasted spending in Hurricane Katrina-related contracts.” Read the rest at Mother Jones. Original link –  How Top GOP Donors Got Jeb Bush to Facilitate a Hurricane Katrina Cruise-Ship Boondoggle ; ; ;

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How Top GOP Donors Got Jeb Bush to Facilitate a Hurricane Katrina Cruise-Ship Boondoggle

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Will New Orleans Survive the Next Katrina?

by Myrna Posted on August 26, 2015

Take a bird’s-eye tour of the $50 billion battle to save Louisiana. I’m driving down a dirt road in the vast tangle of coastal bayous that stretch south of New Orleans, so that Reggie Dupre can show me his pride and joy. “This is the little silver lining on the very dark cloud that was over Louisiana,” he says. In front of us, construction crews are shaping mounds of rock and dirt into a mile-long, 12-foot levy. On one side is a canal, crammed with boat traffic for the offshore oil drilling industry. On the other side is Terrabonne Parish, a rural community of commercial shrimp fishermen and oil roughnecks who rely on these waterways the same way a city kid like me relies on the subway. The levy dead-ends into a shiny new $25 million floodgate, the last line of defense against storm surges that accompany the hurricanes that frequently slam this coastline. Dupre is the director of the Terrabonne Levy and Conservation District, a county agency tasked with keeping the homes here above water. A decade ago—when Hurricane Katrina forced 1.5 million evacuations, killed nearly 2,000 people, and caused $100 billion in damage—Dupre was the parish’s representative in the Louisiana legislature in Baton Rouge. After the storm, he became a key architect of the state’s overhauled flood-control agenda, pushing through legislation to create a new state agency to manage coastal issues and working to steer tax revenue from oil drilling into coastal protection projects. Now he’s back home, overseeing projects like the one in front of us. Since Katrina, his office has built 35 miles of new levees. But the levees are just a small piece of the unprecedented transformation taking place along Louisiana’s coast. Dupre is also an evangelist for a new, broader ethos that has washed over the whole state since Katrina. Experts here agree that levees and floodwalls like this are only effective if they’re buttressed by natural barriers further out in the delta: The barrier islands and marshlands that are rapidly disappearing thanks to erosion, land subsidence, and sea level rise. Because of those forces—driven in part by a century-old practice of sealing the Mississippi River in its course and thereby starving the adjacent wetlands of nutrients and fresh water—Louisiana loses coastal land area equal to the size of a football field every hour. Before the storm, hurricane protection and coastal restoration were treated as separate, or ever competing, interests. Now, they’re one and the same. “Without Katrina, this wouldn’t be happening,” Dupre says. “We’ve gone from being the laughingstock to the model for the rest of the country.” In 2012, officials in the state’s new Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority—Dupre’s brainchild—released their most recent 50-year, $50 billion “master plan,” a sweeping document that encompasses everything from wetland restoration to elevating at-risk houses. Already, according to CPRA chair Chip Kline, the state has reconstructed 45 miles of barrier islands and restored nearly 30,000 acres of wetlands. These natural barriers slow storm surge before it reaches the levees, the first in what are known here as “multiple lines of defense.” There are also 250 miles of new levees, a two-mile storm surge barrier wall, the world’s largest pumping station (it can drain an Olympic-sized swimming pool in less than five seconds), and a host of other projects designed to control floods and stymie land loss. Kline says he’s confident that New Orleans is now safe from at least a 100-year flood (that is, a flood so severe that it has only has a 1-in-100 chance of occurring in any given year). Katrina was a 150-year flood in New Orleans. But given the realities of climate change, most experts think the city won’t be truly secure until it reaches the 500-year level. President Barack Obama agrees: Earlier this year he signed an executive order stipulating that any flood protection measures supported by federal money must meet a 500-year standard. Louisianans like Kline and Dupre contend that that standard is unreasonable and could hamper vital projects that are too expensive for the state to roll out on its own. Either way, the Louisiana coast is now a massive laboratory for the kinds of measures that coastal cities like New York and Miami will need to survive climate change. For Dupre, the stakes are clear: “If I’m not successful, my whole culture disappears.” There’s no better way to see the coast’s plight, and the scramble to save it, than from a bird’s-eye view. So Climate Desk hopped aboard a pontoon plane for an exclusive flyover. Check out the video above. More:   Will New Orleans Survive the Next Katrina? ; ; ;

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Will New Orleans Survive the Next Katrina?

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Miami Nice: Are Florida’s Power Brokers Mellowing on Cuba?

by CharoletteCambe Posted on August 12, 2015

Mother Jones

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For decades, Florida’s Cuban exile community has ensured that the United States maintained its tough policy toward the island nation. From Miami, these fierce opponents of Fidel Castro plotted to overthrow the Cuban dictator and channeled funds to dissidents. This made them logical allies of communism-denouncing Republicans, and the exile community’s wealth and political savvy made it a crucial voting bloc, not to be crossed by either party, in a state that can decide presidential elections. But attitudes have shifted. The embargo doesn’t hold the same importance for younger Cubans and those who left Cuba for economic reasons. The major players now fall into three categories: hardliners who continue to oppose any change in policy until the Castros are out of power; reformers who have long pushed for normalization; and converts whose views have softened.

The Hardliners

Sen. Marco Rubio, though his parents came to Florida before the Cuban Revolution, has made anti-Castro opposition central to his political career. He vows to roll back Obama’s efforts to normalize relations once he is in the White House.

Jeb Bush, whose political roots lie in Miami’s Cuban exile community, has called Obama’s policy a “tragedy.” But his opposition has been less aggressive than Rubio’s, a reflection of changing attitudes in Florida and disagreement among his own advisers.

Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, who fled Havana when she was eight, began her political career in the Florida Legislature in 1982, when a tough position on Cuba was a political necessity. The Republican has slammed normalization with Cuba as a “propaganda coup for the Castro brothers.”

Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart, another Republican, hails from a powerful Miami family—his father was a Cuban politician before Fidel Castro seized power, and his aunt was Fidel’s first wife. A member of the House appropriations committee, he has tried to undermine Obama’s policy by attaching riders to spending bills—including a provision blocking flights and cruise ship routes to Cuba.

Gus Machado, a wealthy Miami auto dealer and Republican donor, is the treasurer of the US-Cuba Democracy PAC, the main political advocacy group opposing normalization.

Remedios Diaz-Oliver, the Miami-based CEO of a major plastic container company and a board member of that PAC, has called Obama’s policy of normalization “Bay of Pigs II.”

Mel Martinez, a former GOP senator from Florida who fled Cuba as a teenager, supported Obama’s 2009 decision to lift travel restrictions for people visiting relatives in Cuba, but he has blasted the president’s decision to normalize relations.

Al Cardenas, the former head of the Florida GOP, is now a lobbyist and adviser to Jeb Bush. His opposition to normalizing relations has put him at odds with others in Bush’s inner circle.

The Reformers

Ricardo Herrero, the onetime executive director of the Miami-Dade Democratic Party, cofounded #CubaNow in 2014 to pressure the White House to normalize relations with Cuba—part of a lobbying campaign spearheaded by the Trimpa Group.

Mike Fernandez, a Cuban exile billionaire, is a big GOP donor and an ally of the Bush clan. But on Cuba, he’s in Obama’s corner. “I am not a fan of President Obama, but after 50-plus years, this is long overdue.”

Manny Diaz, a lawyer who was born in Cuba, rose to prominence representing the Miami relatives of Elián González, thereafter becoming the city’s mayor.

Jorge Pérez, Florida’s “Condo King,” supports lifting the embargo and says doing so may lead to a real estate boom on the island: “Demand for second homes will be much bigger than the Bahamas, Puerto Rico, or Dominican Republic.”

The Converts

Carlos Saladrigas, a Miami millionaire who was once a fierce advocate of the embargo, now says the old policy has held the Cuban people back. In 2000, he cofounded the Cuba Study Group, an organization of Cuban business leaders to promote engagement.

Carlos Gutierrez, who fled Cuba as a child, was George W. Bush’s commerce secretary and is now a Jeb supporter. Gutierrez recently embraced normalization, penning a New York Times op-ed titled, “A Republican Case for Obama’s Cuba Policy.”

Alfonso Fanjul leads a vast sugar and real estate empire with his brothers. For decades they bankrolled anti-Castro efforts. But Alfonso shocked the exile community last year when he said he was open to doing business in Cuba. His brother Andres has also mellowed, and is on the board of the Cuba Study Group, which calls for normalization. Meanwhile, his brother Pepe, a major GOP donor, has not joined his brothers in calling for change.

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Miami Nice: Are Florida’s Power Brokers Mellowing on Cuba?

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120 Years of Rocky US-Cuba Relations, in Pictures

by Rolland89L Posted on August 12, 2015

Mother Jones

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A brief history of the long, rocky relationship between the United States and Cuba, from the Spanish-American War through the recent reestablishment of diplomatic relations, as told in pictures.

Teddy Roosevelt made a name for himself when his Rough Riders charged San Juan Hill during the Spanish-American War. Above, the Sixth Infantry under Spanish fire from San Juan Hill in July 1898. William Dinwiddie/Library of Congress

At the end of 1898, Spain and the United States signed the Treaty of Paris, marking the end of the Spanish-American War. This 1900 campaign poster for the Republican Party trumpets the benefits of “American rule in Cuba.” Wikimedia

Students outside the University of Havana with their rifles in September 1933. President Garado Machado was overthrown in a coup in 1933. AP

In May 1934, Cuban President Carlos Mendieta (third from left) exchanges greetings with the US ambassador in Havana after the signing of the Cuban-American Treaty, which secured American rights to Guantanamo Bay. AP

Cuban President Fulgencio Batista with his family. Batista was elected in 1940, kicking off a period of close cooperation between Cuba and the United States. He left office in 1944, and in 1952 he launched a successful military coup. Harold Valentine/AP

With Batista back in power, Cuba became a party destination for Americans. Above, a troupe from the Tropicana Night Club entertains passengers on a Miami-Havana flight in 1953. AP

An American tourist in ’50s Havana Constantino Arias/Wikimedia

Ernest Hemingway at his home in San Francisco de Paula, Cuba, after being awarded the 1954 Nobel Prize in literature. The author said he “broke the training” and took a drink to celebrate. AP

In July 1953, a group of revolutionaries led by a young lawyer named Fidel Castro attacked the Moncada military barracks in Santiago de Cuba. The attack failed and Castro was imprisoned until 1955. AP

After fleeing to Mexico, Castro and his fellow insurgents returned to Cuba in 1956 to continue their civil war against Batista. Above, Cubans wait to withdraw money from a bank in April 1958. AP

Young rebels cruise Havana’s streets in January 1959 AP

A young woman patrolling Havana in January 1959. After leading a guerilla campaign in the Sierra Madre mountains, Castro’s forces defeated the government forces and Batista fled the country. AP

Fidel Castro (right) entered Havana with fellow revolutionary Camilo Cienfuegos on January 8, 1959. Wikimedia

Shortly after assuming power, Castro visited the United States, Canada, and a number of Central and South American countries. Above, Castro talks with Ed Sullivan. Harold Valentine/AP

Castro and W.A. Reiford, a Creek missionary from Oklahoma who came to Havana to open an orphanage in 1959. AP

Cuban revolutionary hero Ernesto “Che” Guevara (center) confers with Castro and Cuban President Osvaldo Dorticos in 1960. Prensa Latina/AP

In 1960, the United States enacted a trade embargo on Cuba. The following year, it closed its Cuban embassy, formerly ending diplomatic relations between the two countries. Above, an American flag is rolled up as the US embassy in Havana prepares to close. AP

President John F. Kennedy declares the United States will be “alert and fully capable” of dealing with any threat from Soviet-backed Cuba, on September 13, 1962. A month later, the 13-day Cuban Missile Crisis would bring the United States, Cuba, and the Soviet Union to the brink of war. AP

Police disperse anti-Castro demonstrators in New York City in September 1963. AP

Hijackings between the United States and Cuba spiked in the late 1960s and ’70s. Above, a passenger plane that was hijacked to Cuba in July 1968 returns to Miami with only the crew aboard. AP

The hijackings prompted some politicians to try to reopen communications between the two countries. Above, Senators Jacob Javits and Claiborne Pell visit Castro in Havana in September 1974. Charles Tasnadi/AP

President Jimmy Carter is surrounded by reporters in March 1977 after announcing that his administration would lift a travel ban to Cuba. The same year, the United States and Cuba opened “interest sections” to facilitate communication. AP

Refugees headed for Florida wait aboard a boat at the port of Mariel, Cuba, in April 1980. During what became known as the Mariel boatlift, 125,000 Cubans left the country. Jacques Langevin/AP

The Rev. Jesse Jackson meets with Castro and other Cuban officials in Havana in June 1984. J.Scott Applewhite/AP

US-Cuban relations cooled under Presidents Reagan and Bush. In October 1992, President George H. Bush signed legislation tightening the embargo on Cuba. The president said the bill would “speed the inevitable demise of the Cuban Castro dictatorship.” Ron Edmonds/AP

In August 1994, Castro suggested that any Cubans who wanted to leave were free to do so. More than 30,000 people sailed away on makeshift rafts while authorities stood by. Jose Goitia/AP

Elián González was rescued at sea while his mother attempted to bring him to the United States in 1999. The Clinton administration ordered that Elián be returned to his father, sending border patrol agents to remove him from his relatives’ house in Miami. In 2013, Elián described his time in the United States as “a very sad time for me.” Alan Diaz/AP

Following the September 11 attacks and the beginning of the war in Afghanistan, a detention camp for “enemy combatants” was established at the US naval base at Guantanamo Bay. Above, military guards take a Guantanamo detainee to an interrogation in March 2002. Andres Leighton/AP

As part of the December 2014 agreement to normalize relations between the United States and Cuba, the administration approved a quiet exchange of prisoners, including the three remaining members of the “Cuban Five.” Above, the Cuban Five (from left), including Gerardo Hernandez, Fernando Gonzalez, Antonio Guerrero, Rene Gonzalez, and Ramon Labanino, wave after a concert in Havana on December 20, 2014. Ramon Espinosa/AP

As part of the deal, Cuba released Alan Gross, an American aid worker who had been imprisoned since 2009. Above, Gross flies back to the United States with his wife on December 17, 2014. On July 20, 2015, the United States reopened its embassy in Cuba. Lawrence Jackson/White House

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120 Years of Rocky US-Cuba Relations, in Pictures

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Obama Just Burned GOP Climate Deniers In “Anger Translator” Rant

by FredQXHHqvqfj Posted on April 26, 2015

Mother Jones

Towards the end of his annual speech to the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner in the nation’s capital Saturday night, President Obama got “angry.” Aided by Luther, his “anger translator” (a character played by Comedy Central’s Keegan-Michael Key, from the TV show Key and Peele), President Obama launched into an epic tirade against climate deniers on Capitol Hill.

For those who aren’t familiar with the set-up of the skit featured on Key and Peele: “No-drama Obama” (played by Jordan Peele) can’t risk getting angry in public, so Luther translates what he’s really thinking, behind all the political soft-ball rhetoric. It’s quite brilliant.

When the real Obama got around to mentioning the big challenge of climate change on Saturday, Luther chimed in, filling in Obama’s supposedly unspoken rage: “California is bone-dry! It looks like the trailer for the new Max Max movie. You think Bradley Cooper came here because he wanted to talk to Chuck Todd? He wanted a glass of water! Come on!”

Eventually, though, Obama didn’t need his anger translator anymore:

“Look at what’s happening right now. Every serious scientist says we need to act,” Obama said, pitch and volume rising. “The Pentagon says it’s a national security risk. Miami floods on a sunny day, and instead of doing anything about it, we’ve got elected officials throwing snowballs in the Senate! It is crazy! What about our kids?! What kind of stupid, short-sighted, irresponsible…”

Luther finally intervenes:

“With all due respect, sir? You don’t need an anger translator. You need counseling.”

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Obama Just Burned GOP Climate Deniers In “Anger Translator” Rant

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How a War-Shattered African Nation Gave Birth to a Heavy-Metal Scene

by ToddBainerry Posted on November 17, 2014

Mother Jones

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When the dust cleared and the war formally ended in 2002, Angolans looked back on their previous 40 years and saw little more than violence and bloodshed. After 350 years of Portuguese rule, the country fell into a war of independence followed by a civil war. Factions became Cold War players. Armed with Western and Soviet weapons, the warring sides destroyed the little infrastructure the Portuguese had built, sowed the countryside with land mines, and displaced and killed people by the thousands.

Filmmaker Jeremy Xido’s new documentary, Death Metal Angola, is about what happens after those years of destruction. The film follows one woman, Sónia Ferreira, the mother figure behind an orphanage for boys, and her boyfriend, Wilker Flores, as they launch Angola’s first-ever metal festival in Huambo, Angola’s second-largest city. I asked Xido about his experiences with Angolan metal musicians, and how they are rebuilding a scene in a country whose culture was virtually lost amid the fighting.

Mother Jones: How did you first get interested in Angola?

Jeremy Xido: I was invited to Lisbon to work on a performance project, and the thing I was most struck by was the African presence in the city. It was very different than other cities in Europe. There was something intimate about it, so I just found myself talking to a lot of Africans. I was interviewing a young law student, and I asked her what she was going to end up doing when she was done with her degree. Would she stay in Europe? And she just looked at me like I was just insane. She said, “Europe’s dead. The future is Angola.”

I grew up in Detroit. I was the only white kid in my neighborhood. Everyone always talked about going “back to Africa,” even though no one actually knew where Africa was. And to hear this moment in which Angola wasn’t mythological in the sense of being a safe haven, or rife with clichés about the suffering of Africa—it was the first glimpse that I got of the continent being at the forefront of 21st century power and politics. I was like, “Okay, I have to go.”

MJ: Your film takes place not in the capital, Luanda, where Angola’s new oil wealth is concentrated, but in Huambo, a battleground during the war and still a really burnt-out city.

JX: That’s where the story was taking place. In the aftermath of the war, money started flowing into Luanda to turn it into a sort of Miami Beach poster child of “New Africa.” Huambo had been largely left alone. These were people who had experienced unimaginable things and survived, and the power of this particular music is that it can go to those deep places of human experience and allow people to touch them and express them collectively in such a way that’s permissible—people can tell the story of what happened, as opposed to that sort of Economist Angola: “Well, war is behind us, and now we’re marching to the future.” Huambo is a place that defies that approach, a place where the ghosts still exist and people are wrestling with them. It was interesting for me to juxtapose the glittering Luanda that people in the West hear about and this story that these people who had been fighters all their lives were telling. That tension became the real focus of the film.

MJ: Angola’s war is unique among African wars in that it employed so many modern weapons. There seems to be a parallel in this music—Angola destroys itself with Western bombs, and then Angola’s youth rebuild an identity with Western music.

JX: Angola is trying to figure out what the roots are, because people don’t fully know. Rock hit Portugal later than other parts of Europe. War was raging in Angola, and anybody who had enough money or enough luck sent their kids to live with relatives in Portugal—in the middle of this rock youth culture that was emerging as Portugal was coming out of a dictatorship. I think some of those guys came back and started their bands. And people like Sónia watched all of that music and fell in love with it. But because the war was raging, it was never possible to really connect all the different parts of the country. In the aftermath of the war, the young guys suddenly had access to the internet and technologies which could link different parts of the country. Even if you couldn’t drive from Luanda to Huambo, these technologies allowed people to know about each other, and those who knew about rock started to play it.

MJ: Is the music more a subject of conversation between Angolans, or just the means to have a conversation?

JX: I think it’s both. Socially it’s just really hard. You have to practice, you have to learn stuff, you have to seek out people, you have to teach each other. And you have to have band practice, which is, like, insane, because you have to mediate and negotiate between personalities. In and of itself, that’s rebuilding things that were lost in the years of the war: basic education, basic principles of conflict resolution.

Also, there’s a history of rock talking about things that authority doesn’t want you to talk about. So, in and of itself, to play the music is justice, an act of self-definition and release. Metal musicians, particularly death-metal musicians are some of the most erudite and curious, and also soft-spoken people I’ve met. I’ve always wondered about that since the thing they do on stage is so tough and the iconography is so bombastic. And then you realize there’s something unbelievable about getting together with a group of people and getting up in front of others and going to this very primal place—a primal place that requires an extreme technical capacity. But you go there together, and by permitting each other to go there, there’s the kind of release that exists anytime people tell what they believe to be the truth. That itself is an act, and that is the conversation.

MJ: You mentioned that the history of rock in the West is one of rebellion. Do they see it that way?

JX: We filmed this a couple years ago. At that time, there was a revolutionary act to just getting up on stage and doing this thing that people don’t understand and not getting shut down by the police. They couldn’t, at that moment, actively talk against the government, because they weren’t strong enough yet. Since then, they’ve continued to have concerts and festivals and different things that are growing exponentially. I really see the rock movement as the revolution that happens in the aftermath of destruction. It’s the thing that people don’t talk about. Media always talks about war, but nobody really talks about the day after, and the year after, and the five years after—what it means to rebuild. It’s that hidden story that’s less sensationalist, and less sexy. It’s much more complex, and much more human. You are confronted with your own inadequacies when you start thinking about the difficult things, the work of what it is to be human.

MJ: What is the future of metal in Angola? The musicians want to talk about the government, but Angola is an incredibly repressive country.

JX: They’re on a very thin line. It’s easy for me to travel around in the world and say whatever I want to say, but I have to be very careful about representing them in any way that might cause them trouble. Sónia and I have actually had moments where she’s read some interview and she’s like, “You can’t say these things. Think about where we are.”

MJ: How does one survive as a metal musician in Angola?

JX: A lot of the musicians from the bigger bands have jobs. There are a bunch who work at banks or in internet technology or satellite installation. Some of the big singers work for the military, in the air force. The younger guys, some of them don’t have work, and they struggle. They’ve also decided to have the concerts be free events so they can build an audience, so this is a moment of sweat equity for all of them. Sónia struggles day to day to keep 75 boys alive and healthy and to organize all this stuff. But I think it’s as much of a struggle to be a musician pretty much anywhere. The amount of love and passion at the core of this, and the amount of good that it brings to people is off the charts.

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How a War-Shattered African Nation Gave Birth to a Heavy-Metal Scene

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23 Reasons Why Jeb Bush Should Think Twice About Running for President

by AbbyHoinville Posted on September 9, 2014

Mother Jones

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For months, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush has been mentioned as a possible 2016 candidate, with the conventional wisdom holding that he was the one GOP contender the party’s donor class could unite behind. “Jeb has the capacity to bring the party together,” Fred Malek, a top Republican operative, told the Washington Post in March. Bush has yet to signal whether he’ll seek to follow in the footsteps of his older brother and their father by launching a bid for the White House, but the Wall Street Journal reported last week that his advisers have reached out to key fundraisers and consultants to ask them to hold off on throwing in with a presidential candidate until Bush makes up his mind sometime after the November election. One Bush family confidant told the Journal that there was a better than 50-50 chance that Bush would run.

But there are plenty of reasons why Bush should think long and hard before subjecting himself (and his family) to the ruthless scrutiny of a presidential campaign. His history is an opposition researcher’s dream—clouded by embarrassing family episodes, allegations of philandering, offensive comments to black voters, and dubious business dealings.

Many of these past deeds and misdeeds will no doubt be put under the microscope should Bush run in 2016. Here are 23 reasons why he might want to take a pass—and it’s only a partial list:

The shopaholic: Customs agents detained Bush’s wife, Columba, in 1999 at the Atlanta airport and fined her $4,100 for failing to declare the more than $19,000 in clothes and jewelry she’d purchased in Paris.

The addict: In 2002, Bush’s daughter Noelle was arrested for trying to purchase Xanax with a bogus prescription. In rehab, she was caught with a “white rock like substance” thought to be crack cocaine. Between 1995 and 2002, she racked up seven speeding tickets, five other traffic violations, and was involved in three wrecks.

The stalker: In 1994, Bush’s eldest son, George P., broke into his ex-girlfriend’s house. After fleeing her father, George returned to the scene and drove his SUV into their front lawn. His ex told the police that young George had “been a problem” since the breakup. Her father declined to press charges.

The other son: In 2000, cops discovered Bush’s 16-year-old son “Jebby” boffing a 17-year-old girl in a car in a mall parking lot. The police reported the incident of sexual misconduct, but Jebby wasn’t arrested.

The black sheep brother: Volumes have been written about Jeb’s siblings, especially former president George W. Bush. But his brother Neil, who helped bankrupt a savings and loan and once toured Asia with the late Rev. Sun Myung Moon while he was promoting the development of a 51-mile underwater highway between Russia and Alaska, will give reporters plenty to chew on.

The fraudster: In 1986, Camilo Padreda, who had been a counterintelligence officer for Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista in the 1950s, hired Bush to find tenants for office buildings financed with US Department of Housing and Urban Development-backed loans. Bush took the gig, despite the fact that four years earlier Padreda had been indicted for embezzling $500,000 from a Texas savings and loan. Those charges were dropped, but in 1989 Padreda pleaded guilty to defrauding HUD of millions. (Bush was not involved in that scam, and it’s unclear whether he was aware of the savings and loan indictment when he teamed up with Padreda.)

The international fugitive: In 1986, Miguel Recarey, who’d done 30 days in jail for income tax evasion in the 1970s, paid Bush $75,000 to help him find a new headquarters for his health care company. The company never moved, but while Bush’s father was serving as vice president, Bush lobbied the US Department of Health and Human Services to help Recarey access millions in Medicare funds. Bush also helped arrange for Recarey’s company to provide free medical care to the Nicaraguan contras. Recarey was later indicted for a massive Medicare fraud scheme but fled the country before trial. He is now an international fugitive.

The bribery case: In 1988, Bush formed a company with GOP donor David Eller to market water pumps manufactured by Moving Water Industries, another Eller business, to foreign countries. The company used Bush’s White House ties to drum up business. In 1992, at the behest of MWI, the Export-Import Bank approved $74 million in US-backed loans to Nigeria to buy water pumps from Eller’s company. The Justice Department later alleged in a 2002 civil suit that about $28 million of those loans were used to bribe a Nigerian official. Bush was not implicated, but in November 2013, a jury found MWI guilty of making 58 false claims to the Export-Import Bank on its applications for the Nigerian loans. A federal judge fined the company $580,000. Bush escaped testifying after the judge determined his testimony wouldn’t be relevant to the central issue in the case.

The fortunate son: Cuban American real estate developer Armando Codina was the Florida chair of George H.W. Bush’s unsuccessful 1980 bid for the GOP presidential nomination. He loved the Bush family so much that when Jeb first moved to Miami in the early 1980s, he made Bush a partner in his real estate company and gave him 40 percent of the profits—even though Jeb had no real estate experience or money to invest. In 1985, Bush and Codina bought an office building partially financed by a savings and loan that later failed. The $4.56 million loan went into default, but federal regulators gave Bush and his partner a pass. Instead of foreclosing, they merely asked them to repay $500,000 of the loan. Taxpayers picked up the rest. In 1991, Bush and Codina sold the building for $8 million.

The shady company: In 2007, Bush joined the board of InnoVida, a building materials-manufacturing startup founded by a businessman whose previous company had gone bankrupt under suspicious circumstances. Bush and his fellow board members subsequently failed to notice that InnoVida officials had used forged documents to fake solvency, hidden the company’s financial problems, and misappropriated $40 million. The company’s Maserati-driving founder eventually went to jail for money laundering, and investors lost their shirts when the company went bankrupt in 2011. Last year, Bush agreed to repay the $270,000 he was paid by the company as a consultant to reimburse defrauded investors.

The Big Finance fail: Bush signed on as a paid adviser to the financial giant Lehman Brothers in 2007, just as the firm was on the brink of collapse. The company hoped he would use his political ties to rescue it, but he couldn’t even convince Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim to throw some money into that pit.

The terrorist: In 1989, Bush successfully lobbied his father, who was then serving as president, for the release of Cuban terrorist Orlando Bosch, who allegedly orchestrated the bombing of a Cuban airliner that killed 73 people in 1976 and other terrorist attacks. Bosch, who was in a federal prison on an immigration violation and dubbed an “unrepentant terrorist” by then-Attorney General Dick Thornburgh, was a cause célèbre for Miami’s influential Cuban population—a voting bloc that Jeb needed to launch his political career.

The black vote: During his first failed campaign for governor in 1994, Bush was asked in a debate what he would do to help African Americans. “Probably nothing,” he replied. In 2000, his administration purged 12,000 eligible voters from the rolls because they were incorrectly identified as convicted felons. More than 40 percent of them were African Americans.

The welfare wife: During his 1994 campaign, Bush said that women on welfare “should be able to get their life together and find a husband.”

The Playboy bunny: In 1999, Bush appointed Cynthia Henderson as his secretary of business regulation. Bush later transferred Henderson, who had worked her way through law school as a bunny at the St. Petersburg Playboy club, to another job in his administration, after she got caught taking a trip to the Kentucky Derby on a corporate jet owned by a company she regulated and accepting lodging and tickets to the event from an association of race track regulators. (Henderson’s boyfriend, a Florida real estate developer, eventually paid the cost of the trip.) Rumors that Henderson and Bush were having an affair forced him to publicly deny philandering.

The socialist: While at the elite prep school Andover, Bush was briefly a member of the socialist club. He also smoked pot.

The failed charter school: After wining just 4 percent of the black vote in his first failed run for governor, Bush teamed up with the Greater Miami Urban League to start Florida’s first charter school. In 1999, the state implemented a school grading system at Bush’s insistence. His own charter school received a D. By 2008, the school had earned a C- and was $1 million in debt; the state shut it down that year.

The shady charter school operator: In 2010, Bush gave the commencement speech for the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow, an Ohio online charter school owned by William Lager, a big GOP donor who has served on Bush’s Digital Learning Council, which promotes for-profit online schools like ECOT. (Lager’s companies have also sponsored conferences hosted by Bush’s education foundation.) The school was far from a model for the future. At the time Bush gave his speech, ECOT’s graduation rate had never exceeded 40 percent. A 2001 state audit found that though the state had paid the school tuition for more than 2,000 students one month, only seven students had logged on to ECOT’s computer system. When state auditors couldn’t find the rest of the school’s alleged student body, ECOT was forced to repay Ohio $1.7 million. School founder William Lager’s private companies have earned more than $100 million from online schools that perform worse than any of Ohio’s worst brick-and-mortar public schools.

The cheaters: In 2010, Bush and his education reform organization, the Foundation for Excellence in Education, created a group of school superintendents and other high-ranking officials called “Chiefs for Change” to advance the Florida model of education, which emphasizes accountability and emphasized giving schools letter grades based on performance, especially standardized test scores. One of the original eight chiefs was caught inflating the grade of a lackluster charter school funded by a Republican donor. The office of another was caught manipulating test score data.

The IRS complaint: In October, a New Mexico advocacy group filed a complaint with the IRS alleging that Bush’s Foundation for Excellence in Education failed to disclose thousands of dollars it paid to bring public school superintendents, education officials, and lawmakers to the group’s events, where they had private “VIP” meetings with the foundation’s for-profit ed-tech company sponsors. The complaint alleges that Bush’s foundation disguised travel payments as “scholarships” to hide the fact that the nonprofit was facilitating lobbying between big corporations and public officials. The IRS has not commented on the complaint. Bush’s foundation issued a statement dismissing the allegations as politically motivated.

The immigration book: Last year, Bush published Immigration Wars, a book that took a hardline position against a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants. After going on TV to push the book’s anti-path-to-citizenship position—and being accused of having changed his position to avoid offending the tea party—he quickly reverted to his previous stance of supporting citizenship.

The Reagan comment: In 2012, Bush said publicly that Ronald Reagan would have had trouble getting his party’s presidential nomination today—meaning that the tea party had driven the GOP too far too the right. He told editors at Bloomberg, “Back to my dad’s time and Ronald Reagan’s time—they got a lot of stuff done with a lot of bipartisan support.” Reagan “would be criticized for doing the things that he did.”

The mother: In April, former First Lady Barbara Bush appeared on the Today Show and said that her son would be “by far the best qualified man, but…we’ve had enough Bushes.”

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23 Reasons Why Jeb Bush Should Think Twice About Running for President

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The NFL Finally Fixed Its Weak Domestic-Violence Penalties

by RusselProby Posted on August 29, 2014

Mother Jones

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The National Football League has drastically toughened its punishments for domestic violence after weeks of uproar over its weak response to the case of Baltimore Ravens running back Ray Rice. Rice received a two-game suspension after allegedly assaulting his fiancée, while players who tested positive for marijuana—some in states where weed is legal—were handed four-game and even season-long suspensions.

In a letter to NFL owners Thursday, commissioner Robert Goodell wrote that the league had fallen short in “a recent incident of domestic violence” and announced that a first-time domestic-violence offender would now receive a six-game suspension. Repeat offenders, he wrote, would face indefinite bans, with the possibility to apply for reinstatement after a year.

To be clear, there’s no epidemic of domestic violence among NFL players; this graph from FiveThirtyEight shows that NFL players are generally less likely to be arrested than the rest of 25-to-29-year-old American men*:



Rather, this smells a lot like a PR-related move from the league, which has seen its reputation suffer in the wake of Rice’s light penalty. After all, it’s not like the NFL jumped to punish any of the following four players, all of whom were involved in domestic incidents during Goodell’s tenure as commissioner:

AJ Jefferson: In February, Jefferson allegedly strangled his girlfriend and was arrested and charged with assault. The Minnesota Vikings released him hours later, but he was picked up by the Seattle Seahawks this spring.
Chad Johnson: In 2012, Johnson was arrested for head-butting his wife and charged with misdemeanor domestic battery. He pleaded no contest, was sentenced to probation and was cut by the Miami Dolphins.
Brandon Marshall: The Chicago Bears’ star wide receiver has one of the lengthier rap sheets in the league. Since 2004, he has been arrested five times, twice on domestic-violence charges, and has been involved in 10 disputes—many involving violence against women—in which no charges were filed. Marshall was suspended one game in 2009 over charges he’d abused his girlfriend in 2008 (he was acquitted); in 2007, he was arrested after preventing his girlfriend’s taxi from leaving his home, completed anger management, and did not receive punishment from the NFL.
Quinn Ojinnaka: The former Atlanta Falcons offensive lineman was suspended for one game in 2010 after a dispute in which he threw his wife down a flight of stairs and out of their home. (The dispute is said to have begun over Ojinnaka contacting a woman via Facebook.)

Ultimately, the NFL is deeply invested in maintaining a clean, family-friendly image, and Goodell is clearly responding to claims that the league takes smoking pot more seriously than it does violence against women. While it’s good that future domestic-violence offenders will receive more appropriate punishment, the timing of his letter—just a day after a vocal outcry about Rice’s punishment—makes it seem like the move of an embarrassed league looking to crack down on players who embarrass it.

Goodell is burnishing his reputation as an authoritarian who’s concerned with appearances, rather than a commissioner who leverages the league’s reach and resources to actually address issues like domestic violence.

*Note: As commenter Bumpasaurus pointed out, the data from the FiveThirtyEight chart is “adjusted for poverty status.” NFL players are wealthy, and compared to other, wealthy individuals in the same age group, “the domestic violence arrest rate is downright extraordinary.”

Originally posted here – 

The NFL Finally Fixed Its Weak Domestic-Violence Penalties

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Is Montana More Corrupt Than Miami?

by JaimeFunkhouser Posted on July 9, 2014

Mother Jones

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For such a sparsely populated state, Montana has managed to generate some outsized headlines lately. There’s the GOP Senate candidate who made news by suggesting that creationism should be taught in public schools. Then there’s Missoula’s reputation as the “rape capital” of the world, thanks to, among other things, serious allegations of sexual assault committed by University of Montana football players. And continuing that theme, there’s also the Justice Department’s investigation of the Missoula County Attorney’s office alleging that prosecutors had been systematically discriminating against female sexual abuse victims.

Now comes new data showing that Montana is leading the country in public corruption prosecutions, suggesting that the state’s reputation for graft (dating back to the days of the Copper Kings) hasn’t changed much. Clocking in with 18 active cases, the federal judicial district of Montana has had more public corruption prosecutions in 2014 than those in south Florida, southern California, and even New Jersey, according to data crunched by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University.

How is it that such a small state has so many prosecutions? “Why prosecutors do what they do is a mystery,” says TRAC’s David Burnham. But the prosecutors in Montana have a good explanation: They’ve recently organized a major crackdown on corruption on American Indian reservations, of which the state has seven.

A recent AP investigation concluded that, nationally, tribal governments are five times more likely to have “material weaknesses” in their administration that make corruption possible, and reporters for years have been sounding alarms that federal prosecutors have largely turned a blind eye to these problems. Montana decided to change that trend, at a time when millions in additional federal dollars have flowed into tribal governments thanks to the federal stimulus package enacted after the financial collapse in 2008.

In 2011, the US Attorney’s office launched a task force, dubbed the Guardians Project, with the FBI, the IRS, and inspectors general of various federal agencies, to target corruption on American Indian reservations. The results have been telling: In 2012, Montana had only one official corruption prosecution, but by August of last year, the Guardians Project had netted 25 indictments against people who’d allegedly done all sorts of devious things to keep federal money from reaching those it was supposed to help.

Prosecutors promised there would be more to come, and there have been. Just last month, four members of the Blackfeet tribe were sentenced to prison for involvement in a scheme to steal federal mental health and substance abuse treatment funds from a $9 million contract. More than $225,000 intended for the program ended up being spent on travel and gambling, among other things.

Six people have pleaded guilty to embezzling federal dollars from a $361 million pipeline project designed to bring freshwater to the Rocky Boy’s Indian Reservation. Another seven people from the Crow reservation were indicted for stealing at least half a million dollars from the tribe in a double-billing scheme operated out of the tribe’s historic preservation office. One of the people convicted in the scheme allowed a coal company to take a backhoe to a 2,000-year-old sacred bison burial site. The corruption investigations have already ensnared a former state representative and Chippewa Cree tribe official, Tony Belcourt, who in April pleaded guilty to bribery, theft and tax-evasion charges related to the water project, as well as construction of a multi-million dollar clinic.

Overall, though, Montana itself probably isn’t more scandal-plagued than New Jersey or Miami. Montana’s US Attorney has just taken a harder line on prosecuting the abuses on its reservations, and all those cases have added up to boost Montana to the top of the rankings in terms of public corruption prosecutions. “These figures from Syracuse reflect only a portion of our effort,” US Attorney Mike Cotter said in a statement Tuesday. “Many of the public corruption indictments brought in Montana were initiated before last October. Relatively speaking, Montana is a small office; a David among Goliaths. But the Guardians have done truly remarkable work. Their efforts have unearthed widespread criminal activity and flagrant abuses of trust with regard to federal programs and grants designed to provide for the common good of our Indian communities.”

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Is Montana More Corrupt Than Miami?

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