Tag Archives: mother

It’s Not the 1 Percent Controlling Politics. It’s the 0.01 Percent.

by Jamie Cox Posted on April 23, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Even before presidential candidates started lining up billionaires to kick-start their campaigns, it was clear that the 2016 election could be the biggest big-money election yet. This chart from the political data shop Crowdpac illustrates where we may be headed: Between 1980 and 2012, the share of federal campaign contributions coming from the very, very biggest political spenders—the top 0.01 percent of donors—nearly tripled:

In other words, a small handful of Americans* control more than 40 percent of election contributions. Notably, between 2010 and 2012, the total share of giving by these donors jumped more than 10 percentage points. That shift is likely the direct result of the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United ruling, which struck down decades of fundraising limits and kicked off the super-PAC era. And this data only includes publicly disclosed donations, not dark money, which almost certainly means that the megadonors’ actual share of total political spending is even higher.

It’s pretty fair to assume that most of these top donors are also sitting at the top of the income pyramid. Out of curiosity, I compared the share of campaign cash given by elite donors alongside the increasing share of income controlled by the people who make up the top 0.01 percent—the 1 percent of the 1 percent. The trend lines aren’t an exact match, but they’re close enough to show how top donors’ political clout has increased along with top earners’ growing slice of the national income. Again, note the bump around 2010 and 2011, when the Citizens United era opened just as the superwealthy were starting to recover from the recession—a rebound that has left out most Americans.

Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that a few hundred people control 40 percent of election contributions, based on my own calculations. According to Crowdpac, the number is around 25,000.

Jump to original:  

It’s Not the 1 Percent Controlling Politics. It’s the 0.01 Percent.

Posted in alo, Citizen, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on It’s Not the 1 Percent Controlling Politics. It’s the 0.01 Percent.

Obama Has a Plan to Expand Medicaid in Red States—by Weakening It

by HattieEdmiston Posted on April 22, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

One of the Affordable Care Act’s major provisions sought to expand the number of people covered by Medicaid by allowing people earning up to 138 percent of the poverty line to enroll.

But in many parts of the country, it hasn’t worked out that way. Individual states are largely responsible for running Medicaid, and despite the act’s generous terms—the federal government promised to initially cover 100 percent of the cost, then 90 percent after 2016—only 29 states have taken the deal. Of the holdouts, most are conservative states with Republican governors where Obama is unpopular.

Some red states have been coming around, lured by of the enormous infusion of federal funds they’ll receive by expanding Medicaid. And without participating, states soon stand to lose billions in other payments designed to compensate hospitals for care for the uninsured. (Florida could lose more than $2 billion on account of leaving 800,000 residents uninsured who could otherwise be covered under Medicaid.)

Despite that carrot and stick, Republican-controlled states have demanded additional concessions from the Obama administration before taking part in the expansion—and in many cases, as a new paper from the National Health Law Program suggests, the administration has agreed to changes that undermine its own goal of expanding coverage.

These changes have made some states’ Medicaid programs more, well, Republican—not to mention punitive. Take Arkansas, which in 2013 was allowed to use its Medicaid funds to let poor residents buy private insurance on the state health exchange—policies that may not have the same protections or coverage as traditional Medicaid. Iowa and New Hampshire have followed suit. According to the NHLP, these initial waivers emboldened states to seek even greater concessions. An example is Indiana, where, in exchange for agreeing to expand Medicaid, officials not only won the right to charge poor people premiums and co-payments, but also to lock people out of the program for at least six months if they fail to pay those premiums.

The administration has granted such waivers through its authority to authorize so-called demonstration projects to encourage policy innovation in the states. But NHLP contends that waivers like Indiana’s violate the law, which “requires demonstrations to actually demonstrate something.” As NHLP points out, reams of research have long showed that such premiums dramatically reduce health coverage for low-income people. After the Obama administration granted Indiana’s request, Arkansas went back to ask for permission to charge premiums, too. And it prevailed.

And yet some states still want more. Florida, for instance, is considering a bill that would use billions of dollars of Medicaid money to provide vouchers to poor people to buy private insurance. But anyone getting a voucher would have to pay mandatory premiums, and also either have a job or be in school. Childless adults need not apply. (The administration hasn’t signed off on this one—yet.)

NHLP suggests that the Obama administration is undercutting its very strong bargaining position by allowing states to dismantle Medicaid through waivers, at the expense of the very poor and sick. Its white paper notes that Medicaid’s history proves even the most ardent opponents of government health care eventually come around: In 1965, when the program was first created, only 26 states joined in. Five years later, though, almost all had.

Read the article: 

Obama Has a Plan to Expand Medicaid in Red States—by Weakening It

Posted in alo, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Obama Has a Plan to Expand Medicaid in Red States—by Weakening It

Washington State Is So Screwed

by ThaddeusChifley Posted on April 22, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

California’s been getting all the attention, but it isn’t the only agriculture-centric western state dealing with brutal drought. Washington, a major producer of wheat and wine grapes and the source of nearly 70 percent of US apples grown for fresh consumption, also endured an usually warm and snow-bereft winter.

The state’s Department of Ecology has declared “drought emergencies” in 24 of the state’s 62 watersheds, an area comprising 44 percent of the state. Here’s more from the agency’s advisory:

Snowpack statewide has declined to 24 percent of normal, worse than when the last statewide drought was declared in 2005. Snowpack is like a frozen reservoir for river basins, in a typical year accumulating over the winter and slowly melting through the spring and summer providing a water supply for rivers and streams. This year run-off from snowmelt for the period April through September is projected to be the lowest on record in the past 64 years.

The drought regions include apple-heavy areas like Yakima Valley and the Okanogan region. Given that warmer winters—and thus less snow—are consistent with the predictions of climate change models, the Washington drought delivers yet more reason to consider expanding fruit and vegetable production somewhere far from the west coast. That’s an idea I’ve called de-Californication (see here and here). But we’ll need a new term to encompass the northwest. De-westernization? Doesn’t have quite the same ring.

Source article: 

Washington State Is So Screwed

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Washington State Is So Screwed

Tales From City of Hope #3: The Stop Sign For Dwarves

by Garland36G Posted on April 22, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

This is the stop sign at the end of the road that runs outside my apartment in Parsons Village. It is about three feet high.

There are no other stop signs on the corner. As far as I can tell, there are (currently) no obstructions that prevent building a normal height sign. All the other traffic signs in the vicinity are normal height.

So what’s the deal? Did it replace a normal height sign that trams and maintenance carts that kept ignoring? Is it some kind of “fun” sign for the kiddies? Did someone write the specs in metric, and 3 meters became 3 feet somehow? Any other ideas?

See more here – 

Tales From City of Hope #3: The Stop Sign For Dwarves

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Tales From City of Hope #3: The Stop Sign For Dwarves

New Document Cache Shows the Real Roots of ISIS Are as Much Secular as Religious

by DollyMoris Posted on April 21, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Spiegel has quite a fascinating report this week about the origins and growth of ISIS. It’s a great counterpoint to Graeme Wood’s Atlantic piece from February that focused on the Islamic and theological roots of ISIS and the territorial ambitions of its self-appointed caliph, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

But it turns out that this is far from the whole story. According to Christopher Reuter, a recently discovered cache of documents shows that the founding architect of ISIS was actually Haji Bakr, the pseudonym of Samir Abd Muhammad al-Khlifawi, a former colonel in the intelligence service of Saddam Hussein’s air defense force. Bakr, who lost his job and his power in 2003 when Paul Bremer made the decision to disband the Iraqi army, was the real mastermind behind ISIS. In dozens of detailed pages written in 2012, he laid out an organizational plan for the kind of pervasive, brutally efficient spy state he knew best:

It seemed as if George Orwell had been the model for this spawn of paranoid surveillance. But it was much simpler than that. Bakr was merely modifying what he had learned in the past: Saddam Hussein’s omnipresent security apparatus, in which no one, not even generals in the intelligence service, could be certain they weren’t being spied on.

….There is a simple reason why there is no mention in Bakr’s writings of prophecies relating to the establishment of an Islamic State allegedly ordained by God: He believed that fanatical religious convictions alone were not enough to achieve victory. But he did believe that the faith of others could be exploited. In 2010, Bakr and a small group of former Iraqi intelligence officers made Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the emir and later “caliph,” the official leader of the Islamic State. They reasoned that Baghdadi, an educated cleric, would give the group a religious face.

So the roots of ISIS are purely pragmatic: Bakr wanted to build an organization that could retake Iraq, and he calculated that this could best be done by combining the secular mechanisms of Saddam Hussein with the religious fanaticism of an Al Qaeda. The whole piece is well worth a read.

From:

New Document Cache Shows the Real Roots of ISIS Are as Much Secular as Religious

Posted in alo, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on New Document Cache Shows the Real Roots of ISIS Are as Much Secular as Religious

Chart of the Day: Obamacare Is Popular!

by Zeniarwpzz Posted on April 21, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Guess what? Obamacare’s popularity has been rising slowly but steadily for the past two years, and in April it hit a milestone. According to Kaiser, it is now more popular than unpopular. Not by much, but at least it’s making progress.

Source: 

Chart of the Day: Obamacare Is Popular!

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Chart of the Day: Obamacare Is Popular!

Tired of Remembering Passwords? Try Swallowing Them Instead.

by Keenan11Mzrcnj Posted on April 21, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Chances are you’re bad at passwords. Most of us are. A recent statistic offered up by Jonathan LeBlanc, the global head of developer advocacy at PayPal, suggests that nearly 10 percent of people have a password consisting of 123456, 12345678, or, simply, “password.”

LeBlanc has some bold thoughts on improving this state of affairs. As he told the Wall Street Journal last week, “embeddable, injectable, and ingestible devices” are the next step companies will use to identify consumers for “mobile payments and other sensitive online interactions.”

From the Journal:

While there are more advanced methods to increase login security, like location verification, identifying people by their habits like the way they type in their passwords, fingerprints and other biometric identifiers, these can lead to false negative results, where valid users can’t log in to their online services, and false positives, where invalid users can log in.

Mr. Leblanc pointed to more accurate methods of identity verification, like thin silicon chips which can be embedded into the skin. The wireless chips can contain ECG sensors that monitor the heart’s unique electrical activity, and communicate the data via wireless antennae to “wearable computer tattoos.”

Ingestible capsules that can detect glucose levels and other unique internal features can use a person’s body as a way to identify them and beam that data out.

To be fair, LeBlanc told the paper that these specific technologies aren’t necessarily things that PayPal is planning, but he’s been raising the possibility in a presentation he’s been giving, and has said the online dealbroker is “definitely looking at the identity field” as a means of allowing users a more secure way to identify themselves.

You don’t have to be a “mark of the beast” person or a conspiracy theorist to have concerns. Indeed, what could possibly go wrong with a little implanted device that reads your vein patterns or your heart’s unique activity or blood glucose levels just so you can seamlessly buy that cup of Starbucks? Wouldn’t an insurance company love to use that information to decide that you had one too many donuts—so it won’t be covering that bypass surgery after all?

As the Wall Street Journal cautiously notes, “Mr. Leblanc admits that there’s still a ways to go before cultural norms catch up with ingestible and injectable ID devices.”

Read this article:

Tired of Remembering Passwords? Try Swallowing Them Instead.

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, PUR, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Tired of Remembering Passwords? Try Swallowing Them Instead.

Welfare Reform and the Decline of Work

by UnitedCashLoans Posted on April 18, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

A recent paper suggests that over the past two decades there’s been a decline in the desire of people outside the labor force to ever get jobs. Why?

We conjecture that two mechanisms could explain these results. First, the EITC expansion raised family income and reduced secondary earners’s (typically women) incentives to work. Second, the strong work requirements introduced by the AFDC/TANF reform would have, through a kind of “sink or swim” experience, left the “weaker” welfare recipients without welfare and pushed them away from the labor force and possibly into disability insurance.

This comes via Tyler Cowen, who attended an NBER session this morning conducted by the authors of this study. He came away thinking they probably hadn’t made a strong case. Still, an interesting hypothesis that probably deserves followup.

Visit site: 

Welfare Reform and the Decline of Work

Posted in FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta, Vintage | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Welfare Reform and the Decline of Work

Are Republicans Finally Giving Up on Killing Obamacare?

by ShaneLanglais Posted on April 18, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Let me say right up front that I’m skeptical of the following report. But then, maybe I’m blinded by partisanship. Who knows? In any case, here is Noam Levey writing in the LA Times today:

After five years and more than 50 votes in Congress, the Republican campaign to repeal the Affordable Care Act is essentially over. GOP congressional leaders, unable to roll back the law while President Obama remains in office and unwilling to again threaten a government shutdown to pressure him, are focused on other issues, including trade and tax reform.

Less noted, senior Republican lawmakers have quietly incorporated many of the law’s key protections into their own proposals, including guaranteeing coverage and providing government assistance to help consumers purchase insurance.

….At the same time, the presumed Republican presidential front-runner, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, has shown little enthusiasm for a new healthcare fight. Last year, he even criticized the repeal effort….“Only 18% of Americans want to go back to the system we had before because they do not want to go back to some of the problems we had,” Whit Ayres, a veteran Republican pollster said….”Smart Republicans in this area get that,” he added.

Well, maybe. Levey concedes that there will still be plenty of calls to repeal Obamacare during the 2016 presidential campaign, but he believes that in practice, Republicans will be unwilling to seriously gut a program that’s now providing health coverage for 20 million Americans, a number that will only increase over the next two years.

This is an argument I’ve made myself on multiple occasions, so I ought to be sympathetic to it. And I guess I am. On the other hand, I’ve been repeatedly astonished at the relentlessness of the GOP base’s hatred of Obamacare. Over and over, I thought it would fade out. Maybe when the Supreme Court ruled it was constitutional. Maybe when Obama won in 2012. Maybe when the law finally took full effect in 2014. But like the Energizer bunny, their unholy enmity toward the law just kept going and going and going.

So is Obamacare Derangement Syndrome finally burning itself out? I guess I’ll believe it when I see it. But maybe.

See the original post: 

Are Republicans Finally Giving Up on Killing Obamacare?

Posted in Bunn, Casio, FF, GE, LG, ONA, PUR, Uncategorized, Venta, Vintage | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Are Republicans Finally Giving Up on Killing Obamacare?

Bonus Friday Cat Blogging – 17 April 2015

by CeciliaPlate Posted on April 17, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

My sister has given me loads of catblogging photos to choose from, and this week I’m choosing this one. I understand that Hilbert contested Hopper’s right to this spot for a bit, but Hopper defended herself and is now queen of the chair. She has quite the regal presence.

In the meantime, padded coat hangers have been dragged downstairs, temporary window coverings have turned into cat toys, and someone is apparently pulling blue masking tape down from somewhere. On the brighter side, both cats have decided that jumping up on the couch and snoozing next to Karen while she reads or watches TV is really not a bad alternative to whoever those folks were who used to provide laps and cat food.

I understand more cat blogging will be coming later. Keep your eyes peeled.

Follow this link:

Bonus Friday Cat Blogging – 17 April 2015

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta, Vintage | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Bonus Friday Cat Blogging – 17 April 2015