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Trump’s New Finance Chair Led a Bank That Made Millions Off Taxpayer Bailouts

by GilbertDowney Posted on May 5, 2016

Mother Jones

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Donald Trump has slammed Washington insiders, lobbyists, and Wall Street as he has tapped populist anger to snag the Republican presidential nomination. Yet when it came time to pick the top money man for his campaign, he turned to a hedge-funder best known for running a bank that made billions off taxpayer bailouts and, by one account, cost the federal government $13 billion.

On Thursday, Trump named Steven Mnuchin, a former Goldman Sachs partner and a hedge-fund boss from Los Angeles, as his national campaign finance chairman. Mnuchin has worked with many of Wall Street’s biggest firms, but he is perhaps best known for his leadership in organizing the takeover of IndyMac’s failed subprime mortgage business in 2009. Mnuchin organized a team of billionaires to buy the California-based bank’s assets from the FDIC after the government insurance fund had taken over the bank. Mnuchin’s group paid roughly $1.55 billion and received a promise from the FDIC to cover a portion of the losses on bad loans within the IndyMac pool. The FDIC’s losses on these assets have since ballooned to an estimated $13 billion.

The FDIC took on most of the risk, but Mnuchin and his partners, who named their new bank OneWest, ended up doing spectacularly well. They parlayed their $1.55 billion investment into a $3.4 billion payday last year, when Mnuchin engineered the sale of OneWest to another California bank, CIT. Along the way, OneWest issued more than $2 billion worth of dividends to shareholders. The tremendous profits the bank made, with taxpayers on the hook for IndyMac’s bad bets, raised eyebrows across the industry.

OneWest’s owners got a great deal when they bought IndyMac’s failed business from the FDIC (with a hefty dose of risk protection, care of US taxpayers), but the bank has not been lenient with homeowners who have found themselves in financial trouble. In fact, OneWest was targeted by regulators, who found the bank was unrepentant in the face of questioning. In one investigation of predatory loan practices, OneWest was the only bank that refused to settle. The bank also was the target of angry homeowners who filed lawsuits around the country that accused the bank of being overly aggressive in foreclosing. In one notable 2009 case that turned into a cause celebre for opponents of predatory loan practices, a Minnesota woman found herself locked out of her mother’s house in the middle of a blizzard after OneWest took the house and changed the locks while still in negotiations to refinance the home.

Mnuchin’s record seems at odds with Trump’s purported populism. When it comes to fundraising, it appears Trump is hardly an unconventional candidate: It’s the money that matters.

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Trump’s New Finance Chair Led a Bank That Made Millions Off Taxpayer Bailouts

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Here’s Why OxyContin Is So Damn Addictive

by GrettaRupert Posted on May 5, 2016

Mother Jones

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Why has OxyContin become the poster child for opioid abuse? The LA Times has a long investigative piece today which suggests that a big part of the blame should be laid at the feet of Purdue Pharma, the makers of the drug. When OxyContin was launched, it was billed as a painkiller that would last 12 hours—longer than morphine and other opioids. That 12-hour dosing schedule was critical to its success. Without it, Oxy didn’t have much benefit. Unfortunately, it turned out that it wore off sooner for a lot of people:

Experts said that when there are gaps in the effect of a narcotic like OxyContin, patients can suffer body aches, nausea, anxiety and other symptoms of withdrawal. When the agony is relieved by the next dose, it creates a cycle of pain and euphoria that fosters addiction, they said.

OxyContin taken at 12-hour intervals could be “the perfect recipe for addiction,” said Theodore J. Cicero, a neuropharmacologist at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and a leading researcher on how opioids affect the brain.

Patients in whom the drug doesn’t last 12 hours can suffer both a return of their underlying pain and “the beginning stages of acute withdrawal,” Cicero said. “That becomes a very powerful motivator for people to take more drugs.”

But Purdue refused to accept shorter dosing schedules, since that would eliminate its strongest competitive advantage. Instead, they launched a blitz aimed at doctors, telling them to stick with the 12-hour dosing but to prescribe larger amounts. Sometimes this worked and sometimes it didn’t, and when it didn’t it increased the chances of addiction:

In the real world practice of medicine, some doctors turned away from OxyContin entirely. San Francisco public health clinics stopped dispensing the painkiller in 2005, based in part on feedback from patients who said it wore off after eight hours. The clinics switched to generic morphine, which has a similar duration and costs a lot less.

“What I had come to see was the lack of evidence that it was any better than morphine,” Dr. Mitchell Katz, then head of the San Francisco public health department, said in an interview.

The whole piece is worth a read. Purdue has known from the start that 12-hour dosing didn’t work for a significant number of patients, but they relentlessly focused their marketing in that direction anyway. Why? Because without it, Oxy wouldn’t be a moneymaker. As for the danger this posed, that was mostly suppressed by keeping documents under seal in court cases “in order to protect trade secrets.” Welcome to the American pharmaceutical industry.

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Here’s Why OxyContin Is So Damn Addictive

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John Kasich Drops Out of Presidential Race

by DianTrivett Posted on May 4, 2016

Mother Jones

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John Kasich announced Wednesday evening that he was dropping out of the presidential race, leaving Donald Trump as the sole Republican contender and almost-certain nominee. Kasich’s announcement comes less than 24 hours after Trump’s sweeping Indiana primary victory sent shock waves through the political world and prompted Ted Cruz to abandon the race. Following Cruz’s announcement, GOP chairman Reince Priebus called Trump the presumptive nominee on Twitter and encouraged Republicans to rally behind the real estate mogul.

Unlike Cruz, Kasich never had much of a shot at becoming the GOP’s nominee. On the campaign trail, he touted positions—expanding Medicaid, supporting a path to legalization for undocumented immigrants, and more—that seemed removed from the typical attitudes of the GOP electorate. The Ohio governor won only one state primary: his own. But with Cruz out of the race, Kasich represented the GOP’s last, long-shot hope for somehow stopping Trump from winning the 1,237 delegates needed to secure the nomination.

Shortly after Cruz dropped out Tuesday night, Kasich’s campaign assured voters he would be staying in the game. “It’s up to us to stop Trump and unify our party in time to defeat Hillary Clinton,” Kasich’s campaign manager, Ben Hansen, wrote in an email to supporters.

But Wednesday evening, during a speech in Columbus, Ohio, Kasich changed course. He opened by thanking his family, his wife, and his campaign staff and volunteers. He recounted some of the interactions with voters he had on the campaign trail: “The people of our country changed me with the stories of their lives,” Kasich said. He ended on a somber note: “As I suspend my campaign today, I have renewed faith, deeper faith, that the Lord will show me the way forward and fulfill the purpose of my life.”

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John Kasich Drops Out of Presidential Race

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Charles Koch finds a lot of things scary — except climate change

by DerickJWCV Posted on May 2, 2016

Politics

Charles Koch finds a lot of things scary — except climate change

By on May 2, 2016Share

Charles Koch finds plenty of things scary. He’s alarmed by “rampant cronyism” in government (a phrase he’s used to veil his jabs at renewable energy) and by what President Obama’s reelection did to the American Dream. He is afraid for what the 2016 election holds in store and believes collectivist thinking will doom us. What the Koch Industries CEO doesn’t find alarming, however, is that humans are causing the planet to burn up.

In a recent interview with ABC News’ Powerhouse Politics podcast, Koch diminishes the impacts of our warming planet. He muses about our fate in a segment flagged by the liberal super PAC American Bridge:

Is the climate changing due to CO2 in a way that’s going to be catastrophic and unmanageable? Or is it changing in a mild and manageable way? I believe the evidence is overwhelming that it’s changing in a mild and manageable way.

These policies that are being introduced in the United States, as a matter of fact, under their own models would have virtually zero impact on the future temperature or other aspects of the climate. And in fact I think they make matters worse, because they get people going after the subsidies rather than innovating.

If this line of thinking sounds familiar, it’s because climate-denying politicians and others in the Koch-funded universe have all used similar talking points. It’s more clever than outright denying that carbon pollution is warming the planet – a fact Koch admits is true.

But Koch adds a key qualifier: Human activity, he says, has “contributed to much less than what [scientific] models projecting catastrophe show.” It’s foolish, he continues, to push policies that “are making people’s lives worse. They’re raising the cost of energy for no benefit and guess who suffers the most – the poorest people used three times the energy as a percentage of income than the average American.”

Never mind that utilities, corporations, and households are increasingly turning toward renewables in order to shave energy costs — alternative energy meets Koch’s criteria of “making people’s lives worse.”

It’s a modification of Koch’s past arguments on climate change, which have ranged from doubting scientific consensus to suggesting the warming will be good for us. With awareness of climate change back on the rise in the United States, it only makes sense that Koch is trying out another message.

The talking points might shuffle, but they serve the same purpose: delay. And like many arguments that came before it, this one is full of problems. Koch ignores that the poor in the United States and around the world are on the front lines of climate change, and are likely to be hardest hit by even the slightest changes in global averages. Indeed, they have already started to feel some dramatic consequences at an average 1-degree warming. Left unchecked, the planet is in for well over 4-degree C warming by the end of the century.

From his corporate headquarters in Wichita, Kansas, the 80-year-old billionaire has little reason to be fearful of climate change.

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Charles Koch finds a lot of things scary — except climate change

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Science Says This Centuries-Old Discovery Will Save the Planet

by AnnetteGalindo Posted on May 2, 2016

Mother Jones

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The United States leads the world in the number of electric vehicles on the road, but the count is still tiny: about 350,000. That’s less than 1 percent of all passenger cars and trucks in the country. Recent market research suggests that number will climb steadily over the next several decades. But will it climb fast enough? When it comes to fighting climate change, that could turn out to be one of the most important questions of the next few years.

On April 22, world leaders gathered in New York City to sign the Paris Agreement on climate change, in which they vowed to keep global temperature rise to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels, a limit the world is already more than halfway toward exceeding. Meanwhile, energy experts have begun to map out the fine-grain details of what meeting that goal would actually require. And it’s becoming increasingly clear that electric vehicles have a indispensable role to play.

It turns out that one of the most immediate societal changes for average Americans in a climate-savvy future would likely be the electrification of just about everything. In other words, the hope of the planet could like in a force—electricity—we’ve known about for hundreds of years.

That might sound strange, given that electricity production is the number-one source of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States. Coal- and gas-burning power plants are still our main sources of electricity, and in some parts of the country the power grid is so dirty that electric vehicles might actually cause more pollution than traditional gas-guzzlers.

But thanks to the explosive growth of solar, wind, and other renewable energy technologies, electricity is getting cleaner all the time. Over the last decade, the share of total US electricity production from renewables (including hydroelectric dams) rose from about 9.5 percent to more than 14 percent, with year-to-year growth getting faster all the time. So there’s a good case to be made for phasing out the other types of fossil fuel use in our daily lives—particularly gasoline for cars and oil and gas for heating buildings. We should be using electricity instead—even if that means using more electricity overall.

That’s a key finding of the Deep Decarbonization Pathways Project, an international consortium of energy researchers that produced a detailed technical study of how to cut US greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent compared to 1990 levels by 2050—the change necessary if Americans hope to do their part to stay within the two-degree limit. The report found that it’s technically possible for the US to meet that target, at an annual cost of about 1 percent of GDP, without sacrificing any “energy services.” That is, the report assumes we’ll still drive and have houses and operate factories the same as we do today. But to do so will require a major boost in electrification—which will in turn require that the US produce about twice as much electricity as it currently does—while reducing the carbon emissions per unit of energy down to just 3 to 10 percent of their current levels. In other words, at the same time we’re electrifying everything, we need to continue to clean up the electric grid and double down on energy efficiency, especially in buildings.

“You can’t get to a level of emissions that’s compatible with 2C or less unless you do all three of those things,” said Jim Williams, one of the report’s lead authors and chief scientist at the private research firm Energy and Environmental Economics.

We get energy from fossil fuels in two basic ways: Either burning it in a power plant to create electricity that gets used elsewhere, or by burning it directly where it’s needed—i.e., your car’s internal combustion engine or a gas-fueled stove. Williams’ basic idea—which has also been advanced by other leading energy economists, particularly Stanford’s Mark Jacobson—is to axe that second category as much as possible, while simultaneously “decarbonizing” the electric grid by replacing fossil fuels with wind, solar, and other renewables.

Williams’ model doesn’t assume that all fossil fuel consumption goes completely to zero. A small portion of electricity could still come from natural gas plants; some oil and gas could still be used for manufacturing and industrial purposes; and airplanes, freight trains, and ocean liners may still rely mainly on petroleum. But by the middle of the century, the total “budget” for fossil fuels will become so small that they need to be limited only to uses that are absolutely unavoidable. Everything that can run on electricity needs to do so. Cars and buildings are low-hanging fruit. And despite gradual fuel efficiency improvements in cars over the last few decades, Williams said, there’s ultimately no way to make an oil-burning internal combustion car engine efficient enough to fit in the tiny fossil fuel “budget.”

“At some point you can’t continue to do direct combustion of fossil fuels, even if it’s efficient,” he said. “There is a point where you have to get out of direct fossil fuel combustion to the maximum extent.”

Ending direct combustion of fossil fuels would take a massive bite out of greenhouse gas emissions: Put together, buildings, transportation, and industrial uses account for more than half of the country’s carbon footprint.

In practical terms, the most important element of that transition would be bringing electric vehicles off the sidelines and into the mainstream. The charts below, from the report, illustrate what that transformation would look like. It’s important to note that these charts are not a projection of what the authors think will happen, but rather a prescription for what they think should happen. In the left chart, you can see that starting in the mid-2020s, sales of gas-powered cars (blue) fall off dramatically in favor of hybrids (red) and fully electric vehicles (gold). On the right, you see that by the mid-2030s, there are more electric cars and hybrids on the road than gas-powered cars:

DDPP

At the same time as this transformation is happening on the road, your gas stove will be swapped for an electric one; ditto the gas furnace in your basement. Gas stations will close and be replaced by charging stations. Machinery in factories that uses oil and gas will be largely replaced with electric equipment. Your propane or charcoal grill could be replaced by a George Foreman…you get the idea.

These are big shifts, but Williams said they probably won’t actually be very noticeable to most people. How much do you really know about what’s under your hood? Would you really notice if your basement held an electric heat pump instead of a gas furnace?

“The carbon aspect is in the guts of it that people don’t really look at,” he said. “The good news is that even if we continue to live like we’re living, we have the technology, we have what it takes to quit emitting so much CO2 to the atmosphere.”

Still, we’re not yet on pace to meet the goals laid out in the DDPP report. In a recent market forecast from Bloomberg New Energy Finance of global electric vehicle sales—a realistic picture of what the future actually holds, given current policies—global sales of electric and hybrid vehicles in 2040 are still only 35 percent of total car sales, instead of close to 100 percent in Williams’ model.

How do we get on track? Williams argues that policymakers need to start spending less energy worrying about fuel efficiency for oil-powered cars and focus instead on speeding up the transition to electric vehicles. That’s something the Obama administration has only scratched the surface of, so it could be an area of focus for the next president. Power grid operators, too, need to start planning for a future in which there could be major demand for electricity in sectors (i.e., electric cars, home heating, etc.) that are small now.

“We’re not used to having a whole lot of our electricity being used by sectors that currently don’t exist,” Williams said. “We need to already be thinking about that. If we don’t start planning now, we’ll run into dead ends.”

Have more questions about electricity? We’ve got your answers in this special podcast episode with our engagement editor Ben Dreyfuss:

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Science Says This Centuries-Old Discovery Will Save the Planet

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The More of Less – Joshua Becker

by Myrna Posted on May 1, 2016

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The More of Less

Finding the Life You Want Under Everything You Own

Joshua Becker

Genre: Self-Improvement

Price: $11.99

Expected Publish Date: May 3, 2016

Publisher: The Crown Publishing Group

Seller: Penguin Random House LLC


Don’t Settle for More &#xa0; Most of us know we own too much stuff. We feel the burden of our clutter. We tire of cleaning and managing and organizing. Our toy rooms are messy, our drawers won’t close, our closets are filled, and we can’t fit our cars in our garages. The evidence of clutter is all&#xa0;around us. &#xa0; Meanwhile, this constant accumulation of stuff slowly begins robbing us of life. It redirects our God-given passions. It steals our greatest potential. It consumes our limited resources. And it distracts us from the very life we wish we were living. &#xa0; But it doesn’t have to be this way.&#xa0; &#xa0; One of today’s most influential minimalist advocates, Joshua Becker, used to spend his days accumulating more and more. But then he realized how his possessions were not only failing to make him happy, they were actually keeping him from the very things that do. Instead of bringing&#xa0;fulfillment, they brought distraction. In&#xa0; The More of Less , Joshua helps you… &#xa0; •&#xa0;&#xa0;&#xa0;&#xa0;&#xa0;&#xa0;&#xa0;&#xa0;&#xa0; recognize the life-giving benefits of owning less •&#xa0;&#xa0;&#xa0;&#xa0;&#xa0;&#xa0;&#xa0;&#xa0;&#xa0; realize how all the stuff you own is keeping you from pursuing your dreams •&#xa0;&#xa0;&#xa0;&#xa0;&#xa0;&#xa0;&#xa0;&#xa0;&#xa0; craft a personal, practical approach to decluttering your home and life •&#xa0;&#xa0;&#xa0;&#xa0;&#xa0;&#xa0;&#xa0;&#xa0;&#xa0; discover greater contentment, less envy, and more joy •&#xa0;&#xa0;&#xa0;&#xa0;&#xa0;&#xa0;&#xa0;&#xa0;&#xa0; recognize why you buy more than you need&#xa0; •&#xa0;&#xa0;&#xa0;&#xa0;&#xa0;&#xa0;&#xa0;&#xa0;&#xa0; experience the joys of generosity •&#xa0;&#xa0;&#xa0;&#xa0;&#xa0;&#xa0;&#xa0;&#xa0;&#xa0; learn why the best part of minimalism isn’t a clean house, it’s a full life &#xa0; It’s time to own your possessions instead of letting them own you. After all, the beauty of minimalism isn’t in what it takes away. It’s in what it gives.&#xa0; &#xa0; Make Room in Your Life for What You Really Want &#xa0; “Maybe you don’t need to own all this stuff.”&#xa0; After a casual conversation with his neighbor on Memorial Day 2008, Joshua Becker realized he needed a change. He was spending far too much time organizing possessions, cleaning up messes, and looking for more to buy. &#xa0; So Joshua and his wife decided to remove the nonessential possessions from their home and life. Eventually, they sold, donated, or discarded over 60 percent of what they owned. In exchange, they found a life of more freedom, more contentment, more generosity, and more opportunity to pursue the things that mattered most. &#xa0; The More of Less&#xa0; delivers an empowering plan for living more by owning less. With practical suggestions and encouragement to personalize your own minimalist style, Joshua Becker shows you why&#xa0; minimizing&#xa0; possessions is the best way to&#xa0; maximize&#xa0; life. &#xa0; Are you ready for less cleaning, less anxiety, and less stress in your life? Simplicity isn’t as complicated as you think.

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The More of Less – Joshua Becker

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In Which I Respond to My Critics About the Bernie Revolution

by JeffreyCoy Posted on April 30, 2016

Mother Jones

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A couple of days ago I wrote a post criticizing Bernie Sanders for basing his campaign on a promised revolution that never had the slightest chance of happening. A lot of people didn’t like it, which is hardly a surprise. What is a surprise is how polarizing the response was. My Twitter feed was split almost perfectly in half, and nearly every response fell into one of two categories:

  1. OMG, thank you for finally writing what I’ve been feeling all along.
  2. Another Boomer happy with the status quo. Your generation has been a failure. Stupid article.

There was almost literally nothing in between. Either fulsome praise or utter contempt. I need to think some more before I figure out what to make of this: It’s dangerous to assume Twitter reflects the larger progressive community, but it might be equally dangerous to write it off as meaningless. It certainly seems to suggest an even stronger chasm in the Democratic Party than I might have suspected, and possibly more trouble down the road if it also reflects a stronger loathing of Hillary among white millennials than I’ve previously suspected. But I’m not sure.

In any case, although I can’t do much about people who just didn’t like my tone (bitter, condescending, clueless, etc.) I figure it might be worth addressing some of the most common substantive complaints. Here are the top half dozen:

1. I’m a typical Clintonian defender of the status quo.

No. My post was very explicitly about how to make progress, not whether we should make progress. I don’t support everything Bernie supports, but I support most of it: universal health care, reining in Wall Street, fighting climate change, reversing the growth of income inequality, and so forth. If we could accomplish all this in a couple of years, I’d be delighted. But we can’t.

2. I think change is impossible.

No. Of course the system can be changed. Why would I bother spending 14 years of my life blogging if I didn’t believe that? But promising a revolution that’s simply not feasible really does have the potential to create cynicism when a couple of years go by and it hasn’t happened.

3. Yes we can have a revolution! You just have to want it bad enough.

FDR and LBJ had massive public discontent and huge Democratic majorities in Congress. The former was the result of an economic disaster and the latter took a decade to build up in an era when Democrats already controlled Congress. We’re not going to get either of those things quickly in an era with an adequate economy and a polarized electorate.

4. Sure, you boomers have it easy. What about young people?

This just isn’t true. The average college grad today earns about $43,000, roughly the same as 25 years ago. The unemployment rate for recent college grads is under 5 percent. About 70 percent of college grads have debt under $30,000, and the default rate on college debt is about the same as it was 30 years ago. I want to be crystal clear here: this isn’t good news. Incomes should be rising and debt should be much lower. Nonetheless, the plain fact is that recent college grads aren’t in massive pain. They suffered during the Great Recession like everyone else, but all told, they probably suffered a little less than most other groups.

(For comparison purposes: My first job out of college in 1981 paid me about $35,000 in current dollars. That’s a little less than a current grad earning $43,000 and forking over $300 per month in loan repayments. I was hardly living high on that amount, but I can’t say that I felt especially oppressed either.)

5. You have no idea what life is like outside the Irvine bubble.

I got a lot of tweets suggesting that I was, um, misguided because I’m personally well off and live in an upper-middle-class neighborhood. It’s certainly true that it’s easier to be patient about change when you’re not personally suffering, but in this case it’s the Bernie supporters who are living in a bubble. They assume that the entire country is as ready for torches and pitchforks as they are, but the numbers flatly don’t back that up. The median family income in America is $67,000. Unemployment is at 5 percent, and broader measures like U6 are in pretty good shape too. Middle-class earnings have been pretty stagnant, but total compensation hasn’t declined over the past two decades. Obamacare has helped millions of people. So has the ADA, SCHIP, the steady rise in social welfare spending, the 2009 stimulus, and the 2006 Pension Protection Act.

Again, let’s be crystal clear: This isn’t an argument that everything is hunky dory. I’ve written hundreds of blog posts pointing out exactly why our current economic system sucks. But it is an argument that the economy is simply nowhere near bad enough to serve as the base of any kind of serious political revolution.

6. Oh, fuck you.

I guess I can’t really argue with that. I also can’t argue with anyone who just didn’t like my tone. In my defense, I’ve found that no matter how hard I try to adopt an even tone, Bernie supporters are quick to insist that I’m just an establishment shill. For what it’s worth, the same is true of Hillary supporters when I write a post critical of her—even when my criticism is of something patently obvious, like her appetite for overseas military intervention.

Two more things. First, Greg Sargent makes a perfectly reasonable criticism of my position. My fear is that having been promised a revolution, Bernie supporters will become disgusted and cynical when Hillary Clinton and the establishment win yet again and the revolution doesn’t happen. Sargent argues not only that it’s useful to have someone like Bernie delivering a “jolt” to the political system, but that he might have permanently invigorated a new cohort of voters. “Many of these Sanders voters, rather than dissipate once they come crashing down from their idealistic high, might find ways to translate those newly acquired high ideals into constructive influence.”

Yep. There’s no way of telling what will happen. If Bernie himself is bitter from his defeat, I think I’m more likely to turn out to be right. But if Bernie decides to take what he’s built and turn it into a real movement, Sargent is more likely to be right. We’ll see.

Finally, for the record, here’s where I agree and disagree with Bernie’s main campaign points. None of this will be new to regular readers, but others might be interested:

Income inequality: Total agreement. I’ve written endlessly about this. Rising inequality is a cultural and economic cancer on a lot of different levels.

Universal health care: Total agreement. I think it will take a while to get there from where we are now, but if I could snap my fingers and import France’s health care system today, I’d do it.

Breaking up big banks: I agree with the sentiment here, but I don’t think it’s the best way of reining in the finance system. I prefer focusing on leverage: increasing capital requirements significantly; increasing crude leverage requirements; and increasing both of these things more for bigger banks. This makes banks safer in the first place; it gives them an incentive not to grow too large; and it reduces the damage if they fail anyway. (This, by the way, has been our main response to the financial crisis via Basel III and Fed rulemaking. It’s been a good step, but it would be better if it had been about twice as big.)

Free college: I’m ambivalent about this. These days, college benefits the upper middle class much more than the working class. On the other hand, the nation benefits as a whole from making college as accessible as possible. Beyond that, this is mostly a state issue, not one that can be easily solved at a national level. Generally speaking, I’d like to see college debt levels drop by a lot, but I’m not quite sure what the best way to do that is.

Raising taxes on the rich: I’m generally in favor of this, though not necessarily in exactly the way Bernie proposes. More broadly, though, I think liberals should accept that if we want big programs that significantly reduce inequality—and we should—it’s going to require higher taxes on everyone. The rich can certainly do more, especially given their stupendous income increases since the Reagan era, but they can’t do it all.

Military intervention: Bernie hasn’t really been very specific on this, but he’s generally skeptical of overseas wars. I agree with him entirely about this. It’s my biggest concern with a Hillary Clinton presidency.

I’ve probably left some important stuff out, but those are the big ticket items. Take them for what they’re worth.

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In Which I Respond to My Critics About the Bernie Revolution

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Shia Mob in Iraq Demands More Technocrats

by GroverDingle Posted on April 30, 2016

Mother Jones

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Protesters stormed the Iraqi parliament today:

Baghdad Operations Command declared a state of emergency and said all roads into the capital had been closed….Iraq is in the grip of a political crisis, with Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi attempting to reshuffle his cabinet and meet the demands of the demonstrators, who have been spurred on by the powerful Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. But Abadi has been hampered by chaotic parliament sessions, where lawmakers have thrown water bottles and punches at one another.

Oddly, the “firebrand cleric” Sadr (remember when that practically used to be his first name in news reports?) is demanding that…the current hacks running government ministries be replaced with nonpartisan technocrats. “More bean counters in the cabinet!” isn’t the usual rallying cry of a populist uprising, but there you have it.

Needless to say, the sectarian hacks currently in charge have been resisting this change for the past month. In the meantime, Iraq is in chaos. Again.

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Shia Mob in Iraq Demands More Technocrats

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Watch a NASA Scientist and a Yellow Puppet Explore Greenland’s Melting Glaciers

by CerysGollan Posted on April 30, 2016

Mother Jones

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For a sign that Josh Willis isn’t your typical NASA scientist, let’s start with the name of his major new climate study: Oceans Melting Greenland. That’s “OMG,” if your mind isn’t the sort to instantly elide everything into texting lingo.

Willis, a researcher at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, likes to inject a little humor into the science of climate change, taking to the stage and to YouTube in the hopes of spurring his audience to action. On this week’s episode of the Inquiring Minds podcast, he’s joined by special guest “Dick Dangerfield,” the swashbuckling NASA pilot who stars in Willis’ new comedy web series, “The Adventures of Dick Dangerfield.” Oh, and Dick is also a puppet. You can watch the first episode above.

Willis and Dangerfield talk with co-host Kishore Hari about NASA’s mission to study Greenland’s melting ice and its massive climate-altering potential. “Greenland contains enough ice to raise sea levels 20 feet if it all melted,” Willis says. “The big question is how fast it’s going to melt.”

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Most research takes a top-down approach to the melting of the Greenland ice sheet, Willis says, examining the flow of water as it melts off the surface of the glaciers. But due to changing ocean temperatures, the ice around the island’s edges is disappearing even more quickly than it is at the center. That’s partly due to Greenland’s unique geography; the massive glaciers “literally have a toe in the water,” he explains. They flow directly into deep ocean water that is saltier and warmer than the water near the surface. The deeper water, which is typically a few degrees Celsius above the melting point, nibbles away more ice in the warm months than can be replenished over the winter, causing the glaciers to gradually recede.

Greenland’s glaciers run directly into the ocean, plunging into warmer, saltier water beneath the surface that’s melting them from below. NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory/Caltech

But the exact mechanisms for this process remain poorly understood, Willis says. Scientists with the OMG project measure the heights of glaciers each year using airborne radar. They also torpedo sensors into the surrounding ocean to record temperature and salinity. In the interactions between the glacial ice and ocean water, the scientists are looking for signs of a runaway melting process similar to what has been feared in western Antarctica, where climate models suggest rapid melting could contribute to more than three feet of sea level rise by 2100.

Beyond sea level rise, scientists worry that an influx of cold freshwater from Greenland’s melting ice could itself alter the climate, bringing changes to the Atlantic currents that regulate the weather conditions of surrounding landmasses. Some regions could see an uptick in extreme weather, Willis says, while others could see extra sea level rise. But we’re unlikely to know the precise effects until we observe them happening.

But for all the gloomy uncertainty, Willis says he tries to remain optimistic about the future of Greenland’s ice. Though some melting and sea level rise is inevitable, there’s still time to avoid the biggest consequences, he says. “The question is, do you want to get hit in the head with a pingpong ball or a bowling ball?”

Inquiring Minds is a podcast hosted by neuroscientist and musician Indre Viskontas and Kishore Hari, the director of the Bay Area Science Festival. To catch future shows right when they are released, subscribe to Inquiring Minds via iTunes or RSS. You can follow the show on Twitter at @inquiringshow, like us on Facebook, and check out show notes and other cool stuff on Tumblr.

Image: Josef Hanus/Shutterstock

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Watch a NASA Scientist and a Yellow Puppet Explore Greenland’s Melting Glaciers

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GOP Insider Trent Lott Tried to Broker a Kasich-Rubio Ticket to Thwart Donald Trump

by JuliusBackhaus4 Posted on April 29, 2016

Mother Jones

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The other day, I bumped into Trent Lott, the former Republican Senate majority leader who’s now at the law and lobbying firm of Squire Patton Boggs (its clients include Airbus, Goldman Sachs, and Royal Dutch Shell). He’s always polite and chatty—these days he’s promoting a book he wrote with former Democratic Sen. Tom Daschle called Crisis Point that decries the partisan polarization of Washington and offers proposals for de-gridlocking the city—and he asked me what I was up to. I noted that I had just finished listening to a Donald Trump speech. Lott rolled his eyes. So who are you for? I asked, though I had a good guess. Almost all the former Capitol Hill GOPers who are now lobbyists in DC are pulling for Ohio Gov. John Kasich, and, sure enough, Lott declared he’s on Team Kasich. And, Lott added, he had been trying to thwart Trump.

How so? I asked.

Lott said he had actively tried to broker a deal between Kasich and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), another Washington Republican favorite whose presidential campaign did not last too long once the voting started. This was Lott’s plan: Kasich and Rubio would agree to run as a ticket, with Rubio in the veep slot, and the pair would keep this quiet and not announce the deal until days before the Republican convention. This dramatic, headline-grabbing move, in Lott’s thinking, would dominate the news, as GOPers gathered in Cleveland, and potentially rewrite the narrative of the Republican race. That is, the Kasich-Rubio ticket would be the story, not Trump. This would “shake up the landscape,” Lott said.

Lott told me that he had put some time into this idea but, alas, it was now probably dead. Why? First, he said, Kasich’s alliance with Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), which lasted several nanoseconds, had gotten in the way. That ill-fated deal—under which Kasich would not campaign in Indiana and give Cruz a one-on-one shot at Trump—bolstered Trump’s claim that Republican insiders were plotting against him and conniving to undermine the will of GOP voters. Another brokered arrangement, Lott said, would look awful. In essence, the party deal-makers could only get one shot to concoct a stop-Trump deal, and they had blown their chance.

And there was another reason to pull the plug on the Kasich-Rubio plan, Lott said: it now seemed as if Trump would snag the 1,237 delegates needed to obtain the nomination—or get damn close. Lott is one of the growing number of GOP bigwigs saying that if the real estate mogul is close to the magic number, it will be all but impossible to not hand him the presidential nomination. Not even a Kasich-Rubio dream ticket—well, it’s a dream for K Street Republicans, at least—could stop Trump, if he’s within spitting distance of 1,237.

“But I tried,” Lott said.

I later asked a Kasich adviser about Lott’s plan, and he said, “The Kasich-Rubio or Rubio-Kasich team has been hanging around for months as a concept that could potentially be very popular with the delegates. I know of no active pursuit of that concept presently perhaps because what I have heard is that Rubio has been making overtures to Trump.” (Rubio and Trump! How’s that for wonderful political gossip?)

Lott went on to note that he believes Trump could win a general election against Hillary Clinton. “There’s something happening in this country, and Trump has tapped into it,” he explained. Lott pointed out that when he goes back home to Mississippi he comes across plenty of blue-collar workers who are pissed off about trade deals and immigration. They’re for Trump, and some are Democrats. He noted that when he was in Congress he supported every trade deal that came through but now would not. And, he added, did you know this: one out of five households in this country don’t have anyone working in a job. His analysis: it’s a mess out there, and Trump could well ride populist anger into the White House.

But would Lott vote for Trump over Clinton? “Yes, I would,” Lott answered, without any hesitancy. Really? I replied. He said he would have no qualms doing so. But, he added, if Vice President Joe Biden were the Democratic candidate, he would vote for Biden.

“That’s not going to happen,” I said.

“Yeah,” Lott replied. “That’s too bad.”

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GOP Insider Trent Lott Tried to Broker a Kasich-Rubio Ticket to Thwart Donald Trump

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