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Anti-fracking activists hit a roadblock in Colorado

by FerdinaNVGF Posted on August 29, 2016

(Fr)ack

Anti-fracking activists hit a roadblock in Colorado

By on Aug 29, 2016Share

Two anti-fracking initiatives will not be on the ballot in Colorado this November, the Colorado secretary of state’s office announced on Monday.

Initiative 78 would have prohibited fracking within 2,500 feet of an occupied building and Initiative 75 would have allowed local governments to ban fracking. Previously, cities in Colorado have tried to ban fracking, only to have the bans overturned by the state Supreme Court.

Supporters gathered about 107,000 signatures for each initiative — in both cases, more than the 98,492 required. But the signatures have to be deemed valid by Secretary of State Wayne Williams. In a random sample of 5 percent of the signatures, he could only verify around 80 percent of them. Projecting that rate over the total number of signatures suggests that both initiatives would get around 85,000 valid signatures and fall short.

But Lauren Swain, an activist who worked as a paid signature gatherer for the initiatives and serves on the board of 350 Colorado, says the campaign will challenge Williams’ ruling. “There’s a high likelihood that the reasons are not valid” for throwing out signatures, she told Grist. She believes his office is biased against the anti-fracking movement, noting that his spokeswoman Lynn Bartels tweeted irrelevant and unflattering information about their petition gathering. Any challenge must be submitted within a month, so there should be a final answer on whether the initiatives will make the ballot by around the end of September.

Anti-fracking activists have faced overwhelming opposition from the state’s political establishment and fossil fuel industry. As Politico recently reported, “Two oil and gas companies with large footprints in the state, Noble and Anadarko, gave more than $11 million this year to Protect Colorado, an umbrella group launched to fight the initiatives. … The anti-fracking campaign, meanwhile, had raised just $424,000 as of Aug. 1.”

Williams is a Republican, but many Colorado Democrats, such as Gov. John Hickenlooper, also oppose the initiatives. “There’s not a lot of daylight between the parties when it comes to establishment politicians on this issue,” Swain said.

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Anti-fracking activists hit a roadblock in Colorado

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Welfare Reform Is 20 Years Old and It’s Worse Than You Can Imagine

by ANSJclbotxccm Posted on August 22, 2016

Mother Jones

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Last year, Gov. Phil Bryant of Mississippi made a decision that could disrupt the lives of nearly 84,000 of his state’s poorest residents. There was no public announcement or debate. It took a critical report by advocates and a swell in media coverage to alert policy circles to what was coming. “The overall feeling was a lot of panic and stress,” said Jessica Shappley, a senior policy analyst at the Jackson-based Hope Policy Institute.

The two-term Republican governor had reintroduced a three-month time limit on food stamp access for “able-bodied adults without dependents,” individuals between the ages of 18 and 49 who are known as “ABAWDs.” After three months of receiving food aid, they would now have to prove they were working at least 20 hours a week. If they couldn’t, their food stamps—averaging between $150 and $170 a month—would be cut off. The loss of that aid would disrupt the lives of many low-income Mississippians. “It’s the difference between having a meal every day until the end of the month and literally running on empty the last couple weeks,” said Matt Williams, research director at the Mississippi Low Income Child Care Initiative.

The time limit is an often overlooked section of the sweeping welfare reform bill that former President Bill Clinton signed into law 20 years ago today. In a statement after signing the bill, Clinton heralded the legislation as a “historic opportunity to end welfare as we know it and transform our broken welfare system by promoting the fundamental values of work, responsibility, and family.” The bill granted states a large degree of discretion over how, and even whether, the food stamp policy was implemented, so that states with high unemployment were able to request a waiver that nullifies the time limit.

In recent years, Republican governors and legislatures across the country have passed up the waivers not because of belt-tightening—SNAP benefits are fully funded by the federal government, and the administrative costs are split 50-50 with the state—but because of ideology. Mississippi, which has the fifth-highest unemployment rate in the country, had received a statewide waiver every year since 2006. But in 2016, the story took an unexpected turn. Echoing like-minded politicians in Wisconsin and North Carolina, Gov. Bryant told the Mississippi Department of Human Services that he wanted to “steer people to jobs,” the Associated Press reported. The consequence? Across the country, tens of thousands of people in areas of high unemployment—including veterans, the homeless, and the mentally and physically handicapped—have lost access to federally funded food assistance. Many are likely to fall into what policymakers call “food insecurity,” the state of not reliably knowing where your next meal will come from.

The tension between conservative ideology and the harsh realities of poverty is nowhere more evident than Mississippi, which has the highest rate of food insecurity in the nation (22 percent) and the second-highest rate of poverty. African Americans are more than twice as likely to be poor than white Mississippians. Three historically impoverished regions converge here: the toe of Appalachia in the northeastern corner, the Delta region along the western edge, and the Black Belt that extends across the state. Since agricultural labor was mechanized, beginning in the 1940s, and jobs in rural regions disappeared, working-age people have moved, leaving a shrunken tax base. “We have some counties that are persistently losing people,” said John Green, director of the Center for Population Studies at the University of Mississippi. “As the counties try to do things like improve education, diversify the economy, invest in small businesses, it’s harder and harder for them to do that.”

With unemployment rates in some counties more than twice as high as in the United States as a whole, few jobs exist for the people who now must work 20 hours a week to avoid losing their food stamps. Earlier this year, Bryant’s spokesman directed the Associated Press to the state’s jobs app, which he said “currently lists more than 40,000 job openings,” but there were twice as many ABAWDs as positions and no guarantees that the jobs were in communities where they lived.

The federal government even offers additional funding to states that pledge to provide job training or workfare slots for every person facing the time limit. But only five states have taken the pledge, and Mississippi is not among them. A memo sent by the Mississippi Department of Human Services to the US Department of Agriculture last year estimated that more than 71,000 of an estimated 84,000 ABAWDs were at risk of losing their food stamps and noted that only 1,391 workfare slots would be made available each month in 2016. The problem, according to Ed Bolen, a senior policy analyst at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, is that job training and workfare programs are “expensive,” and under the 1996 welfare reform bill, states are not obligated to offer them.

The time limit became law during a period of seismic shifts in the American welfare system. In July 1996, President Bill Clinton and the Republican-dominated Congress were desperately seeking a compromise on the radical welfare overhaul that Clinton had promised in his presidential run. Clinton had already vetoed two proposals. On the day the House was to vote on a third version, John Kasich and Bob Ney from Ohio proposed a three-month lifetime limit on food stamps for able-bodied adults without dependents—unless they worked 20 hours a week.

Some Democrats were horrified; Bill Hefner (D-N.C.) declared it the “most mean-spirited amendment” that had come before the body in his 22 years in the House. Kasich assured the critics that anyone willing to work would be able to meet the requirement. “If you cannot find a job, you go to work for the state in a workfare program,” he said, adding that the rule would only apply in areas where “there are jobs available.” The amendment was debated for half an hour and added to the welfare reform bill. In negotiations, the time limit was softened to three months every three years. Despite signing the bill, Clinton expressed “strong objections” to the food stamp provision, saying that the policy failed to support able-bodied adults who “want to work, but cannot find a job or are not given the opportunity to participate in a work program.” Summing up the bill’s popular appeal, Ney—who a decade later was jailed for selling official favors to the clients of notorious Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff—told the Columbus Dispatch that there was “no escalator built by Washington to carry you up the ladder of opportunity.”

Suspicion toward the able-bodied poor runs deep in the history of US social assistance. In the words of historian Michael Katz, “Except for the Great Depression of the 1930s, even abundant evidence of job scarcity failed to shake the belief that men were unemployed because they were lazy or incompetent.” During the Reagan era, black mothers described as “welfare queens” became seen as undeserving of aid. By 1996, food stamps were the only form of aid widely available to the able-bodied poor. A few, about 136,000, also received general assistance, or cash benefits granted to the impoverished who do not qualify for other programs. But that support has waned as states slashed their general assistance programs in the intervening decades. Today, only 11 states offer such benefits to childless adults who are not disabled, leaving food stamps the one source of aid for the more than 1 million people in this group.

For all the political rancor directed at the able-bodied poor, remarkably little is known about them. A report commissioned by the USDA in 1998 referred to ABAWDs as a “little-known segment of the Food Stamp population,” and little has changed since then. States are not obligated to track the able-bodied once they leave SNAP; from a policy standpoint, that means they all but disappear. The group likely to be cut off from food stamps have an average monthly income of just 17 percent of the official poverty line, which in 2016 is $11,880 a year for an individual, and includes veterans, the homeless, and people with undiagnosed mental and physical disabilities.

Consider the 48-year-old African American woman in poor physical health who earlier this summer appeared at an office in Indianola, Mississippi, a city in the heart of the Delta known as the childhood home of B.B. King. She wanted a signature to prove that she had come looking for work and arrived at the Mississippi Center for Justice—a Jackson-based public-interest law firm. The staff soon realized that she was one of those nearly 84,000 in the state struck by the new time limit. She told Matt Williams, then a policy associate at the center, that after a lifetime of work her back could no longer handle physical labor. Under federal law, a physical handicap should have qualified her for an exemption from the time limit. But she had been led to understand that, because she was not receiving disability payments, she was legally “able-bodied.” After missing an employment and training session early in the year, the woman lost her food stamps for two months. Desperate, she had re-enrolled and was now paying someone to drive her around the city to perform mandatory job search activities, Williams told Mother Jones. He and a colleague advised the woman to seek a medical notice testifying to her condition, after which they lost contact.

There are provisions in the law to protect people in certain circumstances from the time limit, but to determine whether a person qualifies for an exemption the state has to gather a pile of new information. Many states don’t. Instead they send out form letters informing ABAWDs that they are now facing the time limit and telling them to speak to a caseworker if they qualify for an exemption. By doing that, states have shifted the burden of implementing a vital piece of the policy onto the poor and disadvantaged people affected by it. In Florida, according to Cindy Huddleston, an attorney at Florida Legal Services, people are “never given a complete list of everything that might exempt them.” When the time limit went into effect in Franklin County, Ohio, in 2014, people thought to be ABAWDs “were brought in in very large groups, anywhere from 200 to 400 people…and basically told to go get a job,” said Lisa Hamler-Fugitt, executive director of the Ohio Association of Foodbanks. “Having been in those,” she added, “I can tell you they’re worse than cattle calls. It’s hard to hear instructions.”

There are a whole host of reasons why a person might not be able to find or perform work, but little of this information is systematically captured by state agencies. From 2014 to 2015, Hamler-Fugitt’s organization conducted a rare comprehensive survey of 5,000 people subjected to the time limit in Franklin County. What they found contradicts the popular image of the food stamp recipient who could work but just doesn’t feel like it. One in three of their “able-bodied” clients self-reported a physical or mental limitation, with a quarter saying their conditions obstructed daily activities. Nearly 13 percent said they were caregivers to a parent, friend, or relative. And 36 percent said they had felony convictions, a known barrier to employment. Public support for the policy might just hinge on the public not truly knowing who is affected, Cindy Huddleston said. “If people realized that these are veterans, people with mental disabilities, people who have nowhere else to turn…they might feel differently.”

In Mississippi, many of those now facing the time limit likely qualify for an exemption. Ellen Collins runs the Prosperity Center of Greater Jackson, a one-stop shop serving low-income Mississippians in partnership with a Department of Human Services office. When five suspected ABAWDs came in for a meeting with a caseworker earlier this year, she said, it turned out that three of them qualified for an exemption. “What I’m hearing from other offices is that they think that same percentage probably applied,” Collins said. But without individual attention from caseworkers, thousands have likely slipped through the cracks. The Mississippi Center for Justice estimates that more than 42,000 ABAWDs disappeared from the SNAP program between January and June this year.

While advocates suggest that Mississippi could invest more in job training or use the many measures available in the bill to soften the time limit’s impact, there is a much simpler solution: Mississippi could seek a waiver. But, as Williams from the Mississippi Low Income Child Care Initiative notes, “Pure politics and ideology has driven the decision not to seek that waiver.”

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Welfare Reform Is 20 Years Old and It’s Worse Than You Can Imagine

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How a Wonky Trade Pact You’d Never Heard of Became a Huge Campaign Issue

by Allison05T Posted on August 18, 2016

Mother Jones

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Until very recently, grousing about the pitfalls of global trade was seen as akin to complaining about the weather. One could no more stop China from dumping cheap imports than outlaw El Niño. And besides, the deluge of foreign goods would in the long run lift all boats. Or so we were told—before Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump begged to differ.

In a year of seething resentment towards the political establishment, support for “free trade” is no longer a given within either party. Even Hillary Clinton, whose husband famously negotiated NAFTA, has come out against the Trans Pacific Partnership—a sweeping trade deal she helped set up as secretary of state.

Larry Cohen has a pretty good idea why that happened. As the president of the Communications Workers of America, and more recently a senior advisor to Bernie Sanders, he has probably done more than anyone to elevate the issue. I reached out to Cohen to ask how he managed to make trade a big deal again.

Mother Jones: How has global trade affected your union members?

Larry Cohen: Call center jobs are tradable—more tradable than the production of steel or auto parts. Tens of thousands of CWA jobs are now in South Asia with English speakers. But that’s not all. The United States is the biggest consumer of telecom products in the world and almost none of them are made here. Other countries that don’t have this kind of trade regime have held onto those jobs. So Germany with Siemens and France with Alcatel—the French government puts huge penalties on shutdowns. We don’t put any.

MJ: The Democratic Party has been divided on trade since the 1990s, when Bill Clinton pushed through NAFTA with Republican support. President Obama’s Trans Pacific Partnership agreement with 12 Pacific Rim countries was supposed to win over the liberal wing of the Democratic Party by better protecting workers and the environment. What happened?

LC: A year ago, President Obama said to me, “Larry, you must admit, the language is a lot better in here.” And I said, “Yeah, the language is a lot better, but the problem is with enforcement.”

MJ: Give me an example.

LC: I worked on a case in Honduras involving the murder of labor organizers and the collapse of bargaining rights. When there’s complaints, the International Labor Affairs Bureau does an investigation. It takes them at least two years. Then you get a report eventually, and then it goes to the US Trade Representative. This is the guy who is gung ho for all these deals in the first place. When he gets to it, he meets with his foreign counterpart. They had one meeting on Honduras. It can move, after years and years, to a loss of some trade preferences. TPP enumerates that a little bit more clearly. But that’s years and years, and by that point, you know?

MJ: The jobs are long gone?

LC: It’s not just the jobs. It was people being butchered! The bottom line is: Multinational corporations get reparations. We get reports.

MJ: In other words, companies get to sue to protect their interests but workers and environmental groups do not?

LC: Right. Companies get to sue under what’s known as “investor state dispute settlement.” Occidental Petroleum got $3 billion from Ecuador because, after the bilateral agreement with the US, Ecuador said, “No more coastal drilling.” That impacted Occidental’s profit. They got an award last year of $3 billion for their lost future profit. Ecuador doesn’t have $3 billion, so it’s in limbo, but probably they will let them drill. TransUnion is suing the US over Keystone: $15 billion. Vattenfall, which is a Swedish energy company, is suing Germany for $5 billion Euros because German Chancellor Angela Merkel, a conservative, said we’re going to shut down nuclear after Fukushima. These are examples. That has been the history of 25 years of so-called improvements in side agreements in trade.

MJ: And you don’t think TPP fixes those problems?

LC: Chapter after chapter was written by corporate lobbyists. Nothing was written by people like me. There was a little side panel on labor and the environment and they didn’t do a single thing we wanted.

MJ: Obama has framed the TPP as part of his “pivot to Asia,” arguing basically that this is really a diplomatic mission aimed at counteracting the influence of China.

LC: That’s what they wrap this in. But what it really is about is all the multinational corporations that are cheering this deal because they will reign supreme in all 12 countries. That is the core of our foreign policy. Just look at our embassies around the word. In Honduras they throw in one person on human rights. This person says, “I am totally overwhelmed. People are killed here, killed there—it’s a police state.” And then the Commerce Department has 15, 20 people in Honduras promoting US multinationals there, from Fruit of the Loom to you name it. It’s way off.

MJ: How did your meeting with Obama come about?

LC: It was May of 2015. I’d been criticizing TPP at the time and they said, “He’d like to talk to you.” What he told me was: “I am too far down the road to change.” He repeated it over and over.

MJ: So you got a sense that he kind of agreed with you?

LC: No, he never agreed with me. His point of view was that this was significantly better than any other trade agreement on the things that I cared about. He did most of the talking. The joke I made at the end was: I grew up as the only kid. There were five adults in my great grandmother’s rural house in North Philadelphia. These were big talkers. Once in a while, I got to talk, and they never listened to a thing I said. And I told the president, “I love you very much anyway.”

MJ: What did he say?

LC: He laughed. They all laughed.

MJ: So after that meeting you kept fighting against TPP—and you almost derailed it.

LC: Right, June 27. They needed 60 votes to pass fast-track authority for the deal. We lost in the Senate by one vote.

MJ: And that’s when you decided to do something different.

LC: In September I said, “I am not going to run again for CWA president. I feel like we are in a box. I want to go back to movement building.”

MJ: So you joined the Sanders campaign as a senior advisor.

LC: Yeah, I worked full time, unpaid.

MJ: On the trade issue?

LC: Yeah, that was my job.

MJ: What did you do, specifically?

LC: In Lansing, Michigan, we set up a trade forum with Bernie and the media and brought in a whole bunch of people who gave firsthand reports about what they had experienced.

We did a nonpartisan march through Indianapolis. Carrier, which is owned by United Technologies, announced a shutdown of their heating and furnaces plant—1,900 jobs moving to Monterrey, Mexico at $3 an hour. Bernie spoke at the march and it was 100 percent about trade.

On the South Side of Chicago, we did a big event in front of the Nabisco plant in the middle of winter with the workers there, mostly black. They had announced they are moving the Oreo cookie line, over 1,000 jobs out of that plant, to Mexico.

Bernie wrote op-eds on trade. He did a thing in Pittsburgh, We had a thing called “Labor for Bernie” that I helped organize, bringing in tens of thousands of active union members.

MJ: Can you point to any particular moment in the campaign when it became clear that the trade issue was really resonating with voters?

LC: Definitely Michigan.

MJ: Sanders’ primary victory there was a big upset.

LC: There were dramatic results there from what we believed was, in part, that work. I would give the credit to Bernie. He really thinks that the way the global economy is working is at the center of what’s wrong. We call it trade, but it really isn’t trade. It’s how we rig it.

MJ: As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton helped set up the negotiations for TPP, so it was surprising when she came out against it in October. Did you see that coming?

LC: Gradually. The pressure was enormous. I think she made a very careful calculation: If she had not come out against TPP, she would have lost to Bernie Sanders. She never could have provided enough cover to the national labor unions that endorsed her campaign without that flip.

MJ: Did you then start to see other prominent Democrats follow her lead?

LC: No. Tim Kaine would be the next prominent Democrat, and that was only when it was announced that he would be vice president.

MJ: Interesting. So what were you doing heading into the Democratic convention?

LC: Bernie put trade right at the top of his list. We had five people on the platform drafting committee out of 16. There was a meeting in St. Louis where the draft got finalized. The language had said that Democrats are “divided” on the TPP. The platform committee itself had I think 188 people, of which we had 72. They realized they had a problem. They took out “Democrats are divided” and instead they listed a bunch of standards that are actually pretty decent. The document concludes by saying: “Trade deals must meet this standard.” We had an amendment that said, “Therefore, we oppose the TPP.” It lost 106 to 74. So we got 2 votes from the Clinton appointees and our 72.

MJ: If Clinton really opposes the TPP, why would most of her platform committee reps oppose that language?

LC: The reason is, I think, that the White House said, “This is a total embarrassment to us. You are our secretary of state. We are not going to put up with that. We don’t want any opposition to the TPP in the platform.”

MJ: Why didn’t you take it to a floor vote?

LC: We could have, because you only need 25 percent of the platform committee to go to the floor, but Bernie’s view was that we would get the same thing. We would lose, and then it would look like the Democratic Party doesn’t oppose the TPP.

MJ: So you orchestrated a protest instead. People who watched the convention on TV may still remember all the anti-TPP signs. How did that come about?

LC: On Monday night we had the giant TPP forum with 800 delegates. That’s where we sort of revved up the signs and the stickers and the chants of “No TPP!” We actually practiced that in the room.

MJ: Whose idea was it to do that?

LC: Me and others who organized the forum. We knew we had to use it as a springboard. That is what a political convention is supposed to be. It’s not just about falling in line. In my opinion, Hillary Clinton is opposed to TPP, so we should be saying it publicly so we don’t give ground to Trump.

MJ: What is your take on how the trade backlash happened within the GOP?

LC: It’s voters. Hillary Clinton would say the same thing. “I listened to voters.” People get it. They look at the numbers about jobs or incomes or the trade deficit, and they see the results.

MJ: Trade might be the only thing Trump and Sanders agree on.

LC: At an ideological level, we don’t have the same views of fair trade at all. Our view would be that workers rights and the environment need to count as much as corporate profits, and Trump’s view would be just that it’s “a bad deal.”

MJ: Do you think you can build an effective bipartisan coalition on trade?

LC: With regular people we can do that. But it’s not like our part of the movement can unite with whatever that part is in the Republican Party. There’s some acknowledgement of each other. That’s about it. I just got off a call earlier making a plan for the next few months. We don’t have any of them to make a plan with.

MJ: Do you think TPP will be addressed in the lame duck session?

LC: Only once can TPP be sent to Congress by any president. If it is sent before the election, it’s really gonna get attacked. Anyone who is in a vulnerable district, that issue is gonna go way to the top. The White House could send it after the election but they are not even guaranteed the vote. So they are caught here. They can’t send it unless they think they have the best chance they possibly have to pass it. That’s why you have House Speaker Paul Ryan doubting it for lame duck.

MJ: So they might just wait until the next administration?

LC: Yeah, but we’re not going to give on that. We are going to mobilize constantly on it.

MJ: And beyond the TPP?

LC: The only thing that the president really controls is trade policy. Congress reacts, the president acts. I do think there is a ground swell for not bringing Wall Street people into the US Trade Representative’s office and taking it over. That has been going on either directly or indirectly for decades.

MJ: What should the overarching principles be?

LC: Balanced trade should be a major factor: The net effect on jobs. Consequences about manufacturing. What happens to different employment sectors in our country. But also, ending the investor state dispute settlement. There should be issues about the environment or workers rights or human rights that can trump national courts in the same way that investment rights do now.

MJ: This stuff is obviously important, yet when politicians talk about it, people’s eyes often glaze over. How do you keep voters engaged?

LC: Only by saying to people quite bluntly, “This is not about trade, it is fundamentally about the way in which large foreign corporations rig the global economy.” We need to have plain, simple language that regulates the global economy where we count just as much as the richest corporations in the world. That’s what people react to.

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How a Wonky Trade Pact You’d Never Heard of Became a Huge Campaign Issue

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Trump’s Ag Czar Runs His Business Like Herbalife

by KraigFreeh07 Posted on August 18, 2016

Mother Jones

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On Tuesday, the Donald Trump campaign formally announced its Agricultural and Rural Advisory Committee—a crew of more than 60 GOP politicians (including Texas’ colorful ag commissioner, Sid Miller) and agribusiness execs, chaired as previously announced by Nebraska cattleman and business operator Charles Herbster, whom I wrote about a couple of weeks ago.

Since then, I’ve learned something interesting about Herbster’s company, Conklin, a Kansas City-based firm with an odd mix of product lines: pesticide additives called adjuvents; fertilizers for farms and lawns; probiotics for livestock, pets, and even people; industrial roof coatings; and motor oils for “everything from semis to farm equipment to race cars.”

Turns out, it’s a multilevel marketing operation: one of those companies—like Avon, Amway, or Herbalife—that sell their products to the public through a network of individual “distributors” who make money not just based on their own sales, but also from the sales of others they’ve managed to recruit.

The homepage of the Conklin’s website lays out the business model. “Our superior products are your ticket to a financially-independent life. Become a Conklin distributor today! Get Started.” The link goes to a page stating that “in the last 40 years, Conklin has made it possible for thousands of ambitious people to increase their income and achieve financial independence.”

Since it’s privately held and not publicly traded, it’s hard to say how large of a company Conklin is. It’s certainly well connected in Nebraska Republican political circles. When I called the company to ask, the receptionist referred me to the voicemail of Carlos Castillo, vice president of governmental affairs for the company. Before taking the Conklin job, Castillo served as a top aide to former Nebraska Gov. Dave Heineman—who now serves on Conklin’s board of directors and was recently named as a member of the Trump ag advisory committee chaired by Herbster.

In this video, an interview with the trade publication Agri-Pulse released July 27, Herbster and Heineman make the case for Trump.

I have repeatedly called Herbster, Castillo, and Heineman to ask for more information on Conklin, but have so far not heard back.

According to the MLM-promoting website Business for Home, Conklin brought in an estimated revenue of $28 million in 2015—tiny compared with industry giants Amway, Herbalife, and Avon, which drew in billions of dollars per year, and just the 239th largest US MLM, according to the website.

MLM is a highly controversial business model. Critics like Robert FitzPatrick, president of Pyramid Scheme Alert and co-author of the book False Profits: Seeking Financial and Spiritual Deliverance in Multi-level Marketing and Pyramid Schemes, says the model by its nature concentrates profits at the top of the chain and keeps most “distributors” in the red.

FitzPatrick noted that the Federal Trade Commission has long taken an indulgent view of MLMs, distinguishing between “legitimate” and “illegitimate” MLMs. But the agency’s recent settlement with Herbalife “may change all that,” he added. Last month, the giant MLM agreed to pay $200 million to consumers the company “deceived into believing they could earn substantial money selling diet, nutritional supplement, and personal care products,” according to an FTC statement.

Conklin has “the classic MLM hallmarks,” FitzPatrick told me. Another MLM expert, Jon Taylor of the Consumer Awareness Institute, echoed FitzPatrick’s assessment of Conklin. He told me Conklin has “all the hallmarks” of an MLM.

Of course, the spectacle of GOP politicians rubbing shoulders with MLM purveyors is nothing new, as Rick Perlstein showed in a 2013 Nation series. The DeVos family, owners of the enormous MLM Amway, have played a large role in shaping the modern Republican Party, as Mother Jones‘ Andy Kroll laid out in a 2014 article.

And Trump himself has dabbled in the MLM business model. He made “millions of dollars for extolling ACN Inc., a multilevel marketing firm that has weathered regulatory investigations in three countries,” the Wall Street Journal reports. And he licensed his name to a vitamin-hawking MLM that became known as Trump Network, whose owners eventually went bankrupt, the Washington Post reports.

With Trump’s surprise success sending the GOP into disarray, he’s apparently having to bring in second-tier MLM titans like Herbster, FitzPatrick told me. He noted that last month’s Republican National Convention featured a speech by a representative of Youngevity, an elixir-selling MLM closely associated with the prominent right-wing conspiracy theorist and broadcaster Alex Jones, an avid Trump supporter.

In the above video interview, Herbster makes a claim about the 2016 presidential campaign that at this point seems as likely as someone achieving “financial independence” by peddling supplements to friends: “I believe we the Trump campaign will win. I don’t think there’s any question about that.”

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Trump’s Ag Czar Runs His Business Like Herbalife

Posted in FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, Ultima, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Trump’s Ag Czar Runs His Business Like Herbalife

Trump Reportedly Hires Roger Ailes to Help Prepare for Debates

by ErnestoBucher Posted on August 16, 2016

Mother Jones

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Less than a month after Roger Ailes was ousted as chairman of Fox News amid a growing list of sexual harassment allegations, Donald Trump has hired Ailes to help him prepare for the upcoming presidential debates against Hillary Clinton, the New York Times reports.

Multiple sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, confirmed the alliance to the Times. Two of the sources told the paper that Ailes’ role could “extend beyond the debates” if Trump were to be elected president.

Just as a man who’s been in the pay of a pro-Russian regime is managing a Trump campaign with increasing Cold War overtones, a man accused of serial sexual harassment will now be coaching the Republican presidential candidate on how to defeat a woman in the race for the White House.

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Trump Reportedly Hires Roger Ailes to Help Prepare for Debates

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Yes, Economic Anxiety Really Does Explain Some of Donald Trump’s Appeal

by rogalski_adam@o2.pl Posted on August 15, 2016

Mother Jones

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Matt Yglesias says it’s ridiculous to attribute Donald Trump’s support to economic anxiety:

While plenty of people, including plenty of Trump fans, certainly have concerns about the economy, it’s racial resentment that drives who does and doesn’t support Trump….Adding an economic anxiety factor to your account doesn’t actually help to explain anything. Trump’s supporters, for example, are considerably whiter and considerably older than the American population at large. If the economic problems of the past decade had been unusually hard on the white and the old, then an economics-focused explanation could be valuable. In reality, things have been rougher on nonwhites and rougher on younger cohorts.

Generally speaking, I agree. There’s been an endless amount of research, including endless splicing and dicing of poll internals, that tries to explain what’s different about Trump supporters. And every time, the answer is pretty clear: racial resentment. This is so clear that it’s become a joke on Twitter. Every time a Trump supporter (or Trump himself) does or says something racist, it will get linked with a snarky comment about the latest bit of “economic anxiety.”

And yet, I do think that genuine economic anxiety has something to do with Trump’s popularity. The chart on the right, which I posted a couple of weeks ago, tells the basic story. Over the past few decades, women’s incomes have made great strides. Blacks have improved their economic position a bit. Hispanics too. The only group that’s failed to make any progress at all is white men. Maybe it’s not right to call this “anxiety,” but it’s certainly something that helps explain why white men are angrier than most people about their economic position.

Nor do I really buy this:

By contrast, the idea that Donald Trump is going to usher in a new era of broadly shared prosperity based on a revival of coal mining and labor-intensive methods of steel production is patently ridiculous. Under guise of being respectful of Trump voters’ concerns, pundits attributing his appeal to his economic “policies” are in effect attributing a remarkable degree of foolishness to his supporters. The more parsimonious and simple explanation is that there is a basic divide over values and cultural identity.

One of the remarkable things about presidential elections is the extent to which voters simply believe whatever candidates tell them. It doesn’t matter if it’s impossible. It doesn’t matter if the candidate changed his mind about this the day before yesterday. It doesn’t matter if there’s no plausible policy behind the claim. If Trump says he’s going to build a wall, then he’s going to build a wall. If he says he’s going to renegotiate all our trade treaties, then that’s what he’s going to do. This is not something specific to Trump fans. It’s true of all voters.

Personally, I find it sort of remarkable. But then, I’m basically half-Vulcan. Most people aren’t.

Presidential campaigns are mostly just an exercise in finding someone whose heart is in the right place. The fancy term is “mood affiliation.” Most voters don’t really care if either Trump or Hillary Clinton can do what they say. They just want to know what they consider important. Trump has very loudly signaled that he considers the plight of blue-collar workers important, both economically and culturally—and that’s really all that matters.

Now, there’s a metric buttload of racial and sexist angst wrapped up in that word “culturally.” Yglesias is right about that. But there really is an economic component too.

POSTSCRIPT: Of course, this whole argument might be moot. There’s considerable evidence that blue-collar whites don’t actually support Trump any more strongly than they’ve supported any other Republican candidate for president. Some of them may be louder than usual this year, but Trump doesn’t actually seem to have moved the needle much in terms of raw numbers.

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Yes, Economic Anxiety Really Does Explain Some of Donald Trump’s Appeal

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Donald Trump’s Secret Weapon: The Non-Christian Christian Vote

by PennyPalazzi Posted on August 13, 2016

Mother Jones

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Hmmm:

Catholics dislike Trump more than Romney, perhaps because Pope Francis doesn’t care for Trump. Or because Trump is a dick. Whatever. And among white evangelicals who attend church regularly, they’re just going to vote for the Republican, full stop.

But among white evangelicals who blow off church, Trump is much more popular than Romney was. Why? I suppose they sense quite accurately that Romney really was religious. Trump, on the other hand, says he’s religious but very clearly isn’t. This appeals to them. They’re apparently the kind of folks who want to call themselves Christians, but don’t care much for holier-than-thous who make them feel guilty—even just by their existence—for not acting Christian. That’s smart. Trump fits the bill perfectly.

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Donald Trump’s Secret Weapon: The Non-Christian Christian Vote

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I Just Texted With the DNC Hacker…

by FinlayYgqh Posted on August 13, 2016

Mother Jones

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The hacker or hackers working under the pseudonym “Guccifer 2.0” released another set of documents Friday, this time posting a series of documents that appear to have been stolen from the internal Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee network. The latest dump includes personal contact information for dozens of members of Congress, along with memos related to a campaign in Florida’s 18th Congressional District, and other internal DCCC documents, and is titled “Guccifer 2.0 Hacked DCCC.”

The hacker(s)’ site had been dormant for nearly a month before the DCCC documents were posted Friday evening, and over the last several weeks multiple news outlets have cited anonymous US government officials as saying that they believe the hacks are not the work of a lone hacker—as the hacker claimed in interviews with Vice News’ Motherboard and Mother Jones, among others—rather they’re the work of Russian intelligence groups or hackers working with the Russian government in an alleged effort to divide Democrats and aid Republican nominee Donald Trump.

On Wednesday, the New York Times reported that US government officials believe the hack, which was first publicly acknowledged by the Democratic National Committee on June 14, was much wider than initially thought, and could have targeted several Democratic political organizations along with the private email accounts of more than 100 Democratic Party officials and other groups.

Shortly after the documents were released Friday, Guccifer 2.0 answered a series of questions for Mother Jones via Twitter direct messaging. Here’s our semi-casual exchange:

At that point, the hacker(s) stopped communicating with me.

The initial release of hacked documents from the DNC, and the subsequent release of nearly 20,000 DNC emails and thousands of attachments by Wikileaks, showed signs that some Democratic Party officials did not like Bernie Sanders and discussed ways to undermine his campaign. The controversy led to the resignation of then-DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz and several other top party officials, and cast a shadow over the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. The DNC later publicly apologized to Sanders for “inexcusable” behavior of those officials.

The hacker(s) included a message about US elections along with the stolen documents posted Friday: “As you see the U.S. presidential elections are becoming a farce, a big political performance where the voters are far from playing the leading role. Everything is being settled behind the scenes as it was with Bernie Sanders. I wonder what happened to the true democracy, to the equal opportunities, the things we love the United States for,” the hacker(s) wrote. “The big money bags are fighting for power today. They are lying constantly and don’t keep their word. The MSM are producing tons of propaganda hiding the real stuff behind it. But I do believe that people have right to know what’s going on inside the election process in fact.”

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I Just Texted With the DNC Hacker…

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Wisconsin’s Strict Voter ID Law Is Back on the Books

by GroverTovlw Posted on August 10, 2016

Mother Jones

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Wisconsin voters will likely vote this November under the state’s strict voter ID law after a federal appeals court struck down a trial court’s ruling that would have allowed voters to cast ballots without identification.

In Wednesday’s ruling, a three-judge panel from the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals concluded that the trial court’s decision would likely be reversed on appeal. The lower court ruled on July 19 that election officials had to let people vote without ID if they signed a form saying they had problems getting proper documents.

The trial court’s ruling, in turn, came in response to an appeals court ruling in April finding that the state’s 2011 voter ID law would likely prevent people from voting who had legitimate difficulties obtaining documentation to get IDs, and it tasked the trial court with coming up with a method to help those people. That method was the affidavit, which the appeals court ruled Wednesday wasn’t targeted enough, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

“Instead of attempting to identify these voters, or to identify the kinds of situations in which the state’s procedures fall short, the district court issued an injunction that permits any registered voter to declare by affidavit that reasonable effort would not produce a photo ID—even if the voter has never tried to secure one, and even if by objective standards the effort needed would be reasonable (and would succeed),” the appeals court judges wrote, adding that the trial court judge did not attempt to distinguish between genuine difficulties voters might have in obtaining the proper documents and “any given voter’s unwillingness to make the effort that the Supreme Court has held that a state can require.”

Rick Hasen, an elections expert at the University of California-Irvine, wrote Wednesday that the ACLU, which originally brought this case, might appeal the case to the full 7th Circuit Court of Appeals. But the practical effect of the ruling, he noted, is that the strict voter ID law will be in place for November. The ACLU could also appeal Wednesday’s ruling to the Supreme Court.

Dale Ho, the director of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project, says he is disappointed that the judges “removed a safety net for voters after earlier this year holding that such a safety net would be appropriate. Their decision will guarantee disenfranchisement of many Wisconsonites in this fall’s election.”

Ho says the ACLU is evaluating its options, but that an appeal to either the full 7th Circuit or the Supreme Court will happen soon.

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, a Republican, said in a statement that Wednesday’s ruling was “a step in the right direction” and that his administration would “continue to work to make it easy to vote and hard to cheat.”

A separate case challenged the 2011 voter ID law and other voter restrictions put in place by Wisconsin Republicans, including limits on early voting and on college students’ ability to register to vote. A federal district judge struck down those provisions on July 29, but its ruling on voter ID affected the ways in which voters can obtain a voter ID. The case is still awaiting appeal. Wednesday’s ruling, for its part, addressed what happens when voters get to the polls without an ID.

This story has been updated with comments from Dale Ho.

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Wisconsin’s Strict Voter ID Law Is Back on the Books

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BREAKING NEWS! Republican Presidential Candidate Endorses Republican Congressional Candidate

by NormanJobe20433 Posted on August 6, 2016

Mother Jones

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I could have chosen just about any newspaper for this, but here’s the Washington Post last night:

Drink this in: it’s front-page news that the Republican candidate for president has endorsed the Republican Speaker of the House for reelection. Front. Page. News. The New York Times says Trump did it in an effort to “heal” a “party rift.” If so, Trump sure was dragged kicking and screaming into it. He read off his endorsement with all the enthusiasm of a Cultural Revolution dissident reading a confession of his counter-revolutionary deviations to his fellow reeducation campmates.

Anyway, Hillary Clinton also got a tiny bit of press on Friday for once again bobbling her claim that James Comey kinda sorta exonerated her in Emailgate. But the operative word here is “tiny.” It might have been a bigger deal if everyone hadn’t been so busy writing about the latest episode of the Trump telenovela. And Paul Ryan is going to win regardless.

Bottom line: Trump says he’s the guy who’s going to win so much we’ll all get tired of winning. But he lost the news cycle completely on Friday for no reason and no gain, just so he could indulge yet another trivial personal feud. Nice work.

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BREAKING NEWS! Republican Presidential Candidate Endorses Republican Congressional Candidate

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