Tag Archives: street

Elizabeth Warren Launches New Battle Against the Fed

by ManuelMaurer Posted on February 26, 2015

Mother Jones

While speaking before the Senate’s Banking Committee on Tuesday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) hit Fed Chair Janet Yellen with a string of harsh questions over the performance of Scott Alvarez, the Fed’s general counsel, who is at the helm of an investigation of a Fed leak from September 2012.

Warren has expressed frustrations over the investigation’s lack of public information.

“Wall Street banks could profit handsomely if they knew about the Fed’s plans before the rest of the market found out, and that’s why any leak of confidential information from the Fed results in serious penalties for the people who are responsible,” Warren said on Tuesday. “But apparently there have been no consequences for the most recent leak.”

The Massachusetts senator specifically pointed to Alvarez’s Wall Street-friendly reputation, mainly referring to his past criticisms of Dodd-Frank, when she asked Yellen whether the Fed’s views aligned with those of its top lawyer.

Pressed for a strict yes or no response, Yellen eventually said she is “not seeking to alter Dodd-Frank in any way at this time.”

“Do you think that it is appropriate that Mr. Alvarez took public positions that do not evidently reflect the public position of the Fed’s board, especially before an audience that has a direct financial interest in how the Fed enforces its rules?” Warren responded.

Yellen appeared slightly irritated:

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Elizabeth Warren Launches New Battle Against the Fed

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CBS Has Released The Falklands Protest Footage Bill O’Reilly Asked For. It Doesn’t Support His Claims.

by TeodoroRichter Posted on February 24, 2015

Mother Jones

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CBS News today posted its reports from Buenos Aires at the end of the Falklands war, in response to a request from Fox News host Bill O’Reilly, who has been seeking to counter reports that he mischaracterized his wartime reporting experience. But rather than bolstering O’Reilly’s description of the anti-government protest he says he covered as a “combat situation,” the tape corroborates the accounts of other journalists who were there and who have described it as simply a chaotic, violent protest.

On his Monday night show, O’Reilly broadcast clips from the CBS video and maintained that the footage proved “I reported accurately the violence was horrific.” But the issue has not been whether violence occurred at the demonstration. O’Reilly had previously claimed this protest—triggered when Argentines angry at the ruling junta’s surrender to the Brits in the 1982 war gathered near the presidential palace—was a massacre, with Argentine troops gunning down civilians. O’Reilly has relied on that description to support his claim that he was in a “war zone…in the Falklands.” The video does not show civilians being mowed down.

O’Reilly, who was reporting on the protest as a correspondent for CBS News, has asserted that during the demonstration, Argentine soldiers fired into the crowd with “real bullets” and slaughtered “many” civilians. As he put it in a 2009 interview, “Here in the United States we would use tear gas and rubber bullets. They were doing real bullets. They were just gunning these people down, shooting them down in the street.”

Mother Jones reported that O’Reilly’s account of the protest was at odds with media reports from the time, which made no mention of troops firing real bullets into the crowd or civilians killed:

Dispatches on the protest filed by reporters from the New York Times, the Miami Herald, and UPI note that thousands did take to the street, setting fires, breaking store windows, and that riot police did battle with protesters who threw rocks and sticks. They say tear gas was deployed; police clubbed people with nightsticks and fired rubber bullets; reporters were assaulted by demonstrators and by police; and a photojournalist was wounded in the legs by gunfire. But these media accounts did not report, as O’Reilly claims, that there were fatalities.

On Sunday, CNN reported that seven of O’Reilly’s former CBS colleagues disputed his claim that Argentine soldiers had fired live rounds at civilians. They also questioned O’Reilly’s assertion that this protest constituted “combat” and occurred in a “war zone.” Former CBS correspondent Eric Engberg, who wrote a lengthy Facebook post debunking O’Reilly’s Falklands claims, said Buenos Aires “was not a war zone or even close. It was an ‘expense account zone.'” And Richard Meislin, the former New York Times reporter whose account of the protest was selectively quoted by O’Reilly on a Fox News show on Sunday, noted on Facebook, “As far as I know, no demonstrators were shot or killed by police in Buenos Aires that night. What I saw on the streets that night was a demonstration—passionate, chaotic and memorable—but it would be hard to confuse it with being in a war zone.”

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CBS Has Released The Falklands Protest Footage Bill O’Reilly Asked For. It Doesn’t Support His Claims.

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With a New Musical, Punk Icon Fat Mike Aims for Broadway

by AudreaEQQE Posted on February 19, 2015

Mother Jones

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I ring the buzzer at a downtown San Francisco rehearsal space and the door swings open. Mike Burkett, sporting a fading pink mohawk, offers a handshake as he shows me up the stairs.

Burkett, 48, is best known as Fat Mike, founder of the San Francisco record label Fat Wreck Chords, and the irreverent frontman of legendary punk band NOFX. With its unique brand of raucous pop-punk and onstage antics, the band has sold millions of records, cultivating generations of fans in the three decades they’ve been performing.

Now, after five years of writing, finessing, reworking, rehearsing, and self-medicating to complete Home Street Home, his new Broadway-style musical production, Fat Mike is hoping to win over a different audience, and bring them into his world, for a couple of hours at least.

Home Street Home tells the story of a young runaway who joins a “saucy tribe of slutty, castaway street punks,” according to the website description. Along with a catalog of infectiously catchy songs, it offers audiences a “celebratory exploration of sex work, drug use, pain, and BDSM power exchange.”

But don’t expect another cheesy rock opera or genre-bending attempt. In addition to writer/director Soma Snakeoil (a professional Dominant and fetish-movie star who is now Burkett’s fiancé), he’s brought in Jeff Marx, co-writer of the Tony Award-winning musical “Avenue Q,” and veteran Los Angeles stage director Richard Israel. On the day of my visit, with just two weeks left before opening night, the cast and crew were working out the final kinks and last minute changes. It was almost ready.

“We are just about to rehearse the roughest scene,” Burkett tells me over his shoulder as we walk into the bustling studio. We sit across from the performers, and he whispers explanations about what we’re seeing. The scene is a flashback that reveals why Sue, the lead character, ran away from home. When Burkett starts describing the accompanying song, I tell him I’ve already listened to the entire soundtrack. “What did you think?” he asks anxiously.

Writers Jeff Marx, Soma Snakeoil, and Fat Mike. Shervin Lainez

In truth, I hadn’t just listened to it, I’d devoured it. The soundtrack was released in advance of the show, and featured plenty of punk-world notables. A partial list includes Frank Turner, Alkaline Trio’s Matt Skiba, Tony Award winner Lena Hall (Hedwig and the Angry Inch), Dance Hall Crashers’ Karina Denike, and members of Descendents, Lagwagon, the Mad Caddies, and Me First and the Gimme Gimmes. Even the late, great, Tony Sly shows up on one of the tracks.

I already knew most of the words, had picked out my favorite songs, and had been unsuccessfully fighting to get them to stop looping in my head. Even with limited knowledge of the plot, the songs stood on their own, a strange but perfect marriage of the peppy show tunes I grew up on and the punk rock that helped me find myself as a teen.

NOFX, and many of these other bands, played a big part in that, so it was surprising to learn that Fat Mike cared about my opinion. Wasn’t he, after all, the fearless role model of the “don’t give a fuck” philosophy so many of us tried to embody as insecure teenagers?

“I liked it a lot,” I answer simply, before Burkett concedes his anxiety over how the soundtrack would be received. He’d written it, after all, more with Broadway in mind than 924 Gilman Street. Breaking into the theater world was a lifelong dream.

“The first record I ever heard was Rocky Horror Picture Show,” he recalls. “I saw it on TV—too young, like 8 or 9—and I taped it on my tape recorder. Held it up to the TV and taped it. And that is what I listened to for years. That is what I am trying to do. Just how Rocky Horror changed my life when I was a kid. Growing up, that phrase—’Don’t dream it, be it.’—that stuck with me forever.”

But there’s still work to be done and Burektt won’t be satisfied with good-enough. He jumps up frequently to weigh in on the details, from costume fittings to vocal range. “We have to train these people to sing punk,” he says with a smile. “No vibrato allowed!”

With Home Sweet Home, he’s had to pick his battles—frustratingly foreign territory for a guy used to calling the shots. “For a NOFX record, I write usually 15 songs, finish em, no one says shit to me, and I decide which 12 I like best. For this, I had 28, 29 songs, and one by one they just keep getting cut, cut, cut. I write the song and the director goes, ‘This doesn’t make any sense’ and ‘You can’t write this’ and, ‘This is not what we are trying to go with here.’ Songs I spent months working on!” he says. “So, people are telling me what to do, from fucking every direction!”

Even the way he writes songs needed to be adjusted. “All the songs I wrote for this originally were just songs, and I thought we could build a story around it. But the songs have to be story-driven. The goal in the musical is to have people talking and then suddenly they just go into song. It is not like, ‘Hey, here we go!’ and ‘Watch this one!’ and then you start singing a song about elephants or whatever. You have to write lyrics thinking about what’s happening.”

He and Soma often acted out the roles as they wrote to make sure the lyrics were realistic and that the song was building the story. It wasn’t that much of a stretch, considering that much of the storyline was culled from their own lives. Both spent time on the streets as teens, relishing in the freedom and seeking solace in the company of other street kids—many of whom are reflected in the play’s characters.

Some of them turn to prostitution to survive. Others to drugs and alcohol. And the story includes many situations that may be hard for some people to stomach. But Burkett sees it as an honest portrayal of teens living on the street. They don’t want your pity, he emphasizes. These kids are not lost souls.

“The show is about chosen family. How all these kids move to the street because it was better. How these kids were all screwed over but they are all happy and they are in a great family,” he says. “Looking down your nose at people is ridiculous. And that’s what this shows, that these kids are happier than most of the fucking people in the world—even if they are homeless and hookers and drug addicts.”

Burkett hopes his new audiences will be open to a culture and experience that might seem to them far removed. “You feel a little bit odd to the world. You feel different. And that’s why it all started right? People don’t fit in. That is what is punk about it,” he says. “These kids are outcasts and had really shitty childhoods and they came together.”

Home Street Home opens February 20 at Z Space in San Francisco. For now, there are only 11 performances scheduled. Burkett hopes it will go far beyond that. “I hope it is as successful as Avenue Q or Hedwig. My goal was to write something similar to Rocky Horror—a cult classic musical. And I think we have done that.”

If nothing else, Burkett offers audiences a new way to see stories from the streets. “None of this was about anything except writing something that is going to be really remembered,” he says. “I think people’s attitudes will change from this—maybe they will look at street people and drug users and prostitutes and get a good glimpse of people who chose their family.”

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With a New Musical, Punk Icon Fat Mike Aims for Broadway

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I Am a White Mother of Black Sons. Here’s What I Know.

by EldonGollan Posted on February 18, 2015

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

For Adam and Khary

Black bodies
swingin’ in
the summer
breeze
strange fruit hangin’ from the poplar trees

It was 1969 and 1973, both times in early fall, when I first saw your small bodies, rose and tan, and fell in love for the second and third time with a black body, as it is named, for my first love was for your father. Always a word lover, I loved his words, trustworthy, often not expansive, sometimes even sparse, but always reliable and clear. How I—a first-generation Russian-Jewish girl—loved clarity! Reliable words—true words, measured words, filled with fascinating new life stories, drawing me down and in. The second and third times I fell in love with black bodies I became a black body, not Black, but black in a way I’d say without shame and some humor, for mine is dark tan called white. But I am the carrier, I am the body who carried them, released on a river of blood.

Am I black in a cop’s hands when he is pushing, pressing hard for dope or a gun or a rope or a knife or a fist? I am not a black body, yet my body is somehow, somewhere, theirs—Trayvon’s, Emmett’s, thousands more at the end of a rope’s tight murderous swing, black as a night stick splits my head, shatters my chest, black as a boy not yet a man walking toward a man with a gun, suddenly shot dead, a just-become man walking down the stairs toward a gun, black as a tall man, a big man, looking strong but pleading for his breath, killed by choking arms and bodies piled on top of his head.

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I Am a White Mother of Black Sons. Here’s What I Know.

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Missing David Carr

by ConnorHowell Posted on February 13, 2015

Mother Jones

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David Carr was a bundle of genius wrapped up in the most unlikely packaging. Once, when I was working at the Washington Monthly, he stopped by our scruffy, roach-infested Dupont Circle headquarters for a visit. He didn’t get three feet into the office before another editor physically tried to shove him back out the door. He thought Carr was a homeless person who’d wandered in off the street. Steve Pomper will never live that down, but Carr and I had a good laugh about it. But that was the thing about him, especially as the wheels really started to pop off his battered body: The disguise was deceptive.

Behind the guy who often looked like a derelict was a formidable intellect and an unmatchable gift for language. Carr hired me to work for him at Washington City Paper. Even today, I can re-read my old clips from my days at City Paper and identify the brilliant one-liners that were all Carr. The “jackknife of joy” and other Carrisms that found their way into my stories have become like code words for those of us lucky enough to be in his tribe.

Carr has been a steady figure in my life for 20 years. For someone who had had such a messy personal history, he was a rock as a friend. Even after he launched into media superstardom, and it seemed he knew just about everyone worth knowing, he was always there when it counted. When I got engaged to my then-editor, Erik Wemple, Carr was the very first person we told. He was in my wedding, and gave the appropriately off-color rehearsal dinner toast. When my mother-in-law dropped dead in the supermarket unexpectedly, he was there for the funeral. He scheduled his whole summer last year to make sure he could be around to celebrate Erik’s 50th birthday. He loved my children and they love him.

David Carr, with his favorite people: Jill Rooney Carr (right), Erin, Maddie and Megan Carr Carr family

In spite of the manic pace of both his work and social life, David knew what was important. He was fiercely loyal and just generally fun to have around. Loud and outspoken, he was never afraid to put his foot in his mouth—what he called his “social autism.” Two summers ago, at a lake in the Adirondacks, I introduced him to a coworker and her husband, who was wearing a life jacket on the beach. Carr razzed him mercilessly about sporting the vest on dry land—only to learn later that the guy couldn’t swim. He’d try speaking his loud, terrible Spanish to a street vendor, only to be told later that the vendor was from South Asia. At those moments, he could laugh at himself, and no one ever held those sorts of things against him because Carr’s gaffes were invariably accompanied by such enthusiasm and effusive interest in whomever he was talking to at the time it was impossible not to love him.

To this day, I don’t even know where Carr went to college, which is unusual for anyone who’s spent any time in Washington. He might have liked to drop a few names, but Carr was the ultimate anti-snob. As someone who also has a forgettable college record, I loved that about him. Carr was brilliant, but he also got where he was with agonizing hard work, and working smarter than everyone else, not because of his pedigree or other credentials. That work ethos and determination carried over into his personal life.

Even though he was a physical wreck and a chain smoker, he continued to go on regular bike tours organized by his good friend John Otis. The last trip, in the Adirondacks, he did in spite of a set of ribs broken after falling off his bike in a training ride. For years, I’d wondered how he managed to keep up with the far fitter cyclists he traveled with. I thought maybe he was simply fueled by competitiveness and his determination to keep going in spite of his failing body—a defiant “fuck you” to his own mortality. To an extent, that was all true. But a few years ago, I learned the real secret.

In 2011, I went to China for a visit, and Carr, a man with a friend in every port, hooked me up with his buddy Ruthie, who lived in Shanghai. Over dinner, Ruthie, who’d been on several of the bike trips, disclosed Carr’s secret: He got a head start. Carr would get up and hit the road several hours before the other guys so he could keep up. If anyone had ever wondered how someone like Carr, with his history of addiction and jail and all the other stuff, ever made it to the top of the media pyramid, this story seemed to sum it all up nicely.

Over the past few years, Carr has had a bit of a haunted look about him. He’d lost weight. His health problems seemed to be dogging him more. I think everyone who knew him well recognized, at least subconsciously, that Carr was not going to be on this earth long enough to need a rocking chair. But I think we also had some collective denial about his mortality. To use a cliché he wouldn’t approve of, Carr genuinely was a force of nature. I think maybe we assumed he could go on like that forever, pulling the all-nighters, smoking, drinking gallons of coffee, working like a fiend, and talking, talking and talking. But of course, he couldn’t. And so here we are, devastated, grieving, missing our irreplaceable friend. I think Jake Tapper spoke for a lot of us who knew and loved Carr when he wrote in an anguished tweet today, “What the hell are we going to do now?”

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Missing David Carr

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Google Can Do Well With Its New Communications Products, But Only If It Acts Like a Genuine Startup

by MarylouMuo Posted on February 7, 2015

Mother Jones

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Brian Fung tells us that Google is making a “serious play in the communications space,” featuring an aggressive strategy that includes rollouts of new products like ultra-fast internet service, new smartphones, and even wireless service:

Google’s investments in telecom pit the company against some of the largest voice and Internet providers around. But Google has a key advantage: It doesn’t make its money from Internet service subscribers. That’s why it will be able to drive down prices for consumers, to adopt business practices that would be unsustainable for other carriers and to influence Washington policy debates in surprising ways.

“This is a multilayered strategy,” said Harold Feld, senior vice president for the consumer group Public Knowledge. “Even if Google only makes 10 percent profit margin on its fiber and wireless offerings, that’s enough for it to be successful and to achieve the desired result of driving more use of its applications.”

This isn’t quite right. Or maybe I should say it’s only half right. It’s true that these new services will probably help Google increase sales of its core products, thus offsetting low margins in the communications space. But that’s not the real reason Google can afford to do this. The real reason is that Google is a new entrant, which means that entering these new businesses doesn’t force it to cannibalize any of its current businesses.

This is the key problem that kills old companies when new technology hits the street. Every cheap new widget they sell means one less expensive old widget they sell, and very few companies have the stones to just accept reality and really dive into the new widgets regardless. So they sell the new widgets, but only half-heartedly. They defeature them. They limit their sales channels. They don’t spend enough on marketing. Meanwhile, a startup with no such issues eats their lunch because their new widgets are their main business and they just sell the hell out of them.

That’s Google’s big advantage in this space. The fact that entering the telecom business might—might!—boost sales of other Google products is great, but it’s just a bonus, and not one they should be thinking too hard about. In fact, if their new products are tailored too tightly as mere helpers for their old product lines, they could end up in the same position as all those old dinosaur companies that couldn’t quite put their hearts into new tech. That road is well trod, and it’s usually a pretty grim one.

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Google Can Do Well With Its New Communications Products, But Only If It Acts Like a Genuine Startup

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Mitt Romney Is Going to Run for President Again? WTF?

by JoannaSims Posted on January 14, 2015

Mother Jones

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I’m sort of slowly catching up on things I missed over the past couple of days, and most of it at least makes sense. Wall Street panicked over a single bad economic report. Check. Boko Haram massacred another village in Nigeria. Check. Tea partiers still control the Republican agenda in Congress. Check. Mitt Romney is going to run for president again. Ch—

Wait. Mitt Romney is going to run for president again? Seriously? That’s insane, isn’t it? Can anyone aside from Romney’s overpaid team of advisors and consultants actually make a good case that he can win?

I’m still a little woozy, so I’m not up to the job of trying to figure this out. But there’s just no way. Parties don’t rally around losers, and Romney is now a two-time loser. Ann Romney may still be nursing a planet-sized grudge about the way Mitt was treated in 2012, but that buys no votes. Besides, he’ll be treated the same way this time around. Once a plutocrat, always a plutocrat. Maybe that’s fair, maybe it’s not, but nobody ever said life was fair.

So I guess I’m caught up. Except for this one thing. What the hell is Romney thinking?

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Mitt Romney Is Going to Run for President Again? WTF?

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Check Out This Amazing Presidential Debate Mitt Romney and Jeb Bush Just Had

by AlyceL77dvcyrf Posted on January 9, 2015

Mother Jones

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On Friday, the Wall Street Journal reported that Mitt Romney may be running for president again in 2016. Meanwhile, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush is also considering a run! Mother Jones DC bureau chief David Corn, who broke the news of this little video back in 2012, had a couple of thoughts about how that battle for the GOP nomination might play out:

We can’t wait.

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Check Out This Amazing Presidential Debate Mitt Romney and Jeb Bush Just Had

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Pharma Marketing: Pretty Much the Same As Every Other Kind of Marketing

by LucasBrune Posted on January 8, 2015

Mother Jones

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Charles Ornstein and Ryann Grochowski Jones published a story yesterday that’s gotten a lot of attention. It’s an examination of where pharmaceutical companies spend most of their marketing budgets:

The drugs most aggressively promoted to doctors typically aren’t cures or even big medical breakthroughs. Some are top sellers, but most are not. Instead, they are newer drugs that manufacturers hope will gain a foothold, sometimes after failing to meet Wall Street’s early expectations.

“They may have some unique niche in the market, but they are fairly redundant with other therapies that are already available,” said Dr. Joseph Ross, an associate professor of medicine and public health at Yale University School of Medicine. “Many of these, you could call me-too drugs.”

Maybe this is just my marketing background blinding me to an obvious outrage, but….what else would you expect? This is what every company does. If you’re in marketing, you spend a lot of money on new product launches and you spend a lot of money where you most need to differentiate yourself. This is nothing unique to pharma. It’s just the common-sense way that marketing works.

There’s a lot that’s wrong with pharmaceutical R&D priorities, and there’s also a lot that’s wrong with pharmaceutical marketing strategies. But spending a lot of money on new products that have entrenched competitors? If that’s wrong, then every consumer products company on the planet is doing something wrong. I’m a bit at a loss to figure out what the story is supposed to be here.

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Pharma Marketing: Pretty Much the Same As Every Other Kind of Marketing

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We Should Respond to North Korea. But What If We Can’t?

by LinwoodConforti Posted on December 19, 2014

Mother Jones

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Over at the all-new New Republic, Yishai Schwartz sounds the usual old-school New Republic war drums toward North Korea. “The only way to prevent future attacks,” he says, “is for foreign governments to know that attacks against U.S. targets—cyber or kinetic—will bring fierce, yet proportionally appropriate, responses.” And time is already running out. We should be doing this now now now.

Right. So what’s the deal, Obama? Why all the dithering in the face of this attack? Are you just—oh wait. Maybe there’s more to this. Here’s the Wall Street Journal:

Responding presents its own set of challenges, with options that people familiar with the discussions say are either implausible or ineffective. North Korea’s only connections to the Internet run through China, and some former officials say the U.S. should urge Beijing to get its neighbor to cut it out…But the U.S. already is in a standoff with China over accusations of bilateral hacking, making any aid in this crisis unlikely, the intelligence official said.

Engaging in a counter-hack could also backfire, U.S. cyberpolicy experts said, in part because the U.S. is able to spy on North Korea by maintaining a foothold on some of its computer systems. A retaliatory cyberstrike could wind up damaging Washington’s ability to spy on Pyongyang, a former intelligence official said. Another former U.S. official said policy makers remain squeamish about deploying cyberweapons against foreign targets.

…North Korea is already an isolated nation, so there isn’t much more economic pressure the U.S. can bring to bear on them either, these people said. Even publicly naming them as the suspected culprit presents diplomatic challenges, potentially causing problems for Japan, where Sony is based.

I’d like to do something to stomp on North Korea too. Hell, 20 million North Koreans would be better off if we just invaded the damn place and put them all under NATO military rule. It’s one of the few places on Earth you can say that about. However, I’m sensible enough to realize that things aren’t that easy, and there’s not much point in demanding “action” just because the situation is so hellish and frustrating.

Ditto in this case. A US response would certainly be appropriate. And honestly, it’s not as if there’s really anyone taking the other side of that argument. But given the nature of the DPRK, a meaningful response would also be really hard. America just doesn’t have a whole lot of leverage against a place like that. What’s more, if we do respond, it’s at least even odds that it will be done in some way that will never be made public.

So let’s cool our jets. Armchair posturing might make us feel better, but this isn’t a partisan chew toy, and it’s not a matter of the current administration being insufficiently hawkish. It’s a matter of figuring out if there’s even a way to respond effectively. Like it or not, it might turn out that there isn’t.

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We Should Respond to North Korea. But What If We Can’t?

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