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These Baltimore Teens Aren’t Waiting Around for Someone Else to Fix Their City

by AntoineCarper Posted on April 28, 2015

Mother Jones

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Since protests sprang up across Baltimore in the wake of Freddie Gray’s death last week and turned increasingly violent on Monday night, cleanup crews and residents—including kids—have been working to repair the city. But long before the protests for Gray there were teens like Diamond Sampson, a Baltimore high school student who three years ago started working with a group of peers on the Inner Harbor Project, an effort to defuse tension between Baltimore’s youth and its police.

Sampson says she’s felt disheartened by the violence, but she sympathizes with the anger and frustration. Part of why the peaceful protests first spiraled out of control on Saturday, she says, is that some people walking by them shouted, “Black lives didn’t matter”—a detail that she feels the media overlooked.

Sampson was one of the first teens to be recruited by Inner Harbor Project founder Celia Neustadt, who grew up in Baltimore and was one of four white students in her own high school class. After going on to graduate from Pomona College, Neustadt returned to the city to start the initiative, with Sampson as her first recruit. Since then, dozens of Baltimore teens have joined and helped conduct “trainings” for the Baltimore Police Department’s Inner Harbor unit. They’ve often walked the harbor—a tourism destination and popular hangout for inner-city teens—as self-declared “peace ambassadors,” wearing matching blue T-shirts and watching out for trouble: If a cop and a teen start arguing, they move in to help mediate. The group now has formal partnerships with local businesses and the police.

The current unrest pains Neustadt: “I know kids who saw the protests as an opportunity to, as my kids say, ‘act a fool.’ They thought this was an opportunity to take out anger on the city without consequences. Our work is front and center right now. There are so many young people in this city with nothing to lose.”

In the days to come, the Inner Harbor Project’s members are planning to use their social networks to try to stop agitators and recruit future youth ambassadors. In conversations with friends, Sampson says there’s been talk about human rights for black teens and even a new civil rights movement. Whether or not that takes shape, she adds, “there’s something going on, greater than our generation can realize.”

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These Baltimore Teens Aren’t Waiting Around for Someone Else to Fix Their City

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Republicans Painting Hillary Clinton As a Tool of the Superrich Forget One Little Thing

by RoxanaWelsh Posted on April 27, 2015

Mother Jones

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While Kevin Drum is focused on getting better, we’ve invited some of the remarkable writers and thinkers who have traded links and ideas with him from Blogosphere 1.0 to this day to contribute posts and keep the conversation going. Today we’re honored to present a post from New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait, whose writing on politics has been published by the New Republic, the American Prospect, and the Los Angeles Times.

Barack Obama was raised by a financially struggling single mother, and Mitt Romney was the son of an auto executive turned governor who grew up to be a gazillionaire in the financial industry. This made biographical populism an unfruitful subject for the right in 2012. But circumstances have changed a bit. Hillary Clinton and her husband have grown extremely rich in their post–White House years, and the Republican Party is cultivating at least a couple of potential candidates, like Scott Walker and Marco Rubio, who boast of their modest backgrounds. Republicans are licking their lips for a year and a half of Hillary-as–Leona Helmsley, flying around in private jets, luxuriating in wealth, and disingenuously pretending to care about the struggles of average Americans. There is, however, one wee problem in the Republican populist plot. That is the policy agenda.

Conservative writer Jay Cost is already looking ahead to this problem, which he presents as a kind of dodge. After flaying Clinton for her wealth, he fumes, “Really, the only claim Clinton can make to understanding the travails of everyday Americans is her party’s platform,” writes Cost, “Endorsement of that document is a kind of sacrament that bestows the power of empathy upon every Democratic pol. This is perhaps the most absurd premise of the Clinton candidacy.”

This is a strange and revealing passage. He argues that Clinton is a tool of the rich, and the only possible fact undermining this otherwise obvious reality is her party’s platform, i.e., the stuff she would do as president. This is an “absurd” premise upon which to cast her as a populist if you think of elections as a soap opera drama between two individuals. It makes a lot of sense if you think about the presidency as a vehicle to change public policy.

And the cardinal fact of the modern political age is that the two parties are primarily fighting over redistribution. Democrats want the government to tax the rich at higher levels and spend more to support the poor, and Republicans want the opposite. The major political fights of the last three decades, from the Reagan tax cuts to the Clinton tax hikes to Clintoncare to the Bush tax cuts to Obamacare to the Ryan budget, have all been centered on the redistributionary principle.

And yet some conservatives don’t want the Republican Party to invest its political capital so heavily in this fight. Maybe they don’t care that much about overtaxing the rich. Or maybe they believe, accurately, that the political price of having to defend tax cuts for the 1 percent crowds out policies that appeal to the 99 percent, who have a lot more votes.

One of the distinctive qualities of this group of populist conservatives is that they seem unable to distinguish between the hope that the Republican Party will adopt their policy vision and the belief that it already has. They have a habit of invoking the GOP they wish existed as though it were the real thing.

Cost falls into this category. In the same piece, he describes a different kind of political debate, one which pits the Republicans against the economic elite, rather than on its side. He describes this alternative debate is if it were the real one:

The GOP ostensibly stands for smaller, more efficient government—but it allows the Democrats to define just what sort of government we are talking about. The debate always seems to be about Medicare and Medicaid, food stamps and unemployment insurance, Pell grants and Head Start. In other words, by the very terms of the conversation, big government works for the benefit of the downtrodden. Even as they defend big government, the Democrats identify themselves as the champions of the downtrodden and the GOP as their hardhearted assailants.

But what about corporate tax payouts? Or farm subsidies for the largest agribusinesses?

The debate “seems” to be about Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, unemployment insurance, Pell grants, and Head Start because the Republican platform is to slash those programs deeply. Those are not things Democrats have defined as the “sort of government we are talking about.” Those are programs Republicans have decided to make the focal point of their economic program (along with deep cuts in taxes for the highest earning Americans, a point Cost is too embarrassed to raise in this context).

What about corporate tax payouts and subsidies for the largest agribusinesses? Well, that would be a great debate for our hypothetical populist Republicans. The actual Republicans defend corporate tax loopholes. They will sometimes invoke them in general, as an argument for a generalized reform that lowers tax rates, but when faced with proposals to eliminate even completely egregious corporate loopholes (like the faster depreciations rate for private jets), they refuse. When Dave Camp went off the reservation before his retirement and designed a tax reform that did not give rich people a huge tax cut, his party abandoned him en masse and never mentioned his plan again.

Farm subsidies are an issue that somewhat divides the parties, since rural members tend to support them regardless of their affiliation. Neither party will forthrightly eliminate them altogether, which is the position I’d favor. But the actual political divide in Washington confounds Cost’s idealized one. It is the Obama administration that wants to reduce agriculture subsidies, and House Republicans fighting to keep them at a higher level.

So, “what about corporate tax payouts? Or farm subsidies for the largest agribusinesses”? Well, those issues underscore the same conclusion as the issues Cost doesn’t want to talk about. It would be wonderful if Republicans stopped being a party whose most despised spending programs benefit the poor and whose most acceptable spending programs benefit the middle class or even the affluent. It would likewise be nice if the Republican Party wasn’t most determined to reduce (or, if possible, eliminate) the taxes paid most heavily by the rich, while also being most willing to raise the taxes heavily paid by the poor. The world would be a much better place. It is not, however, the world we inhabit.

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Republicans Painting Hillary Clinton As a Tool of the Superrich Forget One Little Thing

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Hillary Wants a Piece of the Elizabeth Warren Love Fest

by FrancesLease Posted on April 24, 2015

Mother Jones

Hillary Clinton desperately wants liberals to redirect their adoration of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) toward her presidential campaign.

Since the official launch of her 2016 run earlier this month, Clinton has done everything she can to cozy up to Warren and publicly channel the spirit of the Massachusetts senator. Clinton has bemoaned hedge funders paying lower tax rates and called out CEOs for earning outsize paychecks. She penned a fawning blurb about Warren for Time‘s list of the world’s 100 most influential people. “Elizabeth Warren never lets us forget that the work of taming Wall Street’s irresponsible risk taking and reforming our financial system is far from finished,” Clinton wrote. “And she never hesitates to hold powerful people’s feet to the fire: bankers, lobbyists, senior government officials and, yes, even presidential aspirants.”

Beyond this broad political rhetoric, Clinton so far has been unwilling to reveal where exactly her views align with Warren’s. She launched her campaign by traveling to Iowa and New Hampshire for a “listening tour” of sorts, with detailed ideas promised to come later in the year. A spokesman for the Clinton campaign declined to say if Hillary Clinton would support a list of specific ideas proposed by Warren, such as breaking up big banks and imposing new taxes on financial transactions.

“As Hillary Clinton said last week, Elizabeth Warren is a champion of working families and scourge of special interests,” Clinton spokesman Jesse Ferguson said in a statement to Mother Jones. “The campaign is only two weeks old and we will be detailing our policy agenda after our ramp up period ends this summer but Elizabeth Warren and Hillary Clinton share a record of and a commitment to fighting for everyday Americans and their families.”

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Hillary Wants a Piece of the Elizabeth Warren Love Fest

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

by Jamie Cox Posted on April 23, 2015

Mother Jones

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

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

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

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

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

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Scott Walker Celebrates Earth Day by Proposing To Fire 57 Environmental Agency Employees

by DelorisHeyward Posted on April 22, 2015

Mother Jones

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Happy Earth Day! Today is a day we can all band together and share our love for this beautiful planet—or at least drown our sorrows about climate change with nerdy themed cocktails. Later today, President Barack Obama will mark the occasion with a climate-focused speech in the Florida Everglades. Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, a frontrunner for the GOP presidential nomination, had a different idea: Fire a big chunk of the state’s environmental staff.

From the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel:

Fifty-seven employees of the state Department of Natural Resources began receiving formal notices this week that they might face layoff as part of Gov. Scott Walker’s budget for the next two fiscal years…

The DNR’s scientific staff conducts research on matters ranging from estimating the size of the state’s deer herd to to studying the effects of aquatic invasive species. Work is paid for with state and federal funds…

All told, Walker’s budget would cut 66 positions from the DNR. Of this, more than 25% would come from the science group. Cosh said a smaller number of employees received notices than the 66 positions in the budget because some positions targeted for cuts are vacant.

It’s no secret that a signature tactic in Walker’s controversial environmental record has been to degrade the DNR, which in addition to carrying out research is tasked with regulating the state’s mining industries. Still, the timing of this particular announcement is striking. I guess no one marked Earth Day on Walker’s calendar.

Neither Walker’s office nor DNR immediately returned requests for comment.

As consolation for this depressing news, here’s is a webcam of pandas at the San Diego Zoo.

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Scott Walker Celebrates Earth Day by Proposing To Fire 57 Environmental Agency Employees

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How Californians Screwed Drought-Plagued California

by OliverSheets Posted on April 22, 2015

Mother Jones

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Solving California’s water crisis got a lot harder on Monday when a state appeals court struck down steeply tiered water rates in the city of San Juan Capistrano. Like many other California cities, this affluent Orange County town encourages conservation by charging customers who use small amounts of water a lower rate per gallon than customers who use larger amounts. The court ruled that the practice conflicts with Proposition 218, a ballot measure that, among other things, bars governments from charging more for a service than it costs to provide it.

The drought isn’t the only way Prop. 218 is hamstringing California cities. Early last year, San Francisco’s Municipal Transportation Agency announced a controversial pilot program that would allow Google buses and other tech shuttles to use public bus stops for $1 a stop. Activists, who saw the shuttles as symbols of inequality and out-of-control gentrification, wanted the agency to charge Google much more than that and use the profits to subsidize the city’s chronically underfunded public transit system. But MTA officials argued that their hands were tied: Prop. 218 prevented them from charging more than the estimated $1.5 million cost of administering the program.

Prop. 218, the “Right to Vote on Taxes Act,” was a constitutional amendment drafted in 1996 by the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, the group that led the tax revolt that swept California in the 1970s and eventually helped elect President Ronald Reagan. After 1978, when the group’s signature initiative, Prop. 13, began severely limiting property tax increases, cities and counties moved to plug their budgetary holes with other types of taxes and fees. Prop 218 was designed to constrain those workarounds by requiring that any new tax be approved by voters or affected property owners. For the purposes of the act, taxes included any fees from which a government derived a profit.

Prop. 218 has been widely criticized for making it harder for cities to raise revenues, but the recent cases with water rates and tech shuttles point to another issue: the way the initiative prevents state and local governments from addressing urgent social and environmental problems. It’s worth remembering that withdrawing water from California’s dwindling reservoirs to feed verdant lawns is in itself a tax of sorts, and Mother Nature may not wait until the next election to revoke our ability to levy it.

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How Californians Screwed Drought-Plagued California

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Cruz Campaign Accuses Paul and Rubio of Wimping Out on Gun Rights After Newtown

by ClarissSiggers Posted on April 21, 2015

Mother Jones

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With the gaggle of GOP 2016 presidential contenders growing, the Republican wannabes have largely refrained from assailing one another and have instead focused their wrath on Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton. But now Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) has launched one of the first R-on-R attacks, and he has done so regarding an issue of primal importance to the Republican voting base: guns.

A few days ago, Cruz’s presidential campaign zapped out an email hitting up conservatives for donations. The solicitation showed Cruz, the tea party favorite, wearing a bright orange hunting vest, with a shotgun on his shoulder, and its message was stark: Send me money so I can support your Second Amendment rights, which “serve as the ultimate check against government tyranny.” Cruz warned that he was “under attack from the left-wing media and even Republicans who want to label me as an extremist—all for supporting a fundamental right.” And then he took a shot at the other GOP 2016 contestants: “I’m the only candidate running for President who not only believes in the Constitutional right to keep and bear arms—but has the record of fighting for it, tooth and nail.”

The only Republican 2016er who’s a proven crusader for gun rights? That was quite the claim—and a dig at everyone else in the crowded field, particularly the other GOPers who are competing for tea party and conservative voters. After all, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) has declared himself a champion of gun rights. He has long supported the National Association for Gun Rights—a group that hypes itself as the conservative alternative to the NRA. Rand Paul often signs email solicitations for this outfit, such as one that asserted that President Barack Obama and the United Nations were plotting to “CONFISCATE and DESTROY ALL ‘unauthorized’ civilian firearms.'” (Paul was not invited to the NRA’s recent convention—because, NGAR president Dudley Brown claimed, “Paul is more pro-gun that the NRA.”) Paul has repeatedly moved to eviscerate the gun laws of Washington, DC. And prior to becoming a senator, he campaigned at a gun rights rally with armed militia members who noted that guns could be used to prevent “progressive socialists” from thwarting Second Amendment and other rights. That is, Paul has established a rather die-hard stance on guns.

Yet that did not stop Cruz from depicting himself as the only true and tested advocate for gun rights in the Republican’s 2016 gang. So what does the Paul campaign think of this Cruz attack? Paul campaign officials would not comment on the record. “We’ll pass for now,” spokesman Sergio Gor said—a suggestion that the Paul did not want to mix it up with Cruz at this point.

The same sentiment was not evident when I asked the Cruz campaign how Cruz could justify this implied assault on Rand Paul. Rick Tyler, a well-known conservative consultant working for Cruz, responded with a detailed email that essentially accused Paul and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), another GOP 2016 candidate, of wimping out at a key moment for the gun rights crowd:

From April 11-18, 2013 in the shadow of Newtown, CT, when the Democrats were lined up to hammer Republicans, Paul and Rubio never came to the floor to stand up for the Second Amendment when the Toomey-Manchin gun bill which would have required background checks on all commercial gun sales was being considered. On April 17, Cruz came to the floor promoting a bill (Grassley-Cruz) he co-authored which was the conservative alternative to Toomey-Manchin and which did not expand background checks and made it easier to purchase and transport guns against state lines. It got 52 votes including 9 from Democrats but failed the cloture vote. During that time Cruz and Lee were very aggressive in defending the Second Amendment including gathering stories for the Congressional Record of Americans who used a firearm in self-defense.

With this note, the Cruz campaign, rather than retreat from a political fight over who’s best on gun rights, made its assault on Paul and Rubio explicit, asserting that both Paul and Rubio failed the gun rights movement in its hour of need.

And once again, Paul’s campaign did not engage, declining to answer questions about Tyler’s amplification of the original criticism. Rubio’s campaign also did not respond to a request for comment.

Paul has insisted in the past that after the Newtown gun massacre, he quickly took steps to prevent any gun safety bills from advancing in the wake of that tragedy. On April 10, 2013, he wrote on CNN’s website, “Along with Sens. Mike Lee of Utah and Ted Cruz of Texas, I circulated a letter promising to ‘oppose any legislation that would infringe on the American people’s constitutional right to bear arms, or on their ability to exercise this right without being subjected to government surveillance.'”

Following the Newtown tragedy, Paul considered Cruz an ally in the battle to beat back gun safety legislation. These days, Cruz is not returning the favor and looking to turn Paul and Rubio into targets in order to best them among a critical GOP constituency. The question is, how long will this remain a one-way fight?

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Cruz Campaign Accuses Paul and Rubio of Wimping Out on Gun Rights After Newtown

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The BP Oil Spill Happened 5 Years Ago Today. We’re Still Paying the Price.

by FrancescaGresha Posted on April 20, 2015

Mother Jones

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The Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico five years ago today, killing 11 men and sending nearly 5 million barrels of oil into the sea. After the well was finally plugged, the national media went home, but the story is still very much unfolding everywhere from federal courtrooms to Louisiana backyards.

Let’s have a look back at the nation’s worst-ever oil spill, by the numbers:

Tim McDonnell

Icon credits (via Noun Project unless otherwise noted): Oil barrel—Marco Hernandez; leaky pipe—Evan Udelsman; airplane—Luis Prado; boat—Kevin Chu; cash—Natalie Clay; eviction—Luis Prado; money paper—Alex Tai; pelican—Jennifer Gamboa; birds—Joe Looney; dolphins—Matthew Hall; oil spill—Andrew Hainen; permit—Luis Prado; oil rig—Patrick Trouvé; tourist—Jerald Kohrs; oyster—RedKoala/Shutterstock

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The BP Oil Spill Happened 5 Years Ago Today. We’re Still Paying the Price.

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Nebraska Conservatives Take On GOP Governor Over Death Penalty

by AlphonsVarnum Posted on April 16, 2015

Mother Jones

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A group of conservative legislators in Nebraska are gearing up for what could be a multi-day battle to end the state’s death penalty. The fight pits the right-wing anti-death penalty crusaders against their fellow conservatives and the state’s Republican governor. Here’s the Omaha World-Herald:

Nine conservative lawmakers have signed on as co-sponsors of a repeal measure the Nebraska Legislature will begin debating Thursday. One of their key platforms: Repealing the death penalty makes good fiscal sense.

“If capital punishment were any other program that was so inefficient and so costly to the taxpayer, we would have gotten rid of it a long time ago,” said Sen. Colby Coash of Lincoln.

The bill is unlikely to become law. There are currently enough votes for passage, but advocates warn that anything could happen when the bill comes up for a final vote. Death penalty advocates could mount a filibuster to block the legislature from even voting on the measure. If they don’t, Gov. Pete Ricketts, a Republican, has vowed to block the legislation, and it’s unclear that there are enough votes to override his veto.

Still, the upcoming debate and vote on the bill marks a victory for a small conservative group working on a state-by-state basis to end the death penalty and replace it with life in prison without the possibility of parole. This group, Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty, argues that capital punishment violates core conservative beliefs about the sanctity of life, small government, and fiscal responsibility.

The Nebraska chapter of the group held a press conference Wednesday in advance of today’s floor debate on the bill. “I may be old-fashioned, but I believe God should be the only one who decides when it is time to call a person home,” said state Sen. Tommy Garrett, a conservative who supports repeal. “The state has no business playing God.”

Nebraska has not carried out an execution since 1997, when the state was still using the electric chair, but that might change, according to the World-Herald:

Nebraska Attorney General Doug Peterson said this week that his staff is working to restore the viability of a lethal injection protocol. He did not, however, predict when executions could resume.

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Nebraska Conservatives Take On GOP Governor Over Death Penalty

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As Cities Raise their Minimum Wage, Where’s the Economic Collapse the Right Predicted?

by LatiaChumleigh Posted on April 16, 2015

Mother Jones

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The Fight for 15 protest in New York City. Fast Food Forward

Fast-food cooks and cashiers demanding a $15 minimum wage walked off the job in 236 cities yesterday in what organizers called the largest mobilization of low-wage workers ever. The tax-day protest, known as Fight 4/15 (or #Fightfor15 on Twitter), caused some backlash on the Right:

Conservatives have long portrayed minimum wage increases as a harbingers of economic doom, but their fears simply haven’t played out. San Francisco, Santa Fe, and Washington, DC, were among the first major cities to raise their minimum wages to substantially above state and national averages. The Center for Economic and Policy Research found that the increases had little effect on employment rates in traditionally low-wage sectors of their economies:

Economists with the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment at the University of California-Berkeley have found similar results in studies of the six other cities that have raised their minimum wages in the past decade, and in the 21 states with higher base pay than the federal minimum. Businesses, they found, absorbed the costs through lower job turnover, small price increases, and higher productivity.

Obviously, there’s a limit to how high you can raise the minimum wage without harming the economy, but evidence suggests we’re nowhere close to that tipping point. The ratio between the United States’ minimum wage and its median wage has been slipping for years—it’s now far lower than in the rest of the developed world. Even after San Francisco increases its minimum wage to $15 next year, it will still amount to just 46 percent of the median wage, putting the city well within the normal historical range.

The bigger threat to the economy may come from not raising the minimum wage. Even Wall Street analysts agree that our ever-widening income inequality threatens to dampen economic growth. And according to a new study by the UC-Berkeley Labor Center, it’s the taxpayers who ultimately pick up the tab for low wages, because the federal government subsidizes the working poor through social service programs to the tune of $153 billion a year.

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As Cities Raise their Minimum Wage, Where’s the Economic Collapse the Right Predicted?

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