Tag Archives: venta

In Trumpland, Who’s Conning Whom?

by JanelleWeldon2 Posted on April 22, 2016

Mother Jones

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Donald Trump is getting a lot of flak from liberals for this confession from his new campaign honcho:

Trump’s newly hired senior aide, Paul Manafort, made the case to Republican National Committee members that Trump has two personalities: one in private and one onstage. “When he’s out on the stage, when he’s talking about the kinds of things he’s talking about on the stump, he’s projecting an image that’s for that purpose,” Manafort said in a private briefing.

….The Associated Press obtained a recording of the closed-door exchange. “He gets it,” Manafort said of Trump’s need to moderate his personality. “The part that he’s been playing is evolving into the part that now you’ve been expecting, but he wasn’t ready for, because he had first to complete the first phase. The negatives will come down. The image is going to change.”

This is basically being taken as an admission that Trump has just been conning his followers so far, and he’ll turn on a dime when he needs to. But that’s not how I take it.

First, I doubt that this recording was leaked. Rather, it was “leaked.” The Trump campaign wanted it to become public. Sure, it will inspire some mockery from liberals and campaign reporters, but that’s never done Trump any harm. And since leaks are usually taken as a glimpse into the real behind-the-scenes truth, this is the most effective way to get his message out to the public in a credible way.

And how will the public respond? Unlike us hyper-engaged folks, they’ll just take it as an assurance that Trump can act like an adult when he wants to. More subtly, his current fans will also take it as a hint that his adult persona will be meant primarily not to con them, but to con centrist Republicans. With a wink and a nod, he’s telling them he’ll do what he has to do in order to appeal to the corrupt establishment folks, but not to take it too seriously.

And if Trump can pull it off, it might very well work: the establishment folks will start to fall in line, impressed by the “new” Donald. They’re so certain that only yokels can be conned, it will never occur to them that they’re the real marks.

But that’s if Trump can do it. Can he?

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In Trumpland, Who’s Conning Whom?

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We Dare You to Not Break Down Watching Prince’s Tribute to Freddie Gray

by misiaczekssk Posted on April 21, 2016

Mother Jones

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Prince wasn’t just a major pop icon—he was also a staunch supporter of the Black Lives Matter movement. Last May, after weeks of protests in Baltimore that followed the death of Freddie Gray in police custody, he released a tribute song, “Baltimore,” which honored Gray and those demonstrating against police brutality. Prince performed the song live that month at a free show in Baltimore. He also gave a nod to the Black Lives Matter movement while presenting the award for Album of the Year at the 2015 Grammys. “Albums still matter,” he said. “Like books and black lives, albums still matter.”

Today fans are mourning the death of the legendary pop star. This week also marks the one-year anniversary of Freddie Gray’s death. Check out the video for Prince’s tribute to Gray below.

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We Dare You to Not Break Down Watching Prince’s Tribute to Freddie Gray

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Breaking: Pop Megastar Prince Has Died at 57

by BrookeAvelar Posted on April 21, 2016

Mother Jones

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Prince, the legendary pop icon, was found dead at his Paisley Park home in Minnesota, a publicist told the Associated Press on Thursday. He was 57. TMZ first reported the death.

The police were investigating a death at Prince’s estate on Thursday morning but have not made the identity of the deceased person public. Last week, the musician’s private plane made an emergency stop in Moline, Illinois, after performances in Atlanta. A representative for Prince told TMZ that the musician had been battling the flu for several weeks, though the exact cause of death has yet to be confirmed.

Prince’s publicist Yvette Noel-Schure noted in a statement that there were “no further details as to the cause of death at this time.”

Fellow musicians, artists, and celebrities took to social media to mourn the soulful singer’s death.

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Breaking: Pop Megastar Prince Has Died at 57

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Harriet Tubman Was a Republican!

by t07c6o Posted on April 21, 2016

Mother Jones

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Conservatives have finally found something to like about the Obama administration:

Perhaps some of the voices calling for Tubman on the $20 just wanted any prominent African-American woman to replace one of the white males on our currency. If it was political correctness that drove this decision, who cares? The Obama administration has inadvertently given Tubman fans of all political stripes an opportunity to tell the story of a deeply-religious, gun-toting Republican who fought for freedom in defiance of the laws of a government that refused to recognize her rights.

Yeah. That’s the ticket. All those folks in the Obama administration had no idea who Harriet Tubman really was. They were all like, check this out, Jack: black, female, helped slaves, done. Boxes checked. Identity politics satisfied. Put her on the twenty.

The poor fools. She was religious! She carried a gun while helping slaves escape! She was a Republican! She fought for freedom against a tyrannical government! If you think about it, she’s basically the poster child of the modern-day Tea Party. And none of those idiots in the White House had a clue.

Seriously. That seems to be what they think. Next they’re going to remind us that Abraham Lincoln was a Republican too.

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Harriet Tubman Was a Republican!

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Silicon Valley Not Really Feeling the Bern

by FrancescaMackino Posted on April 21, 2016

Mother Jones

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Based on donor data, Brian Fung says that Bernie Sanders has a lot of fans in the dotcom biz:

This wouldn’t be worth mentioning except for the fact that Sanders appears to have a broad-based appeal among Silicon Valley workers compared with his rivals. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Sanders’s campaign committee seems to be by far the biggest recipient of donations from employees of Alphabet (Google’s parent company), Apple, Microsoft, Amazon.com and Intel.

….This sets up a few possibilities. It’s conceivable, for instance, that Clinton’s support among tech companies is actually higher than what we can observe from her list….Another possibility is that tech-industry folks are donating to Clinton but in amounts too small to break into the lists we’re looking at….What we can say is that Sanders appears to have much more support than Clinton across a wider range of tech companies, even if the amount of that financial support is relatively small.

Nah. Google employees are split nearly evenly between Bernie and Hillary, and employees of the other four companies probably are too. We just can’t see them because their totals fall below the top 20 in Hillary’s donor list. But why guess about this? All we have to do is look at the overall industry numbers. Here they are:

Compared to overall fundraising, this represents a bigger tilt toward Hillary than average. And despite the size of this sector, it represents a dismal 0.43 percent of Hillary’s total campaign donations and 0.36 percent of Bernie’s. So we can draw the following conclusions:

Hillary has broader support in the internet sector than Bernie.
Hillary gets a bigger percentage of her donations from the internet sector.
Silicon Valley is full of cheapskates who don’t care much about politics.

So there you have it.

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Silicon Valley Not Really Feeling the Bern

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Is It Finally Time For a UBI?

by Leesa78508779713 Posted on April 20, 2016

Mother Jones

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UBI is having a moment. Not a big moment, mind you, but a moment nonetheless. Why?

UBI stands for Universal Basic Income, and it’s just what it sounds like. It guarantees everyone, rich and poor alike, a certain minimum cash income and replaces the alphabet soup of current welfare programs. No more food stamps. No more Section 8. No more unemployment compensation.

On the right, UBI got a boost a few years ago from Charles Murray, who championed the idea in his book In Our Hands: A Plan To Replace The Welfare State. On the left, the rise of Bernie Sanders has given it a bit of new momentum, even though it’s not part of Bernie’s campaign platform. It’s also gotten some attention thanks to planned experiments in Finland and the Netherlands, and a referendum for a national UBI in Switzerland this summer. On his Freakonomics podcast last week, Stephen Dubner suggests it’s “an idea whose time finally may have come.”

So what are the pros and cons? Here’s a quick, extremely non-exhaustive rundown.

THE GOOD

#1: A UBI eliminates bad work incentives.

There’s a problem inherent with all means-tested welfare benefits: they phase out as you make more money. Suppose you make $15,000 per year, and above that point you lose 50 cents of welfare benefits for every dollar you earn. This means that working more hours or taking a more challenging job doesn’t pay much. On net, a raise of $5,000 per year only gets you $2,500 of actual compensation. This reduces the incentive to work harder in order to escape poverty. But a UBI is different: Since you continue to receive a UBI no matter what your income, it has no effect on work incentives.

#2: A UBI reduces admin costs.

Means-tested programs all have to be administered, and that costs money. A UBI reclaims nearly all of that. The government just sends out a monthly check to every citizen, and that’s it. Admin costs are minuscule.

#3: A UBI allows the poor to live freer lives.

Poor people no longer have to endure a demanding gauntlet of welfare offices and complicated forms. They don’t have to prove their income is low, or that they have kids, or that they’re actively looking for work. Nor do they have to accept only the specific forms of welfare the government feels like giving them. They just get a check every month, and they can spend it as they please.

THE BAD

#1: It costs a fortune.

A reasonable UBI would probably amount to about $10,000 per year, which works out to a total cost of $3.2 trillion. Of course, we’d also eliminate lots of welfare payments, so the net cost would be less than that. But even accounting for that, it would probably require the federal income tax to be doubled or tripled. That’s a pretty tough sell.

#2: It can’t replace everything.

You can—barely—live on $10,000 per year. But that won’t pay for health care. It won’t pay for public schools for our kids. We’ll still have to keep some welfare programs around even with a UBI. On the plus side, as long as these programs are universal, they generally retain the benefits of a UBI: low admin costs and no bad work incentives.

#3: What about children?

This is tricky. Option A is to simply include them like everyone else. But this provides a substantial incentive to have children in order to get their UBI, and that’s not something most voters are likely to accept. Option B is to give children a smaller UBI than adults. But would that be enough to provide for them properly? Nobody wants kids to suffer because their parents are poor. How do you ensure that?

#4: What about the elderly?

Should retirees be folded into the UBI? If so, their pensions would be quite a bit lower than they are now. If not, we’d basically be guaranteeing a higher UBI for old people than for young people. Would that seem fair to most people?

#5: Money is a sadly vulnerable commodity.

It’s an unfortunate but painful truth that poor people are often vulnerable to having cash taken away from them. It can be stolen, of course, but more likely it’s simply confiscated by someone they’re living with. This is obviously a problem with earnings of all kinds, but one advantage of existing welfare programs is that it provides a minimum floor to this. A drunk and abusive husband can’t take away your Section 8 voucher or your food stamps or your Medicaid in order to blow it on beer and smokes.

This is just the briefest outline. And it may be that in the near future we no longer have much choice about this anyway. As robots take away more and more jobs, a UBI may be the only realistic answer to a nation full of robots that can replace low-skill workers at almost no cost. If we get to a point where a substantial number of people flatly don’t have the skills to perform any job for any wage, what are we going to do? The most likely answer is that we’ll end up with a UBI whether we like it or not. And that makes it worth thinking about right now.

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Is It Finally Time For a UBI?

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Jeb Bush’s Campaign, Once Flush With Cash, Is Now $260,000 in Debt

by marekso65 Posted on April 20, 2016

Mother Jones

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Jeb Bush, once considered the prohibitive front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination due to his nine-figure war chest, has now revealed that his defunct campaign is more than a quarter of a million dollars in debt.

Bush ended his campaign almost two months ago amid poor poll numbers, but the extent of its wreckage is only now becoming clear. In a filing made over the weekend, Bush revealed that his presidential campaign is more than $260,000 in debt and has just $31,000 in cash on hand. That’s a stunning admission from the candidate who once sat on a pile of more than $115 million in cash, and a demonstration of just how far Bush fell.

A year ago, before Bush was even a declared candidate, he was working closely to wring dollars out of big donors for the benefit of his super-PAC, Right to Rise, which vacuumed up more than $100 million in its first six months of existence. Bush aides talked of a “shock and awe” campaign that would wow and cow his rivals.

According to Right so Rise’s filing from last summer, on April 15, 2015, exactly a year before the new report of the campaign’s debt, the super-PAC raised $852,000—just on that one day alone. The single biggest donor that day, James C. Flores, the CEO of mining giant Freeport-McMoran’s oil operation, gave $250,000. That would now be nearly enough to wipe out the campaign’s remaining debt. (Not that it could: Super-PAC money isn’t legally available for the direct use of the candidate it backs.)

Last April, Bush was actually worried about being seen as having too much money, and he asked his super-PAC donors not to write such big checks. This April, the Bush team is just trying to keep the lights on while it finishes winding down.

As if that weren’t bad enough for Bush, the biggest outstanding debt comes from a $250,000 loan issued during the campaign’s dying days—by Bush himself.

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Jeb Bush’s Campaign, Once Flush With Cash, Is Now $260,000 in Debt

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Another Pension Fund Goes South After the Great Recession

by RoxannaGuest Posted on April 20, 2016

Mother Jones

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Here’s the latest big pension fund in trouble:

More than a quarter of a million truckers, retirees and their families could soon see their pension benefits severely cut — even though their pension fund is still years away from running out of money.

….Like many other pension plans, the Central States Pension Fund suffered heavy investment losses during the financial crisis that cut into the pool of money available to pay out benefits. While the stock market has recovered since then, the improvements were not enough to make up for the shortfall….That imbalance left the fund paying out $3.46 in pension benefits for every $1 it received from employers. The shortfall has resulted in the fund paying out $2 billion more in benefits than it receives in employer contributions each year.

One of the big criticisms of 401(k) style retirement plans is that they can lose a bundle when the stock market tanks. And sure enough, that’s exactly what happened during the Great Recession. The value of 401(k) plans fell dramatically, causing a lot of pain for people who were close to retirement.

But don’t let that make you nostalgic for the good old days of defined-benefit pensions. Sure, they promise a steady retirement income, but promises are only as good as the money to back them up. This means that pension funds which lost a lot of money during the Great Recession are in no better shape than 401(k) plans that did the same. There’s no magic here.

What’s more, 401(k) plans have rebounded since the depths of the recession: taking into account both their losses and their subsequent gains during the recovery, the average 401(k) balance has grown more than 10 percent per year between 2007 and 2013. Apparently that’s not the case for the Central States Pension Fund. Perhaps those much-maligned 401(k) plans are a better retirement vehicle than their critics give them credit for?

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Another Pension Fund Goes South After the Great Recession

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Watch Donald Trump Blast the GOP’s "Crooked System" in His NY Victory Speech

by TabathaThatcher Posted on April 20, 2016

Mother Jones

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Speaking from Trump Tower in Manhattan on Tuesday, Donald Trump celebrated his resounding victory in New York’s Republican primary. The GOP front-runner took the opportunity to dismiss his challengers, Ted Cruz and John Kasich, and to declare the race essentially over.

“Senator Cruz is just about mathematically eliminated,” Trump told a crowd of supporters. “We’ve won another state. As you know we have won a million more votes than Senator Cruz. Millions and millions of more votes than Governor Kasich.”

“We’re really, really rocking,” he added.

The real estate magnate closed out his victory speech by once again criticizing the Republican party, describing its presidential nomination system as “rigged.” At one point, Trump even referenced the battle that Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders are currently waging for the support of Democratic superdelegates.

“Nobody should take delegates and claim victory unless they get those delegates with voters and voting,” he said. “And that’s what’s going to happen, and you watch, because the people aren’t going to stand for it. It’s a crooked system.”

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Watch Donald Trump Blast the GOP’s "Crooked System" in His NY Victory Speech

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Trump Dominates New York, Reclaiming Momentum

by RubenDriskell Posted on April 20, 2016

Mother Jones

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Donald Trump emphatically reclaimed momentum Tuesday night in the fight for the Republican presidential nomination, scoring an overwhelming victory in his home state of New York.

The major networks called the race immediately after polls closed at 9 p.m. ET. Exit polls showed Trump winning more than half the vote in the state, with John Kasich and Ted Cruz trailing far behind.

The Republican front-runner’s win follows a string of losses this month, in the Wisconsin primary and at state conventions in Colorado and Wyoming where Cruz outmaneuvered Trump in the delegate selection process. But in New York, which will send 95 delegates to the Republican National Convention in Cleveland in July, Trump worked hard to climb back on top.

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Trump Dominates New York, Reclaiming Momentum

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