Tag Archives: venta

BREAKING: Ivanka Out, Eric & Don Jr. to Take Reins of Trump Biz

by RosalinDeen Posted on December 13, 2016

Mother Jones

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It looks like Ivanka has been fired:

In a pair of tweets sent after 11 p.m., Trump wrote: “Even though I am not mandated by law to do so, I will be leaving my businesses before January 20th so that I can focus full time on the Presidency. Two of my children, Don and Eric, plus executives, will manage them. No new deals will be done during my term(s) in office.”

….Trump’s tweets omitted reference to daughter Ivanka, who, like her brothers, currently works at the Trump Organization. However, Ivanka is expected to step away from the business to serve in an advisory capacity to her father; her husband Jared is a key and trusted aide.

Then again, maybe she’s been promoted. Which is better: being a co-CEO of a crippled Trump Organization, or being acting First Lady because apparently your stepmother doesn’t want the job? That’s a ticklish question. Where’s the chief of protocol when you need him?

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BREAKING: Ivanka Out, Eric & Don Jr. to Take Reins of Trump Biz

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As Always, Inflation Is Yet Again Right Around the Corner

by LeolaGeach156 Posted on December 13, 2016

Mother Jones

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The Wall Street Journal has annoyed me again today. See if you can spot how they got my dander up:

A rallying stock market, rising bond yields and the return of inflationary pressures are creating new challenges for the Federal Reserve….Many Fed watchers see the prospect of tax cuts and fiscal spending under Donald Trump, as well as rising oil prices and inflation expectations, pointing to a pickup in the pace of rate increases.

….Many money managers say an upsurge of inflation throughout 2017 ranks among the top risks to a continued advance in U.S. stocks….On the bond market, meanwhile, a gauge of 10-year inflation expectations rose to the highest level in more than two years and edged above the Fed’s 2% inflation target….The fiscal stimulus Mr. Trump has proposed could boost demand and send inflation higher. Expectations of higher inflation have firmed further after the agreement by oil-producing nations boosted crude prices.

Sigh. Here’s a chart of all the commonly used inflation measures:

The ordinary measures of inflation (in red) are rising, but only to the level of two years ago—and well below the Fed’s target of 2 percent. The core measures of inflation (in blue) are pretty steady at well under 2 percent. And the 10-year-breakeven (in brown), which is a measure of inflation expectations, has been on a steady downward march for three years.

The only measure that’s both rising and breaking past the 2 percent target is the 10-year-breakeven—but only if you look at the daily change over just the past five weeks. So which measure does the Journal show in its chart? The daily change of the 10-year-breakeven over the past five weeks.

Inflation is always right around the corner, isn’t it? No matter how you have to twist things to make it come out that way, it’s always right around the corner.

But maybe we should turn the corner first before we panic. After all, 2 percent is a target, not a ceiling. After years of sub-2-percent inflation, surely we can wait until we’ve had at least a few months of 3 percent inflation before we break out the hammer and shatter the punch bowl?

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As Always, Inflation Is Yet Again Right Around the Corner

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Donald Trump Is Once Again the Day Trader in Chief

by JimmieOdonnell Posted on December 13, 2016

Mother Jones

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Early this morning Donald Trump launched another one of his famously random tweets:

The F-35 program is pretty famously over budget. I don’t think anyone will argue with Trump about that. But Christopher Bouzy asks an interesting question. Here’s a chart showing Lockheed Martin’s stock price today:

Bouzy wonders if someone profited by knowing about Trump’s tweet a few minutes before it went out. This is a reasonable suspicion if you look at tweeting and trading times down to the minute, but if you look at them down to the second you get a different picture. Trump’s tweet went out at 8:26:13 and there were a flurry of small trades ten seconds later, followed by a second flurry three seconds after that. This caused Lockheed Martin’s price to drop considerably, but only because pre-market trading volume is pretty low and illiquid, so even a smallish trade can send prices down. Most likely, these flurries were day traders who happened to see Trump’s tweet and acted instantly, or perhaps some kind of bot that reacts to Trump tweets.1

But even if there was no hanky panky, our president-elect still seems to have had an effect: Lockheed Martin stock traded very heavily today and closed down by more than two percent. Coincidence? Or a response to Trump’s tweet?

This revives a question we asked last week after Trump tweeted about Softbank, sending Sprint and T-Mobile stock upward. Do we really want the president of the United States calling out individual corporations and affecting their stock prices? Do we really want to be left wondering if maybe someone had a little advance knowledge of Trump’s tweets? That doesn’t seem to have been the case today, but if you knew a day ahead, for example, your trade would get lost in the noise and no one would ever know.

I assume the answer to these questions is no, isn’t it?

1Ridiculous? Not at all. I’d be surprised if someone hasn’t done this.

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Donald Trump Is Once Again the Day Trader in Chief

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A Guide To Donald Trump’s Huge Debts—and the Conflicts They Present

by ShellyCqnrzoy Posted on December 12, 2016

Mother Jones

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Donald Trump has announced that on December 15 he will hold a press conference to reveal to the world his plan to address the many conflicts of interest between his vast business empire and his new role as president. Trump has indicated that he will remove himself from the daily “business operations” of the Trump Organization—but not sell off his holdings or create a truly blind trust.

Ethics experts have criticized this approach because Trump would continue to own his properties, benefiting from their success and suffering from their losses. He would know when his policy decisions and actions—or those of others (including corporations and foreign governments)—could affect his assets. Consequently, he would not be separating his presidential decision-making from his own personal financial circumstances. Yet, arguably, the biggest conflicts he faces aren’t related to what he owns. Rather, they relate to what he owes.

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All of Trump’s top properties—including Trump Tower, the Trump National Doral golf course, and his brand new luxury hotel in Washington, DC—are heavily mortgaged. That means Trump maintains critical financial relationships with his creditors. These interactions pose a significant set of potential conflicts, for his creditors are large financial institutions (domestic and foreign) with their own interests and policy needs. Each one could be greatly affected by presidential decisions, and Trump certainly has a financial interest in their well-being.

Below is a list of all the financial players that Trump owes money to and how much Trump directly has borrowed from each one. This roster is based on publicly available loan documents. According to his own public disclosure, Trump, as of May, was on the hook for 16 loans worth at least $713 million. This list does not include an estimated $2 billion in debt amassed by real estate partnerships that include Trump. One of those loans is a $950 million deal that was cobbled together by Goldman Sachs and the state-owned Bank of China—an arrangement that ethics experts believe violates the Constitution’s emolument clause, which prohibits foreign governments from providing financial benefits to federal officials.

Deutsche Bank: $364 million

The troubled German bank is Trump’s top lender and has been for years. When the rest of Wall Street essentially abandoned Trump years ago, apparently frustrated by his business tactics, Deutsche Bank stuck by the celebrity developer. Well, not all of Deutsche Bank. In 2005, Trump borrowed $640 million from a group of banks, including Deutsche Bank, to build his Chicago tower. But by 2008, the real estate market had gone bad, and Trump was in financial trouble. Shortly before he was due to pay Deutsche Bank $40 million for a portion of the loan he had personally guaranteed, Trump filed a lawsuit against the German bank, demanding $3 billion to compensate him for the international economic turmoil that Trump claimed the bank had helped cause and that Trump now said was hurting his investment in Chicago.

The dispute was eventually settled, but Trump’s relationship with the division of the bank handling big commercial loans was done. Instead, he began working with what’s known as the “private bank” side of Deutsche Bank—the division that caters to high-net-worth individuals and which has significantly more leeway to lend money. His various corporations now have four outstanding loans from that part of Deutsche Bank, worth a combined $364 million.

Trump’s Deutsche Bank loans include:

$125 million for two mortgages on his Trump National Doral golf course in Miami. Both were taken out in 2012.
$69 million for a 2014 loan tied to the Chicago tower that Trump and Deutsche previously bickered over. This loan is listed within Cook County property records. Trump’s personal financial disclosure form lists a loan that appears similar but doesn’t match the official record. That document notes he has a 2012 loan for the Chicago tower valued at between $25 million and $50 million.
$170 million for a loan related to the Trump’s hotel in the Old Post Office in Washington, DC. Trump doesn’t own the building—he leases it from the federal government—but he borrowed the money to finance the building’s extensive renovation. It’s not clear when Trump borrowed the money, but it was likely after he announced his bid for the presidency.

Trump has an enormous conflict of interest on his hands with Deutsche Bank. As Trump himself noted in his 2008 lawsuit against the bank, Deutsche played a prominent role in the run-up to the 2008 financial crisis. The Obama administration has targeted Deutsche Bank and other banks for creating and repackaging bad mortgage products, and earlier this fall the Justice Department announced it was seeking to settle claims against the bank for about $14 billion. That was much more than Deutsche Bank was expecting to pay, and the news sent the bank into a tailspin. Its stock price plummeted amid speculation that it could not remain afloat if the Justice Department pressed the bank for such a big settlement.

Negotiations between the bank and the Justice Department over the size of the settlement are underway. But if they are not resolved by January 20, Trump’s administration will be in charge of handling this case. So a federal government run by Trump will have to decide how hard to push the bank that Trump owes so much to and that has been critical to Trump’s personal fortunes.

Ladder Capital: $282 million

Ladder Capital is not a traditional bank or a big name on Wall Street, but in the last several years it has joined Deutsche Bank as a main source of financing for Trump. In fact, since 2012, these two outfits have been the only ones to lend Trump money. Ladder Capital is a small Wall Street firm that specializes in loaning money for commercial real estate projects and, with the help of the big Wall Street banks, combining pieces of these loans into bigger packages that it then sells to investors.

One big issue with Trump’s loans from Ladder Capital is that he appears to be personally liable for at least $26 million of the debt. So if a problem with the loan emerges, Ladder Capital could ask Trump, not his business, to cover this amount personally. Even if Trump does remove himself from the operations of the Trump Organization and lets his adult children run the business, this conflict of interest would not be addressed. The man in the Oval Office would still be in hock to this financial institution.

There’s another major issue with the Ladder Capital loans. As was reported last week, Ladder Capital has hired Citibank to help organize a possible sale. Sources at the firm told Reuters that new federal regulations covering the repackaging of loans were making the company’s core business more complicated.

It’s possible then that if the firm does go on the block, Trump’s loans could end up being bought by another party. It could be an investor or a financial institution based in the United States or overseas. Imagine, say, a Russian bank owning the debt of an American president. In any event, another troubling conflict of interest could exist—and the public might not even know about this at first, for Trump would be under no obligation to update the personal financial disclosure until it was time to file his annual disclosure report.

Trump’s loans with Ladder Capital include:

$160 million for a loan related to Trump’s 40 Wall Street office tower. Trump took out the mortgage in 2015 to replace a similar loan he had from Capital One with a higher interest rate.
$100 million for a mortgage on Trump Tower. This is Trump’s most prized possession and the possible “White House North,” but he only owns a small portion of the property. (Most of the condo units were sold years ago.) This mortgage provides Trump a line of credit secured by the building.
$7 million for a mortgage on several commercial condo units in the Trump International Hotel Tower on New York City’s Columbus Circle. This loan doesn’t appear on Trump’s most recent personal financial disclosure. He filed that document in May, and he borrowed this money in July. The loan replaced an earlier one of the same amount that Trump had obtained from Swiss bank UBS Capital.
$15 million for a mortgage on three condo units in the Trump Plaza apartment building on New York’s upper East Side.

Investors Savings Bank: $23 million

In 2010, Trump combined an earlier mortgage on his Westchester County golf course into a much larger $23 million mortgage that also leveraged his ownership of condo units in the Trump Park Avenue building in New York City.

Amboy Bank: $16 million

In 2010, Trump took out a mortgage on his Trump National Golf Club-Colts Neck in Monmouth County, New Jersey, for $16 million from Amboy Bank, a tiny New Jersey bank.

Chevy Chase Trust Holdings: $10 million

In 2009, Trump purchased a golf course in Loudon County, Virginia, for $13 million. To make the deal happen, he borrowed $10 million from the land development company that previously owned the property.

Bank of New York Mellon Trust: $9.25 million

Trump’s personal financial disclosure lists bonds, first issued in 1996, against a commercial property on New York’s East 56th Street. Paperwork filed with the State of New York shows the due date on the bonds has been extended to 2020.

Royal Bank of Pennsylvania: $8 million

In 1995, Trump purchased a lavish estate in Westchester County, New York, and in 2000 he refinanced that purchase with an $8 million mortgage from the Royal Bank of Pennsylvania. Trump originally planned to turn the large estate into a golf course, but opposition from local residents blocked the project. The property has been used as a family retreat and a playground for Trump’s two oldest sons. Trump has long had a personal relationship with the bank’s founder, and he allowed the banker’s 10-year-old grandson to perform magic tricks at Trump’s Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City.

Merrill Lynch: Less than $750,000

In the early 1990s, Trump purchased two houses next to his Mar-A-Lago estate, borrowing about $2 million from Merrill Lynch for these purchases. The loans, which were taken out in 1993 and 1994 and come due in 2019, are now worth between $350,000 and $750,000.

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A Guide To Donald Trump’s Huge Debts—and the Conflicts They Present

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Films to Quench Your 60’s Music Nostalgia

by HymanLeist Posted on December 12, 2016

Mother Jones

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The Beatles
Eight Days a Week—The Touring Years
Capitol/UMe

T.A.M.I. Show/The Big T.N.T. Show
Shout! Factory

Courtesy of Apple Corps Ltd./UMe

Nostalgic fans of a certain age who like to pontificate about how great music was in the ’60s can cite a couple of new home video releases to back up their argument. Directed by Ron Howard, documentary Eight Days a Week—The Touring Years offers a concise, 100-minute survey of the Fab Four’s career up to the point they stopped touring in 1966. Inevitably, it only skims the surface, but the music is (of course) terrific and the footage of the lads sending audiences into a hysterical frenzy captures the bizarre, sometimes frightening energy of the day. Extras on the two-disc edition include charming reminiscences by American fans and uncut performances of five songs that prove what a cooking live act they were. While The Beatles probably had to stop touring just to preserve their sanity, it’s hard not to conclude from this engaging film that a special spark left their music when they retired from the road, even as their artistic ambitions expanded exponentially.

T.A.M.I. Show/The Big T.N.T. Show pairs two mid-’60s concert films presenting rock and soul acts live on stage, each delivering a brief set in the style of multiple-artist package tours of the day. The previously available T.A.M.I. Show offers strong performances from the likes of Chuck Berry, Marvin Gaye, The Beach Boys, Lesley Gore and Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, among others, as well as a few duds, but the centerpiece remains James Brown’s surreal, over-the-top display of genius. Writhing and shouting, yet always fully in control, the Godfather of Soul embodies performance art at its mind bending best, and makes the Rolling Stones, who follow him in the movie, seem like capable but callow little boys by comparison. (T.A.M.I. is “Teenage Awards Music International,” fyi, but there were no such awards.)

Long unavailable, The Big T.N.T. Show isn’t quite in the same league, but more than bears watching. Highlights include the sloppy and charming Lovin’ Spoonful, witty country songsmith Roger Miller and early rock’n’roll great Bo Diddley, laying down deep grooves (not to mention The Byrds, Ray Charles and The Ronettes). The weirdest moment occurs when folk queen Joan Baez fronts an orchestra for a faithful cover of The Righteous Brothers’ “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’,” with Phil Spector, who produced the original, conducting the musicians. It’s as astounding in its own puzzling way as James Brown’s titanic “Please Please Please.” Those were the (strange) days.

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Films to Quench Your 60’s Music Nostalgia

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John Bolton Set To Be #2 At State Department

by MaikSeibert Posted on December 12, 2016

Mother Jones

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Andrea Mitchell reports on who will be working with Rex Tillerson at the State Department:

He will also be paired with former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton as his deputy secretary of state, one of the sources added, with Bolton handling day-to-day management of the department.

John Bolton? This is hardly unexpected, but holy shit. Bolton is a lunatic. Here he is on Fox News today:

Bolton is seriously suggesting that the hacks into Democratic Party computers might have been false flag operations, presumably with the goal of making it look like Russia supported Donald Trump. This would ruin Trump’s reputation and guarantee a win for Hillary Clinton.

This is completely nuts. It’s deranged. It’s unhinged. And it doesn’t even make sense on its own terms. No campaign in its right mind would do this, and certainly not a campaign desperately trying to keep the word “email” in any form out of the public discourse.

Dark insinuations of false flag operations are a favorite among conspiracy theorists. They think it makes them sound sophisticated and worldly. This means that either Bolton is a conspiracy theorist or else he doesn’t mind sounding like one if that’s what it take to defend his side. And soon he’ll be the #2 guy at State, the person really running things while Tillerson provides the public face. God help us.

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John Bolton Set To Be #2 At State Department

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Why Are Children Less Likely to Earn More Than Their Parents These Day?

by JimIrons2455760 Posted on December 12, 2016

Mother Jones

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Even by my standards, the blog has been pretty chart heavy lately. I’m not sure why, but I think it’s to take my mind off the unfolding disaster of Donald Trump. Muddling around in Excel seems pretty soothing by contrast.

(I mean, Trump just told us he’s not going to bother with intelligence briefings at all because “I’m, like, a smart guy.” And as near as I can tell, the entire political class of the country hasn’t exploded en masse. WTF is going on here?)

Ahem. You see the problem? So let’s go back to charts. Recently a team of economists led by Raj Chetty finished a groundbreaking bit of census research that compared incomes of parents at age 30 to their children at age 30. What they found was that children who reached age 30 in 1970 were 91 percent likely to have higher incomes than their parents. However, children who reached age 30 in 2010 were only 50 percent more likely to have higher incomes than their parents.

Why the decline? To demonstrate the answer, I have two charts for you. Here they are, with explanations below:

The chart on the left shows mean real incomes over the past eight decades. The orange lines indicate a guesstimate of standard deviation as a proxy for income inequality. If I keep that standard deviation constant through the years (at about one-third of income), the number of children we’d statistically project to have higher incomes than their parents goes down from 91 percent to 74 percent. The decline is due to the fact that incomes are growing more slowly than they used to.

The chart on the right is identical, except it uses the figures that Chetty’s team came up with based on real-life parents and children. The number of children who actually have higher incomes than their parents declined from 91 percent to 50 percent.

In other words, although some of the effect is due to slow income growth, much more of it is due to something else. And that something else is growing income inequality. Here is Chetty’s chart (note that he uses birth years rather than age-30 years):

The dotted green line shows what reality would be like if income inequality hadn’t gone up. The dotted pink line shows what reality would be like if incomes had continued to grow at their postwar rate. They both make a difference, but income inequality makes a bigger difference.

Now then, since Chetty has a perfectly good chart, why did I bother producing a different one? And not just different, but arguably more confusing than Chetty’s. It’s because I was a little skeptical of Chetty’s results and wanted to work out some things for myself. Gotta do something to keep from thinking about Donald Trump, after all.

But when I was done, my statistical guesses matched Chetty’s empirical figures pretty closely. So I shrugged, and then, having done all this work, I figured I might as well share it. Maybe it just makes things more confusing or maybe it helps. Who knows? But I have to do something to keep from jumping off a ledge, don’t I?

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Why Are Children Less Likely to Earn More Than Their Parents These Day?

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Quote of the Day: Trump Is Blowing Off Intel Briefings Because "I’m, Like, a Smart Person"

by DortheaWofford Posted on December 11, 2016

Mother Jones

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Donald Trump doesn’t believe all this nonsense about Russia interfering with the election to help him out. I guess we all expected that. But then there’s this:

He also indicated that as president, he would not take the daily intelligence briefing that President Obama and his predecessors have received. Mr. Trump, who has received the briefing sparingly as president-elect, said that it was often repetitive and that he would take it “when I need it.” He said his vice president, Mike Pence, would receive the daily briefing.

“You know, I’m, like, a smart person,” he said. “I don’t have to be told the same thing in the same words every single day for the next eight years.”

Hoo boy. A few years ago we learned that President Obama only attended 44 percent of his daily briefings. (He read the material on his own the rest of the time.) Conservatives were up in arms. Marc Thiessen complained that Obama was “consciously placing other priorities ahead of national security.” John Sununu called the daily brief “the most important half-hour of the day for a president who has to protect the security of the United States.” The Daily Caller snarked that Obama “has spent more time golfing than he has spent listening to daily intelligence briefings.” Breitbart called the news “alarming.” Dick Cheney was insulted: “If President Obama were participating in his intelligence briefings on a regular basis then perhaps he would understand why people are so offended at his efforts to take sole credit for the killing of Osama bin Laden.”

Now Trump is saying he’s never going to take the briefing because “I’m, like, a smart person.” I await the conservative response with bated breath.

POSTSCRIPT: This is hardly the most important part of this story, but I’m curious. If Trump has only received two or three intelligence briefs so far, how does he know that they’re “often repetitive”?

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Quote of the Day: Trump Is Blowing Off Intel Briefings Because "I’m, Like, a Smart Person"

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For Neil Young, the Trump Era Feels a Lot Like the ’60s

by Chelsea7389 Posted on December 11, 2016

Mother Jones

Legendary rocker Neil Young continues to add to his 50-plus-year recording career with his just-released studio album Peace Trail. A shrewd collection of new songs, written and recorded quickly this past summer, the album is one of immediacy, with kinetic playing from a spare crew of Jim Keltner on drums and Paul Bushnell on bass. With bits of processed vocals added to the folk-rock core, and an amplified harmonica that sounds like Little Walter after a Marvel-esque dose of radiation, Young employs strategies meant to throw the whole thing off kilter and make you listen closer.

The songs cover the things on the singer’s mind right now, both within—old dreams broken and those newly forming—and in the world around him: Standing Rock, xenophobia, immigration, and technology. For an artist at 71, it’s beautifully charged, invigorated, and present work. While the call is urgent, Young doesn’t beat you over the head with the message so much as inject you with it. I spoke with Young over the phone while he was at his home in Colorado.

Mother Jones: Overall, it feels very much like this is an album about being present with things happening in the world, as well as with your own feelings. Tell us a bit about the emergence of this record.

Neil Young: I started writing “Peace Trail” here in Colorado, then I went back to California. I had a few other tunes going around in my head, so I had a couple of them finished after a few days and then I wanted to go into the studio. I like to go in right away as soon as I have things. I called the guys from Promise of the Real, whom I’ve been playing with, and they were all on the road. Right after I hung up the phone, I wrote another song and started writing another, and I’m going, “Hey, I can’t wait. I should be doing this now!” My experience tells me that when it’s there, it’s there, and you can’t make it wait. So I got Jimmy Keltner and Paul Bushnell, two good guys, and went in and did this record.

MJ: Both of those guys, obviously, are experienced session musicians. Did you relate specific things to them or did you all kind of feel things out together?

NY: I would play all the parts of the song, show them the way it went together. Then I’d basically break down an arrangement—I wouldn’t plan endings or beginnings—so they knew everything that was going on. I had the lyrics on a prompter so that I could remember everything I’d written, and I was able to just get into the groove and play with them. Most cases it’s Take 1 or Take 2 on that record. I think “Peace Trail” is one of the exceptions, where it’s a later take. It just happened really quickly. It’s the way I like to work for these kinds of songs. It was the right time of the month; everything was looking good.

MJ: I felt like the immediacy of the playing on this particular album, and some of the disruptive things you introduce, like the sound processing on the harmonica and vocals in places, make the listener pay more attention.

NY: The songs were written to have a certain simple form. Everything is minimal, and if it’s over, it’s over. We’re abrupt with things: in and out. Especially if it’s an overdub—it’s gone. It does something that’s not real. It’s not trying to be like it was there. I think the ultimate result of it is you can get inside the record. I do one take; I never overdubbed twice. I know there’s stuff that isn’t perfect, but it doesn’t matter: Nothing is perfect, and there is a magic there that is undeniable because of the fact that we don’t care about those things. We’re really more interested in what we’re saying than how we’re saying it.

MJ: On the song “Peace Trail,” you express a commitment to moving forward and a sense of optimism with the refrain, “Something new is growing.” Did the November election alter that outlook?

NY: Not really. I still feel the same about everything in there. There’s nothing I said that I would change or make different now. I’ve already gotten into the next record, so I started that on the 6th of November.

MJ: In the song “Can’t Stop Workin’,” you sing that work is “bad for the body but good for the soul.” What’s hard for you?

NY: I think it’s the constant work; performing and traveling. It gets to be a bit of a strain. But if you pace yourself, which I’ve managed to do, you can go pretty well. And now I’m at a point where I decided I’m going to be in the studio for a while, at least until I finish this record I’m working on now. I should have two, three, four of the sessions that I had that were similar to the sessions for Peace Trail before I have a complete record. But I’m off to a good start and it may happen faster. Who knows?

MJ: I had an unsettling feeling that the purpose of my own work as an artist should maybe change after this election, but I’m unsure how. You’ve lived through really turbulent times and have written some very powerful protest songs—”Ohio” and “Southern Man,” for example. So how do you view the responsibilities of being an artist in the years to come?

NY: This time is very similar to the ’60s, as far as I can tell. The artists always reflect the times, so there’s a lot to think about, a lot of unknowns, a lot of things that are describable. This is the closest I’ve seen to the kind of ambience that made the ’60s happen. It’s not about the artist having a responsibility to do anything. They have to be artists and express themselves and everything will work out fine. It’s all going to be great. The youth of this country are not behind what is going on. We all know that. If you looked at a political map of the United States 25 and under, it’s all-revealing. It’s a unified map.

MJ: What scares me is this rift in our understanding of one another. You have viewpoints so far apart, so colored by anger and frustration, that it’s very hard to find common ground. Do you have thoughts for how we might connect?

NY: It’s gonna happen. We had the Vietnam War in the ’60s, and there was a draft. The students didn’t believe in it, and it unified them. That brought the people together and made the ’60s like they were. The youth were very unified against the status quo—against the old line and the new old line. It’s the same exact thing today. Social media and young people, art, music, all communications make this one of the most active times for activism. It will be a time of change.

MJ: Speaking of activism, there’s your new song “Indian Giver,” about Standing Rock. What’s your view on the standoff?

NY: It’s injustice. It’s wrong. The pipeline companies didn’t get the permission. They didn’t do the things they should have done in the first place. They tried to just bully their way through there and they got stopped. But they’re not really stopping.

MJ: It’s become a new point of reckoning in the history of how Native Americans are treated.

NY: Five hundred years later we’re still doing it. This is a moment where we’re either going to reaffirm that’s what we do, that’s who we are, or we’re going to start moving toward change. A change won’t come easy, because there’s a lot of big money that doesn’t care about any of this. Standing Rock is the beginning of something. It’s a moment in history. We really have to grab it and go with it. We may only be halfway through the actual “Standing Rock” part, but it’s more than that—it’s the lessons of Standing Rock, of what you can do. How much can you make change happen? How long can you slow things down? How much attention can you bring to things that are unjust, unfair, in many cases illegal? Just exposing it, that’s the job of the social media, the musicians, the people who care, the real protectors around the world. They don’t have to be at Standing Rock. They just have to say they’re with the people at Standing Rock, and tell other people that what’s going on there is wrong. Learn about it. See what happened. See what they actually did. You won’t see it on corporate media, you have to go to social media.

MJ: So, it looks like we’re out of time here. Is there anything else you’d like to say?

NY: We love Mother Jones. That’d be the last thing to say.

MJ: We love you, too.

Originally posted here: 

For Neil Young, the Trump Era Feels a Lot Like the ’60s

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Sam Johnson Wants to Cut Your Social Security Benefits By a Third

by TonySoper22 Posted on December 11, 2016

Mother Jones

For reasons that are a little unclear, Rep. Sam Johnson (R-Texas) has decided to introduce a shiny new plan to reform Social Security when Congress meets next year. Johnson’s idea of “reform” is to slash everyone’s benefits, so this idea seems slightly suicidal—not to mention pointless, since Donald Trump campaigned very loudly on a promise not to touch anyone’s Social Security.

But Johnson is a very conservative guy, and maybe he just wants to lay down a marker. So what would his plan do? It has 15 components, all of them crammed full of Social Security’s usual alphabet soup of acronyms—AWI, PIA, AIME, MAGI, bend points, etc.—but it turns out that only six of them are big enough to be meaningful. Here is the Social Security actuary’s estimate of how much money they’d save:

Basically, there are four big proposals that would cut benefits by 5.76 percent of payroll, and two proposals that would increase benefits by 1.37 percent of payroll. I assure you that this chart is far simpler to understand than the actual analysis, but it probably still leaves you a little baffled. Whose benefits would be cut? And by how much? I’m here to help:

Roughly speaking, people with extremely low average earnings over their working lives would see their benefits rise. That’s good! Unfortunately, everyone with an average lifetime income over $22,000 would see their benefits slashed—in some cases by a lot. An income of $60,000 is not exactly a king’s ransom, but nonetheless Johnson would cut benefits for these folks by a third.

As usual with these plans, a lot of its provisions are phased in gradually over time. But unlike most of these plans, some of them start to kick in right away. This means that even people who are already retired would suffer benefit cuts. For example, Johnson’s plan reduces the annual cost-of-living increase—and eliminates it entirely for anyone earning over $85,000—beginning in 2018.

Anyway, since I tortured myself by reading this plan, I figured I should torture all the rest of you by blogging about it. Happy Holidays!

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Sam Johnson Wants to Cut Your Social Security Benefits By a Third

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