2013 - %3, March

Whatever Happened to the $100 Million Mark Zuckerberg Gave to Newark Schools?

—By

| Thu Mar. 28, 2013 2:23 PM PDT
Cory Booker, Mark Zuckerberg and Chris Christie discuss Zukerberg's $100 million donation to Newark, September 2010. Mike Derer/New Jersey Governor's Office

Reports are surfacing that Mark Zuckerberg and other technology leaders are planning to launch a new, yet-to-be-named advocacy group that will push for immigration and education reform. The move is a big deal for Zuckerberg, who has mostly avoided politics in the past, but has a reported $13.3 billion to put into the game if he chooses to.

What would this influence look like? There could be clues from Zuckerberg's last foray into advocacy work, the high-profile $100 million he donated to Newark public schools in the fall of 2010. That September, Zuckerberg appeared with New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and Newark Mayor Cory Booker to announce the donation on the Oprah Winfrey Show. This was right before the premier of The Social Network, which portrayed Zuckerberg as a narcissist who stole the idea for Facebook.

News of the donation captured national attention for a moment, then faded. In Newark, a local foundation established by Zuckerberg and the state have spent more than two years deciding how to best create a schoolyard revolution with $100 million dollars. At first, the "Facebook money," as it's called in Newark, helped the state hire consultants and establish several new charter schools. But the reform effort has floundered at moments: The first million dollars went towards a poorly conducted community survey that had to be re-worked by Rutgers and New York University, and criticism was fierce when a foundation board established to decide how the Facebook money was spent included only one Newark resident: Cory Booker. ("Yes, it's their money. But it's Newark's kids," an op-ed that ran in the Star-Ledger read.)

Then last November, nearly $50 million of Zuckerberg's money went to pay for a new teacher's contract, the first in New Jersey to offer performance pay for teachers who are deemed as "highly effective." The contract offers up to $12,500 in bonuses for the teachers rated as the best in the district. It's the first contract in New Jersey to offer performance-based pay, a policy that's been instituted in a few cities such as Washington, DC. In DC, the plan was so controversial that it might have cost Mayor Adrian Fenty his job. "I think it helped—I know it helped—to be on our side of the table and have deeper pockets," one school district official said about the Newark negotiations.

[Read more]

Advertise on MotherJones.com

Train Derailment Spills Oil, Ignites Keystone Debate

—By

| Thu Mar. 28, 2013 1:16 PM PDT
tar sands protesters

A mile-long Canadian Pacific Railway train derailed in Minnesota on Wednesday, spilling 15,000 gallons. Reuters reports that 11 of the 94 train cars came off the tracks about 150 miles northwest of Minneapolis. 

Officials did not say whether the oil was from Canada's tar sands, but the derailment is sparking still more debate over the controversial proposed Keystone XL pipeline that would carry tar sands oil into the US. Here's a relevant excerpt from another Reuters piece:

Some experts have argued oil-by-rail carries a higher risk of accidents and spills.
"It is good business for the rails and bad safety for the public," said Jim Hall, a transportation consultant and former chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board.
"Railroads travel through population centers. The safest form of transport for this type of product is a pipeline. This accident could—and ought to—raise the issue for discussion," he added.
Others note that spills from rail cars are rare, and that delivering crude by rail has opened up opportunities in recent years for producers to develop huge volumes of oil production in areas of the United States that are not connected to markets by pipeline.
"It's not very good publicity, but railroads are incredibly safe, they don't spill often," said Tony Hatch, independent transportation analyst with ABH Consulting in New York who has done work for major railroads. "It should not change the opportunity railroads have to make us more energy independent."

We import more oil from Canada than any other country, so it's worth noting that with or without the pipeline, we're already moving oil into the US and there is a potential for spills.

How Fracking Causes Earthquakes, the Animated GIF

—By and

| Thu Mar. 28, 2013 1:00 PM PDT

Contributing writer Michael Behar has an intriguing feature today that details the science behind the link between injection wells and earthquakes. For a visual rundown of the fascinating process, check out the GIF below.

Drillers inject high-pressure fluids into a hydraulic fracturing well, making slight fissures in the shale that release natural gas. The resulting briny wastewater flows back up to the surface, where it is transported by truck or pipeline to nearby injection wells. The liquid is then pumped down the injection wells to a layer of deep, porous rock, often sandstone. Once there, it can flow in every direction, including into and around faults. Added pressure and lubrication can cause normally stable faults to slip, unleashing earthquakes.

how fracking causes earthquakes

Illustration: Leanne Kroll. Animation: Brett Brownell

New Hampshire House Votes to Repeal Stand Your Ground

—By

| Thu Mar. 28, 2013 12:59 PM PDT

By a slim five-vote margin, New Hampshire's House of Representatives yesterday passed a bill to repeal the state's Stand Your Ground law, the controversial self-defense statute that essentially allows anyone who feels threatened by someone else to shoot first rather than retreat.

No one in New Hampshire has claimed Stand Your Ground as a legal defense since the law was enacted in 2011. The proposed repeal will likely face an even tougher fight in the state's Republican-controlled senate. 

Florida became the first state to adopt Stand Your Ground in 2005. By 2011, with a boost from the National Rifle Association and the American Legislative Exchange Council, 24 more states, including New Hampshire, had passed similar laws.

Meanwhile, study after study shows SYG laws don't deter crime and are associated with more murder and manslaughter. Between 2005 and 2010, justifiable homicides by civilians using firearms doubled in Stand Your Ground states, while falling or remaining the same in others. And they're not applied equally to white and black shooters, as MoJo's Hannah Levintova pointed out: "homicides involving white shooters and black victims are 11 times more likely to be deemed 'justifiable" than those where the scenario is reversed."

The interactive map below shows how Florida kicked off a campaign to spread Stand Your Ground nationwide.

Does the Public Really Care About Background Checks?

—By

| Thu Mar. 28, 2013 11:27 AM PDT

Jonathan Bernstein makes a good point today about what I call "poll literalism," the idea that if a poll shows the public is on your side, that means the public is really on your side. In this case, the subject is background checks for gun buyers:

Sure, 90 percent of citizens, or registered voters, or whoever it is will answer in the affirmative if they're asked by a pollster about this policy. But that's not at all the same as "calling for change." It's more like...well, it is receiving a call. Not calling.

Those people who have been pushing for marriage equality? They were calling for change. And marching for it, demanding it, donating money to get it, running for office to achieve it and supporting candidates who would vote for it, filing lawsuits to make it legal. In many cases, they based their entire political identity around it.

Action works. "Public opinion" is barely real; most of the time, on most issues, change the wording of the question and you'll get entirely different answers. At best, "public opinion" as such is passive. And in politics, passive doesn't get results.

Public opinion is real. But it only matters if it's strong, and polls rarely measure that. It only matters if it determines who you're going to vote for (or against), and polls rarely measure that. It only matters if it means that lots of people are willing to make big hairy pains in the asses of themselves, and polls never measure that.

Public opinion is a start. You certainly need it, and politicians won't do much of anything without it. But it's nowhere near enough.

Yep, Our Sluggish Recovery Is Mostly Cyclical. But Not All of It.

—By

| Thu Mar. 28, 2013 11:03 AM PDT

One of the longstanding arguments about our sluggish recovery from the Great Recession is whether it's mostly cyclical or mostly structural. If it's cyclical, that basically means it's a matter of depressed spending. If the Fed and Congress would just pump enough money into the economy to stimulate demand, that would kickstart us back into a stronger recovery.

But if it's structural, that won't work. A structural problem, for example, would be an economy that needs lots of computer programmers, but instead finds itself with too many construction workers thanks to the housing bubble. You can't easily train construction workers to be computer programmers, so even if you stimulate demand you're still going to have a big unemployment problem.

Neil Irwin points out today that it's been hard to find evidence for the story of structural problems. If certain occupations were in desperate need of workers they couldn't find, wages in those occupations would skyrocket. But they haven't. Likewise, if it were a matter of too many workers in, say, California, and too few in Texas, you'd expect wages in Texas to go up. But that hasn't happened either. With a few small exceptions, wages have stayed depressed in all occupations and all regions.

So now a team of Fed economists has taken a different approach to slicing and dicing the data: Maybe the problem is actually a broad mismatch between the supply and demand for workers who can do complex, nonroutine jobs. But they took a look, and their basic answer is no: the Great Recession has hit both routine and nonroutine occupations about the same.

I accept this. And yet, the data from the Fed study doesn't back up their theory completely. For example, here's a pair of charts showing the change in unemployment rates:

That's a little hard to read, though. Here's a rough re-charting of their data using equal units for the entire period from 2007 through 2012:

It's true that routine jobs have recovered a little better than nonroutine jobs, but they've still done worse overall. And their other charts show a similar trend: before the recession, there was no difference at all between routine and nonroutine jobs. Since then, a persistent gap has appeared. It's a small gap, but it's there.

And this is just a guess on my part, but I suspect that routine workers have dropped out of the workforce at a greater rate than nonroutine workers, which means they don't show up in unemployment statistics at all. Some of them go on disability, some of them stay home with the kids, some of them retire early, and some just plain give up and don't have any income.

For what it's worth, I also have some issues with their definitions of routine vs. nonroutine. But that's obviously a very tricky thing, and I certainly haven't taken a close look. So I'll set that aside for now.

Generally speaking, I think this study is valuable: it shows, more broadly than some previous studies, that the aftermath of the Great Recession is primarily cyclical, not structural. That means we could fix most of it if we quit obsessing over budget deficits in 2030 and instead focused on proper fiscal and monetary policy right now. My only caution is that I don't think this study shows that our problem is entirely cyclical. It really does look to me like the Great Recession opened up—or perhaps exposed—a structural gap that's a bit larger than it used to be. It's not a lot bigger, but it's there.

Advertise on MotherJones.com

Mississippi Nominates Anti-Abortion Lobbyist to Board of Health

—By

| Thu Mar. 28, 2013 11:01 AM PDT

As Mississippi continues its efforts to close the state's last remaining abortion clinic, the governor's office is also trying to stack the Board of Health. On Wednesday, Gov. Phil Bryant (R) nominated Terri Herring, the national director for the Pro-Life America Network, to serve as the newest board member.

This news, via Robin Marty at RH Reality Check, is perhaps unsurprising, given Bryant's previous promise to "end abortion in Mississippi." But it's also worth noting that Herring, a pro-life lobbyist, "apparently has no medical background," according to the Jackson Free Press.

Almost a year ago Bryant's lieutenant governor, Tate Reeves, blocked the nomination of Dr. Carl Reddix to the Board of Health. Reeves' office argued that Reddix was not "a qualified doctor" because he had been associated with Jackson Women's Health, the state's lone abortion provider. Reddix has never provided abortions there; he was only affiliated as the "physician of record" who could admit women to the hospital in case of an emergency.

The reality in Mississippi, he said, is that anyone even remotely associated with abortion gets marginalized.

I met with Dr. Reddix while I was in Jackson last year. Former Gov. Haley Barbour, who is a strident abortion opponent, had nominated Reddix to the board before leaving office. If he'd been confirmed, Reddix would have been the only black doctor on the board, in a state that is 37 percent African American, and the only obstetrician-gynecologist.  "It was the only reason I even agreed to serve, was that voice needed to be present," Reddix, a middle-aged man who exudes a certain Southern calm, told me.

Reddix wasn't mad, just frustrated. "I was just a sacrificial lamb for him to earn some political points with his perceived base constituency," he says. The reality is Mississippi, he said, is that anyone even remotely associated with abortion gets marginalized.

It was also rather interesting to bar Reddix's nomination because of his relationship with JWHO, given that the state had just passed a new rule requiring all doctors who provide abortions to have admitting privileges at a local hospital. Anti-abortion lawmakers insisted that this was not a back-door means of shuttering JWHO, and it was about women's safety. But there was already a law on the books requiring the clinic to have a doctor on-call to admit women in the rare event of complication, it just did not previously have to be the doctor who provided the abortion. Reddix served as that doctor for the clinic, and he was pushed out of the board doing so. 

Adding Herring to the board of health instead leaves little doubt about the governor's motivations. 

Obama on Gun Violence: "Shame on Us If We've Forgotten"

—By

| Thu Mar. 28, 2013 10:33 AM PDT
Barack Obama and Joe Biden attend an event in January to discuss proposals to reduce gun violence.

With the Senate continuing its attempts to reach a bipartisan compromise on a gun-control package, President Barack Obama held a press conference at the White House Thursday morning urging strong action.

Surrounded by mothers "whose children were killed as recently as 35 days ago," Obama touted the work of Vice President Joe Biden's gun violence task force, which produced 23 executive actions aimed at reducing gun violence. The task force also recommended that Congress pass a package of new laws that includes universal background checks, a new assault weapons ban, and a ban on high-capacity magazines.

Obama mentioned recent polls that show as many as 90 percent of Americans support universal background checks. "How often do 90 percent of Americans agree on anything?" he asked, eliciting a laugh from Biden, who stood beside him. "It never happens!"

"None of these ideas should be controversial," Obama continued. "What we're proposing is not radical. We're not taking away anybody's gun rights."

Gun advocates, of course, see things differently. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has promised to allow the Senate to vote on the assault weapons ban introduced by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) as an amendment, after leaving it out of the main gun-control package in fear that it would prevent the larger bill from passing. Pro-gun Republicans have threatened to filibuster any bill they think "will serve as a vehicle for any additional gun restrictions," and there is limited bipartisan support for strengthening background checks.

Obama's conference was a brief, emotional appeal for common-sense gun reforms. He was introduced by Katerina Rodgaard of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, a mother and dance instructor whose former student Reema Samaha was one of the 32 people killed by a gunman in the 2007 Virginia Tech massacre. Families of Newtown victims also sat in the audience.

After the nation's recent string of mass shootings, "I felt it was no longer safe to raise a family in America," Rodgaard told the crowd.

While there will always be gun violence, Obama said, "we can make a difference." He mentioned a recent article that suggested Washington is missing its opportunity to seriously reform gun laws as the public's memory of Newtown fades away.

"Let me tell you, the people here don't forget," Obama said. "Shame on us if we've forgotten."

How Much Is a Beachfront Home in the Sandy-Ravaged Rockaways Worth?

—By and

| Thu Mar. 28, 2013 10:05 AM PDT

257 Beach 140th Street, a modest four-bedroom house blocks from the beach in Rockaways, Queens, is fairly unremarkable, but it put up a hell of a fight during Hurricane Sandy. While other houses just down the street were being ripped off their foundations, 257, which had been up for sale since before the storm, suffered only a little flooding in the basement. It's otherwise unscathed, but even that damage was enough to knock a solid 10 percent off its list price (down to $799,000 from $890,000), enough to make first-time homebuyers Matthew and Jenny Daly take a closer look.

"There are more opportunities because of everything that's happened in the last six months," Matthew says.

In New York City alone, Sandy racked up $3.1 billion worth of damage to homes. Many of those properties in hard-hit areas like the Rockaways and the south shore of Staten Island are still empty, awaiting repairs, government buyouts, resident squatters, or like in the case of 257, a new owner ready to tackle a fixer-upper. Damaged homes are now on the market for as much as 60 percent off their pre-storm value, and local realtors say there's a ready contingent of bargain-hunters waiting to pounce—sometimes, to the detriment of sellers.

Defying the Laws of Physics at Walmart

—By

| Thu Mar. 28, 2013 9:43 AM PDT

One of the stories making the rounds this week is a Bloomberg piece about people getting increasingly frustrated with Walmart because the shelves aren't being stocked and they can't find the stuff they want. The culprit, apparently, is low staffing levels:

It’s not as though the merchandise isn’t there. It’s piling up in aisles and in the back of stores because Wal-Mart doesn’t have enough bodies to restock the shelves, according to interviews with store workers. In the past five years, the world’s largest retailer added 455 U.S. Wal-Mart stores, [but its workforce] dropped by about 20,000.

....At the Kenosha, Wisconsin, Wal-Mart where Mary Pat Tifft has worked for nearly a quarter-century, merchandise ready for the sales floor remains on pallets and in steel bins lining the floor of the back room — an area so full that “no passable aisles” remain, she said. Meanwhile, the front of the store is increasingly barren, Tifft said. That landscape has worsened over the past several years as workers who leave aren’t replaced, she said.

Something isn't right here. I'm no expert in retail logistics, but I do know enough about the laws of physics to understand that this really can't be true for more than a short period of time. At some point, when the back room gets full, then either (a) new merchandise gets shelved at the same rate it comes in, or (b) it starts overflowing out into the parking lot. Since (b) apparently hasn't happened, I conclude that the flow of merchandise onto store shelves has to be about the same as the flow of merchandise getting shipped in from Walmart's warehouses.

So how is that going? One person interviewed for the story said his local Walmart "would go weeks without products he wanted to buy, such as men’s dress shirts, which he found only in very large or small sizes and unpopular colors." OK, but that's probably a forecasting/MRP problem, not a shelving problem. Somebody's not ordering the right stuff for their stores.

Now, if, as reporter Renee Dudley says, Walmart has 13 percent more stores but 1.4 percent fewer workers, that's going to hurt. Stories of long checkout times or inability to get help in the shoe department make perfect sense. But the shelving thing seems a little iffier. They could certainly be chronically behind, leading to shelves that don't always have the latest and greatest stuff—and that's a genuine problem for Walmart execs—but over any period longer than a few days the actual flow of merchandise into the store pretty much has to match the flow of merchandise into the back room. Right?

POSTSCRIPT: And it's still Walmart, not Wal-Mart. Rebranding is hard!