Watch out, Big Oil. Jay Inslee’s back at it again with a greenhouse gas fee.
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Watch out, Big Oil. Jay Inslee’s back at it again with a greenhouse gas fee.
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California Lawmakers Vote to Expand Overtime Pay for Farmworkers
Mother Jones
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For the last 80 years, farm workers have toiled for long hours in grueling conditions with little or no overtime pay. On Monday, California lawmakers passed a bill that would change that. If signed by the governor, the law would make the Golden State the first to require the agricultural industry to meet the federal labor standards applied to most other industries.
“The whole world eats the food provided by California farmworkers,” said Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez, who introduced the bill, “yet we don’t guarantee fair overtime pay for the backbreaking manual labor they put in to keep us fed…We’re now one step closer to finally providing our hard-working farmworkers the dignity they deserve.” Supporters of the bill, which include Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, argued that farm workers should be granted the same protections as millions of other Californians.
Starting in 2019, the new law would gradually expand overtime pay for California’s estimated 825,000 farm workers. Currently, farmworkers who put in more than 10 hours a day receive overtime. (California is one of the few states that require overtime pay for farmworkers.) By 2022, anyone who works more than 8 hours a day or 40 hours a week would be eligible for overtime pay, bringing the agricultural industry in line with national standards.
California’s economy is fueled in large part by its agricultural output. More than a third of all vegetables and two-thirds of all fruit and nuts sold in the United States come from the state. Its agricultural industry raked in more than $50 billion in 2014. Nationally, farm workers earn an average of less than $18,000 a year, according to Farm Worker Justice. Numerous studies have found that many California farmworkers struggle to afford food for their families.
Industry representatives and their allies in the legislature argued that the added protections could backfire, saddling employers with added costs at a time when they are struggling with the state’s water crisis. Ultimately, they said, employers would simply hire more workers and cut their hours in order to avoid paying overtime. “Agriculture needs greater flexibility in scheduling work than do other industries,” argued Beatris Espericueta Sanders, executive director of the Kern County Farm Bureau, in the Bakersfield Californian. “Supporters of the legislation claim this is about ‘equality,’ but AB 1066 would actually hurt the employees it’s meant to help.”
According to the United Farm Workers, the largest union for farm workers and a key sponsor of the bill, the lack of overtime protection for agricultural laborers has its roots in the Jim Crow era, when most farmworkers were African-American. In 1938, Congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act, which laid out wage protections and overtime compensation requirements for employees across the nation. However, to appease white Southern lawmakers, an exemption was added for agricultural employers. “Today, 78 years later, when farm workers are mainly Latino, this shameful legacy of racism and discrimination still infects our society,” UFW said in a statement. “Excluding farm workers from overtime after eight hours was wrong in 1938. It’s wrong now.”
As reported by the Los Angeles Times, the 44-32 vote in favor of the overtime bill led to an outbreak of applause among farmworkers who took time off of work to witness its passage.
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California Lawmakers Vote to Expand Overtime Pay for Farmworkers
Native Americans Get Shot By Cops at an Astonishing Rate
Mother Jones
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Nearly 100 people demonstrated in downtown Denver earlier this week after police there shot and killed 35-year-old Paul Castaway on July 12. Police said the man was coming towards an officer with a knife, but his family and witnesses on the scene dispute those claims and say he was pointing the knife toward himself.
The shooting comes a little more than a month after two Denver Police officers were cleared in the shooting death of Jessie Hernandez, a 17-year-old girl killed in January when the officers fired into a stolen car she was supposedly driving toward them in an alley.
According to his mother, Castaway struggled with schizophrenia and alcoholism. Witnesses say he was holding a knife to his own throat and didn’t threaten officers, according to the Denver Post. Castaway was shot four times and died later that night. Denver Police Department spokesman, Sonny Jackson, told the Post that the department is reviewing the incident, and that the officers involved will be named soon.
Castaway was a Lakota Sioux. His death brings up a rarely-discussed aspect of the ongoing conversation around police brutality in the United States: Native Americans are more likely than most other racial groups to be killed by police. Indian Country Today noted that according to the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, a nonprofit organization that studies incarceration and criminal justice issues, police kill Native Americans at a higher rate than any other ethnic group.
The center’s analysis relied on data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Center for Health Statistics. It found that Native Americans, making up just .8 percent of the population, are the victims in 1.9 percent of police killings. When the numbers are broken down further, they reveal that Native Americans make up *three of the top five top age-groups killed by law enforcement:
Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice
“This is a reflection of an endemic problem in the perception of non-white people when it comes to the administration of justice,” Chase Iron Eyes, an attorney with the Lakota People’s Law Project in South Dakota, told Mother Jones. The group put out a report called “Native Lives Matter” in February discussing various ways the justice system disproportionately impacts Native Americans. He said the US Department of Justice needs to address police violence against Native Americans and that Castaway’s death is only the most recent example of the problem.
“You can tell they’re shooting out of fear,” he said. “If it’s not out of hate, for some reason they’re pulling the trigger before determining what the situation actually is. Something does need to happen. Somebody does need to take a look and we need help.”
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Hillary can’t believe we’re still fighting over this whole reproductive rights thing, either
Hillary can’t believe we’re still fighting over this whole reproductive rights thing, either
By Eve Andrewson 27 Apr 2015commentsShare
Last week, Hillary Clinton gave the keynote address at the 2015 Women in the World Summit, and fired a couple of shots at certain should-be-fossilized religious institutions that, for some reason, remain in a more or less constant tizzy over women deciding what to do with their uteri.
Far too many women are still denied critical access to reproductive healthcare and safe childbirth. All the laws we’ve passed don’t count for much if they’re not enforced. Rights have to exist in practice, not just on paper. Laws have to be backed up with resources and political will; and deep-seated cultural codes, religious beliefs, and structural biases have to be changed. As I have said and as I believe, the advancement of the full participation of women and girls in every aspect of their societies is the great unfinished business of the 21st century.
And then:
America moves forward when all women are guaranteed the right to make their own healthcare choices — not when those choices are taken away by an employer like Hobby Lobby.
OK! Hard to argue with that. And yet …
Of course, Clinton never uttered the word “abortion” in her speech, but conservatives are already up in arms about her so-called mission to open “the path to Abortion Nirvana,” which is not a set of words I could ever be dumb enough to make up.
So, to refresh: It’s 2015, some morons out there are still conflating reproductive healthcare with baby-killing sprees, and Hillary’s fed up — as are we all.
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Hillary can’t believe we’re still fighting over this whole reproductive rights thing, either
Northern Canada is On Fire, And It’s Making Global Warming Worse
Mother Jones
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This article originally appeared at Climate Central and is reproduced here with permission.
For the past few weeks, dry and warm weather have fueled large forest fires across Canada’s remote Northwest Territories. The extent of those fires is well above average for the year to-date, and is in line with climate trends of more fires burning in the northern reaches of the globe.
Of the 186 wildfires in the Northwest Territories to-date this year, 156 of them are currently burning. That includes the Birch Creek Fire complex, which stretches over 250,000 acres.
The amount of acres burned in the Northwest Territories is six times greater than the 25-year average to-date according to data from the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Center.
Boreal forests like those in the Northwest Territories are burning at rates “unprecedented” in the past 10,000 years according to the authors of a study put out last year. The northern reaches of the globe are warming at twice the rate as areas closer to the equator, and those hotter conditions are contributing to more widespread burns.
A satellite image of the smoke plume from fires burning in the Northwest Territories captured on July 7, 2014. NASA Earth Observatory
The combined boreal forests of Canada, Europe, Russia and Alaska, account for 30 percent of the world’s carbon stored in land, carbon that’s taken up to centuries to store. Forest fires like those currently raging in the Northwest Territories, as well as ones in 2012 and 2013 in Russia, can release that stored carbon into the atmosphere and contribute to global warming. Warmer temperatures can in turn create a feedback loop, priming forests for wildfires that release more carbon into the atmosphere and cause more warming. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s landmark climate report released earlier this year indicates that for every 1.8 degree Fahrenheit rise in temperatures, wildfire activity is expected to double.
In addition, soot from forest fires can also darken ice in the Arctic and melt it faster. The 2012 fires in Siberia released so much soot that they helped create a shocking melt of Greenland’s ice sheet. Over the course of a few weeks in July that year, 95 percent of the surface melted. That could become a yearly occurrence by 2100 if temperatures continue to rise along with wildfire activity.
Forest in other parts of the globe are also feeling the effects of climate change. In the western U.S., wildfire season has lengthened by 75 days compared to 40 years ago. Additionally, rising temperatures and shrinking snowpack have helped drive an increase in the number of large forest fires. In Australia, fire danger is also increasing, if not the total number of fires, due to a similar trend of hotter, dryer weather.
Perhaps not surprisingly then, the current Northwest Territories fires have been fueled by hot and dry weather. Yellowknife’s June high temperatures were 3.8 degrees Fahrenheit above normal highs while rainfall was only 15 percent of normal. Through July 15, high temperatures have been running 4 degrees Fahrenheit above July averages and the city has only seen 2 percent of its normal rainfall for the month. While these conditions can’t be tied specifically to climate change, they’re in line with those trends.
The fires have shut down parts of territory’s Highway 3, a main thoroughfare, and inundated Yellowknife with a thick haze of smoke and ash. The city’s 19,000 residents are also under a health warning. At points last week, the smoke plume was whisked south across the provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan and even reaching the Dakotas, 2,000 miles away.
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Northern Canada is On Fire, And It’s Making Global Warming Worse
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The Latest Obamacare Extension Won’t Have Much of an Impact
Mother Jones
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Adrianna McIntyre agrees that the optics and legality of allowing consumers to extend old health care policies is dodgy. However, she also thinks that its practical impact is pretty slight:
Senior officials reported that some 1.5 million people might be eligible for the latest administrative tweak to the Affordable Care Act, an extension of the “like it/keep it” fix that would permit individuals to maintain plans that don’t meet new coverage requirements through October 2017. The move has already been roundly criticized, but I’m inclined to believe the substantive policy impact will be small.
The thing about the individual market is that it’s volatile. The Kaiser Family Foundation found that about a third of those enrolled in nongroup plans exit within six months. Fewer than half remain after two years. This coverage is transitory for many, a bridge between employer-sponsored plans or other forms of insurance. Since the “fix” only applies to people maintaining these plans, the population eligible for the extension will dwindle over time.
There’s a fear that individuals who cling to old, less generous plans are healthier than those who already jumped to the exchanges. That might be true, but it also probably doesn’t matter much. CBO estimates that the exchange population will swell to 22 million by 2016 as people become more aware of coverage options and the penalty becomes more severe. The specter of adverse selection fades pretty fast when you set 1.5 million—a number that will erode over the life of the administrative fix—in that context.
Actually, according to research published in Health Affairs, only 17 percent of those with individual coverage keep it for more than 24 months. In other words, by the end of 2015, the number of people affected by this extension will be down to about 250,000 at most. That’s not enough to affect the overall operation of Obamacare very much, and it’s also a small enough number that pushback will be pretty slight by the time those remaining few folks are forced to switch to different plans. This is obviously what makes it politically attractive to the Obama administration.
Bottom line: it’s legally a little dodgy but practically of little consequence. Probably not something to get too worked up about.
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Which Economic Models Are Mas Macho?
Mother Jones
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A few days ago Alex Rosenberg and Tyler Curtain wrote an op-ed titled “What Is Economics Good For?” In a nutshell, their answer was “not much.” Paul Krugman begs to disagree:
Rosenberg and Curtain completely misunderstand what’s been going on at the Fed. They also misunderstand the nature of economists’ predictive failures. It’s true that few economists predicted the onset of crisis. Once crisis struck, however, basic macroeconomic models did a very good job in key respects — in particular, they did much better than people who relied on their intuitive feelings….Wonks who relied on suitably interpreted IS-LM confidently declared that all this intuition, based on experiences in a different environment, would prove wrong — and they were right. From my point of view, these past 5 years have been a triumph for and vindication of economic modeling.
Something about this passage has been niggling at me since I read it yesterday, and I just now figured out what it is. Krugman has been banging this drum for quite a while, and regular readers know that I’m basically on his side. Basic Keynesian macro has done a pretty good predictive job in the aftermath of the financial crisis, and it’s fair to wonder why skeptics continue to be skeptics even after years of solid results from textbook macro.
But here’s the thing: I’m on Krugman’s side in hindsight. A better question is whether it was obvious in 2008 that “suitably interpreted IS-LM” was likely to be the best model for dealing with the post-crisis recovery. Maybe it was. Krugman makes the case, for example, that RBC models should have been abandoned decades ago for not fitting the data. But conservative economists would argue that Keynesian macro was quite justifiably thrown out even earlier for failing during the 70s. That’s obviously a matter of contention, but it’s certainly the case that the Keynesianism of the 70s has since been retooled into the New Keynesianism of the 90s and beyond. But that makes it a fairly new theory. So again: how obvious was it before the fact that Krugman’s preferred models were likely to be the best ones for 2008-13?
This is light years above my pay grade, so I’m throwing it out mostly in the hopes that some real economists will essay an answer. I’m not even sure I’m framing the question entirely properly. But the basic problem is that economists change their models the way most of us change our television viewing habits, and the best models often seem to be very dependent on a particular place and time. Wait a couple of decades, or examine a different kind of economy, and suddenly the old models don’t work so well anymore. So how do we know in advance? Can Krugman legitimately say that his models have had a long track record of success in different environments, and therefore should have been the obvious incumbents when the economy went kablooey in 2008?
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Could the NSA Keep Track of Who You Send Letters To?
Mother Jones
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OK, this is just out of curiosity. Suppose the government started up a program that tracked everyone’s mail. They didn’t open letters to read them, they merely kept track of the address, return address, and postmark date for every piece of first class mail and every package that anyone sent anywhere. This metadata would, naturally, be collected for anything sent through the postal service, but also for packages sent via FedEx, UPS, and so forth. The postal system is pretty automated these days, so this probably wouldn’t be all that hard to implement.
Anyway, how do you think the public would react? Would people care more about this than they do about phone and email records? What do you think?
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Crappy Graphics Are a Sign That NSA Is Focusing on Its Core Mission
Mother Jones
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Matt Yglesias is upset about the quality of the intel community’s PowerPoint skills:
I don’t have much to say about the substance, but note that nothing from America’s national security agencies seems to get published without some incredibly lame infographic….There are obviously bigger policy issues in play, but I have to say that I think well-run organizations wouldn’t rely on this kind of garbage in their internal presentations.
I’m on the opposite side: I’m perfectly happy that America’s spy agencies aren’t wasting their time polishing their graphical skills. If they haven’t been to Edward Tufte’s latest gabfest on chart junk, that’s fine with me. People worry about this stuff too much. Who cares if managers in both the private and public sectors are enamored of crappy-looking infographics and PowerPoint decks? Pretty much no one except us tech-savvy journalistic types, who traffic in charts and images for public consumption because it’s part of our jobs and we know our peers will mock us if we produce 90s-era craptacular graphics. That’s fine for us, but we should leave the rest of the world alone on this.
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Crappy Graphics Are a Sign That NSA Is Focusing on Its Core Mission
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VIDEO: The Secret Life of Trolls
green4us
Climate Desk’s three-part series explores who gets to define the truth about climate change in the digital age. James West/Climate Desk If you’ve ever read anything on the Internet, chances are you’ve encountered a troll. No, not the kind that live under bridges, or the ones with a shock of neon hair. We’re talking about those annoying commenters who get their kicks by riling people up as much as possible. But have you ever wondered who these people really are? Well, we found out. Internet researchers at George Mason University recently found that when it comes to online commenting, throwing bombs gets more attention than being nice, and makes readers double down on their preexisting beliefs. What’s more, trolls create a false sense that a topic is more controversial than it really is. Witness the overwhelming consensus on climate change amongst scientists—97 percent agreement that global warming is real, and caused by humans. But that doesn’t settle the question for Twitter addict and Climate Desk perennial thorn-in-the-side Hoyt Connell: “If you allow somebody to make a comment and there’s no response, then they’re controlling the definition of the statement,” Hoyt says. “Then it can become a truth.” We first encountered Hoyt, or as we know him, @hoytc55, several months ago on our Twitter page, taking us to task for our climate coverage. And the screed hasn’t stopped since: In April alone, Hoyt mentioned us on Twitter some 126 times, almost as much as our top nine other followers combined. So we did the only thing we knew how to do: track him down, meet him face to face… and ask a few questions of our own. Watch Episode One of our three-part series Meet the Trolls: Trollus Maximus: While it might not always seem this way, many of our followers actually do believe in climate change. Some are silent, watching from the wings, what internet researchers call “lurkers.” Not Rosi Reed, a 34-year-old nuclear physicist at the Large Hadron Collider and long-time Internet truth crusader, who goes by the nom-de-guerre PhysicsGirl. We like to call her The Troll Slayer: For better or worse, online, people have the luxury to lob bombs from behind a keyboard barricade. Which led us to launch an experiment: What if the trolls and the troll slayers met face to face and talked it out, analog-style (or as close as we can get with Google Hangout)? For all their differences, Hoyt and Rosi have one thing in common: they aren’t cowards. They agreed to square off in a debate about online commenting, climate change, and what defines truth in the digital age. Watch Episode Three, The #Showdown:
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VIDEO: The Secret Life of Trolls
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VIDEO: What’s It Like to Land on an Aircraft Carrier?
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