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Why San Francisco’s Journalists Are Investigating Homelessness

by DwightWight Posted on June 27, 2016

Mother Jones

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This Wednesday, June 29, Mother Jones will join dozens of Bay Area news and media organizations to begin publishing and airing an ongoing series of stories on homelessness in San Francisco. This push is part of the SF Homeless Project, a recently launched effort whose goals are detailed in the open letter below. Stay tuned as we explore the state of homelessness in our city, as well as its history, causes, and potential solutions.

To the city and people of San Francisco:

Like you, we are frustrated, confused, and dismayed by the seemingly intractable problem of homelessness in our city. Like you, we want answers—and change.

We see the misery around us—the 6,600 or more people who live on the streets of San Francisco—and we sense it is worsening. We feel for the people who live in doorways and under freeways, and for the countless others who teeter on the edge of eviction. We empathize with the EMTs, the nurses and doctors, the social workers, and the police. They are on the front lines of this ongoing human catastrophe.

Numerous noble, well-intentioned efforts by both public and private entities have surfaced over the decades, yet the problem persists. It is a situation that would disgrace the government of any city. But in the technological and progressive capital of the nation, it is unconscionable.

So beginning today, more than 70 media organizations are taking the unprecedented step of working together to focus attention on this crucial issue.

We will pool our resources—reporting, data analysis, photojournalism, video, websites—and starting Wednesday, June 29, will publish, broadcast, and share a series of stories across all of our outlets. We intend to explore possible solutions, their costs, and viability.

Though this is a united effort, we do not claim to speak with one voice. There are many lenses through which the issue of homelessness can be viewed. However, we do not intend to let a desire for the perfect solution become the enemy of the good. We want to inspire and incite each other as much as we want to prod city and civic leaders.

Fundamentally, we are driven by the desire to stop calling what we see on our streets the new normal. Frustration and resignation are not a healthy psyche for a city.

Our aim is to provide you with the necessary information and potential options to put San Francisco on a better path. Then it will be up to all of us—citizens, activists, public and private agencies, politicians—to work together to get there.

Signed,

The SF Homeless Project

@bayareahomeless | facebook.com/sfhomelessproject

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Why San Francisco’s Journalists Are Investigating Homelessness

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No one needs K-cups for weed, yet here we are

by JanisDitter Posted on May 24, 2016

No one needs K-cups for weed, yet here we are

By on May 24, 2016Share

Despite the rising popularity and star-studded endorsements of vaping cannabis — Miley Cyrus does it, Sarah Silverman does it, Abbi and Ilana do it a lot — vaping pot is about as cool as an Amazon engineer riding a Solowheel. With a Bluetooth.

Smoking pot may not exactly be good for the planet, but vaping is even worse: You can smoke pot out of an apple and then eat the thing if you want to, but vaping requires expensive tools made up of metal and plastic that can’t be recycled.

Now, a new company promises to make things even worse.

CannaKorp, a Massachusetts company, is introducing single-serving vape pods to the marketplace in an effort to become the Keurig of the cannabis industry.

“The company’s sleek, white-plastic vaporizer heats marijuana just enough to release the active compounds while stopping short of actually burning the plant,” reports Curt Woodward with the Boston Globe. “Users breathe in the vapors released through a canister, and the marijuana comes in small, single-use ‘pods’ that are independently filled by legally authorized growers.”

Sigh.

While single-use coffee pods, otherwise known as K-Cups, may sound great to people who like to buy shit, they are shockingly wasteful. The amount of trash they generate could wrap around the planet 11 times each year, which is truly horrifying.

This new business concept, however, should come as no surprise: CannaKorp chairman Dave Manly is a former vice president at Keurig Green Mountain Inc., and he retired not long before the company was sold for nearly $14 billion.

“Keurig has standards for what coffee went into their K-Cups,” Manly told Business Insider. “It was very consistent from cup-to-cup, so every time you had a K-Cup from a Keurig machine, it tasted the same.”

It also tasted like dirt, but that’s not the point. The point is this: The only things that should be single use on this planet are toilet paper, syringes, and condoms. Not coffee pods, not tea pods, and certainly, God forbid, not pot pods.

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No one needs K-cups for weed, yet here we are

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New Documents Will Be Released on Former Trump Associate With Mob Ties

by IreneG2298 Posted on May 11, 2016

Mother Jones

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On Tuesday, the Associated Press prevailed in its legal fight to persuade a New York federal judge to unseal hundreds of documents allegedly pertaining to the criminal past of a business associate of Republican presidential contender Donald Trump. The documents, which could be made public as soon as Thursday, may shed light on one of the more colorful—and allegedly mobbed-up—individuals Trump has done business with during his long career in real estate.

The case involves a man named Felix Sater, a Russian immigrant who worked for a real estate development firm in New York called Bayrock Group, which had an office in the Trump Tower in Midtown. Bayrock was involved in helping develop some of Trump’s properties in New York, Florida, and elsewhere, including Trump SoHo in New York City. In 2011, Trump settled a lawsuit by investors in Trump SoHo after they discovered, thanks to the New York Times, that Sater had a long criminal past. In 1993, Sater was sent to prison after slicing open a man’s face with a glass during a bar fight. More significant, he was later implicated in a $40 million “pump and dump” stock swindle that involved alleged Russian criminals and American mobsters. In 1998, he pleaded guilty to one count of racketeering, apparently in exchange for his assistance as a government informant in a mob prosecution.

As part of the deal, Sater’s own criminal record was kept under wraps for years—until another group of investors sued Bayrock, alleging they had been defrauded. Among the acts of chicanery, they claimed, was the fact that the firm was hiding Sater’s criminal past. The investors and their lawyer put many of the documents regarding Sater’s criminal history into the public realm in the lawsuit. That disclosure prompted a flurry of other litigation and court action against the investors’ lawyers and caused the documents to be sealed on the grounds that their disclosure could put Sater, and future potential informants, at risk or compromise ongoing criminal investigations. Those are the documents the AP has been trying to dislodge from the court.

Some of the documents, many of which have already been leaked, appear pretty innocuous, including a 2000 press release from the Justice Department touting Sater’s racketeering plea deal. It’s unlikely that many of the records soon to be released directly involve Trump, as most were sealed in attempt to protect Sater from retribution for his informant work.

The likely GOP presidential nominee distanced himself from Sater in 2007, after the New York Times reported the details of his criminal history. However, three years later, Trump gave the man an office and business cards, describing him as a “senior advisor” to Trump’s organization, according to the Times. Sater worked for Trump for about six months, the paper reported, drumming up deals for his organization.

Even if the documents don’t reveal more about Trump’s relationship with Sater, they should illuminate plenty about one of the “best people” Trump says he likes to surround himself with in the course of his business dealings—and highlight one of the more unsavory episodes of Trump’s business career.

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New Documents Will Be Released on Former Trump Associate With Mob Ties

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Pro-Business Reforms Have Very Little Effect on Economic Growth

by EbonyBirdsong1 Posted on May 8, 2016

Mother Jones

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Are pro-business reforms good for economic growth? You’d think so, but the evidence is actually unclear. So Evan Soltas tried a different approach to the question: taking a look at countries that had big, sustained jumps in the World Bank’s Doing Business Index:

This is, I think, a reasonable way of doing things: Even if you are distrustful of the index, as am I, if the World Bank says that your country is in the top 5 percent of reformers in some year, there’s probably something to that. In my sample, it took at least a 10-point increase in the ease of starting a business to qualify as a “reform” year. That is like going from India to China.

A bit of Greek-letter math later, he has an equation that links per-capita GDP growth with the World Bank index:

What I find is that neither term has a significant coefficient. In fact, I can bound the effect of pro-business reforms quite precisely around zero, with a 95-percent confidence interval for the effect of a 10-point reform on the level of per-capita output of -1.4 percent to 3.5 percent. That is far away from the claim that such a reform could double per-capita output.

Now, this isn’t nothing. The reforms led to an increase in economic growth of about 1 percent. And especially in poor countries, there may be other compelling reasons to adopt pro-business reforms. But if Soltas is right, the economic benefits are modest.

Sadly, Soltas did not put this in colorful chart format, which he needs to do if he expects to meet the expectations of his fans. But the bottom line is simple: the United States is already one of top performers in business friendliness. Incremental improvements are all that’s left to us, and the impact of improvements plateau at high levels anyway. More than likely, pro-business reforms in the US would have little to no effect on economic growth. Here’s Soltas:

Maybe the lesson here is to beware the TED-talk version of development economics. Shortening the time it takes to incorporate a small business is not a substitute for deeper institutional reforms, such as those that support investment in human and physical capital, remove economic barriers that hold back women and ethnic or religious minorities, or improve transportation, power, and sanitation infrastructure. Easy pro-business reforms should not distract countries from pursuing changes that, while harder to make, we know to be richly rewarding in the long run.

Roger that.

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Pro-Business Reforms Have Very Little Effect on Economic Growth

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I asked random Swedes to weigh in on American climate change denial

by TrishaWoodall32 Posted on April 11, 2016

I asked random Swedes to weigh in on American climate change denial

By on 11 Apr 2016commentsShare

Ah, Sweden! The land of IKEA, Volvos, and top-ranking green living. And now, you can learn so much more. Swedish tourist officials created a new app, The Swedish Number, that connects foreign callers to any “random Swede” who’s downloaded the app, per The New York Times. The creators encourage callers to “talk about anything.”

I dialed in to find out what Swedes really think about an issue that is commonplace in the United States and less so in Sweden — climate change denial. Even though Americans are now more concerned about climate change than at any time in the past 8 years, at 64 percent according to Gallup, a 2014 survey also found the United States had the lowest rate of people in the world who think we’re observing human-caused climate change. That study also found Sweden to be more accepting of the science.

I found the same to be true in my small, unscientific experiment as I heard my Swedish conversation partners’ reflections on this unwelcome form of American exceptionalism.

“I see [climate denial] as a sign of poor education, and maybe a bit too much influence from some of the more religious groups or the right wing,” said one Swedish IT developer. “And most of all, I think it’s something sad, actually, for all of us, that we can’t agree that climate change is happening to our planet.”

One man I spoke to, Joachim, said that “we have to stand up for the planet and take responsibility” — he built his own low-energy, solar-powered house 10 years ago, and says his next car will not be Volvo, but a Tesla.

Another resident mused on the political differences between his country and the United States, in progressiveness as well as power. “Most Swedes on the political spectrum fall very much on the left in comparison to the American political spectrum, and therefore most [Swedes] would have some sort of agreement that climate change is a result of human output,” he said. “But to be brutally honest, I don’t think that Sweden’s opinion matters in the world stage. It’s like a little tiny Chihuahua who’s there, barking, barking at the ankle of the big dog. The big dog sort of politely nods at the Chihuahua, and then they get back to their business.”

Another pointed out that climate change is already having an effect in Sweden: “Look, 20 years ago when I was a kid, there was snow in November. Now, the snow is coming in January.”

One Stockholm resident, Frederick, was incredulous there are people who deny climate change is happening. “People are denying that climate change is happening? … Are you sure?” he asked, adding some advice for his American counterparts: “I think maybe they should open their eyes then, because I think it’s a fact. I don’t know anything about it, but I do know it’s happening.” The U.S. might want to take some notes.

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I asked random Swedes to weigh in on American climate change denial

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This is how much the fossil fuel industry spends to avoid climate regs

by ElizaGrano Posted on April 7, 2016

This is how much the fossil fuel industry spends to avoid climate regs

By on 7 Apr 2016commentsShare

ExxonMobil and Royal Dutch Shell, along with three oil industry trade groups, spend close to an estimated $115 million annually to obstruct policies that would address climate change around the world, according to a report released by Influence Map, a British nonprofit that conducts research on how corporations influence political inaction.

The report shows the American Petroleum Institute as the clear heavyweight spender, followed by ExxonMobil, Shell, the Western States Petroleum Association, and the Australian Petroleum Production & Exploration Association.

Influence Map

But the $27 million Exxon spent, for example, was just a drop in the bucket compared to the company’s annual earnings of $16 billion last year (which technically was a bad year; Exxon earned double that in 2014).

Using guidelines set out by the United Nations on climate lobbying practices, Influence Map combed through lobbying registers, Internal Revenue Service documents, and annual financial reports to find how much these groups devoted to opposing climate policy. The report, which is not peer reviewed, counts spending on lobbying, political contributions, and advocacy in its overall number, but it’s probably an underestimation: It does not include dark money spent on outside organizations.

Still, $115 million is already a lot more than what the other side is spending to push through pro-climate reform. The researchers estimate that climate-advocacy investor groups have spent less than $5 million. But their pro-climate campaign to reform fossil fuel companies from within has picked up momentum all the same. In 2016 alone, oil and gas shareholders have filed 45 resolutions related to climate change, many of them demanding that major energy companies disclose how it will impact their business.

Despite the momentum, the report observes the pro-climate side will need a “significant ramp up in investment and activity” to match Big Oil’s war chest.

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This is how much the fossil fuel industry spends to avoid climate regs

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Sheldon Adelson’s Casino Agrees to Pay $9 Million in Foreign Corruption Case

by RachaelDawbin Posted on April 7, 2016

Mother Jones

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The casino run by major GOP financier Sheldon Adelson agreed today to settle a long-running Securities and Exchange Commission bribery investigation that has been swirling around Adelson’s Chinese operations. Las Vegas Sands will pay $9 million but won’t have to admit any guilt, and the SEC will close its investigation into possible violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

In 2011, the Department of Justice and the SEC launched an investigation into Adelson’s company after a former executive accused the company of paying an intermediary to hide the company’s role in a variety of transactions, including transferring money to Chinese public officials. In the SEC press release on today’s settlement, the agency said Las Vegas Sands had failed to keep accurate records for more than $62 million in payments to an intermediary. According to the SEC, the money was given to the intermediary to buy a basketball team and arrange the purchase of a building from a Chinese state-run entity, for a “business center” that was never built.

According to the former Sands‘ executive, Steve Jacobs, who is now embroiled in a lengthy court fight with Adelson over his firing several years ago, the intermediary was a man named Yang Saixin, who was helping to organize the Adelson Center for US-China Enterprise in Beijing. Yang has denied any wrongdoing, but an internal Sands memo described him as influential and said his parents “knew President Xi Jinping’s parents, implying a strong connection to Zhongnanhai (the White House of China).” Adelson himself has denied any knowledge of plans for the center.

While the SEC settlement does not make it clear what the true purpose of the spending was, it does show that Adelson’s Chinese operations handed an enormous amount of money over to the intermediary. That intermediary was referred to in Sands internal documents as a “beard,” the SEC announcement said. The payments cited by the SEC today included:

$6 million for the purchase of a Chinese basketball team. The “beard” was used for the purchase because gaming companies aren’t allowed to own basketball teams in China. An additional $8 million was paid to Yang for team operating costs, but no documentation for those costs exists, the SEC found.
$43 million in payments to Yang for the purchase and management of a building, once owned by a Chinese state entity, in order to build the business center. Las Vegas Sands employees were concerned that the payments were “solely for political purposes,” the SEC release said, but there was no documentation or research on the costs associated with the payments whatsoever. Included in the payments were $900,000 for property management costs, when no property management work was ever done, and $1.2 million for “arts and crafts.”

In addition to paying the $9 million fine, Adelson’s company agreed to hire an independent consultant to monitor its internal finances for two years.

In its own statement, Las Vegas Sands downplayed Jacobs’ role in launching the investigation, and quoted Adelson as saying he was “pleased to have the matter resolved…We will build on this experience, which has reemphasized to our 50,000 team members worldwide the same values I have made the foundation of my seven decades in business—integrity and reputation matter.”

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Sheldon Adelson’s Casino Agrees to Pay $9 Million in Foreign Corruption Case

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Americans Are Gorging Themselves on Cheap Meat

by DeannaColleano Posted on March 30, 2016

Mother Jones

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While the Dutch and other nations are advising consumers to cut down on red meat, it’s estimated that Americans will eat more beef this year than we have in the last decade.

The Netherlands Nutrition Centre’s new dietary guidelines suggest eating no more than 500 grams (just over one pound) of meat per week, including no more than 300 grams (0.7 pounds) of red meat, which it describes as “high carbon.” The agency wants the Dutch to scale back red meat for health reasons and sustainability. After all, the meat industry produces 14.5 percent of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions and land for grazing takes up a quarter of the Earth’s non-ice surface. The Dutch agency’s new guidelines also decrease the recommended fish consumption from twice to once per week, and they encourage protein from sources such as unsalted nuts and legumes.

In the United States, on the other hand, diners are piling more meat onto their plates. The USDA has predicted that 2016 will be the biggest year in a decade in Americans’ consumption of beef. We’ll eat an estimated 53.4 pounds, nearly half a pound more per person than last year.

Bloomberg Business compares US chicken and beef consumption since the 1970’s. Source: Bloomberg

According to Bloomberg, the increase could be due to cheaper prices on red meat and the popularity of protein-heavy diets like the paleo diet. Also, there are more cows. Droughts that plagued the Southwest in 2014 meant fewer cows and higher beef prices. However, cattle counts from earlier this year show there are nearly 3.5 million more cows than two years ago.

The Dutch aren’t the only sustainability conscious eaters. Sweden altered its dietary guidelines in 2009, and in 2012 Brazil called for cultivating and eating foods that had “environmental integrity.” Last week, the United Kingdom released its EatWell Guide, which advised Brits to eat less red meat.

It’s unclear whether the USDA will change its guidelines to reflect sustainability any time soon. When “My Plate,” the Obama administration’s food group

The USDA’s “My Plate” guidelines were released in January. The guidelines advised more vegetables, fruits and lean meats, and less sugar. Source: ChooseMyPlate.gov

recommendations, came out earlier this year the government played it safe and only mentioned eating leaner meats. The guidelines instead came down hard on limiting sugar intake.

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Americans Are Gorging Themselves on Cheap Meat

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Venezuela sends country on forced vacation after hydroelectric power dries up

by WoodrowMcCart Posted on March 16, 2016

Venezuela sends country on forced vacation after hydroelectric power dries up

By on 16 Mar 2016commentsShare

This story was originally published by Fusion and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Venezuela is ordering businesses, factories, government buildings, and offices to shut down for an entire week as an extreme energy-saving measure in an oil-rich country that’s running out of power.

The forced shutdown, which begins next Monday, was announced by President Nicolas Maduro during an “anti-imperialist” rally. Initially, it was ordered for government offices and schools, but on Tuesday it was expanded to most of the private sector.

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Next Thursday and Friday are already national holidays for Easter, but the government’s measure will extend the holiday for a full week — something that many in the business community object to.

“We are talking to our lawyers to see if this applies to us, too,” said Clariana Boccardo, the owner of a bakery in southeastern Caracas. “But it would be very damaging for us, because if those days count as holidays, we’d also have to pay our workers 150 percent more.”

Maduro said the work stop will save the country up to 40 percent in electricity output for the week. The South American nation depends mostly on hydroelectric power, and the government says that dry weather conditions caused by El Niño have seriously affected the nation’s ability to generate its own electricity.

But enjoying the extended holiday might not be so easy. On Margarita Island, one of Venezuela’s more popular vacation spots, hotels have been complaining for weeks that they aren’t getting enough water to operate properly.

One tourist last week posted a picture of a guest at the Lake Plaza Hotel taking water from the swimming pool into his room, because there wasn’t any water in the toilet. “We were there for three days, and there was no [running] water,” said Ruth Segovia, the tourist who posted the photo on Twitter. “We were a group of eight people so we had to do something to keep the bathrooms clean.”

The hotel has since reestablished running water, Segovia said. “But they’ve had to shut down the pool, because there are no means of keeping it clean.”

Opponents of the Maduro administration are blaming the government, not Mother Nature, for this mess. According to them, the Maduro administration has mismanaged both the power grid and local aqueducts, and failed to make key investments to keep utilities running properly in Venezuela.

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Venezuela sends country on forced vacation after hydroelectric power dries up

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Shell worries about climate change, but decides to continue making it worse

by JolieSearcy3815 Posted on March 14, 2016

Shell worries about climate change, but decides to continue making it worse

By on 14 Mar 2016commentsShare

Shell Oil released its 2015 annual review last week, and the most surprising thing in it may be how concerned the company is with climate change. It’s hardly what you’d expect from Big Oil, and yet the words “climate change” occur 15 times in the 228 page report. While this may seem minor, it’s a hell of a lot more than climate change is discussed by most other oil monsters (Looking at you, Exxon). Shell, unlike many oil giants, actively acknowledges and even embraces climate action — at least, on paper. “It was encouraging to see governments reach a global climate agreement in Paris in December,” the report reads. “The agreement should now encourage countries to develop policies that balance environmental concerns with enabling a decent quality of life for more people.”

Sounds great, right? But before you get too excited about the prospect of Shell transitioning to a solar company, they go ahead and ruin it: “We know that understanding the world’s future energy needs will help us improve our competitiveness. We have evolved over the last few decades from a company focused almost entirely on oil to one of the world’s leading suppliers of gas, the cleanest-burning hydrocarbon.”

While that may be true that gas is the “cleanest-burning hydrocarbon,” it’s still a hydrocarbon. That means, it still contributes to sea level rise, worsening storms, refugee crises, overseas war, epic drought, and more. Not only that, our means of extracting natural gas — fracking — is linked to cancer, earthquakes, and contaminated groundwater. A Pennsylvania company was just ordered to pay $4.2 million in damages to two families for contaminating their well through fracking. Yes, this is the business Shell wants to be in.

And it makes sense for them to acknowledge climate change, at least financially. As DesmogUK points out, “Last May, the oil company’s shareholders voted unanimously in favour of a resolution that forced Shell to consider the possibility of a 2C world in its forecasting. Until that time Shell had been using a 4C to 6C global warming scenario to guide future business operations (twice the level of warming considered safe for the planet).” Besides, the price of oil is at record lows, and Shell lost $7 billion in a failed attempt to find oil in Alaska’s Chukchi Sea the past few years — a move that has reportedly forced the coming retirement of CEO Marvin Odum, a Shell employee for over 30 years. In a recent Washington Post interview (which you should read in its entirety), Odum said:

“Through geology and seismic surveys, we had reduced the risk to where the only way to reduce it more was to put down a well,” Odum said, adding that Shell put it “where we thought there was the highest prospect” of a discovery. If they had been correct, Odum said, the reward could have been fields as rich in oil as the Gulf of Mexico, which produces 1.6 million barrels a day worth $22 billion a year, even at today’s depressed prices.

“The size of the prize was always big enough to take that next step and find out for sure,” he said.

While Shell’s decision to pull out of the Arctic was widely heralded by environmental groups, it probably had less to do with bad press created by protests than it did the bottom line. That’s the thing about oil companies: Some, like Exxon, are actively destructive, and some, like Shell, may be in denial. But we’ve yet to find an oil company that’s substantially different.

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Shell worries about climate change, but decides to continue making it worse

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