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America’s Biggest Labor Group Has a Fascinating Relationship With Trump’s New Anti-China Staffer

by Tangela9738 Posted on December 22, 2016

Mother Jones

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On Wednesday, President-elect Donald Trump appointed economics professor and outspoken China critic Peter Navarro to a new White House position that will oversee trade and industrial policy. Navarro, a Trump campaign adviser, advocates a more adversarial approach to China, including a controversial 40-plus percent tariff on Chinese imports. He’s also the author of numerous books about what he sees as China’s existential threat to global order, including The Coming China Wars (one of Trump’s favorite China books.)

Navarro’s appointment was met with something akin to optimism by the country’s biggest labor organization. In a statement to Mother Jones Thursday, AFL-CIO spokesman Josh Goldstein said Navarro “has raised some important critiques of American trade policy and we look forward to working with him to translate that into real policies that benefit America’s workers.”

The 12.5 million-member federation of labor unions opposed Trump during the campaign, painting him as a fraud. “Look at what he does, not what he says,” warned AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka in June, labeling Trump the “king” of outsourced labor. “When you give working-class people the facts, I think Trump falls apart,” Trumka said in a March interview with the Washington Post. “He’s a house of cards.” The AFL-CIO actively campaigned for Hillary Clinton; in its endorsement of her, the union called Trump an “unstable charlatan who made his fortune scamming” working families.

The AFL-CIO even released a YouTube video using Navarro’s own words to attack Trump:

Navarro is a University of California-Irvine a professor of economics and public policy who became an economics adviser to Trump during the campaign. In October, The New Yorker referred to him as “Trump’s muse” on trade with China and said he was poised to become “the single most powerful economic adviser in the United States” should Trump win the presidency.

Navarro’s relationship with the AFL-CIO is a bit complicated. During the campaign, he routinely claimed that union workers in states like Ohio would line up behind the Republican real estate mogul, despite opposition from top brass at the labor group. “Donald Trump is going to run the table with organized labor and with non-union labor,” he told MSNBC’s Chris Matthews in June, arguing that union leaders had contradicted themselves by supporting Clinton. “AFL-CIO opposed China’s World Trade Organization entry,” he said. “AFL-CIO opposed the South Korea trade deal. Hillary Clinton supported all those.” (He was right: According to exit polls, 54 percent of Ohio voters from union households voted for Trump. In 2012, just 37 percent voted for Mitt Romney.)

But it wasn’t long ago when the AFL-CIO leadership was very much behind Navarro’s work. In 2012, the union group sponsored several screenings of Navarro’s film Death by China in towns across Ohio. The film is a polemic documentary, narrated by Martin Sheen of The West Wing, that traces the loss of American manufacturing jobs to the rise of China. In particular, Navarro points to China’s admission to the World Trade Organization in 2001 and to what he sees as dangerous concessions that US officials have made to a dictatorial, unaccountable country waging a trade war with America.

The film casts China as a trade cheat that uses currency manipulation, illegal export subsidies, intellectual property theft, poor worker safety, and lax environmental regulations to steal American jobs.

In a way, Navarro’s film foreshadowed the 2016 contest between Clinton and Trump—especially in the Rust Belt states of the upper Midwest. His goal at the time, however, was to make trade with China the No. 1 issue for Ohio voters in the 2012 election between Romney and President Barack Obama. “My view is that whoever wins Ohio will win the presidential race,” Navarro said in August 2012. “Our objective going into Ohio is to elevate the issue of trade reform with China to the top of the checklist of presidential campaign issues.” (Navarro did not respond to a request for comment.)

The film screenings may have been aimed at union members in the Rust Belt, but Navarro’s documentary attracted another a big fan, as well. “Death by China is right on,” Trump wrote in a short blurb for the film on its website. “This important documentary depicts our problem with China with facts, figures and insight. I urge you to see it.”

Trumka, the AFL-CIO president, actually appeared in the film, as a vocal critic of US-China trade policy. “This is an economy that has been made by policy choices, policy choices that really do benefit the rich and the multinationals,” he tells viewers. “Their interests no longer coincide with the interests of this country, so we have to do what’s best for this country.” (The film also features Rep. Tim Ryan, the Ohio Democrat who recently challenged Nancy Pelosi for the House minority leader post.)

Trump’s Navarro appointment comes as tensions between the United States and China appear to be ratcheting up. Earlier this month, the Chinese Defense Ministry confirmed photos showing the country had installed military weapons, including anti-aircraft guns, on contested islands in the South China Sea, something the Obama administration regards as an act of territorial aggression. In November, China flew a nuclear-capable bomber over the South China Sea, according to Fox News. That action came after Trump spoke with Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen, breaking decades of US protocol. Last week, China seized an unmanned underwater research drone from a US Navy operation near the Philippines, prompting strong protests from Washington. (China has since given it back, though Trump suggested on Twitter that China should keep it.)

Trump’s new trade staffer seems likely to raise the stakes. Navarro calls Taiwan a “beacon of democracy” and argues that the US should “stop sacrificing friends like Taiwan to placate what is increasingly morphing from a trading partner and strategic rival into a hostile enemy.” China, for its part, is cautiously weighing its response to the appointment, at least for the moment. But something more forceful might be just over the horizon, according to a Wall Street Journal interview with Gary Hufbauer, a former Treasury official and fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. “Their objective will be to parry what Trump does with targeted reprisals in areas of US vulnerability,” he said. There are a number of potential ways in which China could use its own trade policies to impede Trump’s quest to make America great again, Hudbauer argues, including placing sanctions on American farm exports or canceling big deals with Boeing.

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America’s Biggest Labor Group Has a Fascinating Relationship With Trump’s New Anti-China Staffer

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These Are the Books We’re Giving Our Friends This Year

by Monique7546 Posted on December 3, 2016

Mother Jones

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Every year, Mother Jones receives hundreds of worthy books, but there are always a handful that truly stand out, the ones we end up foisting on friends and family. Well, friends and family, here you go, in no particular order. Also, be sure and check out the Best Cookbooks post by food and ag writer Tom Philpott, and stay tuned for photo book picks from photo editor Mark Murrmann and the year’s best music from critic Jon Young (on Sunday).

The Hopefuls, by Jennifer Close. Beth, the twentysomething protagonist of Jennifer Close’s wryly observed new novel, is an aspiring journalist loving life in New York City. But when her husband, Matt, gets a job in the Obama administration, Beth reluctantly agrees to follow him to DC. Thanks to Close’s eye for detail, The Hopefuls is like a still life of Washington in 2008. She masterfully captures both the contagious enthusiasm and wonky snobbery of DC’s rising political stars and their hangers-on. One character is forever telling anecdotes about senior Obama adviser David Axelrod, pretentiously referring to him as “Ax.” Another refers to Obama as “the senator”—a subtle humble brag that he’s worked for the president since way back when. Beth is miserable in this dreary social circle—until she and her husband click with a charismatic couple from Texas. And before she knows it, Beth herself is swept into this world of political strivers. Ultimately, The Hopefuls is as much about friendship as it is about politics—and about what happens when the two collide. —Kiera Butler, senior editor

My Father, the Pornographer, by Chris Offutt. This memoir is not a salacious romp, as the cover might suggest, but a slow-burning examination of Chris Offutt’s strained relationship with his late dad, a prolific author of smut and sci-fi. Offutt focuses less on the giant pile of kinky material he inherited than how it affected his childhood, his family, and his sense of self. His final plunge into his father’s most secret, and shameful, obsessions is worth the wait. —Dave Gilson, senior editor

Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War, by Mary Roach. This latest book from the perpetually curious Mary Roach looks at the weird yet deadly serious science of keeping soldiers alive. In a globe-trotting tour of labs, training grounds, and a nuclear sub, Roach explores how fighting men and women sweat, sleep, and poop. “No one wins a medal” for this obscure, often gross, survival research, Roach writes. “And maybe someone should.” Like her previous books Gulp and Stiff, Grunt oozes bodily fluids, flippant footnotes, and weapons-grade wordplay. —D.G.

The Arab of the Future 2: A Childhood in the Middle East, 1984-1985, by Riad Sattouf & Such a Lovely Little War: Saigon 1961-63, by Marcelino Truong. Two of the most affecting memoirs of the year are graphic novels by French cartoonists who grew up astride two cultures. The Arab of the Future 2 picks up where its predecessor left off: Riad Sattouf, the adorable six-year-old son of a Syrian father and a French mother, is adjusting to his new life in his father’s village outside Homs in the mid-1980s. Sattouf’s bubbly illustrations belie the bleakness of his surroundings, and the violence and misogyny he witnesses.

Marcelino Truong’s beautifully illustrated tale follows him and his two siblings in their move to Saigon as the Vietnam War heats up. While the kids are enthralled by the war and oblivious to its horrors, their French-born mother breaks down as she sees just how quickly things are falling apart. The two authors’ artistic and narrative sensibilities differ, but their work is united by common themes: surreal childhoods amid geopolitical conflict (Sattouf and his playmates battle the Israeli Army; Truong and his cousins pretend to fight the Viet Cong) and idealistic fathers (Sattouf’s dad is a Qaddafi- and Saddam-admiring pan-Arabist, while Truong’s is an official in the US-backed South Vietnamese government) who are blind to the strife afflicting their countries—and families. Read together or separately, these comics pack a surprising punch. —D.G.

Writing to Save a Life: The Louis Till File, by John Edgar Wideman. In his first book in more than a decade, the acclaimed African American author and Brown University professor John Edgar Wideman explores the saga of Emmett Till’s father, who was court-martialed and hanged by the United States military well before the notorious lynching of his son by white racists in Mississippi. Via a Freedom of Information Act request, Wideman obtains records from Louis Till’s military trial and interrogates the file from every angle—filling in the gaps with his own vivid imagination and recollections. Part history, part memoir, part mystery, part fiction, this insightful book reveals as much about the author as it does about his subject. As Wideman put it to me in a recent interview, “To write a story about Louis Till puts me on trial.” —Michael Mechanic, senior editor

The Underground Railroad, by Colson Whitehead. You’ve probably heard plenty about 2016’s National Book Award winner for fiction, but I’ll pile on anyway. Whitehead’s riveting slavery saga reimagines the underground railroad as a literal thing, but he doesn’t dwell too heavily on that plot device. The story follows a pair of escapees from a Georgia plantation as they move north along the railroad, pursued by a determined slave catcher. Among other things, they stumble across a bizarre eugenics experiment in South Carolina and a vile campaign of ethnic cleansing in North Carolina. Whitehead’s character-driven tale brings into visceral relief the horrors, the cruelty, the stark inhumanity of an economy based on captive black labor. And he reminds us, too, of the grim fate that awaited Southern whites brave enough to oppose the system. —M.M.

The Fortunes, by Peter Ho Davies. Given the extraordinary success of Chinese Americans today, it’s easy to forget how tough white society made things for their forebears who flocked here during the Gold Rush or who were imported as cheap labor for railroad companies—only to later be scapegoated and officially excluded by an act of Congress that would remain in force until 1943 (just in time for the interning of Japanese Americans). Davies’ outstanding new novel reminds us how things were (and still are, if the 2016 election is any indication). The experiences of Davies’ characters—a poor laundry boy hired on as a railroad magnate’s valet, an ambitious Chinese American starlet—highlight the tightrope walk of maintaining one’s culture while striving for acceptance in a resentful society. The Fortunes feels particularly timely now that we’ve handed the White House keys to a man who threatens to register and exclude Muslim immigrants, and to deport Americans (for really, what else can we honestly call them?) brought here without papers as toddlers. —M.M.

While the City Slept: A Love Lost to Violence and a Young Man’s Descent Into Madness, by Eli Sanders. One night in 2009, a disturbed young man named Isaiah Kalebu entered a Seattle home through an open window and raped and stabbed two women, killing one. He was sentenced to life in prison, but local journalist Eli Sanders, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the case, kept digging. While the City Slept, his compassionate examination of the lives that collided that night, relates how a bright but abused boy grew into a violent criminal and, as one psychiatrist put it, “became his illness.” The book plays double duty as tribute to those whose lives were upended and a meticulous indictment of the way we fail fellow citizens with serious mental disorders. —Madison Pauly, assistant editor

Pumpkinflowers, by Matti Friedman. This is a 21st-century war story, with all of the IEDs, propaganda videos, jihadi groups we’re accustomed to—but one told in the restrained, introspective style of the World War I writers Friedman turned to for inspiration. It’s partly an engrossing personal story, partly a history of a forgotten chapter in Middle East conflict, and one of the best-written books I’ve read in years. —Max J. Rosenthal, reporter

Homegoing, by Yaa Gyasi. This ambitious debut novel sparked a bidding war and landed Gyasi a seven-figure contract just one year after she graduated from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. Following seven generations across two continents, Gyasi manages to fit the many stages of slavery’s plunder into a relatively slim volume, to dazzling and often devastating effect. Though some of the storylines unravel a bit toward the novel’s end, the emphasis on global slavery’s ramifications in West Africa, told with rich and lively characters and language that hums, makes this well worth the commitment. —Maddie Oatman, story editor

Real Food, Fake Food: Why You Don’t Know What You’re Eating and What You Can Do About It, by Larry Olmsted. We’ve all been told to steer clear of artificial ingredients, but how much do you know about fake—meaning fraudulent—food? Turns out, it’s everywhere, including in your kitchen right now. Olive oil, parmesan cheese, fish fillets, red wine; it would seem the more scrumptious the victual, the more likely it is to be a sham. Olmsted gives us the lay of this seedy landscape with momentum and aplomb. He demystifies the process by which fake ingredients end up in your shopping cart, explains why some of these deceitful foods could be a real threat to your health, and sheds a light on the government policies and shortsighted commercialism that landed them there. —M.O.

Swing Time, by Zadie Smith. Award-winning author Zadie Smith’s fifth novel interweaves two narratives. One involves the unnamed narrator’s childhood friendship, wrought by a shared passion for dance. The other one revolves around the narrator’s adult travels to Africa in the employ of a pop star as she grapples with her own biracial identity. Penned in Smith’s inimitable, winding style, Swing Time looks unflinchingly at race, gender, parenting, love, and friendship. In places, I found the book an unnerving reminder of my own childhood, of parents who seemed invincible and maddeningly certain about the course of their offspring’s future. —Becca Andrews, assistant editor

March: Book Three, by Rep. John Lewis and Andrew Aydin; illustrated by Nate Powell. Police brutality, segregation, voting rights: Many of the big issues of the 1960s are alive and well today. The March graphic-history trilogy tells the story of the civil rights movement through the eyes of Rep. John Lewis, onetime chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee—a group at the center of the struggle. In poignant detail, the March books, totally 600 pages, put us at the heart of the battles over desegregation and black suffrage. We meet the movement’s leaders and witness the ugly local clashes leading up to the March on Washington. In the third installment, which earned a 2016 National Book Award, the beatings and defiance of “Bloody Sunday” stand in sharp contrast to Lewis’ pride on President Barack Obama’s inauguration day. The book, and the trilogy, offer lessons for modern strivers on how far we’ve come—while serving as a reminder of how far we have yet to go. —Edwin Rios, reporter

Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, by Matthew Desmond. In a tome filled with heartbreak, Desmond, a sociologist who teaches at Harvard, embeds with eight families who are struggling to keep a roof over their heads in the segregated city of Milwaukee. Rich in history and bolstered by engrossing research, Evicted vividly captures with empathy the lives of those caught up in deep poverty as they reel from the consequences of losing their homes. In doing so, it elevates the importance of affordable housing in today’s society. “Housing is deeply implicated in causing poverty in America today,” Desmond told me in March, “and we have to do something.” —E.R.

A Rage for Order: The Middle East in turmoil, from Tahrir Square to ISIS, by Robert F. Worth. This is not your typical Middle East manuscript—no bird’s eye view of battlefield advancements or policy analysis on the region in collapse. Rather, Robert F. Worth, the longtime correspondent for the New York Times, managed to be on the ground seemingly everywhere that mattered during the zenith of the Arab Spring, and takes us a journey inside the lives of those whose hopes rode on the Arab Spring’s promise and whose lives changed—or ended—forever once the popular uprisings collapsed into insurgencies and civil war. It’s a beautifully written, moving account that brings humanity and heart to a region typically only considered in terms of conflict and chaos. —Bryan Schatz, reporter

God Save Sex Pistols, by Johan Kugelberg, with Jon Savage and Glenn Terry. Curator, author, and all-around underground know-it-all Johan Kugelberg released the end-all Sex Pistols ephemera collection earlier this year, and just in time; soon after, Joe Corre, son of punk impressarios Malcolm McClaren and Dame Vivien Westwood, celebrated the 40th anniversary of the Sex Pistol’s first single by burning more than $6 million worth of rare, original Sex Pistols and UK punk memorabilia. Though the original artifacts were lost to Corre’s piqued sense of anti-nostalgia, God Save Sex Pistols lovingly showcases photos, letters, flyers, records, posters, shirts—everything related to the band that once terrified parents and politicians. The book also serves as a more focused compendium to Kugelberg & Savages’ excellent 2012 book, Punk: An Aesthethic. —Mark Murrmann, photo editor

I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life, by Ed Yong. Few writers know how to explain science clearly, and even fewer science writers compose genuinely gorgeous prose. Ed Yong is that unicorn. I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us is the most elegant guide I’ve seen to our still-primitive understanding of the microbiome—the gazillions of tiny critters living within us. Like Nietzsche peering into a microscope, Yong urges us to think beyond “good” and “bad” microbes: “These terms belong in children’s stories. They are ill-suited for describing the messy, fractious, contextual relationships of the natural world.” Context is everything. “The same microbes could be good in the gut, but dangerous in the blood,” Yong writes. One of the many functions of mother’s milk, one scientist informs him, may be to “provide babies with a starter’s pack of symbiotic viruses”—and that’s a good thing. “Every one of us is a zoo in our own right—a colony enclosed within a single body,” he writes. “A multi-species collection. An entire world.” —Tom Philpott, food and ag correspondent

Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? by Thomas Frank. His forward-looking autopsy may seem like a contradiction in terms, but Thomas Frank had the dirge of the Democratic Party cued up before primary season. Still, the shock of November 8 catapulted the virtuosic Listen, Liberal from insightful to downright prophetic. Frank meticulously charts the Democrats’ suicidal slide from a party of the factory floor to one of late-summer galas on Martha’s Vineyard. He hits on all the major missteps—the decline of middle-class wages, the bank bailouts, the trade deals, the technocracy (oh, the technocracy!)—all of which were later parceled out by the flabbergasted into grasping post-election think pieces. Frank’s book is lacerating and urgent, but also titillating, witty, and downright fun to read. It will no doubt give some establishment Dems the strong urge to throw the book into the ocean—indeed, their proximity to the coast and ability to conceivably do just that is part of the problem. This, for my money, is the best nonfiction of 2016. —Alex Sammon, editorial fellow

Critics, Monsters, Fanatics, and Other Literary Essays, by Cynthia Ozick. Narratives of decline seem to be particularly in, but no one can render this notion quite as beautifully as Ozick. At 88, she’s been around the literary block, and she can’t help but lament the state of the American traditions of reading and writing. “What’s impossible not to notice,” as she put it to me earlier this year, “is the diminution of American prose.” To read Ozick is enriching for her startling vocabulary alone, though her intellectual force is also something to behold. This essay collection stakes out the critical cultural importance of literary criticism, and does so with the linguistic expertise of a poet—peaking with a vivid disemboweling of the term “Kafkaesque,” for all its faux-literary worth. One thing, for Ozick, is certain: The road to cultural aridity is paved with 3.5-star Amazon reviews. —A.S.

Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, by J.D. Vance. Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, by J.D. Vance. If you want to understand how Donald Trump took over the GOP, and how he won so many Rust Belt counties that voted for Barack Obama, this is a good place to start. Vance uses the story of his childhood in a dying steel town to highlight what he sees as cultural shortcomings and political delusions among the region’s white working class. “We talk about the value of hard work,” he writes, “but tell ourselves that the reason we’re not working is some perceived unfairness: Obama shut down the coal mines, or all the jobs went to the Chinese.” There’s plenty to disagree with in Vance’s analysis—his insistence on blaming “welfare queens” for their financial problems, for example. Still, for all of us asking, “What just happened to my country?” Hillbilly Elegy provides some invaluable clues. —Jeremy Schulman, senior project manager, Climate Desk

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These Are the Books We’re Giving Our Friends This Year

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Canada Just Took a Big Step Toward Banning a Nasty Pesticide

by MosesWillingham Posted on November 30, 2016

Mother Jones

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While President-elect Donald Trump ponders which anti-regulation stalwart to place at the head of the US Environmental Protection Agency, Health Canada—our northern neighbor’s version of the EPA—just took a bold step toward protecting the environment. Last week, the Canadian agency declared in a preliminary assessment that a high-profile insecticide should be banned within five years, because it’s turning up in waterways “at levels that are harmful to aquatic insects”—the base of the food chain for fish, birds, and other animals.

Health Canada is soliciting public comment on its assessment through late February, after which it will decide whether to proceed with a phased-in ban. The chemical is imidacloprid, widely marketed by Bayer, the German chemical giant that recently bought US seed/agrichemical titan Monsanto in a deal pending approval by US and European antitrust authorities. Bayer was not amused by the finding, declaring itself “extremely disappointed.”

Imidacloprid is part of a class of chemicals known as neonicotinoids, the globe’s most-used insecticides—and one that has been linked by a growing body of research with the declining health of honeybees and other pollinators.

The Canadian assessment has nothing to do with pollinators, though. The agency is conducting a separate evaluation of how the chemical affects them. It’s striking that the agency decided that the risk imidacloprid poses to waterborne insects is so great that the chemical should be banned. Mark Winston, a professor of apiculture at Simon Fraser University and senior fellow at the university’s Centre for Dialogue, told CBC News that the recommendation “really surprised” him, because “to take an action to phase out a chemical that is so ubiquitous, and for which there is so much lobbying pressure from industry…that’s a really bold move.”

Based on similar concerns, Health Canada has initiated reviews of two other prominent neonics, clothianidin and thiamethoxam. They, too, have potent corporate interests behind them—Bayer is a major producer of clothianidin, while the Chinese agrichemical giant Syngenta is the sole maker of thiamethoxam products on the Canadian market, according to Health Canada.

Meanwhile, south of the border, imidacloprid has also generated serious concern among regulatory agencies. Back in January, the EPA released a preliminary assessment finding that in two crops where it’s commonly used, cotton and citrus, imidacloprid harms bees and lowers honey production. As for the most prominent crop for imidacloprid, soybeans, the EPA noted that they’re “attractive to bees via pollen and nectar,” meaning they could expose bees to dangerous levels of imidacloprid. But the agency revealed that it doesn’t know whether it causes harm, because data on how much of the pesticide shows up in soybeans’ pollen and nectar are “unavailable” both from Bayer and independent researchers—even though it’s been on the market for 20 years.

Overall, the assessment was so dire that an EPA spokeswoman told me at the time that the agency “could potentially take action” to “restrict or limit the use” of the chemical by the end of this year. Such a move has yet to happen.

Meanwhile, Hurricane Trump has descended upon Washington. His main ag adviser during the campaign, Charles Herbster, regularly denounced regulation of agriculture. The man leading Trump’s EPA transition is an anti-regulation zealot, and according to Politico, the president-elect is mulling candidates of that ilk to head the agency. Soon, it may not just be disappointed Democrats who fantasize about emigrating north. Bees and aquatic insects may join them.

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Canada Just Took a Big Step Toward Banning a Nasty Pesticide

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How Good Is Flint’s Water These Days?

by Porfirio07K Posted on November 20, 2016

Mother Jones

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Last week a federal judge in Michigan ordered the state to deliver four cases of bottled water each week to families in Flint that need it. On Thursday, the state asked the judge to stay his order, arguing that the court order would “require a ‘Herculean effort’ equivalent to a large-scale military operation and cost the state at least $10.45 million a month, or $125 million annually.” This prompted a reader to ask me what was up. Is Flint’s water still unsafe to drink?

I haven’t checked in on Flint since June, so I figured maybe it was time for an update. I brought up the latest testing results and created a new data point for the past two months, and then added the data point to my old chart using the same metric as always. Here it is:

That’s…not bad.1 Using a different measure, it turns out that about 6 percent of Flint homes were over the EPA’s “action limit” of 15 ppb and 1 percent were way over. That’s not great, obviously, but not catastrophic either. The catch is that presumably these measurements were all taken with water filters in place, and the judge’s ruling applied only to homes without filters:

The city is not required to deliver water to residents whose homes have properly installed and working filters, are unoccupied or decline the service. Judge Lawson also ordered that officials provide information in multiple languages, including English, Spanish, Chinese, Arabic and Hmong, to residents about lead levels of city water and how to install filters that properly reduce the contamination.

….Flint had fought the request for deliveries of water, arguing that residents had sufficient access to clean water from distribution centers throughout Flint and at home using filters that the city provided. Judge Lawson disagreed. Residents struggled to properly install the filters because of language barriers, old age, cognitive barriers or a lack of necessary tools, the judge said. Others struggled to retrieve water even from the distribution centers.

I guess I’m a little puzzled. If Flint is getting good results even though lots of homes don’t have working filters, then its water is in pretty good shape and the judge might be overreacting. However, if it’s getting these results because most homes do have working filters, then the judge’s order wouldn’t be all that burdensome and it’s not clear why the state is fighting it. Perhaps someone with deeper knowledge of what’s going on will weigh in on this.

1There’s a broader measure of blood lead levels that looks oddly high, but the entire state of Michigan looks oddly high. I’m not sure what to make of it.

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How Good Is Flint’s Water These Days?

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What? Bill O’Reilly Is Urging Trump to Keep the Paris Climate Agreement

by OctavioAranda Posted on November 17, 2016

Mother Jones

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Conservative TV host Bill O’Reilly is urging Donald Trump to stick to the Paris climate agreement, the global pact to reduce emissions that the president-elect has railed against for months. “It doesn’t really amount to much anyway,” O’Reilly told his Fox News audience Wednesday evening. “Let it go.”

O’Reilly is no fan of climate action. He said in 2011 that “nobody can control the climate but God.” But on Wednesday, O’Reilly said staying in the Paris agreement would “buy some goodwill overseas” for the incoming president. At least one prominent politician—Nicolas Sarkozy, the former leader of France who is running again for the presidency—has proposed tariffs on US imports should Trump pull out of the deal, which was signed in December 2015 and came into force just before the election.

On Thursday, Britain announced it had ratified the deal, while hundreds of major companies co-signed a letter urging Trump to uphold America’s climate pledges. The 360 companies included Nike, General Mills, and Hewlett Packard.

Trump has said that climate change is a hoax invented by the Chinese and has pledged to slash funding to United Nations climate programs. He put a prominent climate change denier, Myron Ebell, in charge of his Environmental Protection Agency transition team.

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What? Bill O’Reilly Is Urging Trump to Keep the Paris Climate Agreement

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Trump Should Think Twice Before Flying Off the Handle About China

by FrederiBoatman Posted on November 16, 2016

Mother Jones

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Donald Trump—or someone speaking for him, anyway—says that he plans to label China a currency manipulator on “day one” of his presidency. Fair enough. China does intervene in currency markets to manipulate the value of the yuan. Unfortunately, Trump might not like what would happen if China decides to call his bluff:

The simple act of calling out China for manipulating the value of its currency to gain an export advantage shouldn’t roil Beijing to the point of retaliation, said Derek Scissors, a China economy expert at the American Enterprise Institute….But slapping retaliatory tariffs on Chinese goods would be more difficult because it would require congressional approval — a problem given that Republican leaders have been opposed to legislation to punish Chinese currency devaluation with duties, Scissors said.

There’s also the question of whether China is actually devaluing its currency. Most economists agree Beijing intervenes heavily in its currency markets, but in recent years has actually been propping up the value of the renminbi rather than lowering it.

Hmmm. Here is Brad Setser:

The monthly data suggest China has not bought foreign exchange in the market to keep the yuan from appreciating in the past 6 quarters or so, only sold. Its intervention in the market has worked to prevent exchange rate moves that would have the effect of widening China’s current account surplus over time. Every indicator of intervention that I track is telling the same story.

….If China stopped all management (“e.g. manipulation”) and let the yuan float against the dollar, China’s currency would drop. Possibly precipitously. China’s export machine would get a new boost. And rising exports would take pressure off China’s governments to make the difficult reforms needed to create a stronger domestic consumer base.

In other words, right now China’s currency is overvalued. If they weren’t manipulating it, it would most likely have fallen even more than it has—something along the lines of the chart on the right. This would mean Chinese imports get even cheaper, American exports get more expensive, and the trade deficit increases. This is exactly the opposite of what Trump wants.

Demonizing foreigners as the cause of all our problems is apparently a good campaign tactic. Dealing with the real world is a little different. Hopefully Trump will talk to a few actual economists and trade experts before he makes good on this particular promise.

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Trump Should Think Twice Before Flying Off the Handle About China

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The Paris climate accord is a big fucking deal, now more than ever

by StephanCCCG Posted on November 4, 2016

On Friday, the landmark Paris climate agreement officially goes into force. The news will surely be buried under a mudslide of U.S. election coverage, but it shouldn’t be. Paris was and still is a BFD.

Last December, world leaders reached what’s been called the first truly universal agreement on climate change, because the signers account for virtually all of the planet’s greenhouse gas emissions. More importantly, it marked the first time top polluters like China, India, and the U.S. found a way past old divides and down a shared path toward a low-carbon future.

Now that agreement is taking effect much earlier than expected. Often countries take not just months but years to ratify major international deals. It took eight years to activate the Kyoto Protocol. But the Paris Agreement was ratified by enough countries for it to become binding in less than 11 months.

China, India, the European Union, and dozens of other nations got the job done fast in part because they wanted Paris on the books before the U.S. presidential election — not because it will change Donald Trump’s mind about opposing the deal, but because it sends a clear message: The world is behind climate action. You better be, too.

The Chinese government has even taken the unusual step of saying that the next U.S. president needs to take Paris and climate policy seriously. “I believe a wise political leader should take policy stances that conform with global trends,” said China’s climate chief Xie Zhenhua. “If they resist this trend, I don’t think they’ll win the support of their people, and their country’s economic and social progress will also be affected.”

We’ll always ignore Paris.

Although the rest of the signatories to the Paris deal have been paying close attention to the United States, our politicians and media outlets have not been paying attention to Paris in return.

Just three days after the Paris Agreement was signed last December, CNN hosted a primary debate between Republican presidential contenders in which Wolf Blitzer neglected to ask anything about the climate deal (though Trump and John Kasich disparaged it without prodding).

That was just a taste of what would follow. In the three presidential debates and one vice presidential debate this fall, not a single question about climate change was asked (though Ken Bone did ask about energy and the environment).

Throughout both the primary campaigns and the general election, climate change has gotten little attention, and the Paris Agreement almost none. Did it matter whether candidates would work with our allies to make the 187-country deal a success or pull the legs from under it? Apparently, it didn’t.

But Americans need to know: Paris is huge.

It is a BFD that world leaders have agreed on ambitious goals: holding global warming to below 2 degrees C above pre-industrial levels, and ideally 1.5 C, which scientists say is needed to ward off the harshest impacts; peaking emissions as soon as possible and reaching carbon neutrality by 2050; spending hundreds of millions to help poor nations adapt and transition to climate change.

It is a BFD that countries once lukewarm on climate action have rallied around this agreement. Even a developing nation like India, which still needs to bring electricity to millions of citizens and help them out of poverty, is committing to a cleaner energy future.

It is a BFD that the U.S. and China found common ground in the lead-up to Paris and made the deal possible, forming a new bond around their shared efforts to fight the biggest threat facing humanity.

It is a BFD that the world’s nations have committed to remaking the entire global energy system. Rich nations are basically asking (and helping) developing countries to do something no developed country managed: Leapfrog coal, oil, and gas in favor of renewable energy. It’s no coincidence the oil industry is suddenly mindful of renewables again.

Yes, Paris is imperfect.

Of course, Paris has a lot of flaws and shortcomings, and as the world works to implement it, many what-ifs and hazards lie ahead. The most important components — emissions cuts and finance — aren’t legally binding, so the carefully negotiated deal could be eroded by political shifts. Brexit could make it more difficult for the E.U. to meet its promises. The Philippines is waffling on whether it will formally join the agreement, even though it signed on last December. And, yes, the U.S. election could send the whole process reeling.

Since the agreement is largely non-binding, it’s critical that the review process be as transparent as possible, because international peer pressure is essential to ensuring countries don’t miss the mark. For exactly that reason, countries don’t have a particular incentive to be transparent — which is one of Paris’ main challenges going forward.

Even if everything goes as planned and nations follow through on their first-round commitments, that alone won’t be enough to fend off the worst impacts of climate change. Countries will need to keep setting and meeting tougher goals, which will get increasingly difficult and expensive.

Nevertheless, the Paris Agreement is an essential, powerful start to what will be a long, fraught process.

The endless drama of climate change (not to mention international negotiations) is, let’s be honest, less sensational than the drama of the election. Slow, incremental change is a tough thing to fathom, much less to get excited about. The latest poll, the latest insult, and the latest email leak are easier to grasp and more fun to follow.

Even if it’s not as entertaining as a political campaign, what really counts is moving the clean-energy transition along as fast and seamlessly as possible. The Paris deal that comes into force today is helping the world do exactly that. That’s big, and that matters.

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The Paris climate accord is a big fucking deal, now more than ever

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You’ve Been Wrong About Fortune Cookies Your Whole Life

by MerissaHogarth Posted on October 15, 2016

Mother Jones

The Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Factory in San Francisco isn’t much bigger than a narrow garage, but it produces thousands of fortune cookies each day. Large machines drip batter onto hot circular plates, hardening them in an instant. Two Chinese American women quickly grab the warm wafers, fold them over an iron, and insert a small piece of paper inside before fully closing the cookie. They move quickly under the gaze of tourists, who pay 50 cents to snap a photo.

The Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Factory in San Francisco’s Chinatown Photo by Jenny Luna

There’s a decent chance the last fortune cookie you ate came from this factory: San Francisco and Los Angeles churn out most of the country’s supply. Aside from being big producers of the treat since the mid-20th century, these two cities also have a running feud about which city can claim to be the cookie’s original hometown. Jennifer Lee writes about this history in her book, The Fortune Cookie Chronicles; you can hear her on a recent episode of our podcast Bite.

Thirty years ago, this battle came to a head when representatives for each city met in San Francisco’s Court of Historical Review to settle the dispute once and for all. (To be clear, this court was a mock court, the same that deliberated on whether martinis originated in San Francisco or the nearby city of Martinez, and whether Bay Area bagels are as good as New York’s.) After arguments for both sides were heard, the judge was presented with a fortune cookie. It read: “Judge who rules in favor of L.A. not a very smart cookie.”

After the laughter died down, a small Japanese woman named Sally Osaki approached the stand. She was carrying two long irons with clamps on the end—the original tools for making fortune cookies, she said.

And then Osaki said something that shocked everyone: “They’re not Chinese, they’re Japanese.” Later, Osaki recalled that the statement “just came out. I knew it in my soul.”

The irons she carried belonged to the owner of the Japanese Tea Garden in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. Osaki, who grew up in Japan, recognized that the fortune cookie concept originated with Japanese bakers, who would stick messages into tea cakes. Fortune cookies, she said, only became a Chinese tradition later—during her family’s, and her people’s, darkest times.

At the start of World War II, 120,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans were forced into internment camps on the West Coast. They had to leave everything behind: their homes, their businesses, their belongings—and, for those who were bakers, their iron tools for making tea cakes. It’s rumored that Japanese families passed these on to Chinese immigrants in their neighborhoods. And, well, the rest is history.

To hear more about Osaki’s story and the origin of fortune cookie, download our episode here. Also on that episode, don’t miss Tom Philpott’s interview with author Valerie Imbruce on how Chinatown markets have been sources of fresh produce since before the days of big supermarkets, and why they’ll continue to flourish.

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You’ve Been Wrong About Fortune Cookies Your Whole Life

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Trump’s Huge Conflict of Interest With a Big Foreign Bank Keeps Getting Worse

by JaimeLockett Posted on September 28, 2016

Mother Jones

Deutsche Bank is in deep trouble. Its stock price has plummeted in recent days after the Justice Department demanded the gigantic German bank pay $14 billion to settle claims regarding its sale of bad mortgage-backed securities in the the run-up to the 2008 financial crisis. The bank’s shares fell to a new low on Tuesday over reports it might be seeking a bailout from the German government—which Deutsche Bank has denied. The crisis has exposed the fragile state of one of the world’s largest banks, but it also highlights a potential massive conflict of interest for Donald Trump.

In the past few years, Trump obtained $364 million in loans from Deutsche bank via four mortgages on three of his prized properties: Miami’s Doral National golf course, Chicago’s Trump International Hotel and Tower, and the newly opened Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C., a few blocks from the White House. A foreign entity holding so much of Trump’s debt—financial leverage that could affect the decision-making of a future commander in chief—has raised alarms among ethics watchdogs. But with Deutsche Bank floundering, the possible conflicts posed by Trump’s loans are compounding.

The financial health of Deutsche Bank is important for Trump’s corporate empire. Because of Trump’s history of failed projects and repeated bankruptcies, many of the world’s top banks have long stopped doing business with him. Deutsche Bank was one of the only major banks—perhaps the only—that would work with him, and their relationship has been rocky. Trump wore out his welcome with Deutsche Bank’s corporate banking arm in 2008, when he attempted to get out of paying $40 million he personally owed the bank after his company failed to make a payment deadline on a larger $640 million loan for his Chicago project. But Trump has maintained his relationship with Deutsche’s so-called “private bank”—an arm of the bank that caters to wealthy people and has more flexibility in its lending standards than the corporate side. The four loans Trump currently has with Deutsche Bank are each from the private bank, a Deutsche Bank official told Mother Jones.

Deutsche Bank has vowed to fight the US government over the hefty fine it is threatening to impose. The bank has said that it is prepared to pay no more than $2 or $3 billion and noted in a statement last week that it has “no intent to settle these potential civil claims anywhere near the number cited.” Settlement negotiations are expected to take months, raising the possibility that Trump might be in the White House when a final decision is made. In an unprecedented face-off between a foreign bank and an administration led by a man deeply in debt to that bank, how would Trump balance the public interest with his private interests? Could American taxpayers be assured that a Trump administration would aggressively seek the maximum penalty against a lender that played a role in tanking the economy in 2008? Or would Deutsche Bank receive special consideration or favorable terms because of its ties to—or leverage over—Trump?

The news media has paid attention to the the debt Trump, via partnerships, owes a Chinese bank. But Trump’s relationship with Deutsche Bank has yet to receive much scrutiny. And if Deutsche Bank continues to falter, there is the possibility that it may need to sell off loans, perhaps including the Trump loans. It’s hard to imagine a more staggering conflict of interest than a potential or sitting president’s debts being placed on the global market. What individuals or financial institutions here or abroad might buy them? Meanwhile, Trump has offered no firm explanation for how he would separate himself from his businesses—or his debts—if elected president.

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Trump’s Huge Conflict of Interest With a Big Foreign Bank Keeps Getting Worse

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Elon Musk has a big idea to save civilization: Move it to Mars.

by DamionBenefield Posted on September 28, 2016

Myron Ebell, a director at the conservative Competitive Enterprise Institute, would head Trump’s EPA transition team, E&E Daily reports. Ebell also chairs the Cooler Heads Coalition, a pro-business group focused on pushing climate denial.

While Ebell generally maintains that climate change is a hoax, he’s also argued that if it does exist, it’s actually a good thing. “Life in many places would become more pleasant,” he wrote in 2006. “Instead of 20 below zero in January in Saskatoon, it might be only 10 below. And I don’t think too many people would complain if winters in Minneapolis became more like winters in Kansas City.” He has less to say about the summers in Minneapolis, which, if current emissions trends continue, will feel like summers in Mesquite, Texas, by 2100.

Ebell’s waffling is in-line with the candidate’s, who seems to have spontaneously changed his mind about climate change during the first presidential debate. When accused by Hillary Clinton of calling climate change a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese, Trump flat-out denied it, despite a notorious tweet saying just that.

Ebell joins energy lobbyist Mike McKenna, George W. Bush’s former Interior Department solicitor David Bernhardt, and oil tycoon Harold Hamm on Trump’s team.

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Elon Musk has a big idea to save civilization: Move it to Mars.

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