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The Deeply Racist References in Dylann Roof’s Apparent Manifesto, Decoded.

by ErickRittenhous Posted on June 20, 2015

Mother Jones

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The manifesto and photos apparently posted to the web by alleged Charleston gunman Dylann Roof, first unearthed on Twitter by @EMQuangel and @HenryKrinkIe Saturday morning, are full of references to white supremacist groups and terminology. Here are some of the key terms, explained:

1488

The numbers 1488 can be seen scrawled in the sand in photos from the downloadable trove. The 14 is short for “14 words” and denotes an expression used by white supremacists: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.” Because H is the 8th letter of the alphabet, 88 is an abbreviation for the “Heil Hitler” salute.

Council of Conservative Citizens

The manifesto refers to the council as a source of research into “black on White crime.” The council is a conservative group with white supremacist leanings, considered by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) to be part of the “neo-confederate movement.” It was founded by members of Citizens’ Councils of America, also known as White Citizens Councils, a confederation of segregationist groups active until the 1970s. In more recent years, the Council of Conservative Citizens has made the news when it was revealed that former US Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott had given speeches to the group. It was also extremely active in the demonstrations to keep the Confederate battle flag flying over the state capitol of South Carolina between 1993 and 2000.

Northwest Front

The manifesto makes reference to the “Northwest Front.” According to its site, “The Northwest Front is a political organization of Aryan men and women who recognize that an independent and sovereign White nation in the Pacific Northwest is the only possibility for the survival of the White race on this continent.” It was founded by Harold Covington, who joined the American Nazi Party while in the US army before moving to South Africa and then Rhodesia, which deported him in 1976, after he sent threatening letters to a Jewish congregation. He bounced around various hate groups both in the North Carolina and the UK, before founding Northwest Front.

References to South Africa and Rhodesia

A photo of Dylann Roof from the website “The Last Rhodesian.”

In several of the photos, Roof can be seen wearing a jacket with the flags of apartheid South Africa and Rhodesia, just as in the photo that was widely published after the attack. Former Mother Jones editor Nick Baumann has this excellent summary of what these references mean, over at the Huffington Post:

Rhodesia was an apartheid state in East Africa that was majority black but ruled by white, mostly British-descended people from 1965 until 1979. It grew out of the former British colony of South Rhodesia, which had some degree of self-rule (under the British colonial umbrella) from 1923 until 1965, when the colony’s overwhelmingly white government, fearing having to share power with blacks, declared independence to preserve white supremacy.

“The mantle of the pioneers has fallen on our shoulders to sustain civilization in a primitive country,” Ian Smith, the country’s white leader, declared at the time.

“The Rhodesian flag is important in terms of symbolism, for Rhodesia subscribed to white supremacy,” Blessing-Miles Tendi, a lecturer in African history and politics at Oxford, explained in an email. “A minority, racist, colonial white settler state subjugated a majority black population in the then Rhodesia for approximately a century.”

The manifesto also references South Africa, “and how such a small minority held the black in apartheid for years and years.” It continues: “if anyone thinks that think will eventually just change for the better, consider how in South Africa they have affirmative action for the black population that makes up 80 percent of the population.”

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The Deeply Racist References in Dylann Roof’s Apparent Manifesto, Decoded.

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Why are we building a research center full of deadly diseases in the tornado capital of the world?

by HiramWhittell Posted on June 18, 2015

The United States eradicated foot-and-mouth disease from its borders in 1929. The virus, deadly to livestock, persists in more than 100 countries, though, and travels with ease. It is able to hitchhike on shoes, clothes, and tires. Airborne, it can travel almost 40 miles overland and almost 190 over open ocean. …

If the foot-and-mouth virus—or any other airborne danger—escaped from the lab, the air currents would likely carry it beyond where it could cause harm. An out-of-the-way location makes sense because no lab is risk free. In 2007, for instance, the foot-and-mouth virus escaped from Great Britain’s Pirbright Institute, one of the world’s leading laboratories studying animal disease, and set off an outbreak at a nearby farm.

So it is absolutely mind-boggling that Homeland Security has decided to move the lab, to be known as the National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility, to the Kansas State University campus in Manhattan, Kansas, smack in the middle of cattle country and Tornado Alley. Builders recently broke ground on the brand-new $1.25 billion dollar facility, which is set to be fully operational in 2022. It will include a biosafety level 4 lab, meaning one designed to handle deadly and exotic pathogens for which no vaccines or treatments exist. …

In 2010, the National Academy of Sciences conducted a risk assessment of Homeland Security’s first proposal for the Kansas lab and found a 70 percent probability that a foot-and-mouth virus release resulting in an outbreak would occur over the facility’s 50-year life span. In 2012, the National Research Council evaluated Homeland Security’s revised proposal and found considerable improvements in lab construction design that lowered the 50-year risk to below 1 percent, but this extremely low probability of accidental viral release was based on Homeland Security’s unsupported, overly optimistic estimates of human error rates.

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Why are we building a research center full of deadly diseases in the tornado capital of the world?

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Are We Really In Control of Our Own Outrage? The Case of Social Media and Tim Hunt.

by WayneKarpinski Posted on June 14, 2015

Mother Jones

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British scientist Tim Hunt. We all know his story by now, don’t we? Here’s a quick refresher:

  1. In 2001 he won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
  2. In 2015, speaking in Korea, he decided to make a Sheldonian1 joke about women in the lab. “Let me tell you about my trouble with girls … three things happen when they are in the lab … You fall in love with them, they fall in love with you and when you criticize them, they cry.”
  3. Social media immediately erupted into a firestorm. Within days he was fired by University College London and the European Research Council and had essentially been exiled from the scientific community in Britain.

There’s no disagreement about either the inappropriateness of Hunt’s remark or the insufficiency of his “explanation” the next day. What I’m more interested in, however, is the binary nature of the punishment for this kind of thing. As recently as 20 years ago, nothing would have happened because there would have been no real mechanism for reporting Hunt’s joke. At most, some of the women in the audience might have gotten together later for lunch, rolled their eyes, and wondered just how much longer they were going to have to put up with this crap. And that would have been that.

Today, remarks like this end up on social media within minutes and mushroom into a firestorm of outrage within hours. Institutions panic. The hordes must be appeased. Heads are made to roll and careers ended. Then something else happens to engage the outrage centers of our brains and it’s all forgotten.

Neither of these strikes me as the best possible response to something essentially trivial like this. Ignoring it presumes acceptance, while digital torches and pitchforks teach a lesson that’s far too harsh and ruinous, especially for a first-time offense.

The fact that media outlets had limited space and were unlikely to report stuff like this hardly made it right to ignore it in 1995. Likewise, the fact that social media has evolved into an almost tailor-made outrage machine for every offensive remark ever uttered doesn’t make it right to insist on the death penalty every time someone says something obnoxious.

I’m whistling into the wind here, but why do we allow the current state of the art in technology to drive our responses to things like this? Hunt deserved a reprimand. He deserved to be mocked on Twitter. That’s probably about it. He didn’t deserve the guillotine. One of these days we’re going to have to figure out how to properly handle affairs like this based on their actual impact and importance, not their ability to act as clickbait on Facebook. We all have some growing up to do.

1Sheldonian (Shell • doe’ • nee • un) adj. TVE < OE sheldon, valley with steep sides 1. awkward, socially inept behavior, esp. among male scientists toward women.

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Are We Really In Control of Our Own Outrage? The Case of Social Media and Tim Hunt.

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Holy Shit! Almonds Require a Ton of Bees

by DonnaWahl Posted on May 25, 2015

Mother Jones

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Growing 80 percent of the globe’s almonds in California doesn’t just require massive amounts of water. It also takes a whole bunch of honeybees for pollination—roughly two hives’ worth for every acre of almonds trees, around 1.7 million hives altogether. That’s at least 80 percent of all available commercial hives in the United States, Gene Brandi, a California beekeeper who serves as vice president of the American Beekeeping Federation, recently told NPR.

Now, that vast army of bees—made up, all told, of more than 80 billion flying, buzzing soldiers—doesn’t stay put in California’s almond-happy Central Valley all year. The almond bloom typically lasts for just a few weeks (or less) in February. The modern honeybee operation is an itinerant business—beekeepers move hives throughout the year, in pursuit of paid pollination gigs—from tangerines in Florida to cherries in Washington state—as well as good forage for honey.

But California’s almond bloom is the biggest gig of all—the “largest managed pollination event anywhere in the world,” Scientific American reports. And as US honeybee populations’ health has flagged in recent years—most famously epitomized by the mysterious winter die-offs that began around a decade ago, known as colony collapse disorder—the almond industry has been drawing in a larger and and larger portion of the nation’s available bee hives.

One question that arises is: Why do the nation’s beekeepers uproot themselves and their winged charges to travel to California each year? The state houses about 500,000 beehives, meaning that more then 1 million come in, from as far away as Maine. What’s the incentive?

These days, US beekeepers typically make more money from renting out their bees for pollination than they do from producing honey. “Without pollination income, we’d be out of business,” Brandi told me. Income from the two sources varies year to year, but pollination income has grown over the years even as honey revenues have fallen, depressed by competition from imported honey. In 2012, for example, US beekeepers brought in $283 million from honey, versus an estimated $656 million from pollination.

And California’s almond growers have to shell out big money to draw in their pollinators—between $165 and $200 per hive, vs $45 to $75 a hive a decade ago, according to the Fresno Bee. That’s around $309 million, if we assume as average price of $182 per hive, the midpoint of the Bee‘s range.

What’s the impact on overall honeybee health, which has been under heavy pressure over the past decade? There are two potential downsides.

The first is from pesticides—insect growth regulators and fungicides—bees encounter in their travels around almond groves. During the 2014 California almond bloom, between 15 percent and 25 percent of beehives suffered “severe” damage, ranging from complete hive collapse to dead and deformed brood (the next generation of bees incubating in the hive), the Pollinator Stewardship Council estimated. The die-off caused an uproar, and many beekeepers pointed a finger at pesticides—and they probably had a point, as I showed here.

This year, Brandi told me, some beekeepers reported losses, but they weren’t nearly as severe or widespread as the ones in 2014. In the wake of the 2014 troubles, the Almond Board of California released a set of “best management practices” for protecting honeybees during the bloom that, Brandi said, may have influenced growers to avoid particularly harmful pesticide applications. Given that almond growers utterly rely on—and indeed, pay heavily for—honeybees for pollinating their crop, it seems logical that they’ll avoid poisoning them when possible. There will also be tension, though, as long as almond trees are planted in geographically concentrated and vast groves. Large monocrops provide an ideal habitat for pests like fungi and insects, and thus a strong incentive to respond with chemicals. There’s also the possibility that concentrating such a huge portion of the nation’s bees in such a tight geographical area facilitates the spread of viruses and other pathogens.

The second threat to bee health from pollinating California’s massive almond bloom comes from long-distance travel. This one lies at the heart of the beekeeping industry’s itinerant business model. Does it compromise bee health to pack hundreds of hives onto a flatbed truck for cross-country trips? The stresses go well beyond the occasional truck wreck. Scientific American explains the rigors of apiary highway travel like this:

The migration…continually boomerangs honeybees between times of plenty and borderline starvation. Once a particular bloom is over, the bees have nothing to eat, because there is only that one pollen-depleted crop as far as the eye can see. When on the road, bees cannot forage or defecate. And the sugar syrup and pollen patties beekeepers offer as compensation are not nearly as nutritious as pollen and nectar from wild plants. Scientists have a good understanding of the macronutrients in pollen such as protein, fat and carbohydrate, but know very little about its many micronutrients such as vitamins, metals and minerals—so replicating pollen is difficult.

A 2012 paper, coauthored by USDA bee researcher Jeff Pettis, found that long-distance travel may indeed have ill health effects—the researchers found that “bees experiencing transportation have trouble fully developing their food glands and this might affect their ability to nurse the next generation of workers.”

Brandi, for his part, dismisses travel as a factor in the overall decline in bee health. “Bees have been traveling back and forth across he country for years,” he said—since long before the colony collapse disorder and other health troubles began to emerge a decade ago, he said. He said bee travel has actually gotten less stressful over the years as beekeepers have upgraded to smoother-riding flatbed trucks. He said other factors, including pesticides, declining biodiversity, and mites (a bee pest) are likely more important drivers of declining bee health.

Meanwhile, California almond country’s massive appetite for pollination isn’t likely to dissipate anytime soon. According to the latest USDA numbers, acreage devoted to almonds expanded by 5 percent in 2014, and growers continue laying in yet more groves this year, Western Farm Press reports. Land devoted to almonds has grown 50 percent since 2005—and every time farmers add another acre of trees, they need access to two additional bee hives for pollination.

So why don’t more beekeepers simply move to California and stay put, to take advantage of the world’s biggest—and growing—pollination gig? I put that question to longtime bee expert Eric Mussen of the University of California-Davis. He said the state is already home to 500,000 of the nation’s 2.7 million hives. The almond bloom is great for a few weeks, but in terms of year-round foraging, “California is already at or near its carrying capacity for honeybees,” he said—the areas with the best-quality forage are already well stocked with bees.So satisfying the world’s ever-growing appetite for almonds will continue to require an annual armada of beehive-laden trucks.

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Holy Shit! Almonds Require a Ton of Bees

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Josh Duggar Resigns From Family Research Council Amid Molestation Allegations

by LaurenMussen Posted on May 22, 2015

Mother Jones

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On Thursday, Josh Duggar resigned as head of the Family Research Council’s lobbying arm amid allegations from a sealed police report obtained by In Touch Weekly that he sexually molested multiple underage girls when he was a teenager.

Duggar, the eldest son of the reality TV family on TLC’s 19 and Counting, expressed regret for his actions in a statement on the Duggar family’s Facebook page:

Twelve years ago, as a young teenager, I acted inexcusably for which I am extremely sorry and deeply regret. I hurt others, including my family and close friends. I confessed this to my parents who took several steps to help me address the situation. We spoke with the authorities where I confessed my wrongdoing, and my parents arranged for me and those affected by my actions to receive counseling. I understood that if I continued down this wrong road that I would end up ruining my life.

Josh’s parents Jim Bob and and Michelle Duggar reportedly knew about the alleged sexual misconduct, which began in 2002, for more than a year before reporting it to the authorities. After the Springdale Police Department received an anonymous tip in 2006, they investigated, but Duggar was never charged with anything. You can read the partially redacted police report here.

The Duggars emerged as political players for the social conservative right in 2007, when Jim Bob, a one-time state representative, endorsed former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee for president. After the 2012 election, when the family backed Rick Santorum, Josh Duggar catapulted into conservative circles in Washington as the executive director of FRC Action.

The family remains an influential force among social conservatives due to its pro-life views and strong Christian faith. In December, Michelle Duggar pushed for the repeal of a measure in Arkansas that would have prevented housing and employment discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.

In May, Jim Bob and Michelle endorsed Huckabee, calling him “a man of faith.” As of Thursday night, Jim Bob’s endorsement is still on Huckabee’s presidential campaign site. Mother Jones has reached out to the Huckabee camp for comment.

mikehuckabee.com

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Josh Duggar Resigns From Family Research Council Amid Molestation Allegations

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Obama Administration Gives Rail Companies Three Years to Fix Their Most Explosive Oil Cars

by ChristaU73 Posted on May 1, 2015

Mother Jones

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Trains hauling crude oil have continued to explode across the United States and Canada this year as oil production booms in North Dakota and Alberta. Nearly two dozen oil trains have derailed in the past two years, many causing fiery explosions and oil spills. Lawmakers, environmentalists, and communities in the path of these trains have ramped up pressure on the Obama administration to toughen what they see as lax safety regulations at the heart of the problem.

Finally, some new regulations. This morning, U.S. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx stood next to Lisa Raitt, Canada’s transportation minister, to announce coordinated rules across both countries aimed at making the industry safer by catching up to surging crude-by-oil shipments, which increased 4,000 percent from 2008 to 2014.

According to the new rules, older tank cars will have to be replaced or retrofitted with new “protective shells” and insulation to prevent puncture (and potential explosion) after derailment. New tank car construction will have to comply with these standards, too.

Oil trains will also be required to install enhanced “electronically controlled pneumatic” ECP braking, which allows for more control over the train when required to stop suddenly, and they will be limited to to speeds of 50 mph, and 40 mph in urban areas. Many recent train derailments and explosions have occurred at speeds far below those, however.

And lastly, train companies will now be required to minimize the chances of explosions and oil spills happening near towns and environmentally sensitive areas by assessing route options and rail conditions more closely. Once the routes are made, companies will need to tell local and state officials along the train’s pathway.

Transportation Secretary Foxx described the rules as, “a significant improvement over the current regulations and requirements and will make transporting flammable liquids safer.”

But the new rules have already drawn criticism from regulation proponents and industry players alike. The American Railroad Association believes the new braking technology is unnecessary. “The DOT has no substantial evidence to support a safety justification for mandating ECP brakes, which will not prevent accidents,” said Edward R. Hamberger, AAR president and CEO said in a statement. “This is an imprudent decision made without supporting data or analysis.”

But Senator Maria Cantwell, D-WA, who introduced legislation in March to toughen crude-by rail standards, said they didn’t go far enough. “The new DOT rule is just like saying let the oil trains roll,” she said. “It does nothing to address explosive volatility, very little to reduce the threat of rail car punctures, and is too slow on the removal of the most dangerous cars.”

Indeed, rail companies will have several years to bring their fleets up to scratch. The now-infamous DOT-111 oil tankers, involved in nearly half of oil train explosions since 2013, must be fixed within three years. And the so-called “unjacketed” CPC-1232 cars, which are newer but don’t have protective shells (and have also been involved in explosions) will still be in network for up to five years.

That amount of time is too long too wait given the potential dangers, said Anthony Swift, a deputy director at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “We can only hope the federal government revisits the broader issue of crude oil unit trains before it’s too late.”

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Obama Administration Gives Rail Companies Three Years to Fix Their Most Explosive Oil Cars

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How to Really Think About Major Trade Deals Like the Trans-Pacific Partnership

by LachlanMcCready Posted on April 30, 2015

Mother Jones

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While Kevin Drum is focused on getting better, we’ve invited some of the remarkable writers and thinkers who have traded links and ideas with him from Blogosphere 1.0 to this day to contribute posts and keep the conversation going. Today we’re honored to present a post from Matt Yglesias, currently the executive editor of Vox.

There is almost nothing in the whole wide world that economists like better than recounting David Ricardo’s basic case for free trade. And this is sort of understandable. It’s a really cool idea!

If you don’t believe me, check out Paul Krugman’s 1995 essay on the subject. But for the dime store version, what Ricardo showed—and what economists have been enthusing about ever since—is that Country A benefits (in the sense of what’s nowadays known as Kaldor-Hicks Efficiency) from opening up its domestic producers to competition from imports from Country B, even if Country B is better at producing everything.

It’s a cool result.

But oftentimes enthusiasm for this result seems to lead Ph.D. economists into all kinds of wild irrelevancies like former Council of Economic Advisors Chair Greg Mankiw’s enthusiastic endorsement of the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Mankiw focuses on Adam Smith rather than Ricardo, but in both cases the point is the same—18th-century economists showed that the efficiency of an economy can be improved by opening itself up to imports from abroad.

This is very true, but it also tells us very little about the merits of a 21st-century trade agreement.

One huge flaw is that while classical economics has a fair amount to tell us about the wealth of nations, it doesn’t say much at all about the wealth of the individual people inside the nations. A trade deal that enriches Americans who own lots of shares of stock and Central Americans who own lots of plantation land could easily pass the (low) economic bar of efficiency while still making most people worse off.

But an even bigger problem is that many of the biggest barriers to international trade don’t come conveniently labeled as barriers to international trade.

Take the Jones Act here in the United States, which says that if you want to ship goods on a boat from one American port to another American port, you need to do so on boats constructed in the United States and owned by US citizens, staffed by US citizens and legal permanent residents, and crewed by US citizens and US permanent residents. Common sense says that this is protectionism for American ship owners, shipyards, and ship crews.

But the actual text of the Jones Act says otherwise. What the 1920 law says is that a merchant marine “sufficient to carry the waterborne domestic commerce…of the United States” is “necessary for the national defense.” In other words, we dare not let foreign-owned ships outcompete domestic ones as a matter of national security.

Conversely, if you look at Japan’s legendarily protected domestic automobile market you will find essentially nothing in the way of formal barriers to foreign trade. Tariffs on imported automobiles, for example, are currently at zero. The way it works, according to the American Auto Council, is that “Japan has used automotive technical regulations as a means to protect local markets by creating excessively difficult and costly regulatory and certification requirements, with little or no safety or emissions benefits.”

That these regulations are mere protectionism is overwhelming conventional wisdom in the United States. But of course, proponents of the Japanese status quo no more see it that way than do proponents of the Jones Act here at home. These are necessary regulations! This is the dilemma of the modern trade agreement.

Smith and Ricardo never imagined a world in which governments routinely regulated large classes of products to promote consumer safety, workers’ rights, environmental goals, or national security goals. But lurking behind every regulation is potentially a barrier to trade. What the US Food and Drug Administration sees as public health regulation of dangerous cheese bacteria looks like protectionism to French cheesemakers, and what European Union officials see as public health regulation of hormone-treated beef looks like protectionism to American ranchers.

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How to Really Think About Major Trade Deals Like the Trans-Pacific Partnership

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The FDA Just Released Scary New Data on Antibiotics And Farms

by CeliaHdack Posted on April 14, 2015

Mother Jones

Back in April 2012, the Food and Drug Administration launched an effort to address a problem that had been festering for decades: the meat industry’s habit of feeding livestock daily low does of antibiotics, which keeps animals alive under stressful conditions and may help them grow faster, but also generates bacterial pathogens that can shake off antibiotics, and make people sick.

The FDA approached the task gingerly: It asked the industry to voluntarily wean itself from routine use of “medically important” antibiotics—those that are critical to human medicine, like tetracycline. In addition to the light touch, the agency plan included a massive loophole: that while livestock producers should no longer use antibiotics as a growth promoter, they’re welcome to use them to “prevent” disease—which often means using them in the same way (routinely), and at the same rate. How’s the FDA’s effort to ramp down antibiotic use on farms working? Last week, the FDA delivered an early look, releasing data for 2013, the year after it rolled out its plan. The results are … scary.

FDA

Note that use of medically important antibiotics actually grew 3 percent in 2013 compared to the previous year, while the industry’s appetite for non-medically import drugs, which it’s supposed to be shifting to, shrank 2 percent. A longer view reveals an even more worrisome trend: between 2009 and 2013, use of medically important drugs grew 20 percent.And the FDA data show that these livestock operations are particularly voracious for the same antibiotics doctors prescribe to people. Farms burn through 9.1 million kilograms of medically important antibiotics vs. 5.5 million kilograms of ones not currently used in human medicine. That means about 62 percent of their total antibiotic use could be be helping generate pathogens that resist the drugs we rely on. (According to Natural Resources Defense Council’s Avinash Kar, 70 percent of medically important antibiotics sold in the US go to farms.)

The report also delivers a stark view into just how routine antibiotics have become on farms.

FDA

Note that 74 percent of the medically important drugs being consumed on farms are delivered through feed, and another 24 percent go out in water. That means fully 95 percent is being fed to animals on a regular basis, not being given to specific animals to treat a particular infection. Just 5 percent (4 percent via injection, 1 percent orally) are administered that way.

Anyone wondering which species—chickens, pigs, turkeys, or cows—get the most antibiotics will have to take it up with the FDA. The agency doesn’t require companies to deliver that information, so it doesn’t exist, at least not in publicly available form. The FDA only began releasing any information at all on livestock antibiotic use in very recent years, after having its hand forced by a 2008 act of Congress.

Meanwhile, at least 2 million Americans get sick from antibiotic-resistant bacteria each year, and at least 23,000 of them die, the Centers for Disease Control estimates. And while all of that carnage can’t be blamed on the meat industry’s drug habit, it does play a major role, as the CDC makes clear in this handy infographic.

CDC

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The FDA Just Released Scary New Data on Antibiotics And Farms

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Walmart, Lowe’s, Safeway, and Nordstrom Are Bankrolling a Nationwide Campaign to Gut Workers’ Comp

by KimberlyHollins Posted on March 26, 2015

Mother Jones

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Nearly two dozen major corporations, including Walmart, Nordstrom, and Safeway, are bankrolling a quiet, multistate lobbying effort to make it harder for workers hurt on the job to access lost wages and medical care—the benefits collectively known as workers’ compensation.

The companies have financed a lobbying group, the Association for Responsible Alternatives to Workers’ Compensation (ARAWC), that has already helped write legislation in one state, Tennessee. Richard Evans, the group’s executive director, told an insurance journal in November that the corporations ultimately want to change workers’ comp laws in all 50 states. Lowe’s, Macy’s, Kohl’s, Sysco Food Services, and several insurance companies are also part of the year-old effort.

Laws mandating workers’ comp arose at the turn of the 20th century as a bargain between employees and employers: If a worker suffered an injury on the job, the employer would pay his medical bills and part of his wages while he recovered. In exchange, the worker gave up his right to sue for negligence.

ARAWC’s mission is to pass laws allowing private employers to opt out of the traditional workers’ compensation plans that almost every state requires businesses to carry. Employers that opt out would still be compelled to purchase workers’ comp plans. But they would be allowed to write their own rules governing when, for how long, and for which reasons an injured employee can access medical benefits and wages.

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Walmart, Lowe’s, Safeway, and Nordstrom Are Bankrolling a Nationwide Campaign to Gut Workers’ Comp

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Obama Is Ordering the Federal Government to Slash Its Greenhouse Emissions

by BetseyButtensha Posted on March 19, 2015

Mother Jones

President Barack Obama will once again use his executive authority to mandate action on climate change, the White House announced this morning. Later today, Obama plans to sign an executive order directing the federal government to reduce its carbon footprint by 40 percent below 2008 levels within a decade. The White House announcement also includes carbon-reduction commitments from a number of large government contractors, including GE and IBM.

From the Associated Press:

All told, the government pollution cuts along with industry contributions will have the effect of keeping 26 million metric tons of greenhouse gases out of the air by 2025, or the equivalent of what about 5.5 million cars would pump out through their tailpipes in an average year, the White House said. Yet it was unclear exactly how either the government or private companies planned to meet those targets.

In other words, it will take until 2025 to for the cuts to reach 26 million metric tons per year. And even that is a pretty small fraction of the nation’s total carbon footprint, which was nearly 7 billion metric tons in 2013. But the announcement garnered praise from environmental groups as a sign of Obama’s leadership on climate. In a statement, Natural Resources Defense Council president Rhea Suh called the announcement “a powerful reminder of how much progress we can make simply through energy efficiency and greater reliance on clean, renewable sources of energy.”

The executive order will be the latest step the president has taken to confront climate change that won’t require him to push legislation through a recalcitrant, GOP-controlled Congress. In the last couple years his administration has imposed tight limits on vehicle emissions and has put forward a flagship set of new rules under the Clean Air Act to slash carbon pollution from power plants. Obama also negotiated a bilateral deal with China that featured a suite of new climate promises from both countries. And sometime this spring, the president will announce what kind of commitments his administration will bring to the table for a high-stakes round of UN-led negotiations that are meant to produce a new international climate accord.

According to the White House, today’s executive order directs federal agencies to:

Procure a quarter of their total energy from clean sources by 2025;
Cut energy use in federal buildings 2.5 percent per year over the next decade;
Purchase more plug-in hybrid vehicles for federal fleets and reduce per-mile greenhouse gas emissions overall by 30 percent by 2025;
Reduce water use in federal buildings 2 percent per year through 2025.

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Obama Is Ordering the Federal Government to Slash Its Greenhouse Emissions

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