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Standing in Front of Garbage, Trump Recycles Terrible Ideas About Free Trade

by AdolphClarkson Posted on June 28, 2016

Mother Jones

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Donald Trump launched extensive attacks on free trade, China, and Hillary Clinton during a speech on Tuesday in Pennsylvania, pledging to renegotiate trade deals and repeatedly promising American workers better jobs and more tariff protections.

“Globalization has made the financial elite who donate to politicians very wealthy, but it has left millions of our workers with nothing but poverty and heartache,” Trump said. “I want you to imagine how much better our future can be if we declare independence from the elites who’ve led us to one financial and foreign policy disaster after another.”

Standing in front a wall of crushed aluminum cans at a steel plant near Pittsburgh, the presumptive GOP presidential nominee outlined a seven-point plan that included withdrawing from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which he called “the death blow for American manufacturing”; renegotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement (and withdrawing from the treaty if Canada and Mexico don’t agree); and taking numerous steps to crack down on alleged Chinese trade abuses, including currency manipulation.

Clinton, Trump charged, was the handmaiden for anti-working-class policies, having supported TPP and NAFTA. While she was secretary of state, Trump said, she “stood by idly while China cheated on its currency, added another trillion dollars to our trade deficits, and stole hundreds of billions of dollars in our intellectual property.” With these accusations, Trump once again made an explicit appeal to Bernie Sanders supporters. Sanders is a vocal critic of TPP, NAFTA, and other trade deals, and Trump quoted the Vermont senator in attacking Clinton for supporting free trade. “As Bernie Sanders said, Hillary Clinton ‘voted for virtually every trade agreement that has cost the workers of this country millions of jobs,'” Trump said.

Trump linked his old-school trade policies to the United Kingdom’s vote on Thursday to leave the European Union. “Our friends in Britain recently voted to take back control of their economy, politics and borders,” he said. “I was on the right side of that issue—with the people—while Hillary, as always, stood with the elites.” Trump was in Scotland last week, arriving just hours after the referendum result was announced, and congratulated the Scots for “taking their country back”—even though Scotland voted overwhelmingly to remain in the EU. He also told reporters there that the pound’s quickly declining value would bring in more tourists and help his golf courses.

Yet while Trump claimed that protectionism and support for manufacturing would “create massive numbers of jobs” and usher in “a new era of prosperity,” there’s little evidence for those promises. For instance, Trump rhapsodized about the prosperity that tariffs would bring back to the American steel industry, but the United States already slaps a 266 percent tariff on some Chinese steel imports and employs other anti-dumping measures. And American manufacturing production has actually increased over the last six years, but technology advances mean those gains don’t create many new jobs.

Meanwhile, the credit ratings agency Moody’s issued a report last week finding that Trump’s plan would result in “a more isolated US economy” with “larger federal government deficits and a heavier debt load.” The agency acknowledged that Trump’s plan was vague, but its best guesses at what his economic policy would look like were frightening. “By the end of his presidency, there are close to 3.5 million fewer jobs and the unemployment rate rises to as high as 7%, compared with below 5% today,” the report read. “During Mr. Trump’s presidency, the average American household’s after-inflation income will stagnate, and stock prices and real house values will decline.”

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Standing in Front of Garbage, Trump Recycles Terrible Ideas About Free Trade

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Sadiq Khan Makes an Impassioned Call to Reject Brexit

by AlexandriaOrme Posted on June 22, 2016

Mother Jones

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In the final stretch leading up to Thursday’s landmark referendum that will decide Britain’s fate as a member of the European Union, London mayor Sadiq Khan on Tuesday made a rousing speech urging voters to reject Brexit—a campaign he condemned as “project hate” against immigrants.

Khan’s sharp rhetoric was a part of BBC’s Great Debate on Tuesday, in which leading members of both sides in the campaign to determine Britain’s future in the EU made last-minute appeals to voters about whether or not Britain should retain its membership. Pro-Brexit leader and former London mayor Boris Johnson also participated in the televised debate, where he continued his calls for Britain to leave and “take back control” of its economy and its destiny. Johnson also said that if Britain were to vote in favor Britain’s departure on Thursday, it could mark the beginning of a new “independence day” for the country.

Khan and Scottish Tory Leader Ruth Davidson slammed Johnson for spreading “lies” about the cost of EU membership and using Turkey’s potential membership to fuel fears concerning terrorism and Britain’s security. They argued that contrary to those who want to leave the EU, the cost of membership does not outweigh its benefits.

Johnson, along with the the far-right political party United Kingdom Independence Party, have been criticized for employing scare-mongering tactics to convince Britons to withdraw its EU membership. UKIP leader Nigel Farage insists that his party is not racist.

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Sadiq Khan Makes an Impassioned Call to Reject Brexit

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A peek into the relatively sane climate debates outside the United States

by RobinPrettyman Posted on June 21, 2016

Denial’s a river in D.C.

A peek into the relatively sane climate debates outside the United States

By on Jun 21, 2016 5:15 amShare

In the United States, a man with a 50-percent shot at becoming president is on record insisting climate change is a conspiracy (except when he’s on record as a flip-flopper).

By and large, though, the climate-change debate looks different outside the States.

Norwegian researcher Sondre Båtstrand last year compared conservative parties  in the United Kingdom, Norway, Sweden, Spain, Canada, New Zealand, Germany, and Australia, finding that the U.S. Republican Party alone was “an anomaly in denying anthropogenic climate change.”

Even when conservative candidates argue against climate-change action in their home countries, scientific denial is rarely part of the conversation. Here’s a whirlwind tour of the climate and energy debate around the world (which is thoroughly blissful compared to U.S. politics).

Canada

While incumbent Prime Minister Stephen Harper was regularly criticized for his support of the tar sands sector in last October’s federal election, he wasn’t an American-styled climate denier. Even under Harper’s admittedly lax climate agenda, Canada still supported the Paris climate deal and joined other G7 nations in calling for phasing out fossil fuels by 2100.

United Kingdom

During last year’s U.K. election, climate change barely factored into the debate. But this wasn’t because of denial: It was because the leaders of the three major parties signed a joint climate pledge that would see the elected government “seek a fair, strong, legally binding, global climate deal,” agree to a carbon budget, and accelerate the transition to clean, low-carbon energy — regardless of who became Prime Minister.

Australia

As part of his re-election campaign this year, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has warned of increasingly severe disasters fueled by climate change. Turnbull even struck a subtlety, lost on most U.S. politicians, about the relationship between extreme weather and climate change. “Certainly, larger and more frequent storms are one of the consequences that the climate models and climate scientists predict from global warming, but you cannot attribute any particular storm to global warming, so let’s be quite clear about that,” he said on a campaign tour of recently flooded Tasmania.

And Turnbull isn’t even a saint on climate change: He’s been widely criticized for inaction on climate and cutting climate science funding.

Marshall Islands

An island-nation doesn’t have the “luxury of denying climate change,” much less in the Marshall Islands, CNN wrote last year. Already squeezed by the joint threats of drought and rising seas, Marshall Islands’ politicians are more pragmatic. Recently elected President Hilda Heine was a member of the Pacific Islands Climate Change Education Partnership, and Tony de Brum, lead climate negotiator for the Marshall Islands, was instrumental in pushing for stricter temperature goal in the Paris agreement.

Peru

Economist Pedro Pablo Kuczynski won Peru’s tight presidential election in early June against his challenger, Keiko Fujimori. Kuczynski’s party’s plan promoted clean energy and Fujimori’s nodded to carbon-trading mechanisms. And though climate change didn’t factor heavily into election season, ignoring it is a far cry from calling it a hoax.

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John Oliver Slams "Absolutely Insane" Brexit Campaign

by JimmieBryan Posted on June 20, 2016

Mother Jones

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Ahead of Thursday’s referendum to decide whether Britain will leave or stay in the European Union—a campaign commonly referred to as Brexit—John Oliver took to the latest “Last Week Tonight” to urge the people of the United Kingdom to vote to maintain its EU membership.

“The EU is not perfect: it’s large, confounding, and relentlessly bureaucratic,” Oliver said. “Think of it like Gerard Depardieu: it’s an unwieldy European body that’s a source of great bewilderment. But Britain leaving it would be a huge destabilizing decision, so you would expect the Brexit camp to have some pretty solid arguments. Unfortunately, many of them are bullshit.”

Many international leaders, including President Barack Obama, have warned against Britain leaving. And as Oliver showcased with a series of disturbing clips, those on the other side tend to be anti-immigration—and sometimes downright racist.

To help make his case, Oliver delivered a brilliant, profanity-laced anthem in hopes it would convince the United Kingdom to vote “no” this Thursday.

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John Oliver Slams "Absolutely Insane" Brexit Campaign

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9/11 Commissioner Says Saudi Government Members Supported the Attack

by goopwppvt Posted on May 12, 2016

Mother Jones

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A former member of the 9/11 Commission says Saudi government officials offered support to the hijackers, and he joined the growing chorus calling for the government to release 28 classified pages of the commission’s report that may detail the roles those Saudi officials played.

John Lehman, a former Secretary of the Navy under Ronald Reagan, told the Guardian, “There was an awful lot of participation by Saudi individuals in supporting the hijackers, and some of those people worked in the Saudi government.” Details of their involvement are found in the 28 classified pages of the 9/11 Commission report, he said. The Obama administration says it may release those pages soon.

The original report found “no evidence that the Saudi government as an institution or senior Saudi officials individually funded the organization,” and the commission’s leaders wrote an op-ed last month saying that the 28 classified pages should not be released. Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, the 9/11 Commission’s chairman and vice-chairman, argued that “the 28 pages were based almost entirely on raw, unvetted material that came to the FBI” and were more akin to “preliminary law enforcement notes,” not solid evidence.

But Lehman says the report was too lenient on the Saudis, and that the commission saw “an awful lot of circumstantial evidence” that Saudi officials, likely members of the kingdom’s Islamic affairs ministry, were involved. “Our report should never have been read as an exoneration of Saudi Arabia,” he said during his Guardian interview.

Saudi Arabian officials have a long history of backing armed fundamentalist movements, from anti-Soviet fighters in Afghanistan during the 1980s to Islamist rebel groups in the Syrian civil war. The kingdom is also a frequent target of 9/11 conspiracy theorists, who believe the US government helped cover up high-level Saudi complicity in the attacks. Presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump has suggested the same thing on the campaign trail. “Who blew up the World Trade Center?” he said during an appearance on Fox News in February. “It wasn’t the Iraqis, it was Saudi—take a look at Saudi Arabia, open the documents.”

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9/11 Commissioner Says Saudi Government Members Supported the Attack

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Saudi Arabia Killed Nearly 100 Civilians In Yemen With American-Made Bombs

by YoungT08gxixm Posted on April 7, 2016

Mother Jones

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A Saudi airstrike hit a crowded marketplace in Mastaba, Yemen, on March 15, killing at least 97 civilians, including 25 children. “We saw people shredded to pieces. Some with no head, no hands…Unrecognizable,” one survivor told Human Rights Watch when a researcher from the organization investigated the site two weeks later.

It was one of the deadliest strikes in 12-month-old civil war, highlighting the devastating use of weapons supplied by the United States and other Western countries in attacks that human rights organizations call potential war crimes.

In Mastaba, Human Rights Watch came across what it says are remnants of an American-made MK-84 bomb paired with a “smart bomb” guidance kit. The group also reviewed images of remnants of another bomb found by British journalists and determined it to be the same kind. These 2,000-pound general purpose bombs are the largest of their class and are capable of inflicting massive damage on their targets.

The Saudi-led coalition has been criticized for carrying out indiscriminate bombings in the civil war, which began last year after rebel forces seized control of the government. The air campaign is responsible for the vast majority of the conflict’s civilian deaths, according to the United Nations. An airstrike in February that resulted in at least 32 civilian deaths led UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon to call for an investigation.

Remnant of an American-made satellite-guided bomb found at the scene of the Mastaba market airstrike. Human Rights Watch

Western governments have also come under fire for their roles in the conflict. In December, a group of lawyers wrote a legal opinion stating that the United Kingdom is breaking domestic, European, and international law by supplying weapons to Saudi Arabia. A lawsuit filed in March seeks to overturn a $15 billion Canadian arms deal with Saudi Arabia. An international movement to seek an arms embargo on Saudi Arabia is growing.

Despite providing weapons, intelligence, drones, and other assistance to the Saudis, the United States has so far been subjected to less scrutiny. In the past year, the Obama administration has inked arms deals with Riyadh worth more than $20 billion.

Witnesses told Human Rights Watch that the first MK-84 bomb struck near the entrance of the Mastaba market at around noon, and five minutes later, the second bomb hit, killing and wounding both those who were trying to escape and others helping the victims. The day after the strike, a team of UN investigators visited the site and compiled the names of the 97 civilian victims. And they found another 10 bodies “burned beyond recognition,” bringing the death toll to 107.

“Even after dozens of airstrikes on markets, schools, hospitals, and residential neighborhoods have killed hundreds of Yemeni civilians, the coalition refuses to provide redress or change its practices,” Priyanka Motaparthy, emergencies researcher at Human Rights Watch, said in a statement. “The US and others should pull the plug on arms to the Saudis or further share responsibility for civilian lives lost.”

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Saudi Arabia Killed Nearly 100 Civilians In Yemen With American-Made Bombs

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Even Saudi Arabia doesn’t want to be dependent on oil any more

by IvaRDJSecmrfx Posted on April 1, 2016

Even Saudi Arabia doesn’t want to be dependent on oil any more

By on 1 Apr 2016commentsShare

If you thought the world’s biggest company was Apple or Alphabet, you were off by a factor of two to twenty. Saudi Aramco, Saudi Arabia’s state-owned oil and gas company, is worth somewhere in the neighborhood of $1 trillion to $10 trillion — a megalith next to Apple’s $650 billion valuation. And Saudi Arabia, recognizing the end of an era for oil, is looking to sell it off.

In an interview with Bloomberg, Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman confirmed a January rumor that Saudi Arabia would begin to open up foreign investment in Aramco as early as next year and establish a gigantic sovereign wealth fund with the new cash. The fund, called the Public Investment Fund (PIF), could eventually control something on the order of $2 trillion in total assets. The primary goal of the PIF is to move Saudi Arabia beyond its dependence on oil as its only economic driver.

“What is left now is to diversify investments,” bin Salman told Bloomberg. “So within 20 years, we will be an economy or state that doesn’t depend mainly on oil.” Aside from reeling in some much-needed cash to the Kingdom, bringing Aramco to public markets is also a sign that Saudi Arabia may be open to reform, both politically and economically. Floating shares of Aramco on international markets will also require clearer reporting standards and greater transparency for the notoriously secretive company.

The Kingdom has been hit hard by the global fall in oil prices and has already spent billions of savings to keep its economy running. With oil prices hovering around $40 a barrel and only sluggish growth in prices in sight, the Saudi story looks a lot like a microcosm (albeit a comically large microcosm) of the argument that an investment strategy focused on fossil fuels simply does not make sense anymore — at least not in the long run. Banks and pension funds in the U.S. and the U.K. have been needled for the losses they’ve incurred due to continued investment in the fossil sector.

So who’s expected to invest in a massive oil conglomerate in 2017? Aramco is not by any means an unprofitable company, and it does a whole hell of a lot more than drill for oil: It has its fingers dipped in just about every segment of the energy sector, in addition to swathes of the chemical and healthcare sectors. Still, oil is its core business, and it’s looking like that business might not be a good long-term play, especially in an undiversified portfolio. If the international community gets more aggressive about climate policy and moves toward a “keep it in the ground” approach to fossil fuels, an investment in an oil giant could wind up unprofitable and unsellable: stranded.

So while Aramco’s IPO will surely find interested parties, they’ll likely be investors looking for short-term gains and ones with portfolios that are already fairly diverse — otherwise the risk calculation really wouldn’t make any sense. The smart long-term move will not be betting on dirty energy.

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Even Saudi Arabia doesn’t want to be dependent on oil any more

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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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Friday Cat Blogging – 5 February 2016

by MarlaBuxton Posted on February 5, 2016

Mother Jones

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Here are the furballs up on the balcony surveying their domain. All is well in the kingdom—though Hilbert does appear to be alarmed about something. Probably a patch of light on the opposite wall or something. Hilbert is quite convinced that we humans don’t take the threat of light patches seriously enough. Someday, perhaps he’ll have the last laugh.

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Friday Cat Blogging – 5 February 2016

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America’s Food System Could Be More Vulnerable to Climate Change Than We Thought

by DemetriusBruns Posted on January 6, 2016

Mother Jones

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For billions of people around the world, the most immediate threat posed by climate change is at the dinner table, as staple crops face a steadily worsening onslaught of drought, heat waves, and other extreme weather events. The United States certainly isn’t immune to these challenges; for proof, just look at California, where an unprecedented drought has cost the state’s agriculture industry billions.

Still, the conventional thinking among many scientists is that developing countries, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia—where people are typically hit harder by food price spikes and generally more reliant on agriculture as a primary source of income—are the most vulnerable to food-related climate impacts.

A paper published today in Nature may add a wrinkle to that assumption. Scientists often track the impact that an individual weather disaster has on crops (again, see California), but the new research takes it a step further.

A team of scientists from Canada and the United Kingdom compiled the first-ever global tally of how weather disasters over the past 50 years cut into production of staple cereals. After merging a database of global weather records with a UN record of country-level crop production, the researchers found that, as a rule of thumb, droughts and heat waves typically cut a country’s cereal production by 10 percent. That basically accords with predictions from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s predictions for agricultural vulnerability in the future.

But unexpectedly, the researchers also found that the impacts were 8 to 11 percent more severe in developed countries than in developing ones.

“That was a surprise to us,” said Navin Ramankutty, an agricultural geographer at the University of British Columbia.

Ramankutty said it’s not yet clear why droughts and heat waves tend to hit yields in the United States, Europe, and Australia harder than those in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. But he suspects it relates to how farmers set their priorities. In developed countries, the emphasis is often on maximizing profit with big monoculture farms that work great in good climates but get trashed when the weather turns sour. Farmers in developing countries, by contrast, may prioritize minimizing their risk, taking a smaller yield in exchange for better resilience.

Of course, these findings don’t mean developing countries are out of harm’s way. They still face major challenges from climate change, since comparatively small yield losses can have an outsized impact on local economies and food security. But Ramankutty says the new research shows that even in the developed world, farmers may be more at risk from climate change than anyone previously realized.

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America’s Food System Could Be More Vulnerable to Climate Change Than We Thought

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