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NAFTA and China Aren’t Responsible for Our Steel Woes

by vernongrier9 Posted on June 29, 2016

Mother Jones

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Donald Trump stood in front of a pile of scrap metal yesterday in Pittsburgh and blasted both NAFTA and the accession of China into the World Trade Organization. He was positively poetic about how his trade policies would affect the steel industry:

A Trump Administration will also ensure that we start using American steel for American infrastructure.

Just like the American steel from Pennsylvania that built the Empire State building.

It will be American steel that will fortify America’s crumbling bridges.

It will be American steel that sends our skyscrapers soaring into the sky.

It will be American steel that rebuilds our inner cities.

There’s no question that the American steel industry has suffered over the past three decades, thanks to cheap steel imports from other countries. But this began in the 1980s and had almost nothing to do with either NAFTA or China. Take a look:

Do you see a sudden slump in US steel production after NAFTA passed? Or after China entered the WTO? Nope. Other countries simply produced steel more cheaply than we did. It started with Japan and South Korea in the ’80s and later migrated to other countries not because of trade agreements, but because Japan and South Korea got too expensive. And it’s not as if no one noticed this was happening. Ronald Reagan tried tariffs on steel and they didn’t work. George H.W. Bush tried tariffs again. They didn’t work. George W. Bush tried tariffs a third time. No dice.

For all his bluster, when it came time for Trump to lay out his plan to “bring back our jobs,” it was surprisingly lame. It was seven points long but basically amounted to withdrawing from the TPP and getting tough on trade cheaters. This would accomplish next to nothing. TPP’s effect is small to begin with, and we’re already pretty aggressive about going after trade violations.

The bottom line is simple: If we want access to markets overseas, we have to give them access to our markets. Donald Trump can claim he wants to bring back the jobs we’ve lost to overseas competition, but he’d have to back that up by essentially promising to withdraw completely from NAFTA and the WTO—and then promising to build a huge tariff wall around the entire country. He’s not willing to do that because even he knows it would trash the US economy. So instead he blusters and proposes a toothless plan. Sad.

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NAFTA and China Aren’t Responsible for Our Steel Woes

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The Paradox of Immigration: Opposition Is Strongest Precisely Where There Are the Fewest Immigrants

by ReneIBVDadaqo Posted on June 25, 2016

Mother Jones

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James Fallows is in western Kansas around Dodge City, where many of the cities are majority Latino and full of immigrants from Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Cuba, and more recently Somalia and Sudan. Here’s what he says:

I can’t let this day end without noting the black-versus-white, night-versus-day contrast between the way immigration, especially from Mexico and other parts of Latin America, is discussed in this part of the country where it is actually happening, versus its role in this moment’s national political discussion.

….Every single person we have spoken with — Anglo and Latino and other, old and young, native-born and immigrant, and so on down the list — every one of them has said: We need each other! There is work in this community that we all need to do. We can choose to embrace the world, or we can fade and die. And we choose to embrace it.

I don’t have actual data on this, but my sense from both the US and Britain is that the most fervent opposition to immigration—legal or otherwise—comes precisely from the regions where it’s had the least impact. Here in the US, for example, immigration from Latin America has been heaviest in the southern sun belt states of California, Texas, Arizona, and a few others. And yet Donald Trump’s “build a wall” narrative played well in places like New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts, all of which have relatively small Latino populations. Similarly, Brexit did best in the small towns and rural areas of England, the places that have the fewest immigrants and that depend the most on EU trade.

That’s not to say that opposition to immigration is absent in places like London or San Diego. It’s not. But these places mostly seem to have adapted to it and figured out that it’s not really all that bad. It’s everywhere else, where immigration is mostly a fear, that anti-immigrant sentiment has the strongest purchase. And that’s why peddling fear is so effective.

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The Paradox of Immigration: Opposition Is Strongest Precisely Where There Are the Fewest Immigrants

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The Trump Files: Watch Donald Not Be Able to Multiply 17 By 6

by AlbertiLafferty Posted on June 21, 2016

Mother Jones

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Until the election, we’re bringing you “The Trump Files,” a daily dose of telling episodes, strange-but-true stories, or curious scenes from the life of presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump.

Donald Trump was a frequent and favorite guest on Howard Stern’s radio show, and one day in 2006 he brought his children Ivanka and Donald Jr., along for an episode. At one point during the nearly hour-long appearance, the Trump kids explained how they got into the famed Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, their dad’s alma mater, on their own merits. The pair talked up their high SAT scores and told Stern that no one, even parents of friends who allegedly donated large amounts to Wharton, could buy their way into the school.

Then Stern gave the Trumps a pop quiz in simple math. The kids struggled to get the answer right—and Trump himself couldn’t do the basic calculation. But, in what might have been a telling moment, the elder Trump insisted that his answer was correct.

Read the rest of “The Trump Files”:

Trump Files #1: The Time Andrew Dice Clay Thanked Donald for the Hookers
Trump Files #2: When Donald Tried to Stop Charlie Sheen’s Marriage to Brooke Mueller
Trump Files #3: The Brief Life of the “Trump Chateau for the Indigent”
Trump Files #4: Donald Thinks Asbestos Fears Are a Mob Conspiracy
Trump Files #5: Donald’s Nuclear Negotiating Fantasy
Trump Files #6: Donald Wants a Powerball for Spies
Trump Files #7: Donald Gets An Allowance
Trump Files #8: The Time He Went Bananas on a Water Cooler
Trump Files #9: The Great Geico Boycott
Trump Files #10: Donald Trump, Tax-Hike Crusader
Trump Files #11: Watch Donald Trump Say He Would Have Done Better as a Black Man

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The Trump Files: Watch Donald Not Be Able to Multiply 17 By 6

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Coal exec admits Donald Trump doesn’t understand the first thing about coal

by TinaDelong Posted on May 24, 2016

Coal exec admits Donald Trump doesn’t understand the first thing about coal

By on May 24, 2016Share

The way Donald Trump talks about the coal industry, Appalachian miners will be getting back to work on day one of his administration. “The miners of West Virginia and Pennsylvania, which was so great to me last week, Ohio and all over are going to start to work again, believe me,” the presumptive Republican nominee said earlier this month. Everything will be great.

What is unclear is how Trump intends to make coal mining great again, since he doesn’t appear to understand the first thing about the industry he intends to save — neither the broad-brush economics, nor what is within the president’s power to do. Even a coal industry executive, Bob Murray, CEO of Murray Energy and vocal Obama critic, has to admit Trump doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

In an interview with Taylor Kuykendall, a reporter for the trade publication SNL Energy, Murray revealed just how little Trump really gets about coal.

Trump, for instance, reportedly asked Murray, “What’s LNG?” (it stands for liquified natural gas, which the candidate might want to read up on as the glut of cheap natural gas is a large factor in coal’s demise.)

Murray also told Kuykendall that Trump is over-promising and should stop setting unrealistic expectations for coal’s big comeback:

“I don’t think it will be a thriving industry ever again,” Murray said. “We’ll hold our own. It will be an extremely competitive industry and it will be half size. … The coal mines can not come back to where they were or anywhere near it.”

Implicit in Murray’s comments is the fact that there is a lot outside a president’s control when it comes to coal. These include: sinking prices for natural gas and renewable energy that have made coal far less competitive; other markets’, like China’s, demand for coal; and coal production moving from Appalachia to Wyoming, now the top U.S. coal producer, where it’s cheaper to mine.

In other words, Trump can do his worst — like scrap the Environmental Protection Agency — and it won’t bring about an economic revolution for these states. Murray all but admits that when he says he’s skeptical of Trump’s abilities to reverse all these trends.

Trump’s delusions, however, won’t stop the industry from embracing him. Calling Trump “the horse to ride” in a speech yesterday, Murray was ready to give Trump a pass on the policy. As he told Kuykendall, “he’s just focused on getting elected so he has to kind of gloss over all of the issues.”

Trump will be presumably be enlightening us on his energy policy on Thursday, in a speech in North Dakota, home of the domestic oil and gas boom that has helped kill coal.

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Coal exec admits Donald Trump doesn’t understand the first thing about coal

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GOP Leaders Are Preparing to Submit to Donald Trump

by KaiGerowspeox Posted on April 27, 2016

Mother Jones

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Following Donald Trump’s overwhelming victory last week in his home state of New York and his impressive sweep across five East Coast states on Tuesday, Republican Party leaders may be finally reaching the final stage of Trump grief: acceptance that the real estate mogul is likely to be their presidential nominee. Some GOP insiders are even coming to terms with the distinct possibility that the primary race may not reach an open convention and that Trump may well bag the necessary 1,237 delegates to win the nomination, according to two Republican National Committee members.

This recognition began to sink in last week at the RNC’s spring meeting in Hollywood, Florida, where the committee’s 168 members convened to discuss party business. Trump’s resounding New York victory earlier that week “kind of shocked everyone into reality” and “had an enormous effect at the RNC meeting,” says one longtime RNC member, who asked to remain anonymous. “All of a sudden people started accepting the fact, either happily or regretfully depending on who you are, that there seems to be a clear movement here. So that helped Trump in Hollywood, Florida, at the meeting. People were much more open to him then, in my opinion.”

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GOP Leaders Are Preparing to Submit to Donald Trump

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Yep, Wisconsin’s Voter ID Law Is All About Suppressing the Vote

by Martha8879 Posted on April 7, 2016

Mother Jones

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Let’s be clear here: it’s not exactly breaking news that photo ID laws are designed not to fight voter fraud—which is all but nonexistent—but primarily to make it harder for Democratic constituencies to vote. Still, it’s nice to hear it from the horse’s mouth sometimes. The location, once again, is Wisconsin:

You wanna know why I left the Republican Party as it exists today? Here it is; this was the last straw: I was in the closed Senate Republican Caucus when the final round of multiple Voter ID bills were being discussed. A handful of the GOP Senators were giddy about the ramifications and literally singled out the prospects of suppressing minority and college voters.

Think about that for a minute….A vigorous debate on the ideas wasn’t good enough. Inspiring the electorate and relying on their agenda being better to get people to vote for them wasn’t good enough. No, they had to take the coward’s way out and come up with a plan to suppress the vote under the guise of ‘voter fraud.’ The truth? There was almost none.

That’s from Todd Allbaugh, former chief of staff for Wisconsin state Sen. Dale Schultz (R). TPM’s Tierney Sneed gave him a call:

Once he left politics, Allbaugh opened a Madison, Wisconsin, coffee shop, where TPM reached him over the phone and he elaborated on those claims.

“It just really incensed me that they started talking about this particular bill, and one of the senators got up and said, ‘We really need to think about the ramifications on certain neighborhoods in Milwaukee and on our college campuses and what this could do for us,’” Allbaugh said.

….According to Allbaugh, at this point in the point of meeting, Schultz brought up his own concerns with the voter ID legislation. “He was immediately shot down by another senator who said, ‘What I am interested in is getting results here and using the power while we have it, because if the Democrats were in control they would do they same thing to us, so I want to use it while we have it.’”

I wonder how many cases we need of legislators and aides either admitting this outright (like Allbaugh) or accidentally telling the truth about it (like Pennsylvania’s Mike Turzai) before the Supreme Court is willing to take a fresh look at its naive 2008 ruling upholding voter ID laws. At the time, the court wrote that concerns about voter fraud “should not be disregarded simply because partisan interests may have provided one motivation for the votes of individual legislators.” Since then, evidence has continued to pile up that voter fraud is an entirely fake concern and partisan interests are the only motivation for voter ID laws. It’s time to overturn Crawford.

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Yep, Wisconsin’s Voter ID Law Is All About Suppressing the Vote

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Rising Seas Could Deluge US Coastal Cities Sooner Than We Thought

by KimberlyDing062 Posted on April 1, 2016

Mother Jones

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This story originally appeared on Newsweek and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Boston and other coastal cities may want to batten down the hatches. A new study from climate scientists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Pennsylvania State University warns estimates of future sea level rise may be significantly underestimated. The real picture 100 to 500 years from now, they claim, will be ugly for US coastal cities from New York to Miami, which could be underwater or at risk of flooding. Boston, for example, could see about 5 feet of sea level rise in the next 100 years, according to the researchers.

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Rising Seas Could Deluge US Coastal Cities Sooner Than We Thought

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Blocking Scalia’s Replacement Could Put GOP Senators in a Bind, Poll Shows

by LatoyaMallory Posted on February 22, 2016

Mother Jones

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As Republicans and Democrats gird for a showdown over when and with whom to replace the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, the political question is which party will benefit from the battle. If a new survey is any indication, Republicans could end up sacrificing seats in the Senate if they refuse to allow a vote on President Barack Obama’s nominee until after the elections in November.

The Democratic-leaning firm Public Policy Polling (PPP) released a survey Monday showing the political peril of objecting to any nominee Obama may put forward, as leading Senate Republicans have indicated they will do. The danger may be greatest for Republican senators up for reelection this year in purple states, including the subjects of the PPP survey, Sens. Rob Portman of Ohio and Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania. Both senators have taken the position that the next president should appoint Scalia’s replacement—and both have been attacked by their Democratic challengers for holding this stance. For Republicans, whose hopes of confirming a conservative replacement for Scalia next year could hinge on retaining control of the Senate, the poll results are bad news.

In both Ohio and Pennsylvania, a majority of voters want to see a new justice confirmed this year. Among Ohioans, 58 percent want to see a new justice this year, while 35 percent would prefer to wait. Pennsylvania residents feel the same way, by a 57 percent to 40 percent margin. As PPP notes, independent voters, who could sway a tight Senate race, are even more supportive of approving a replacement this year, by 70 percent to 24 percent in Ohio and 60 percent to 37 percent in Pennsylvania.

In both states, 52 percent of respondents said they were less likely to reelect their current senator if the senator refuses to confirm any replacement no matter whom is nominated. Only 25 percent said a blanket refusal to confirm an Obama nominee would make them more likely to vote for reelection. Among independents, again, the numbers are even worse for Portman and Toomey.

The battle over Scalia’s replacement is just getting started, and voters are still making up their minds about it. Both parties, as well as outside groups, are only beginning their public campaigns for and against an Obama nominee. But for Republicans hoping to hold onto the Senate—which would require the reelection of Republican senators in states such as New Hampshire, North Carolina, Wisconsin, and Illinois, as well as Ohio and Pennsylvania—this is a first indication that obstructing a vote on the president’s Supreme Court pick may take a political toll.

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Blocking Scalia’s Replacement Could Put GOP Senators in a Bind, Poll Shows

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Schools Are Doing a Terrible Job Teaching Your Kids About Global Warming

by TVFDwightx Posted on February 11, 2016

Mother Jones

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Kids are a vital part of the climate change conversation; they’re the ones, after all, who have to live in the world the rest of us are screwing up. But if they go to a public school, they could be getting a very confusing education on the subject,

On Thursday, researchers published the first peer-reviewed national survey of science teachers on whether and how they teach about climate change, in the journal Science. The survey, which covered a representative sample of 1,500 middle and high school science teachers from all 50 states, found that classrooms often suffer from a problem also common in the media: the false “balance” of giving equal weight to mainstream climate science and climate change denial.

Science teachers, the study found, have a better grasp of the most basic climate science than the general public: 67 percent agreed that “global warming is caused mostly by human activities,” compared with about 50 percent of all US adults. And most do include some mention of climate change in their lesson plans: 70 percent of middle school teachers and 87 percent of high school teachers spend at least an hour on global warming each year.

But the quality of those lesson plans is inconsistent. One-third of the teachers said they emphasize that global warming “is likely due to natural causes,” and 12 percent specifically downplay the role of human causes. One-third also “report sending explicitly contradictory messages,” simultaneously presenting opposing explanations for humans’ role in recent temperature increases. The chart below, from the study, shows that while most teachers’ lessons align with mainstream climate science, many offer their students conflicting or incorrect messages:

Plutzer et al, Science 2016

Perhaps most distressingly, most teachers are unaware of how many scientists agree that climate change is mostly caused by humans. Only 30 percent of middle school teachers and 45 percent of high school teachers agreed that the consensus was in the range of 81 to 100 percent. (It’s about 97 percent.)

“What’s surprising is that many teachers personally think humans are the culprit for climate change, but they are unaware that scientists share their views,” said Eric Plutzer, a political scientist at Pennsylvania State University who was the study’s lead author.

There are a few possible reasons for this, Plutzer explained. One is that climate science is usually not a part of teacher training curricula at colleges and universities. But teachers are also caught between competing sources of pressure. Because many standardized tests don’t feature questions about climate change, there’s little incentive to spend time on the subject. And teachers’ access to quality materials can be limited: Science advocates in Texas, for example, lost a battle in 2014 to keep climate change denial out of textbooks (although the study didn’t find a meaningful difference between liberal- and conservative-majority states). Teachers also bring their own preconceived prejudices that can align with the general political polarization about climate.

“Those teachers who are more on the small government, free markets, less regulation side of the political scale were the least likely to be aware of or accept the scientific consensus,” Plutzer said. “And they were the most likely to introduce mixed messages.”

It’s too early to say whether teachers’ climate lessons are improving or not; this is the first study of its kind. Minda Berbeco, programs and policy director at the National Center for Science Education and a co-author of the study, said the survey’s aim wasn’t to single out teachers.

“I think in some ways the survey is disappointing,” she said. “But this is really a professional development opportunity. It’s clear teachers aren’t getting the access they need. Let’s start trying to correct that.”

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Schools Are Doing a Terrible Job Teaching Your Kids About Global Warming

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The GOP Undercard Debate Would Have Been Less Terrible If Lindsey Graham Had Been In It

by MarisolM85 Posted on January 15, 2016

Mother Jones

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The lowest-polling GOP presidential candidates—Gov. Mike Huckabee, former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, and former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina—squared off prior to the main GOP debate Thursday night, trying to answer a very basic question: why are they still in the race? Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul was also invited to the undercard debate, but declined to participate if he wasn’t given a spot at the main event. Paul announced that he would instead host a “tele-town hall” on Facebook.

Ahead of Thursday’s debate, the three remaining undercard debaters were polling at about 4.5 percent combined (Santorum was polling at zero), according the RealClearPolitics polling average.

Fiorina came out of the gate with a sharp dig at Hillary Clinton:

The candidate’s responses to question on major issues were more or less predictable: On the economy? Obama has ruined it and pushed jobs overseas. On foreign policy? Obama can’t handle ISIS but they can. Along the way, they managed to sneak in a few zingers.

Fiorina, for instance, took a shot at GOP frontrunner Donald Trump: “Despite Donald Trump’s bromance with Vladimir Putin, Russia is our adversary.”

In one of the event’s most memorable exchanges, Santorum offered an interesting spin on mass deportations. He described sending the children of undocumented immigrants back to their countries of origin as “gift” that would enable them to improve their home countries. He called this “exporting America” in what can only be described as perhaps the worst study abroad program ever. At another point, Santorum suggested people Google him to see how he once stood up to Hillary Clinton. But you probably want to avoid Googling “Santorum.”

Huckabee kept to his normal tack of decrying Obama’s policies on all fronts, including repeating the mostly false claim that, under the Obama administration, the US navy has shrunk to its lowest level since 1915.

Overall the event seemed flat, and certainly could have used the lovable flourishes of erstwhile GOP candidate Sen. Lindsey Graham.

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The GOP Undercard Debate Would Have Been Less Terrible If Lindsey Graham Had Been In It

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