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Trump Can Pull Money From His Businesses Whenever He Wants—Without Ever Telling Us

by KieranE25pdjh Posted on April 3, 2017

Mother Jones

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This story originally appeared on ProPublica.

When President Donald Trump placed his businesses in a trust upon entering the White House, he put his sons in charge and claimed to distance himself from his sprawling empire. “I hope at the end of eight years I’ll come back and say, ‘Oh you did a good job,'” Trump said at a January 11 press conference. Trump’s lawyer explained that the president “was completely isolating himself from his business interests.”

The setup has long been slammed as insufficient, far short of the full divestment that many ethics experts say is needed to avoid conflicts of interest. A small phrase buried deep in a set of recently released letters between the Trump Organization and the government shows just how little separation there actually is.

Trump can draw money from his more than 400 businesses, at any time, without disclosing it.

The previously unreported changes to a trust document, signed on February 10, stipulate that it “shall distribute net income or principal to Donald J. Trump at his request” or whenever his son and longtime attorney “deem appropriate.” That can include everything from profits to the underlying assets, such as the businesses themselves.

Here is the new clause, from page 161:

“It’s incredibly broad language,” said Frederick J. Tansill, a family estate and trust attorney outside Washington, DC, who reviewed the documents for ProPublica.

There is nothing requiring Trump to disclose when he takes profits from the trust, which could go directly into his bank or brokerage account. That’s because both the trust and Trump Organization are privately held. The only people who know the details of the Trump trust’s finances are its trustees, Trump’s son Donald Jr., and Allen Weisselberg, the company’s chief financial officer. Trump’s other son, Eric, has been listed as an adviser to the trust, according to this revised document.

The Trump Organization did not answer detailed questions about the trust. In a statement to ProPublica about the companies’ corporate structures, a Trump Organization spokeswoman, Amanda Miller, said, “President Trump believed it was important to create multiple layers of approval for major actions and key business decision” (Sic. Read the full statement.)

There is a chance Trump will list his profits in his next federal financial disclosure, in May 2018, but the form doesn’t require it. The surest way to see what profits Trump is taking would be the release of his tax returns—which hasn’t happened. Income has to be reported to the IRS, whether it comes from a trust or someplace else.

“For tax purposes, it’s as if the trust doesn’t exist at all,” said Steven Rosenthal, a senior fellow at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center. “It’s just an entity on paper, nothing more.”

It’s not clear why Trump added the language to the trust document. His original trust document, which ProPublica obtained in January, designated Trump as the “exclusive beneficiary.” It did not include any restrictions on when Trump could get the money.

Taking profits regularly could benefit Trump in a variety of ways. It would give the president yet more details on the ongoing finances of his businesses. Trump’s son Eric recently told Forbes he plans to update his father on the company regularly, though the revised trust document states that the trustees “shall not provide any report to Donald J. Trump on the holdings and sources of income of the Trust.”

Trump could also simply find the income helpful, even as president. The trust document shows that Trump has “broad rights to the trust principal and income to support him as necessary,” Tansill said.

The General Services Administration released the document last week when it approved the Trump Organization’s plan to address conflicts involving the Trump International Hotel in DC. (The GSA, which handles procurement for the government, owns the land and Trump has a 60-year lease for the building.) In response to criticism about Trump being, in effect, both tenant and landlord, he agreed to not take any profits from the hotel while in office.

Profits will go into a separate company account, which can only be used for hotel upkeep, improvements or debt payments. Watchdog groups have derided that deal as insufficient, noting that pouring profits back into the hotel will make it more valuable in the long term.

With Trump’s hundreds of other businesses, including golf courses, hotels and branding deals, profits from each go to a holding company and eventually into Trump’s trust. Other corporate documents we obtained, reflecting changes made after Trump’s January 20 inauguration, show how money flows from a golf club outside Philadelphia to the president’s trust.

There soon could be many more Trump family businesses.

The Trump Organization has recently touted plans to open hotels across the country, including a second one in Washington, DC. “It’s full steam ahead,” Trump Hotel CEO Eric Danziger said recently. “It’s in the Trump boys’ DNA.”

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Trump Can Pull Money From His Businesses Whenever He Wants—Without Ever Telling Us

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To reduce obesity and depression, we need more nature in our lives.

by AveryGrafton Posted on March 22, 2017

U.S. cities are packed with about 5 million medium-sized buildings — schools, churches, community centers, apartment buildings. Most use way more energy than they should. Many also have poor airflow and dirty, out-of-date heating and electrical systems. Those conditions contribute to high inner-city asthma rates and other health concerns.

“These buildings are actually making children sick,” says Donnel Baird, who grew up in such a place. His parents, immigrants from Guyana, raised their kids in a one-bedroom Brooklyn apartment, relying on a cooking stove for heat. Baird eventually moved to the South and then attended Duke University, before returning to New York as a community organizer in 2008.

In 2013, Baird launched BlocPower, which provides engineering and financial know-how to retrofit city buildings. The technical part is cool: Engineers survey structures with sensors and smartphone apps, figuring out the best ways to reduce energy use, like replacing oil boilers with solar hot water. But the financing is critical; BlocPower builds the case for each project and connects owners with lenders. It has already retrofitted more than 500 buildings in New York and is expanding into Chicago, Philadelphia, and Atlanta.

“The biggest way for us to reduce carbon emissions right now,” Baird says, “is efficiency.”

Meet all the fixers on this year’s Grist 50.

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To reduce obesity and depression, we need more nature in our lives.

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Trump Plans to Slash the Most Effective Social Program in History

by KristopHunt Posted on March 3, 2017

Mother Jones

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Reuters tells us what to expect from President Trump’s budget:

Under the proposal, which was sent to the EPA this week, grants to states for lead cleanup would be cut 30 percent to $9.8 million, according to the source, who read the document to Reuters.

What an idiot. This is hardly the biggest issue in his budget, and I’ll grant that the current allocation for lead cleanup is so pitiful that a 30 percent cut hardly matters. On principle, though, it’s obvious that Mick Mulvaney’s crew just saw a line item in their spreadsheet and slashed it without knowing anything about it. Nice work, folks. You get a gold star.

By coincidence, the Washington Post ran a piece yesterday that’s all about lead—though the reporter didn’t realize it:

In dozens of one-on-one meetings every week, a lawyer retained by the city of Philadelphia summons parents whose children have just been jailed, pulls out his calculator and hands them more bad news: a bill for their kids’ incarceration….He is one agent of a deeply entrenched social policy that took root across the country in the 1970s and ’80s. The guiding principle was simple: States, counties and cities believed that parents were shedding responsibility for their delinquent children and expecting the government to pick up the tab.

.…”It was a very different time, when too many parents frequently wanted to essentially ‘dump’ their adolescent children on juvenile courts when they found them unruly, ungovernable, uncontrollable,” Linda O’Neal, executive director of the Tennessee Commission on Children and Youth, said of the era decades ago when the laws were implemented.

Regardless of what you think about this policy, there’s a reason it “took root” in the ’70s and ’80s: Kids of that era spent their early childhoods surrounded by lead fumes from automobiles, so they contracted lead poisoning in massive numbers. By the time they were teenagers they really were “unruly, ungovernable, uncontrollable,” and parents didn’t know what to do.

As it turns out, there was nothing they could do. The damage was done. But nobody knew that, so we put in place pointless laws based on the premise that if only they worked harder, parents could keep their kids under control. In reality, the only policy that ended up working came from Trump’s hated Environmental Protection Agency, which banned leaded gasoline and put an end to our national epidemic of lead poisoning.

But the old laws are still around, even though they don’t work, while the EPA’s lead cleanup program is being slashed, even though it does work. Welcome to America.

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Trump Plans to Slash the Most Effective Social Program in History

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Is Your Favorite Restaurant Standing Up for Immigrants?

by ShaniceCastella Posted on February 24, 2017

Mother Jones

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On this episode of the Mother Jones food politics podcast, Bite, restaurant owners dish about what it’s like to run an eatery in the age of Trump-administration immigration raids.

Back on January 25, President Donald Trump issued an executive order vowing to crack down on the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States. The move confirmed that Trump meant to make good on the anti-immigrant zealotry he repeatedly spewed during his campaign—and sent shock waves through the US restaurant scene.

That’s because about 15.7 percent of US restaurant workers are undocumented immigrants, and another 5.9 percent are foreign-born US citizens, as this 2014 study from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) shows. So when Trump ramps up the pressure on undocumented US residents, he’s also making life stressful for the people who cook restaurant meals, wait tables, and wash dishes.

As if they didn’t have enough on their plates to deal with. According to EPI, restaurant workers’ median wage stands at $10 per hour, tips included—and hasn’t budged, in inflation-adjusted terms, since 2000. For non-restaurant US workers, the median hourly wage is $18. That means the median restaurant worker makes 44 percent less than other workers. Benefits are also rare—just 14.4 percent of restaurant workers have employer-sponsored health insurance and 8.4 percent have pensions, vs. 48.7 percent and 41.8 percent, respectively, for other workers.

As a result of these paltry wages, more than 40 percent of restaurant workers live below twice the poverty line—the income level necessary for a family to make ends meet. That’s double the rate of non-restaurant workers. In other words, Trump is going after the most vulnerable subset of an extremely vulnerable group of workers.

On Thursday of last week, activists organized a national Day Without Immigrants, a kind of general strike that included the closing of restaurants in Atlanta, Austin, Detroit, Philadelphia, Portland, San Francisco, Phoenix, Nashville, Albuquerque, Denton, Dallas, Fort Worth, and—most prominently— Washington, DC. My colleague Nathalie Baptiste reports that busy DC spots Busboys and Poets and Bad Saint shut their doors that day, as did all of the restaurants owned by prominent chef Jose Andrés, including Jaleo and Zaytinya.

The gesture took place in a highly charged atmosphere, amid reports that US immigration authorities arrested hundreds of undocumented immigrants in at least a half-dozen states, including Florida, Kansas, Virginia, and my home state, Texas. Things got really tense in my hometown of Austin, where the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) set up checkpoints in low-income neighborhoods with high concentrations of immigrants.

Meanwhile, a “Sanctuary Restaurant” movement gained momentum. Launched back in January by the Restaurant Opportunities Center, Sanctuary Restaurants pledge not to “allow any harassment of any individual based on immigrant/refugee status, race, religion, gender, or sexual orientation to occur in their restaurant” and hang a “Sanctuary Restaurant” sign on their doors. By last week, more than 100 had signed on nationwide.

In the midst of it all, Maddie and I hit the streets to talk to a couple of participating restaurants for the new episode of Bite.

I talked to Johhny Livesay, the chef and co-founder of Black Star Co-op, a community-owned, worker-managed pub and brewery in Austin. In addition to signing on as a sanctuary restaurant, Black Star also has an innovative compensation policy: all the workers are paid a living wage, with benefits, and tips aren’t accepted. Austin has emerged as an incubator of restaurants challenging the industry’s unfair practices. L’Oca d’Oro, an Italian spot helmed by the former punk-rock musician Fiore Tedesco, also rejects the standard tipping model and has joined the sanctuary-restaurant movement.

And Maddie spoke with Penny Baldado, the owner of a lunch joint called Cafe Gabriela in Oakland, California. Penny is an immigrant herself—she’s originally from the Philippines. Give it a listen, and subscribe on iTunes if you haven’t already.

Bite is Mother Jones‘ podcast for people who think hard about their food. Listen to all our episodes here, or subscribe in iTunes or Stitcher or via RSS.

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Is Your Favorite Restaurant Standing Up for Immigrants?

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Here Are the Churches Fighting Back Against Trump’s Immigration Crackdown

by BenitoStingley Posted on February 21, 2017

Mother Jones

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For the past eight years, Jeanette Vizguerra had shown up for every one of her required check-ins with US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement. Though Vizguerra, an undocumented immigrant from Mexico, had been issued a deportation order for two misdemeanors in 2011, ICE officials had previously granted her requests for a stay of removal and allowed her to remain in the country with her four children.

But last week, Vizguerra took a different route. Fearing deportation, she took refuge in the First Unitarian Society in Denver and declared sanctuary. The decision proved prescient: The day of Vizguerra’s scheduled check-in, ICE officials told her attorney that Vizguerra’s request to remain in the country had been denied.

Because ICE has a longstanding policy to not enter churches and schools, Vizguerra will be shielded from deportation. But that means that she’ll have to stay in the church indefinitely. “I did not make this decision lightly,” Vizguerra said through an interpreter, according to NPR. “I was thinking about it for weeks. But I think that I made the right decision in coming here.”

Vizguerra may be one of the first undocumented immigrants to seek this kind of refuge since Donald Trump’s election but, for months, churches have been preparing for exactly this possibility. Since the election, faith-based organizers and leaders have ramped up their work as part of the sanctuary church movement, a campaign among organizers and clergy to help undocumented immigrants facing deportation. More than 700 congregations have signed on to a sanctuary pledge, with the number of participating congregations doubling since the election, says Noel Andersen, a national grassroots coordinator at Church World Service, an international faith-based organization. New sanctuary coalitions have popped up in Ohio, Iowa, Wisconsin, and North Carolina.

In many ways, this has all happened before. Churches played a huge role in sheltering Central American migrants in the 1980s, when civil wars brought an influx of border crossings. They reached out to immigrants again in 2007, when workplace raids were a common tactic among ICE officers. During the Central American child migrant surge in 2014, congregations revived the movement, opening up their doors to children and families fleeing violence. Churches were able to offer a safe haven to immigrants facing deportation and, in some cases, help individuals win temporary relief from removal.

Now, organizers say, Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies have spurred leaders to continue that movement and expand it to other communities targeted by the administration, such as Muslim and LGBQT communities. They’re also looking toward other types of community organizing, such as rapid-response and know-your-rights trainings.

Peter Pedemonti, director of the New Sanctuary Movement of Philadelphia, has focused his efforts on a “sanctuary in the streets” campaign, a rapid-response network of volunteers who are trained to peacefully disrupt ICE raids. In a raid in Philadelphia last week, Pedemonti says 70 people showed up outside an ICE office within 20 minutes of being notified. “The broader strategy is to shine a light on what ICE is doing,” he says. “We want ICE to know that if they come into our neighborhoods and try to drag away our friends and neighbors, we are going to be there to slow it down and disrupt it.”

In Los Angeles, Guillermo Torres, an organizer with Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice, says that the group’s congregations have been working with the National Immigration Law Center to develop rapid-response trainings. They want to train people to film encounters, interview witnesses, and build prayer walls around ICE officers. CLUE is also trying to enlist faith leaders who would be willing to go to detention centers after raids to talk to ICE officers or to serve as a source of spiritual support to detainees.

Torres says he’s seen a “surge” in clergy leaders expressing interest in the movement, many of whom he’d never met before. “The darkness that’s coming out of the president and his administration has created a lot of pain and sadness in in the faith community,” says Torres, “and that pain is compelling leaders to move to a level they’ve not moved before.”

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Here Are the Churches Fighting Back Against Trump’s Immigration Crackdown

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Raw Data: Here’s What Violent Crime Really Looks Like Over the Past Decade

by TashaMathew Posted on February 12, 2017

Mother Jones

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Donald Trump keeps saying that the murder rate is the highest it’s been in 45 years. This is wildly untrue, but other people are joining the bandwagon anyway. Jeff Sessions says the current rise in crime is a “dangerous permanent trend.” Talk show hosts agree. America is a dark and dangerous place, and it’s getting more dangerous all the time.

Aside from outright lies, a lot of this is based on cherry-picked statistics. The murder rate in Chicago has skyrocketed over the past three years. Los Angeles has seen a substantial rise in its violent crime rate. Etc. But if you’re interested in the whole picture, I have it for you below, complete and un-cherry-picked.

You’re all used to seeing long-term crime charts from me because I’m usually illustrating the effect of lead on crime over the past 50 or 60 years. Those charts show national crime rates plummeting in the 90s and early aughts. This time, though, the chatter is all about recent increases in murder and violent crime in big cities. For starters, then, here are the basic numbers for the past decade on violent crime in large cities from the National Crime Victimization Survey:1

The data goes through 2015,2 and shows that big-city violent crime did tick upward slightly in 2015. More generally, though, violent crime has displayed a noisy but steadily downward trend over the past decade. In 2015, violent crime in big cities was nearly a third lower than it was in 2007.

Next up is violent crime from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports. This is based on reports from police departments, and includes detailed data at the city level. Here are violent crime rates in America’s ten biggest cities3 through the first half of 2016:4

Some big cities have indeed shown worrying upward trends: Chicago, San Antonio, and Los Angeles are all up over the past two or three years. At the same time, Philadelphia, New York City, and San Diego are all down. More generally, except for San Antonio every single one of these cities has a lower violent crime rate than in 2006, ranging from 4 percent down (San Jose) to 40 percent down (Dallas and Philadelphia). The overall violent crime rate for all big cities is up over the past two years, but still lower than it was in 2006.

Finally, here are the murder rates in our ten biggest cities:

Chicago, obviously, is a big outlier, with a high and rising murder rate (up 53 percent over the past two years). The three biggest cities in Texas have also seen big recent increases. Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and New York City are down compared to 2015.

You can draw different conclusions from this data depending on what you look at.5 However, this is the best data we have. This is reality. Whatever you decide to say about violent crime, it needs to be based on this.

1The NCVS data on violent crime doesn’t include homicide because, obviously, you can’t call up people and ask if they’ve been murdered in the past year. Generally speaking, however, violent crime as a category includes murder, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault.

2Unlike the other charts in this post, this one starts in 2007 because the Bureau of Justice Statistics warns that a change in methodology in 2006 makes it difficult to compare 2006 to other years.

3Because of a dispute over methodology, Chicago has no official numbers for forcible rape before 2015. Because of this, it also has no official numbers for violent crime. However, it’s pretty easy to create a close estimate of the rape rate and then use that to recreate the violent crime rate. That’s what I’ve done here.

4I’ve annualized the rates for the first half of 2016 so they’re comparable to the other years.

5It’s worth mentioning that property crime is also down over the past decade. Ditto for crime in smaller cities and towns. I haven’t shown any of that here because big-city violent crime seems to be the topic of the moment. However, you might be interested in a little-known bit of crime trivia that will surprise most people: violent crime in big cities has fallen so much that it’s actually lower than anyplace else. The safest places in America are the biggest and smallest cities. It’s the medium-sized cities that now have the biggest violent crime problems.

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Raw Data: Here’s What Violent Crime Really Looks Like Over the Past Decade

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Reuters: 3,000 Neighborhoods Have Higher Lead Levels Than Flint

by Hermine1266 Posted on December 20, 2016

Mother Jones

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Reuters reports on lead poisoning:

ST. JOSEPH, Missouri — On a sunny November afternoon in this historic city, birthplace of the Pony Express and death spot of Jesse James, Lauranda Mignery watched her son Kadin, 2, dig in their front yard. As he played, she scolded him for putting his fingers in his mouth.

In explanation, she pointed to the peeling paint on her old house. Kadin, she said, has been diagnosed with lead poisoning. He has lots of company: Within 15 blocks of his house, at least 120 small children have been poisoned since 2010, making the neighborhood among the most toxic in Missouri.

Of course, it’s not just St. Joseph. Reuters got hold of neighborhood-level lead testing records and found thousands of high-lead communities across the country:

Reuters found nearly 3,000 areas with recently recorded lead poisoning rates at least double those in Flint during the peak of that city’s contamination crisis. And more than 1,100 of these communities had a rate of elevated blood tests at least four times higher.

The poisoned places on this map stretch from Warren, Pennsylvania, a town on the Allegheny River where 36 percent of children tested had high lead levels, to a zip code on Goat Island, Texas, where a quarter of tests showed poisoning. In some pockets of Baltimore, Cleveland and Philadelphia, where lead poisoning has spanned generations, the rate of elevated tests over the last decade was 40 to 50 percent.

Here’s a map of the worst hotspots in the country:

The whole piece is worth reading. My only disappointment is that the authors spent most of the article talking about the dangers of lead paint. That’s worth talking about, but lead-saturated soil is even more worth talking about. That’s why Lauranda Mignery doesn’t want her son digging in their front yard: there may not be any paint there, but there’s probably lots of old lead that settled in the soil decades ago when we were all burning leaded gasoline.

Sadly, there’s barely any money in the federal budget these days for testing, let alone remediation. It would cost tens of billions of dollars to clean up all the old lead, which is mostly a problem in poor communities populated by people of color. And though it’s not polite to say this, nobody cares enough about them to spend tens of billions of dollars.

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Reuters: 3,000 Neighborhoods Have Higher Lead Levels Than Flint

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Chicago Will Now Tax Sugary Drinks

by BerniceD49 Posted on November 11, 2016

Mother Jones

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Even as President-elect Donald Trump looks to a soda lobbyist to craft food and farm policy for his coming administration, another major city has stuck a thumb in Big Soda’s eye by imposing a penny-per-ounce soda tax.

Cook County, Ill.— which encompasses Chicago—approved the tax Thursday. With a population of 5.2 million, Cook emerges as by far the nation’s biggest locale to tax sugary drinks. As in Philadelphia, which instituted a tax in June, the Cook soda tax resulted from a vote of the county’s governing council. In the other US cities that have followed suit—San Francisco, Oakland, Boulder on Tuesday and Berkeley in 2014—such decisions are decided by voters mulling ballot initiatives.

In all of those instances, the American Beverage Association led a heavily funded campaign against the move. In Chicago as in the Bay Area, former New York City mayor Mike Bloomberg countered by funding a pro-tax push.

Michael Siegel, a professor at the Boston University School of Public Health, told me these victories are a harbinger of things to come: “Soda taxes are now on the policy agenda, and I think we will only see an increase in such policies over time.” He added that there’s very little research on how effective they are at pushing people to drink less soda, because such taxes remain pretty rare and new. But in the two places that have taxed sodas the longest—Mexico and Berkeley—initial research looks promising, as I showed here.

On top of that, Siegel said, “there is a huge body of economics research demonstrating that for most food and beverage products, increasing the price leads to a reduction in consumption.”

The latest spate of soda-tax triumphs suggests Big Soda’s efforts to stave off tobacco-like status is coming to an end. According to Bloomberg News, “Since 2009, there have been more than 40 attempts to enact a soda tax in cities across the US.” Berkeley broke the industry’s winning streak two years ago, and not the spigot, so to speak, for more taxes appears to be open.

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Chicago Will Now Tax Sugary Drinks

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Coca-Cola’s Relationship With Health Is Truly Bizarre

by ClayBickford Posted on October 10, 2016

Mother Jones

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Soda companies give big bucks to groups that promote public health—while at the same time lobbying against laws that are trying to do the same.

That’s the takeaway from a study published today in the American Journal of Preventative Medicine, Coca-Cola and PepsiCo donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to groups like the American Diabetes Association, American Heart Association, and Save the Children from 2011-2015. The two companies, represented by American Beverage Association, also spent millions lobbying to defeat legislation aimed at reducing soda consumption across the country. Coke gave the National Institutes of health nearly $2 million in recent years while also spending $6 million each year from 2011 to 2015 to fight efforts on implementing a soda tax in cities like Philadelphia.

Read More: Big Sugar’s Sweet Little Lies Illustration: Chris Buzelli

“The beverage industry is using corporate philanthropy to undermine public health measures,” Kelly Brownell, dean of the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University, told the New York Times.

This isn’t quite breaking news. Soda companies have been funding science of sugar for decades, but today’s study is the first to point out the method of fighting public health measures while also supporting organizations founded on the principle of improving the nation’s health.

For more on how corporate sponsorships can influence public health listen to our Bite podcast episode with Andy Bellatti, founder of Dieticians for Professional Integrity. Or check out Kiera Butler’s dive into Oakland’s deceptively named “grocery tax.”

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Coca-Cola’s Relationship With Health Is Truly Bizarre

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Gary Johnson has an out-of-this-world plan to save us from climate change.

by CarmineLawler84 Posted on September 26, 2016

This week, cities mark World Car-Free Day, an annual event to promote biking, walking, mass transit, and other ways to get around sans motor vehicles (Solowheel, anyone?).

Technically, World Car-Free Day was Thursday, September 22, but participating cities are taking the “eh, close enough” approach to get their car-free kicks in on the weekend. Said cities include Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, Brussels, Bogotá, Jakarta, Copenhagen, and Paris, where nearly half the city center will be closed to vehicle traffic on Sunday.

But going car-free, municipally speaking, is becoming more of a regular trend than an annual affair: Mexico City closes 35 miles of city streets to cars every Sunday; the Oslo city government proposed a ban on private vehicles in the city center after 2019; and in Paris, the government is allowed to limit vehicles if air pollution rises above health-threatening levels.

But even if your city isn’t officially participating in World Car-Free Day, you can be the change you want to see in your own metropolis. And by that, we mean: Just leave your keys at home. Horrible, no good things happen in cars.

Continued – 

Gary Johnson has an out-of-this-world plan to save us from climate change.

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