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Want to See What Donald Trump Is Doing to the Republican Party’s Future? Watch This Florida District

by VeldaWeiser Posted on November 4, 2016

Mother Jones

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By 11 a.m. on the second-to-last Sunday before early voting began in Florida, Joe Garcia, a former Democratic congressman who is running to reclaim his old seat in the state’s 26th district, was going to church for the fourth time that day. “You can do one, maybe two sermons, but on the third one, you’re crying,” he said. He pulled his silver Nissan hatchback onto the grass across the street from the Greater Williams Freewill Baptist Church, a small white building amid fields of winter tomatoes in an African American neighborhood of Homestead, 40 minutes south of Miami.

Garcia is 53, with curly gray hair, glasses, and the wry smile of someone who is always on the verge of saying something he shouldn’t. His Republican opponent, Rep. Carlos Curbelo, points out that he often does. In 2013, during Garcia’s one term in Congress, he referred to obstructionist GOP colleagues as “Taliban“; in September, he told supporters that Hillary Clinton, whom he supports, “is under no illusions that you want to have sex with her.” He has run for the same seat four times and lost all but once to three different Republicans. But this fall, he believes Donald Trump will help propel him to victory.

Florida’s 26th district, which stretches from Key West to the edge of Little Havana, may be the swingiest seat in the nation’s swingiest state. The area, which was part of the 25th district before redistricting, has been represented by a different member of Congress every two years since 2008 and has flipped from red to blue to red in the last three elections. The seat is critical to Democrats’ longshot effort to take control of the House, and to Republicans’ plans to keep it. Combined, the two candidates and their allies have spent $14 million trying to break the stalemate. What’s happening in South Florida is emblematic of the drama playing out in jigsawed districts across the country: an embattled Republican incumbent struggling to escape Trump’s shadow, and a Democratic opponent fighting to keep him there.

But the district is an outlier in a few important ways: The majority of its voters are Hispanic, nearly half its residents are foreign-born, and the consequences of global warming are already being felt. Neighborhoods flood at high tide, immigrants arrive every day, and the most divisive political fights in some communities are over the threat posed by Zika, so Florida is on the frontlines of a fight that climate change may only exacerbate. In the 26th district, the future projected by atmospheric models and demographic trends is already here. The politics have evolved accordingly.

Curbelo is a GOP rising star who joined the party leadership’s whip team as a freshman. But as his party careens toward ethno-nationalism, he is waging his own campaign of mitigation and adaptation, condemning Trump’s candidacy and talking up his work as the co-founder of the bipartisan Climate Solutions Caucus in Congress. Whether or not he can survive will say a lot about what kind of future Republicans are building for themselves.

Democrats consider Curbelo’s moderation little more than a deathbed conversion, after a district he won by three points in the midterms was redrawn to become three points more Democratic. This was the message Garcia hammered home to the congregation in Homestead. He clapped along with the choir from the first pew and bounded up to a spot just below the pulpit when he was introduced. “First off, the chorus was on fire!” Garcia said. “They were on fire!”

“We’ve lived through eight years of attacks and abuse that we’ve seen on a national level,” he said. Republicans were to blame. “They have sowed this sick, sick seed. They’ve watered this wicked weed. And now comes time for their hateful harvest, and they’re running. They’re running because they’re now scared of what they did and they don’t want to be Republicans anymore, right? Because they’re scared of what they’ve wrought.” There was little doubt about whom he was referring to.

Former Democratic Rep. Joe Garcia talks to volunteers at his campaign office in Miami’s Sunset neighborhood. Tim Murphy/Mother Jones

Heading into the 2016 election, Miami-Dade County was the hottest place in Republican politics, home to Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio, two bilingual candidates promising a friendlier, more diverse conservatism. They were also responding to a mathematical reality: If the party didn’t become more presentable to Hispanic voters and instead continued on the course pushed by Mitt Romney (of “self-deport” fame), it would be shut out of the White House indefinitely.

They bet on the wrong hand. Trump shredded Bush and Rubio by directly confronting their appeal. He mocked Bush’s Mexican-born wife, questioned whether the son of Cuban immigrants was even eligible for the presidency, and attacked anyone who crossed him as a water-carrier for undocumented immigrants. The party shrank toward its base of white men, and South Florida became home to a large and vocal contingent of Never Trump exiles.

Calling it a “moral decision,” Curbelo promised in March, when the nomination was still up for grabs, that he would not back Trump. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, whose majority-Hispanic district neighbors the 26th, followed suit. So did Miami mayor Tomás Regalado, Miami-Dade mayor Carlos Giménez, George W. Bush’s commerce secretary Carlos Gutierrez, mega-donor Mike Fernandez, talking-head Ana Navarro, and ex-Florida GOP spokesman Wadi Gaitan. Miami-Dade was the only county Trump lost in the primary, and many of those Republican voters who pulled the lever for Rubio never warmed to the nominee; one survey of the county in October showed Trump running 18 points behind Rubio’s re-election campaign in Miami-Dade.

Refusing to support Trump is a useful survival mechanism, but by itself it might not be enough. While Republicans in South Florida have mostly hidden from the presidential race, their opponents won’t stop talking about it. The county has gained 130,000 new Hispanic voters since 2012, and of those new voters, Democrats outnumber Republicans by more than a two-to-one margin. The Clinton campaign is saturating the airwaves and canvassing for Democrats up and down the ballot. One irony of Trump is that the Republicans most likely to take the fall for his politics are the ones who least subscribe to them.

Curbelo is 36, with short black hair and an almost permanent smirk. Like Garcia, he is the son of Cuban immigrants; they attended the same all-boys Catholic school, Belen Jesuit, which was relocated to Miami from Havana after another alum, Fidel Castro, shut it down. Even Garcia admits to having watched his opponent’s ascent with a certain amount of awe. Curbelo spent most of his early years in politics running campaigns for local Republicans, getting elected to the school board, and supplying occasional quotes to national reporters about how the party can win with Hispanics.

He owes his current job to a series of very Florida scandals. The area’s previous Republican congressman, David Rivera, lost to Garcia in 2012 amid an investigation into whether he had tried to rig the Democratic primary by paying a fake “straw” candidate to run against Garcia. (Rivera has not been charged, but an ally was convicted for her role in the scandal.) But not long after he took office, Garcia’s campaign manager Jeffrey Garcia (no relation) was investigated for funding a fake tea party candidate to draw votes from Rivera. Jeffrey Garcia was later convicted for both the straw candidate and for absentee ballot fraud and spent time in prison. The scandals were just enough for Curbelo to squeak past Garcia in a good Republican year.

So when Trump rose to the top of the Republican primary polls last summer, Curbelo’s first response made a certain amount of sense. “I think there’s a small possibility that this gentleman is a phantom candidate,” he said in a Spanish-language radio interview in July 2015. “Mr. Trump has a close friendship with Bill and Hillary Clinton. They were at his last wedding. He has contributed to the Clintons’ foundation. He has contributed to Mrs. Clinton’s Senate campaigns. All of this is very suspicious.”

Curbelo, who first supported Bush and then switched to Rubio, has since sobered up to the reality of Trump. At his first debate with Garcia in early October, in the auditorium of their old high school with their former civics teacher looking on, Curbelo was asked out of the gate about his presidential election vote. His mind hadn’t changed. “I will not be voting for either of these two candidates, because I believe we can do better,” he said.

Garcia pounced. “You know as members of Congress the only thing we do is vote—that’s the only thing we do,” he said. “The question is, what would Mr. Curbelo say to his daughters if the night of the election Donald Trump wins?”

Later, Curbelo was asked if he’d support Trump’s plan to construct a wall on the southern border. Again, Curbelo said no. When he was asked what his immigration plan would be, Curbelo offered up something that sounded a lot like Clinton’s: more money to secure the border, better visa tracking, and a path to citizenship for people who are here already. In explaining his support for that last plank, he told a story that might have gotten him booed out of the Republican National Convention, had he bothered to attend.

“I did something a few months ago, I stayed overnight at the home of someone who is undocumented,” he said. “Her name is Cristina, she has three children, one came with her to this country and two were born here. I slept over at her home and we woke up at four in the morning. I get choked up because this was one heck of an experience for me. We woke up at four in the morning and we went out and picked okra—quingombó, for those of you who speak Spanish. I was only able to do it for about three hours. She would do it for another six hours.”

Curbelo brought up Garcia’s past scandals at every opportunity, tarring, with some success, his opponent as a corrupt buffoon and a broken record. He bragged about working with Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.) on gun control and Rep. Bobby Scott (D-Va.), a former NAACP official, on juvenile justice reform. If you were coming in blind, you might have thought Curbelo was a Democrat.

Garcia’s task has been to remind everyone he isn’t. In just a few days of following the race, I heard a variation of his favored retort a half dozen times. “He’s in the Republican leadership and voted to make women wait 48 hours after they were raped to get an abortion,” Garcia says. “He’s a guy who’s voted or tried to push back Obamacare on nine separate occasions with no replacement. He’s a guy who’s voted to block all the president’s EPA rules on clean water. But suddenly his road to epiphany, his road to Damascus, was the epiphany of the court drawing a more liberal district.”

The most contentious issue on the ballot in Key West this November isn’t control of Congress; it’s mosquitoes. Climate change is making the problem worse. Tim Murphy/Mother Jones

A few days after their first debate, Curbelo and Garcia faced off again at a forum for local candidates in Key West. A hundred or so residents gathered in an auditorium above an art gallery a short walk from Ernest Hemingway’s old home. The outer Keys are Garcia’s turf; he opened a district office there when he was congressman, and the area skews heavily Democratic. But Curbelo needs Democratic votes to win, and he believes he can get them by doing something Republicans are loath to do: talk about the environment.

Just getting to the event offered a glimpse of what the future has in store. The King Tide, an semi-annual event that produces super-tides similar to what regular tides will look like in a few decades, had turned roads and parking lots on both sides of the main highway into small lakes, as if a water main had burst. “I was out for a run with my dog yesterday, and I had to alternate my route because of the deep water in my street,” the Keys’ Republican state representative, Holly Raschein, told me as she gave away bottles of sunscreen before the forum. Raschein, like Curbelo, split with her party’s leaders to push for funding for adaptation.

More than an hour of the candidate forum was devoted to one issue: fighting mosquitoes and the diseases they carry, such as Zika. The most prominent campaign signs in Key West advertised seats on the mosquito control board, and two questions on the ballot in Monroe County will determine whether to allow a British company to release genetically modified mosquitoes. Opponents of the plan wore white badges that read, “I do not consent.”

Adaptation was the word of the night. On stage, Curbelo and Garcia clashed on Trump and Cuba, but Curbelo also went out of his way to talk about his work on water and climate. He boasted of securing $2 billion for Everglades restoration, blocking future flood-insurance hikes, and sponsoring a bill with the bipartisan Climate Solutions Caucus, the working group he co-founded that now boasts 20 members. (The bill does not propose any measures to address climate change, but, in Washington fashion, would create a commission to study and propose measures to address climate change.) “We’re at the tip of the spear,” he said.

Afterward, Curbelo laughed off Garcia’s talk of a politically motivated conversion. He’d been confronted with the science by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration experts and he’d accepted it. So why did most of his colleagues still have their heads in the sand? Curbelo blamed Democrats. “You’ve gotta look at the history of this issue,” he told me. “When Vice President Gore adopted this cause, that resulted in just some natural polarization on the issue, because I think a lot of Republicans wrongly assumed that this was a Democratic issue or a liberal issue. I think hopefully if Mr. Gore could do it all over again, he would find a Republican partner and advocate together, but anyway that didn’t happen.”

He told me he was optimistic that climate change legislation could happen in a Republican House. “I’ve been very happy with the response I’ve been getting from Republicans,” he said. “Remember—no one’s worked on this! Very few people have worked on this on the Republican side, so I thought it was gonna be a lot tougher, but there’s a lot of interest.”

Curbelo was even optimistic, sort of, that climate legislation might pass under a President Trump—someone who has previously said that global warming is a Chinese hoax. “Who knows! I think he’s someone who’s clearly shown that he’s flexible on many issues,” he said, forcing a laugh. “Sometimes too flexible for my view, but who knows, maybe!”

But his sunny optimism about his party’s future speaks to the challenges facing Republicans like him. It isn’t true that Curbelo’s colleagues haven’t worked on climate issues—they have. But their work has been focused on blocking climate action and hounding scientists who are working on it. That level of obstruction has played well in deep-red patches of the country. But in educated, coastal swing districts, and in particular among millennial voters, it has contributed to a rising tide against Republicans. Garcia may be heavy-handed in his criticism, but his efforts to tie Curbelo to his party’s mainstream have a certain resonance; what’s the point of calling something an existential threat if you’re not even willing to pick a presidential candidate who will fight it?

Many House Republicans who have seen the light on climate change, including Illinois’ Bob Dold, Florida’s David Jolly, and New York’s Lee Zeldin, happen to be in similarly dire electoral straits. On Tuesday, thanks to losses and retirements, the number of Republican members of the Climate Solutions Caucus could easily be cut in half.

As Curbelo made small talk with a few constituents, and fended off questions from the mosquito people, a middle-aged man walked up. He was a biology professor at Florida Keys Community College and a Bernie Sanders supporter, but he wanted to thank Curbelo for his work on climate—he was still on the fence about which candidate to back. Next up was Jonathan Van Leer, a professor of physical oceanography at the University of Miami. He lives just outside the district but said he’d vote for Curbelo if he could. After he’d had a few words with the congressman, he told me, “I’ve been teaching climate change for a long time, and it’s the first time I haven’t felt depressed.”

Curbelo had a three-hour drive back to Miami, but he could not leave just yet. A filmmaker had released a new documentary about the effects of climate change on South Florida, and Curbelo, stepping out of campaign mode for a minute, had agreed to say a few words about his climate caucus and the challenges that lay ahead. As he and a few staffers lingered in the emptying theater, someone had turned on the documentary, and on the screen behind them a wave came crashing down.

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Want to See What Donald Trump Is Doing to the Republican Party’s Future? Watch This Florida District

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Shipping industry: Climate change? What’s the big rush!

by EthanRiggs Posted on October 29, 2016

A firm plan for potentially easing the shipping industry’s impact on the climate will be delayed for seven years under a roadmap drafted by a United Nations agency on Friday.

The lackluster outcome at the end of a week of environmental talks in London deepened the disparity between ship and plane operators and much of the rest of the world when it comes to tackling global warming. The shipping industry participated in the negotiations on behalf of some nations.

MaxGag

The U.N. agency, the International Maritime Organization (IMO), described Friday’s agreement as “another good news story for the #environment” on Twitter — even as it was being broadly criticized by others.

“The fact that there’s a roadmap is good,” said John Maggs, a policy advisor at the nonprofit Seas At Risk who attended the talks. But he criticized it for lacking targets or meaningful timelines and for lacking ambition. “There’s nothing in the roadmap.”

Climate-changing pollution escapes from ships as they burn some of the most polluting types of fuel available. Ships are blamed for 2 to 3 percent of the heat-trapping carbon dioxide released each year and their emissions may grow by 50 to 250 percent by 2050.

Temperatures have risen about 1 degree C or nearly 2 degrees F since the Industrial Revolution, causing seas to rise and amplifying heatwaves, droughts, wildfires, and storms. A global climate pact will take effect next week following talks in Paris last year, but it largely ignores ships and airplanes, which traverse national borders and are overseen by industry-specific U.N. agencies.

Under the agreement reached Friday, an interim strategy for addressing greenhouse gas pollution from ships will be released in 2018. That will be followed five years later by the potential publication of a timeline describing climate-protection measures that could be imposed on ship operators and owners. Owners of large ships will provide confidential information about fuel consumption to the U.N. beginning in 2019.

The roadmap did not set any targets for greenhouse gas reductions, such as those that have underpinned national climate protection strategies and pledges under the Paris climate agreement. Nor does the roadmap commit the sector to setting such targets in 2023.

“Not being prepared to agree to a reasonable short-term framework for developing a target is a bad signal,” Maggs said. “Having an objective is important.”

The European Union is considering expanding its cap-and-trade system, which limits greenhouse gas pollution and imposes fees to reduce fossil fuel demand, to cover ships docking at its ports. Maggs said that may have helped force the shipping industry to take global warming a little more seriously.

“Individual countries and regions making an effort builds pressure at the IMO,” Maggs said. “The view at the IMO is that it’s the only place where you can regulate the shipping industry. When others come along and start regulating regionally, the IMO doesn’t like it.”

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The IMO also resolved on Friday to postpone any potential decisions that could force shipbuilders to produce more fuel-efficient vessels. Bill Hemmings, a clean energy campaigner with European group Transport and Environment who attended the talks, described that decision as “very disappointing.”

“There’s no logic behind that,” Hemmings said. “Making new ships more efficient is a no-brainer.”

The shipping industry was largely silent on Friday afternoon about the outcome of the talks, while the IMO issued a press release describing what it called an “important milestone on the road to controlling greenhouse gas emissions from international shipping.” The International Chamber of Shipping said it planned to issue a statement on Monday.

The IMO in 2004 imposed far-reaching restrictions on journalists covering its meetings. That made it difficult for reporters gathered in London this week to describe how countries and organizations were obstructing or supporting efforts to ease climate impacts.

Unusually for United Nations agencies, corporations have seats at IMO negotiations. The influence of individual countries at the IMO is based partly on the number of ships that fly under their flags. Countries such as Liberia were represented at the talks by groups that operate those ships.

The Marshall Islands, which is highly vulnerable to the effects of rising seas and under whose flag a large number of ships fly, led a push for more stringent rules on greenhouse gas pollution from ships. It was joined by a coalition of small island states and some European countries.

Opposition to stringent climate measures was led by large developing countries, such as India and China, and by countries at the ends of long trade routes — for whom importing and exporting goods by ship requires large amounts of fuel.

Unlike power plants and motor vehicles, which operate according to national rules, international ships and airlines often operate outside the direct regulation of any nations.

“The international nature of shipping and commercial aviation means that some, even most emissions take place outside of the legal jurisdictions of countries,” said Robert Stavins, an economics professor at Harvard who researches and tracks environmental diplomacy.

Stavins said nations and regions could reduce the climate impacts of ships and planes by including them in the growing number of carbon tax and cap-and-trade systems when they reach their ports.

While a U.N. agreement to reduce the use of climate-changing chemicals called HFCs this month was heralded as a sign that world leaders are ready to take the warming crisis seriously, an earlier International Civil Aviation Organization agreement to address global warming was broadly criticized for its weakness. It directs airlines to begin buying carbon credits in 2021 instead of reducing emissions from their aircraft.

“The costs of phasing out HFCs are trivial, as are the political challenges, compared with carbon dioxide,” Stavins said. “The number of countries involved is small, the cost of abatement is relatively low, and substitutes already exist.”

The outcome of this week’s talks shows that the shipping industry, like the aviation industry, remains reluctant to address its role in warming the planet, and it suggests global support for easy climate solutions hasn’t yet translated into strong support for tougher measures.

Continued – 

Shipping industry: Climate change? What’s the big rush!

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Calculating the Cosmos – Ian Stewart

by Myrna Posted on October 23, 2016

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Calculating the Cosmos
How Mathematics Unveils the Universe
Ian Stewart

Genre: Mathematics

Price: $18.99

Expected Publish Date: October 25, 2016

Publisher: Basic Books

Seller: The Perseus Books Group, LLC


Mathematics has informed our understanding of the cosmos on every scale: from the origin and motion of the Moon, to the intricacies of asteroids, comets, and Kuiper Belt objects. Math has taught us how interactions with Jupiter can fling asteroids toward Mars, and how a planet’s rings can spit out moons. In Calculating the Cosmos , Ian Stewart takes us on an astonishing journey—from the formation of the Earth and its Moon, to the planets and asteroids of the solar system, and from there out into the galaxy and the universe. He describes the architecture of space and time; dark matter and dark energy; how galaxies, stars, and planets form; why stars implode; how everything began; and how it’s all going to end. In his characteristically accessible and engaging style, Stewart uses math to explain our extraordinary universe and our place within it.

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Calculating the Cosmos – Ian Stewart

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What We’ve Suspected About Fitbits All Along Is True

by MarkoBurhop Posted on October 4, 2016

Mother Jones

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The makers of Fitbit, the wearable activity tracker, say the technology is “redefining fitness.” Lots of people have bought in: About 1 in 5 Americans own a wearable fitness tracker, like Jawbone, Garmin, or Fitbit. Big-name companies—BP, Bank of America, IBM, Target, Barclays—offer free or subsidized trackers to their employees in hopes of developing a healthy, active workforce. The wearable fitness tracker industry is expected to top $5 billion within three years.

And the need is clear: More than two-thirds of adults are overweight or obese.

The problem is, there is mounting evidence that when it comes to improving health, the trackers don’t work.

In a Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology study published Tuesday, researchers tracked 800 people over the course of a year—some with Fitbits worn around their waists, some without. On average, those wearing Fitbits recorded a modest 16 more minutes of active physical activity than those without Fitbits, and no difference from the control group in health outcomes like weight or blood pressure. After a year, just 10 percent were still wearing the Fitbits. That finding echoes previous research finding that half of all fitness tracker owners don’t use them.

The study also looked at the effect of incentives: For the first six months, some Fitbit wearers were offered cash or charity donations based on reaching a certain number of steps. Those with the charity option didn’t exercise any more than those without; those with the cash option exercised slightly more, but not enough to affect health. When the incentive ended, they went back to their old habits.

Eric Finkelstein, a Duke-NUS Medical School professor and the study’s co-author, says having a fitness tracker is like having a scale in the bathroom—it can be a helpful measurement tool, but it’s not a public health intervention in and of itself. “The notion you can give out a bunch of watches and suddenly people will get more active is just silly,” he says.

The conclusions follow a recent study in the Journal of the American Medical Association finding that those who wore wearable fitness trackers lost less weight than those self-reporting their diet and exercise.

The key issue, the authors of both studies say, is that trackers primarily measure steps, when in fact, the number of steps doesn’t matter as much as the amount of aerobic activity that will get you breathing hard. “If you just get 10,000 steps but are just trudging along, I’m not sure how those steps will have much health benefit,” says Finkelstein. He suspects that the goal of 10,000 steps, the default goal on today’s Fitbits, were calculated based on the federal government’s recommended 150 minutes of exercise per week. “So people sort of ran with this 10,000 steps number and took it a bit out of context.”

What’s more, Fitbit users can develop a false sense of achievement, said John Jakicic, a health researcher at the University of Pittsburgh and lead author of the JAMA, to NPR. “People would say, ‘Oh, I exercised a lot today, now I can eat more.’ And they might eat more than they otherwise would have.”

One improvement, says Finkelstein, would be tracking steps of aerobic activity rather than total steps on the device itself. (Fitbit tracks aerobic activity online.) Another approach is using the trackers as a measurement tool to complement fitness programs. Studies have shown that coupling trackers with counseling or personal training helps participants lose weight.

“As the leader in connected health and fitness, we are confident in the positive results our millions of users have seen from using Fitbit products,” said a Fitbit spokesman over email. “Numerous published studies, along with internal Fitbit data, continue to demonstrate the health benefits of using a fitness tracker combined with a mobile app to support health and fitness goals.” Fitbit points to the two studies involving counseling and personal training studies mentioned above, as well as to two small short-term studies of people with serious mental or physical illnesses.

So does this mean you should hold off on buying that Fitbit? “People who like to track these things, give it a go—I would say start out with a low-cost one,” says Finkelstein. But “don’t be surprised if in six months, you’re not using it.”

Correction: The original version of this article misstated the brand of fitness tracker used in the Journal of the American Medical Association study.

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What We’ve Suspected About Fitbits All Along Is True

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Here’s Why Some Black Leaders Are Fighting the NAACP Over Charter Schools

by NellDooley Posted on September 28, 2016

Mother Jones

In late July, the NAACP called for a national moratorium on charter schools, claiming they target low-income and minority communities with practices mirroring the predatory subprime mortgage lending industry. Now a group of more than 160 black civic leaders is asking the civil rights group to reconsider, arguing that charters create opportunities for black families that could allow minority students to excel.

In a September 21 letter, a coalition of educators, current and former politicians, public officials, and black leaders claimed that a charter school moratorium would deny parents the opportunity to choose “what’s best for their children”—and restrict access to high-quality alternatives to traditional public schools.

“The proposed resolution cites a variety of cherry-picked and debunked claims about charter schools,” the letter reads. “The notion of dedicated charter school founders and educators acting like predatory subprime mortgage lenders—a comparison the resolution explicitly makes—is a far cry from the truth.”

The NAACP’s proposed resolution, which will be voted on at the national board meeting next month, said that charter schools contribute to racial and socioeconomic segregation and raised concerns over disproportionately “punitive and exclusionary” disciplinary practices, fiscal mismanagement, and lackluster oversight. A few weeks earlier, the Movement for Black Lives, a network of 50 organizations brought together by Black Lives Matter, released a policy agenda that included a similar call to curb the growth of charters.

While the charter school industry is littered with the occasional bad actor, and some charters have even been found to practice “skimming”—illegally screening out potentially challenging students, according to a 2013 Reuters investigation and a recent report by the ACLU and Public Advocates, a public interest law firm—the pro-charter letter highlighted research showing the positive academic benefits and opportunities for black students at charters. Here are three of its main arguments:

1. Black students stand to make short-term academic gains: The letter, citing a study from Stanford’s Center for Research on Educational Outcomes (CREDO), argues that black students benefit from added exposure to charter schools. The 2015 study of 41 cities in 22 states found that students attending charter schools in those areas made slightly higher academic gains in both math and reading compared to students in traditional public schools. The gains were particularly pronounced for low-income, black, and Hispanic students, as well as English-language learners. Poor black students, for instance, received the equivalent of 59 additional days of math learning and 44 days of reading learning. For poor Hispanic students, the gains were 48 days of math instruction and 25 days of reading.

Andrew Maul, an assistant professor at the University of California-Santa Barbara’s Graduate School of Education, questioned the CREDO report’s research methods, including that the sizes of the effects “are very small.” (In response, CREDO noted that the study looked at the change in student test scores from year-to-year as a sign of academic growth, rather than the test scores themselves.)

An earlier study commissioned by the US Department of Education in 2010 showed modest improvements for low-income and underachieving students who attended urban charter middle schools. They scored higher on math tests but fared the same on reading scores as their peers at traditional public schools. Students from higher-income backgrounds saw adverse outcomes in math and reading scores. Overall, on average, attending charter middle schools with lotteries had no “significant impacts” on student achievement.

2. There are long-term gains, too: As Kristina Rizga wrote in her latest magazine story, 35 percent of Philadelphia students attend charter schools. While the growth of charters has put a financial strain on the local school district—and contributed to school closures and the push out of black educators—many students have seen improvements in academic performance. Between 2006 and 2012, 61 percent of Philadelphia charters posted higher scores in math and reading than peers at traditional public schools, according to CREDO. In the long run, according to a study of outcomes for students in Chicago and Florida, students attending charter high schools were more likely to graduate, stay in college, and earn more money than students in traditional public schools, according to a 2014 report by Mathematica.

Still, the 2015 CREDO report notes that the effects vary by region. Students in urban areas such as Boston, Memphis, and Newark, for instance, saw positive gains in math and reading. But in the Southwest, Florida, and Texas, students saw adverse outcomes.

3. Black families view charter schools as “immensely popular”: The letter also notes that charters are a popular alternative to traditional public education—in fact, tens of thousands of students across the country are currently on charter school waitlists. A recent survey conducted by the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools showed that at least 80 percent of black, Hispanic, and low-income parents supported the opening of charter schools in their area. And since 2000, the number of charters nearly quadrupled, from about 1.7 percent to 6.6 percent of public schools. The letter notes that the moratorium would affect 700,000 black families, as black students make up 27 percent of those enrolled in charter schools.

In Massachusetts, voters will decide this year on a ballot measure seeking to expand the state’s annual quota on charter schools to add 12 more to the current limit. A Brookings study in mid-September found that charter schools benefited students in the state’s urban areas, particularly for traditionally disadvantaged students. For students in rural and suburban areas, those benefits disappear.

“For many urban Black families, charter schools are making it possible to do what affluent families have long been able to do: rescue their children from failing schools,” the letter notes, adding: “Making charter schools the enemy in a fight for adequate education funding doesn’t serve the interest of all students. We cannot sacrifice another generation of students to the status quo.”

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Here’s Why Some Black Leaders Are Fighting the NAACP Over Charter Schools

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Why One Scientist Went Public With Her Sexual Harassment Story

by JackMurrell231 Posted on September 26, 2016

Mother Jones

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In the past few years, sexual harassment in the sciences has become an increasingly visible problem. Disturbing allegations about the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Park Service, and the former head of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have all made headlines. So have a number of cases involving prominent university professors.

On the latest episode of the Inquiring Minds podcast, Kishore Hari talks to Sarah Ballard, an accomplished exoplanet researcher who was also a complainant in one of the most high-profile recent harassment controversies. Last year, Buzzfeed reported that Geoff Marcy, a renowned astronomer at the University of California-Berkeley, had faced sexual harassment accusations. A report produced by the university found that Marcy had “violated the relevant UC sexual harassment policies”; it cited allegations that he had inappropriately touched students. Initially, Marcy was placed on probation; he was instructed by the university to comply with its sexual harassment policies and to avoid physical contact with students (except to shake their hands).

But the Buzzfeed story sparked a national outcry, and many began demanding a more severe punishment. Marcy posted an apology on his website, though he denies some of the allegations in the report and says that his actions didn’t harm his students’ professional lives. He ultimately retired under pressure from faculty at the university.

On Inquiring Minds, Ballard depicts Marcy as a professor who praised her talent yet abused her trust. She first met him when she was an undergraduate student in one of his classes, but her excitement to work with one of the world’s foremost experts on exoplanets soon took a dark turn. On one occasion, Marcy told Ballard a detailed story about his sexual history. On another occasion, she says, he attempted to massage her neck after driving her home.

After that, Ballard agonized over whether to confront Marcy about his behavior, ultimately deciding to do so. As described in the Berkeley report, this prospect caused “great anxiety” for Ballard, “in part because she believed such a confrontation would effectively forfeit any opportunity of receiving a letter of recommendation” from Marcy. But it never came to that. Ballard says Marcy’s behavior suddenly changed and the harassment stopped. She later found out that a graduate student had confronted Marcy about unwelcome behavior Marcy had allegedly exhibited toward a different student.

Marcy didn’t deny Ballard’s allegations—though he does deny some of the other allegations in Berkeley’s report. (According to the Berkeley report, he told the university investigator that he didn’t recall touching Ballard in the car but that it was possible he did.) In an interview with Mother Jones, Marcy’s attorney, Elizabeth Grossman, argued that Marcy’s actions weren’t serious enough to justify the backlash he’s experienced. “There is not a single allegation of sexual assault against Marcy,” said Grossman. “There is not a single allegation of soliciting sex, of requesting sex in exchange for academic favor. There is not a single suggestion of his interfering with anyone’s ability to thrive on campus.”

Ballard, however, says she was deeply affected by her interactions with Marcy. “To have Marcy say, ‘You are talented, you are full of promise’— that is so compelling,” she explains. “And then to have all of the sudden the knowledge that…that message might not have been delivered in good faith: You feel like the rug has been pulled out under you. So does that mean that I’m not promising? Does that mean that all of it was a lie?…It was profoundly rattling to my nascent sense of self as an astronomer, as a scientist.”

Years later, when Ballard heard that allegations against Marcy were going to become public, she made the decision to come forward and identify herself as one of the victims. She hopes that by doing so, she’ll make things easier for other women.

“There was one principle which helped me to unravel the tangled knot of my feelings that I could always return to…and that was you have to be the woman you needed then,” says Ballard. “You couldn’t protect yourself then, but you can protect younger you today, and you can protect women who are 20 today.”

Ballard went on to receive a Ph.D. in astronomy and astrophysics from Harvard (she notes that Marcy wrote a recommendation letter that helped her get into the prestigious university). She now researches exoplanets at MIT. But across the country, many other women have left the sciences. That’s partly because of widespread sexual harassment, argues Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.). Indeed, a 2014 study found that roughly two-thirds of female scientists surveyed said they had experienced harassment while doing field research.

In January, Speier gave a speech on the floor of the US House of Representatives recounting the allegations against Timothy Slater, who taught astronomy at the University of Arizona and is now a professor at the University of Wyoming. Speier had obtained the results of a confidential 2005 investigation conducted by the University of Arizona. “Dr. Slater himself admitted that he gave an employee a vegetable-shaped vibrator and that he frequently commented to his employees and students about the appearance of women,” said Speier on the House floor. “My staff spoke with one female grad student who was required to attend a strip club in order to discuss her academic work with Dr. Slater. The woman has since left the field of astronomy.” After reading the report, “I was physically sickened,” Speier says on Inquiring Minds.

Slater declined to answer specific questions from Mother Jones about the allegations, though he did provide a letter his lawyers had sent to the University of Arizona threatening to sue the university for defamation and breach of privacy over the release of the report. In the letter, Slater’s attorneys said the university’s report “contains numerous false and misleading allegations, which Rep. Speier and the media has reported as fact.” Specifically, the attorneys state that Slater “never gave a vibrator” to “any graduate student, ever” and that Slater “denies that he ever pressured anyone to go to the strip club or that anyone ever complained about going to strip club.”

Speier proposes one solution to the problem of sexual harassment in the sciences. The federal government has the power under Title IX to fight harassment, she notes. Because so many universities, even private ones, rely on federal dollars, they could lose federal funding in the form of grants or student loans if they violate the law. Last week, she introduced legislation requiring universities to inform federal grant-making institutions when they determine a professor has engaged in sexual harassment.

Speier isn’t optimistic that the bill will pass in the current Congress, but she wants harassment victims to know they have an advocate on Capitol Hill. Her message to them? “They’ve been heard.”

Inquiring Minds is a podcast hosted by neuroscientist and musician Indre Viskontas and Kishore Hari, the director of the Bay Area Science Festival. To catch future shows right when they are released, subscribe to Inquiring Minds via iTunes or RSS. You can follow the show on Twitter at @inquiringshow and like us on Facebook.

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Why One Scientist Went Public With Her Sexual Harassment Story

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Trump’s Tax Plan Reveals His Contempt for the Middle Class

by PQLZelma9382393 Posted on September 26, 2016

Mother Jones

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A couple of days ago, NYU law professor Lily Batchelder released a paper that takes a close look at the details of Donald Trump’s tax plan. She concludes that several million middle-class families will pay more under Trump’s plan than they do now. Jim Tankersley reports the Trump campaign’s response:

The Trump campaign called the findings “pure fiction,” contending the analysis neglects a crucial benefit for low-income taxpayers….Most importantly, Miller said Trump will instruct the committees writing his plan into law to make sure that it does not raise taxes on any low- or middle-income earners. “In sending our proposal to the tax-writing committees we will include instructions to ensure all low and middle income households are protected,” Miller said.

This is obviously spin, but the funny thing is that it’s true. The details that Batchelder analyzed really won’t matter much once Trump’s proposal gets fed into the congressional sausage machine. Rather, his tax plan is essentially a statement of values. It tells the voting public what he believes in.

And that’s the problem. If Trump truly cared about the middle class, he and his team would have taken a very close look at the details to make sure his plan benefited the entire middle class. Obviously they didn’t. They treated it like a throwaway that Congress would iron out later.

Conversely, does anyone doubt that they were very careful indeed about vetting the effect of his plan on the rich? There’s surely not a single person in the top 1 percent who will accidentally end up paying higher taxes under Trump’s plan. Why? Because Trump cares about rich people. They’re winners.1 Struggling families and single mothers are losers. Why sweat the details for the likes of them?

1Also because his plan is so overwhelmingly favorable for rich people that it’s basically impossible for small details to wipe out their average gain.

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Trump’s Tax Plan Reveals His Contempt for the Middle Class

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Four Reasons Why the Freddie Gray Case Isn’t Going Away Any Time Soon

by SalvatoreForrest Posted on August 3, 2016

Mother Jones

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In late July, Baltimore state’s attorney Marilyn Mosby dropped all remaining charges against two officers awaiting trial in the Freddie Gray case and decided not to retry a third, after a judge acquitted three other officers on all counts related to Gray’s death. The decision closed a chapter on a case that was a focal point for the Black Lives Matter movement. But although the criminal case is over, both the state’s attorney’s office and Baltimore police officers are still grappling with the consequences of the failed prosecution. Here’s how:

The six officers charged in Gray’s death will now face an internal affairs review. Led by the Montgomery County Police Department, the reviews—which can move forward now that the criminal cases have been concluded—will determine whether the officers’ actions violated department policy, and whether the officers can return to patrol duty. Such reviews can take several months to complete, however, and an analysis of cases by the Baltimore Sun found that nine of ten misconduct allegations investigated by Montgomery County Police Department do not result in officers being reprimanded. The officers will remain on paid administrative duty until the reviews are complete.

Several officers have sued Mosby for defamation and false arrest. At least five of six officers charged in Gray’s death have filed civil lawsuits against Mosby and Major Sam Cogen, the Baltimore sheriff’s commander who signed the charging documents in the case. Collectively the lawsuits seek more than $3.5 million in damages for charges including defamation, false arrest, false imprisonment, and federal civil rights violations—among their allegations is that Mosby charged the officers in order to appease Black Lives Matter protesters. They also allege that Mosby did not investigate the case as thoroughly as she had initially claimed, and that she deliberately made false statements about officers’ culpability at the press conference where she announced the charges. (Legal observers have said the chances of the suits succeeding are slim because prosecutors generally enjoy immunity from being sued, and the bar the officers’ attorneys would have to meet—showing that Mosby acted with malice—is high.)

Some people want Mosby banned from practicing law in the state of Maryland. At least two complaints have been filed against Mosby with the Maryland Attorney Grievance Commission in an effort to have her disbarred. Ralph Jaffe, who ran for a Maryland democratic US senate seat earlier this year, wrote in a recent Baltimore Sun Op-Ed that he filed a complaint last May because Mosby’s decision to “placate the liberal agitators” reflected “recklessness and a lack of judicial responsibility” and had strained the relationship between the Baltimore police department and the state’s attorney’s office. (A George Washington University law professor who filed a separate complaint against Mosby in June was previously involved in a successful effort to have a North Carolina district attorney disbarred after the failed prosecution of three Duke University athletes in a 2006 rape case.)

The Baltimore police union nearly doubled its membership dues this year to cover legal expenses for the officers charged in Gray’s death. The local Fraternal Order of Police spent around $800,000 last year on legal fees—the vast majority on the Gray case—and was “quickly becoming insolvent” as a result, FOP president Gene Ryan said. Although charges have been dropped and related expenses are expected to fall sharply, according to Ryan the union will continue collecting the increased dues as a precaution against future “malicious prosecution” of other officers by Mosby’s office.

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Four Reasons Why the Freddie Gray Case Isn’t Going Away Any Time Soon

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How Science Could Help Prevent Police Shootings

by denesefetherston Posted on July 13, 2016

Mother Jones

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Illustration by Richie Pope

One morning in April 2015, Rayid Ghani was sitting among more than a dozen big-city police chiefs and officials in a fourth-floor conference room across the street from the White House. It was the latest in a series of meetings about curbing police abuses that the Obama administration had urgently called. The day before, a cellphone video had emerged showing a white South Carolina cop shooting an unarmed black man in the back, sparking another wave of Black Lives Matter protests and eventually prompting an FBI investigation. Ghani didn’t know much about law enforcement, having spent most of his career studying human behavior—things like grocery shopping, learning, and voting. But the Pakistani-born data scientist and University of Chicago professor had an idea for how to stop the next police shooting.

Back when he worked for the consulting company Accenture, Ghani had figured out how to guess the final price of an eBay auction with 96 percent accuracy. In 2012, he served on Obama’s reelection campaign, pinpointing supporters who were most likely to shell out donations. Ghani now believed he could teach machines to predict the likelihood that cops would abuse their power or break the law. It was, he thought, “low-hanging fruit.”

Experts have long understood that only a small fraction of cops are responsible for the bulk of police misconduct. In 1981, when research showed that 41 percent of Houston’s citizen complaints could be traced to 12 percent of the city’s cops, the US Civil Rights Commission encouraged every police department to find their “violence-prone officers.” Ever since, most major departments have set up a system to identify so-called bad apples. These systems typically use software to flag officers who have received a lot of citizen complaints or have frequently used force. But each department’s model is different and no one really knows how well any of them work. Some may overlook officers with many red flags, while others may target cops who haven’t broken any rules. What’s more, the police chiefs at the White House meeting had a hunch that the bad apples were gaming their systems.

Ghani saw a different problem: The departments simply weren’t using enough data. So he made the top cops gathered in Room 430 an offer. If they handed over all the data they’d collected on their officers, he’d find a better way to identify the bad cops.

The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department in North Carolina signed up, agreeing to give Ghani and his team 15 years’ worth of personnel records and other data, provided that its officers’ identities remained anonymous. Charlotte was a good test lab for Ghani’s project. It had also had two recent police shootings; the case against one officer ended in a mistrial, and the other officer was never charged.

Since 2001, Charlotte had flagged officers for review based on certain criteria, like if the cop had used physical force against a suspect three or more times over the past 90 days. Once an officer was flagged, an internal affairs team would decide whether to issue a warning or to notify his supervisor. But the criteria were built on “a gut feeling,” explains Chief Kerr Putney. “It was an educated guess, but it was a guess nonetheless. We didn’t have any science behind it.” When Ghani’s team interviewed cops and supervisors, almost everyone said the system failed to account for factors like what neighborhoods the officers patrolled or which shifts they worked.

The system also created a lot of false positives, dinging more than 1,100 cops out of a 2,000-person force. “The officers felt like we were accusing them when they didn’t do anything wrong,” Putney says. Out on the street, cops were concerned accidents or even justified uses of force might be seen as foul play. When Ghani’s team dove into the data, they discovered that nearly 90 percent of the officers who had been flagged were false positives. “It was a huge eureka moment,” Putney says.

Identifying who was truly a problem cop was an obvious priority, but Ghani also wanted to predict who was most likely to misbehave in the future. So his team started to mine more data—any available information on the stops, searches, and arrests made by every Charlotte officer since 2000. In the end they analyzed 300 data points, trying to find which ones could best predict an officer’s chances of acting badly.

Ghani’s first set of predictions was shaky; it still incorrectly flagged about 875 officers, though it did correctly identify 157 officers who wound up facing a complaint or internal investigation within the following year—making it 30 percent more accurate than Charlotte’s previous model.

It came as no surprise that Ghani’s team eventually found that one of the best predictors of future problems was a history of past problems—like using unjustified force or getting into car accidents, for example. But the team also confirmed something many experts and officers had long suspected but could never demonstrate: Officers subjected to concentrated bouts of on-the-job stress—handling multiple domestic-violence or suicide calls, or cases involving young children in danger, for example—were much more likely to have complaints lodged against them by community members. “That’s something we’ve known anecdotally, but we’ve never seen empirical evidence before,” explains Geoffrey Alpert, a criminologist at the University of South Carolina.

Ghani’s research is already spurring changes in Charlotte. His team found that when three or more officers responded to a domestic-violence call, they were much less likely to use force than when only two officers were called to the scene. Putney says that realization has led his department to rethink how it handles emotionally charged incidents. He is eager to see what Ghani’s research says about shift rotations as well. Often, the youngest and least experienced cops get stuck on night shifts, which tend to be the most stressful and violent, and “where they can become desensitized and calloused,” he says. Putney also hopes to use Ghani’s research as a guide for traits to look for when hiring new officers. He is circumspect, though, about the ability to accurately foresee a police officer’s behavior. Some variables will always be unpredictable, he says, like when things go wrong at 3 a.m. But with 300 data points, he adds, “maybe there’s some science behind this after all.”

Ghani agrees there are limitations to his big-data approach. Even the most accurate predictions won’t eliminate bad cops. Preventing abuses may require a wider look at how officers are recruited, trained, counseled, and disciplined—as well as addressing personal and systemic biases. Without that layer of human intervention and analysis, personnel decisions based on predictive data alone could ricochet through a police department, harming morale and possibly making things worse.

“This is the first step,” Alpert says. “It may not be a panacea, but we’ve got to start thinking differently.” Eventually, Ghani says, data from dashboard and body cameras will factor into his calculations, and his system will help dispatchers quickly decide which officer is best suited to respond to a certain type of call at any given moment. He hopes most large police departments will adopt prediction models in the next five years. Most of the police officials at that White House meeting have said they’d like to work with him, and his team is negotiating with the Los Angeles County sheriff and the police chief of Knoxville, Tennessee. “I don’t know if this will work at every department,” he says. “But it’s going to be better than what it is now.”

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How Science Could Help Prevent Police Shootings

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Even With a Teleprompter, Donald Trump Is Full of Shit

by AbigailCalderone Posted on June 29, 2016

Mother Jones

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Professor Trump delivered a lecture on the evils of international trade today. Here’s a snippet:

Massive trade deficits subtract directly from our Gross Domestic Product. From 1947 to 2001 — a span of over five decades — our inflation-adjusted gross domestic product grew at a rate of 3.5%. However, since 2002 — the year after we fully opened our markets to Chinese imports — that GDP growth rate has been cut almost in half.

What does this mean for Americans? For every one percent of GDP growth we fail to generate in any given year, we also fail to create over one million jobs. America’s “job creation deficit” due to slower growth since 2002 is well over 20 million jobs — and that’s just about the number of jobs our country needs right now to put America back to work at decent wages.

There are two interesting things about this. First, Trump was reading off a teleprompter, and you can tell. The real Donald Trump would have ranted about the real unemployment rate being 40 percent and 50 million people being out of work or something. Who knows? But the carefully handled Donald Trump produces a well-modulated stream of numbers that actually sounds plausible.

And yet—even with someone else carefully vetting the numbers, they still don’t come close to making sense. Consider: the U6 unemployment rate right now is 9.7 percent. This represents every single human being in the country who wants a job but can’t get one, or who wants a full-time job but can only get part-time work. Even if they’re discouraged and not currently looking for work, they’re counted.

The U6 series only goes back to 1994, but a good guess is that the lowest it’s been in all of postwar history is about 6.5 percent. We’d hit that mark if 5 million more people were working. If you do the calculation based on the current output gap instead of the U6 rate, you come up with roughly the same number.

In other words, 5 million is the absolute max, even in theory. If that many more people had jobs, the economy would be roaring along at a 1960s boom level. So where does 20 million come from? If it were just Trump blathering away, the question wouldn’t be worth asking. But this supposedly came from someone who actually thought about these numbers. And they’re still off by a factor of at least four. I sure hope Trump doesn’t run his business with financial estimates like this.

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Even With a Teleprompter, Donald Trump Is Full of Shit

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