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Inside 2016’s Weirdest Republican Delegate Fight

by RachelleWoodhou Posted on April 13, 2016

Mother Jones

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The US Virgin Islands Republican caucus would hardly register on the national radar in a normal year. Traditionally, it hardly even registers on the islands’ radar—fewer than 100 people participated in the 2012 event. But with front-runner Donald Trump struggling to lock up the 1,237 delegates needed to clinch the nomination, the behind-the-scenes wrangling for delegates has taken on an unprecedented significance. And that fight has come to this US territory. The chaos there says a lot about what could unfold in Cleveland in July, when the Republicans convene to select their presidential nominee.

This collection of Caribbean islands—which includes St. Croix, St. John, and St. Thomas—is home to one of the smallest Republican parties in the United States, but it has produced one of the nastiest and most unexpected political clashes in recent memory. The battle has played out in radio attack ads and in the courts, featuring allegations including corruption, carpetbagging, and Nazi sympathizing.

In one corner is the island’s Republican Party chair, John Canegata, a shooting-range owner who works at a rum distillery and has led the GOP there for four years. In the other is a faction led by John Yob, a veteran political consultant from Michigan who worked for Sen. Rand Paul’s presidential campaign before moving to the islands last winter. Yob and his wife, Erica, along with Lindsey Eilon, another political operative recently arrived from Michigan, were among the six delegates elected on March 10; Canegata is fighting to have the entire slate replaced and has signaled he may take the challenge all the way to Cleveland.

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Inside 2016’s Weirdest Republican Delegate Fight

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The Pay Gap Is Costing Women $500 Billion Per Year

by NeilMcgehee Posted on April 12, 2016

Mother Jones

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In 1963, President John F. Kennedy signed the Equal Pay Act, a law meant to close the wage gap between working men and women. But more than 50 years later, women on average earn just 79 cents for every dollar paid to men. And according to a new report by the National Partnership for Women and Families that was released before National Equal Pay Day on Tuesday, the persistent wage gap means women lose a combined $500 billion every year.

“It is unacceptable that the wage gap has persisted, punishing the country’s women and families for decades,” wrote Debra L. Ness, president of the National Partnership, in a press release. “At a time when women’s wages are so critical to the economic well-being of families, the country is counting on lawmakers to work together to advance strong, fair and family friendly workplace policies that would promote equal pay.”

The National Partnership used Census Bureau data to analyze the wages of workers in every state and Washington, DC, and broke down the numbers by state and congressional district, as well as by demographic information. Louisiana has the biggest pay gap (women there are paid 65 cents for every dollar), and DC, with just a 10 cent difference, has the smallest.

The gender pay gap is even larger for women of color. African American women are paid 60 cents for every dollar paid to white men, and Latin American women make even less, at 55 cents for every dollar. All in all, the pay gap amounts to more than $10,800 in lost wages for the average woman each year.

That’s costly for families, many of which rely on mothers as the sole or primary breadwinner. According to the National Partnership, mothers are the heads of households in nearly 40 percent of families. Yet the wage gap for mothers is even larger than for women overall: Women with children are paid 71 cents for every dollar paid to fathers, and single mothers make only 58 cents for every dollar to fathers.

Wage inequality got national attention in March when five high-profile players on the women’s national soccer team filed a complaint with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission accusing the US Soccer Federation of gender-based wage discrimination. The players—who last year brought in their third World Cup gold medal and are projected to rake in $18 million in revenue next year—say they are paid four times less than their male counterparts.

“Simply put, we’re sick of being treated like second-class citizens,” wrote Carli Lloyd, who scored a record-breaking hat trick in the final World Cup game against Japan last year, in a New York Times op-ed on her decision to file the complaint. “It wears on you after a while. And we are done with it.”

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The Pay Gap Is Costing Women $500 Billion Per Year

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Dangerous Work for “Crap Money”—The Dark Side of Recycling

by VenusBergeron47 Posted on April 12, 2016

Mother Jones

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Darkness had enveloped the Newell Recycling yard by the time Erik Hilario climbed into a front-end loader on a cold evening in January 2011. Hilario, a 19-year-old undocumented immigrant from Mexico, earned $8 an hour at the industrial park in East Point, Georgia, working amid jagged piles of scrap metal eventually bound for the smelter.

On this day, Hilario was driving a loader in a paved section of the nine-acre yard known as the defueler or car-processing area. Here, according to witness testimony, gasoline was drained from junked cars through a crude process employing a 30-foot crane and an 11-foot-tall structure topped with a spike known as The Puncher. A claw attached to the crane would pick up cars and smash them, gas tank first, onto the spike, spilling gasoline into a trough. The crane then would swing the cars onto a pile, dripping gas along the way.

As Hilario used the loader to slowly push metal scraps, a spark ignited the gasoline on the ground. An intense fire suddenly engulfed him. “Help me!” he screamed, his coworkers later testified.

When the fire was finally extinguished, Hilario’s severely burned body was found 10 feet from the charred loader. A doctor reviewing Hilario’s autopsy later determined that he was probably conscious for as long as five minutes before he died.

Recycling may be good for the environment, but working conditions in the industry can be woeful. The recycling economy encompasses a wide range of businesses, from tiny drop-off centers in strip malls to sprawling scrap yards and cavernous sorting plants. The industry also includes collection services, composting plants, and e-waste and oil recovery centers. Some of the jobs at these facilities are among the most dangerous in America. Others offer meager pay, and wage violations are widespread. Experts say much of the work is carried out by immigrants or temporary workers who are poorly trained and unaware of their rights.

“These are not good jobs,” says Jackie Cornejo, former director of Don’t Waste LA, a campaign to improve working conditions for waste and recycling workers Los Angeles. “People only hear about the feel-good aspects of recycling and zero waste, and rarely do they hear about the other side.”

The last comprehensive analysis of the American recycling industry, commissioned in 2001 by the National Recycling Coalition, estimated that it employed more than 1 million people. Private scrap yards alone generated more than an estimated $80 billion in revenue in 2015. The nation’s largest trash haulers, Waste Management and Republic Services, are also the largest recycling firms. In 2014, recycling generated a combined $1.7 billion in revenue for the two corporations, or about 7.5 percent of total sales.

But many of the companies that do this work are small and may lack the knowledge and resources to establish effective safety procedures. Recycling workers, by virtue of their immigration status or status as temps, often hesitate to speak up when they see hazards on the job or are victimized by the outright illegal behavior of their supervisors.

One of the largest sectors in recycling, scrap yards, has long had high fatality and injury rates. In 2014 its fatality rate was 20.8 deaths per 100,000 full-time workers, more than 9 times higher than manufacturing workers overall. The same year, garbage and recycling collectors had the fifth-highest fatality rate among the dozens of occupations analyzed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. No one tracks how many workers die across all recycling sectors. But at scrap yards and sorting facilities, at least 313 recycling workers were killed on the job from 2003 to 2014, according to the BLS.

A FairWarning analysis of Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) records found that inspections conducted from 2005 to 2014 resulted in scrap yards and sorting facilities receiving about 80 percent more citations per inspection than the average inspected worksite did.

Christopher Webb with his daughter in May 2012, two months before he was killed at a recycling plant in North Carolina. Allison Hildebrand

Recycling is dirty, labor-intensive work. It involves heavy machinery, including conveyor belts, shredders, and grinders that can pose a serious risk of injury or death, especially if they’re not properly serviced or lack basic safety features. Unlike many industrial processes, recycling cannot be completely systematized because it deals with an ever-changing flow of materials in all manner of shapes and sizes. Workers may have to personally handle most of the scrap passing through recycling facilities, potentially exposing them to sharp objects, toxics, carcinogens, or explosives.

“I did not realize the danger,” recalls Alice Pulliam of Reidsville, North Carolina, whose 32-year-old son, Christopher Webb, was killed at the Southern Investments plastic recycling plant in July 2012. It purchased loads of milk jugs, detergent bottles, and other recyclable plastics and ground them into bits for re-sale to businesses that would further process the material.

One day, just a couple of months after joining the 13-employee company, Webb was feeding giant bales of compacted bottles and jugs into an auger with 14 spinning blades. More than a foot long and sharpened to a point, these blades broke up the bales before they were ground into finer pieces. Following the plant’s standard procedure, Webb used a forklift to place the roughly three-foot high bales on an elevated platform next to the mouth of the auger, according to a report by the North Carolina Department of Labor’s Division of Occupational Safety and Health. While the blades spun below him, Webb climbed onto the bales to cut the wires holding them together. Then he used the forklift to push the bales into the auger.

Webb was on top of a bale when he fell into the spinning blades below, crushing his head. A subsequent investigation by the state department of labor found that plant employees weren’t instructed to shut down the auger while climbing on the bales, and that the machine did not have the proper guarding to prevent the blades from hitting workers.

The state cited Southern Investments with 35 safety violations, including 16 “willful violations,” and fined the company the unusually high sum of $441,000. The plant’s owner, Donald Southern, said he could not pay and agreed to close Southern Investments and not manage another plastic recycling business in North Carolina. He declined to comment for this story.

Generally, the hazards at scrap yards and sorting facilities are typical of any major industrial operation Safety measures to make these workplaces less dangerous are well known and widely implemented in other industries. “This is not rocket science,” says Susan Eppes, a Houston-based safety consultant to the recycling industry.

Although OSHA says that 5 of its 10 regions have special enforcement programs covering sectors of the recycling industry, safety advocates say that isn’t enough. “Systematically, across the country, they haven’t given the industry the attention it’s due,” says Eric Frumin, the health and safety director for Change to Win, a partnership of four national unions. Advocates are lobbying the agency to create a national program aimed at sorting plants, where metal, paper, and plastic are separated. The Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries, a trade association, recently announced that it is partnering with OSHA to try to reduce injury and fatality rates.

Yet basic safety procedures are often ignored in recycling plants, experts say. Consider the case of Robert Santos, a 46-year-old line supervisor at a Republic Services plant in North Las Vegas, where he helped dump mounds of recyclables onto a conveyor belt. Using radios, workers would direct front-end loaders to push paper from a holding bay onto the belt, which rolled towards a baler. State safety inspectors later learned that it was common for employees to stand on the moving belt to pull material from the holding bay, or to sweep up material along its sides.

“he was dead working for crap money”
The recycling industry tends to attract the desperate and the downtrodden. “It’s a low end of the economy,” says Eric Frumin of Change to Win. “We’ve shipped all the factory jobs to China, so what is the modern-day equivalent of dirty, dangerous factory jobs? Warehouses and recycling plants.”

Take the case of 51-year-old David Lightfritz, who was killed in a 2011 accident at Marietta Industrial Enterprises in Ohio when he tried unjamming a large machine used to separate glass from paper and plastics. Lightfritz got into the recycling business after his previous employer learned he was a registered sex offender. “He didn’t have anything else,” says his older brother, Willard Lightfritz. “He wasn’t out of prison long and he was dead working for crap money”—around $7 an hour.

Recycling drop-off centers have become a priority target of wage theft investigations in California by the Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division. Ruben Rosalez, the division’s western regional administrator, says these small businesses are among the “worst that we have to deal with,” and are as exploitative as sweatshops or the agricultural industry.

Wage and Hour investigators in Los Angeles have found that these businesses were often paying their employees as little as $55 or $65 a day, regardless of the hours they worked. Some employers were found to not even keep payroll records, and some failed to provide bathrooms for workers.

On the morning of June 8, 2012, work at the sorting facility was delayed two hours because a mass of paper had clogged the holding bay. Once the jam was cleared, Santos stood on the conveyor belt, yanking paper from the bay, when two to three tons of paper suddenly collapsed on top of him. A coworker would later remember him shouting “Stop the belt! Stop the belt!” before he was enveloped in a pile of paper eight feet high.

After the paper was lifted off of him, Santos was found to have minimal brain activity. He was taken off life support six days later and died. The Nevada Occupational Safety and Health Administration fined Republic Services $5,390 for the incident. Asked to justify such a small fine for a fatal accident, Nevada OSHA’s chief administrative officer said it was in line with agency policy, and that investigators did not find “clear indifference to employee safety and health.” Republic Services did not respond to requests for comment.

After his fatal accident, Erik Hilario’s family moved quickly to file a wrongful death lawsuit. Newell Recycling of Atlanta and the Hilario family declined to comment for this story.

Last September, a jury in Fulton County, Georgia, awarded $29.2 million to the Hilario family. Newell and the family subsequently settled out of court. But the pain of a life cut short lingers Hilario’s family, who were described by their lawyer as still reeling from Erik’s death five years later. “He wanted to be somebody,” Erik’s older brother, Efrain, recalled in his tearful testimony during the trial. “He had many dreams.”

Bridget Huber contributed to this report. The Courtroom View Network provided access to its archive of video trial testimony.

FairWarning, which reported this story, is a nonprofit news organization that focuses on public health, safety, and environmental issues. A longer version of the story appears at fairwarning.org.

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Dangerous Work for “Crap Money”—The Dark Side of Recycling

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Angered by Arizona’s Botched Election, One Man Decides to Run for Office

by GerardBoatright Posted on April 11, 2016

Mother Jones

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A week after the botched election in Maricopa County, Arizona—when thousands of people waited hours to cast their ballots—the state’s House Elections Committee got an earful from angry voters.

One of them, local criminal defense attorney Adrian Fontes, stepped to the lectern and ripped into the state’s legislature and Helen Purcell, the county’s chief elections official.

“A political culture that worships at the altar of slashing budgets will eventually lead to the complete collapse of our most sacred democratic institutions: the right for Americans to vote,” he said at the hearing on March 28. “You are as responsible for this as anyone else.”

He concluded, to cheers (and an attempt by the committee chair to cut him off), “I do not want Helen Purcell to resign. I want to beat her at the ballot box.”

That’s exactly what he’s trying to do. Outraged by the long lines at the March 22 election, Fontes filed his paperwork the next morning to run for County Recorder. Purcell, a Republican, has been the recorder since 1988 and is currently in her seventh term. Maricopa County has been a Republican stronghold for decades; Mitt Romney carried the county by 10 points in 2012.

Aaron Flannery, a Republican from the Phoenix suburb of Glendale, also plans to run against Purcell.

The election in Maricopa County, where voters made their choices for the Democratic and Republican presidential nominations, made national headlines for its lines that stretched as long as five hours. There were also questions as to why county election officials decided to cut the number of voting places from 200 to 60, and accusations that the distribution of those locations adversely affected minority neighborhoods. The state’s House Elections Committee held a contentious hearing the Monday following the election about the bungled election, and five days later, the US Department of Justice, citing concerns about the wait times and the impact to minority communities, opened an inquiry into the election. Arizona Secretary of State Michelle Reagan will hold several public meetings this week to talk about the matter.

Fontes, 46, tells Mother Jones that he’s been thinking about the state of elections in Marciopa County since he nearly ran for a state House seat in 2014. (He’d filed paperwork to run, but ended up not running after all). Since then, he’s been active in local Democratic Party politics.

“We’ve been watching our right to vote deteriorate for several election cycles,” he said, “and this was the straw that broke the camel’s back.” Fontes, a former US Marine and lawyer with experience in Arizona, Colorado, and in federal courts in California, says he’s not sure the County Recorder should be a partisan position, because it requires a person who will go to bat for all voters.

During his testimony before the House Elections Committee, he said that Arizona’s primary (technically called a “presidential preference” vote) should be modified to let all registered voters participate—not just those registered with one of the major parties—and called for a re-vote to occur on June 7th.

Adrian Fontes Champion PR

“There’s a lot of people out there, from all sides of the political spectrum, who got cheated,” Fontes says. “I’m not saying I think they got cheated. There’s no question that they were cheated. And the fraud that was committed against these voters wasn’t by a political party. The fraud that was committed against these voters was by their very own government.”

Fontes sees the problems as part of a years-long pattern of systemic voter suppression. Until 2013, Arizona was one of 16 states that were covered under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, requiring them to get federal approval for changes to election procedure or law. In 2013, the Supreme Court struck down the underlying formula behind Section 5, so Arizona and the other “pre-clearance” jurisdictions could make any changes they wanted. If Arizona had still been under pre-clearance, the decision to cut polling locations by 70 percent would likely have required federal approval and may not have been carried out.

Fontes says the long lines were a form of “poll tax” and were no accident. “If you’re a working person, you’ve got two or three jobs, you can’t afford five hours out of a working day,” he says. “You just can’t. Not only for those folks, but for the veterans who are disabled, for the non-veterans who are disabled. For the elderly. For single parents with kids. This wasn’t just an inconvenience. This was a deterrent, an intentional deterrent to keep people from voting.”

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Angered by Arizona’s Botched Election, One Man Decides to Run for Office

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Bruce Springsteen to North Carolina: No Rock for You

by ThaliaMercado Posted on April 8, 2016

Mother Jones

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Add Bruce Springsteen to the growing list of people who are not fans of North Carolina’s new anti-LGBT law. On Friday, just two days before a scheduled show in Greensboro, North Carolina, the Boss announced that he was canceling his appearance in a gesture of protest against the legislation.

“Some things are more important than a rock show and the fight against prejudice and bigotry—which is happening as I write—is one of them,” the rock star wrote in a short statement on his website. “Canceling the show is the strongest means I have for raising my voice in opposition to those who continue to push us backwards instead of forwards.”

Springsteen described the law as “an attempt by people who cannot stand the progress our country has made in recognizing the human rights of all of our citizens to overturn that progress.”

North Carolina’s Public Facilities Privacy & Security Act, known as HB-2, sailed into law two weeks ago. It is best known for striking down all LGBT nondiscrimination statutes across the state and for requiring transgender people to use public restrooms according to the gender listed on their birth certificate. But as ProPublica‘s Nina Martin has reported, the bill’s language also bars workers in the state from suing under a key North Carolina anti-discrimination law, meaning its impact could be even broader than expected.

Here is Springsteen’s statement in full:

“As you, my fans, know I’m scheduled to play in Greensboro, North Carolina this Sunday. As we also know, North Carolina has just passed HB2, which the media are referring to as the “bathroom” law. HB2—known officially as the Public Facilities Privacy and Security Act—dictates which bathrooms transgender people are permitted to use. Just as important, the law also attacks the rights of LGBT citizens to sue when their human rights are violated in the workplace. No other group of North Carolinians faces such a burden. To my mind, it’s an attempt by people who cannot stand the progress our country has made in recognizing the human rights of all of our citizens to overturn that progress. Right now, there are many groups, businesses, and individuals in North Carolina working to oppose and overcome these negative developments. Taking all of this into account, I feel that this is a time for me and the band to show solidarity for those freedom fighters. As a result, and with deepest apologies to our dedicated fans in Greensboro, we have canceled our show scheduled for Sunday, April 10th. Some things are more important than a rock show and this fight against prejudice and bigotry — which is happening as I write — is one of them. It is the strongest means I have for raising my voice in opposition to those who continue to push us backwards instead of forwards.

Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band’s Sunday April 10th show is canceled. Tickets will be refunded at point of purchase.”

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Bruce Springsteen to North Carolina: No Rock for You

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5 Nature Poets to Enjoy During National Poetry Month

by MayraLoureiro Posted on April 1, 2016

If you’ve ever been tempted to write a poem about your favorite landscape, the seashore or the rites of Spring, now’s the time to do it. April is National Poetry Month, so grab a pen and paper, find your favorite outdoor perch and start scribbling.

If you need inspiration, review the works of these five American poets who wrote about nature and used the natural world to help clarify daily life while exploring some of the more complicated aspects of society.

Emily Dickinson – Emily Dickinson lived in Amherst, Massachusetts in the late 19th century. Famously introverted and considered an eccentric by her neighbors, she spent much of her time in her bedroom, where she wrote nearly 1,800 poems during her lifetime. Though she often touched onthemes of death and immortality, she also had a keen understanding of nature, which she may have observed from her bedroom window.

One of her most charming poems is called “A Bird Came Down the Walk”:

“A bird came down the walk:
He did not know I saw;
He bit an angle-worm in halves
And ate the fellow, raw”

Here’s the complete poem.

She also wrote “A Light Exists in Spring.” Here’s the opening stanza:

“A Light exists in Spring
Not present on the Year
At any other period –
When March is scarcely here…”

Here is the complete poem.

Robert Frost – This famous American poet won four Pulitzer Prizes for poetry. He took his inspiration from early 1900s rural life in New England. Though set in nature, his poems often focused on importantsocial and philosophical issues. You’ll probably know him best for “The Road Not Taken,” but don’t overlook “Mending Wall,” from whence comes the famous line, “Good fences make good neighbors.” It starts…

“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun,
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast…

Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
‘Why do they make good neighbors? Isn’t it
Where there are cows?
But here there are no cows…”

Read the complete poem here.

Gary Snyder – Gary Snyder is an essayist, lecturer, environmental activist and yes, poet. A winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, he’s been described as the “poet laureate of Deep Ecology” as well as a writer associated with San Francisco’s Beat Generation. He’s a master at using natural imagery to convey universal truths. You’ll find references to mountains, volcanoes, the Arctic, flora and fauna in his stanzas, and in the books for which he became well known, such as “Turtle Island.”

Enjoy “Pine Tree Tops:”

“In the blue night
frost haze, the sky glows
with the moon
pine tree tops
bend snow-blue, fade
into sky, frost, starlight.
The creak of boots.
Rabbit tracks, deer tracks,
What do we know.”

Mary Oliver – A winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, Mary Oliver was born in the Midwest in 1945. Shebegan writing poetry and later moved to Massachusetts, which servesas her home base while she writes, teaches and leads workshops. Her poetry celebrates the natural world, beauty, silence, love and the spirit. She’s published many books, including “Wild Geese,” which contains a poem by the same name. Here’s an excerpt:

“You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves…”

You can listen to Mary Oliver read the entire poem here.

Ralph Waldo Emerson – Philosopher, Transcendentalist, essayist and poet:Ralph Waldo Emerson was another poet born in Massachusetts, though in 1803. His most famous essay was on “Self-Reliance.” He titled his first book Nature, which expressed his belief that everything in the world is a microcosm of the universe.

Here’s an excerpt from a beautiful, moving poem simply titled, “Nature.”

“Winters know
Easily to shed the snow,
And the untaught Spring is wise
In cowslips and anemones.
Nature, hating art and pains,
Baulks and baffles plotting brains;
Casualty and Surprise
Are the apples of her eyes;
But she dearly loves the poor,
And, by marvel of her own,
Strikes the loud pretender down.”

You can see a list of more Nature poems dating back to Virgil in 37 BCE and including the Japanese poet Basho, at Poets.org.

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are solely those of the author and may not reflect those of Care2, Inc., its employees or advertisers.

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5 Nature Poets to Enjoy During National Poetry Month

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Everybody Is Wrong

by SonyaSleeman7 Posted on March 31, 2016

Mother Jones

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Atrios is unhappy with how the left is treated:

I’m struck by how everything The Left does is wrong. Not just in terms of policy, but tactics. Running a third party candidate is wrong (I actually agree with this generally!), running in a major party primary is wrong, protesting is wrong, protesting the wrong way is wrong, not protesting is wrong, having a journal of important Lefty ideas is wrong, not catering to the feefees of Real Americans is wrong, proposing legislation is wrong, objecting to racism and sexism is wrong. There’s a longer list, I’m sure, but self-styled “moderates” chastise Lefties no matter what they do.

I dunno. I’m pretty sure we all feel this way. I’m a more moderate liberal than Atrios, but as near as I can tell I’m also wrong about pretty much everything. Hillary is a liar, Glass-Steagall did too cause the economic collapse, nobody votes for a squish, it’s all just privilege, Bernie is going to lead a revolution and his numbers add up just fine, I’m a shill for big corporations, Obama is a total sellout, etc.

On the conservative side, where I can take a more Olympian view of things, it’s pretty obvious the same thing is true. The tea partiers hate the RINOs, the RINOs hate Trump, and the Trumpettes hate everyone. One side are sellouts, the other side is just a bunch of purity mongers.

That’s life. In politics, you’re always wrong according to everyone who’s not you—and the more extreme you get, the wronger you are. That’s the price of being in the arena, or even just being a spectator cheering against the Romans.

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Everybody Is Wrong

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5 Ingredients to Avoid in Your Hair Products

by DaciaMcGaw Posted on March 30, 2016

Many Americans are working to reduce their exposure to harmful chemicals and toxic ingredients. Few industries have faced more criticism for their ingredients than the cosmetics industry, and lately, it seems that more and more brands arereleasing organic or all-natural personal care lines.

Shampoos and conditioners, in particular, contain a lot of toxic ingredients. Some health-conscious consumers have taken to making their own haircare products, but others still prefer to use ready-made, expert-developed shampoos and conditioners. If this is you, rest assured that you have plenty of options. You dont necessarily have to spend a fortune, either! A quick glance at a products ingredient list can tell you a lot about its safety. Here are five toxic ingredients youll want to be sure to avoid when picking out a shampoo or conditioner:

Sulfates

Youve probably heard of sulfates by now; pretty much every natural hair care brand states proudly on itspackaging thataproduct is sulfate-free. But what are sulfates, and why should you avoid them?

The main thing to keep in mind when thinking about sulfates is that they are chemical detergents. That in itself isnt necessarily a bad thing, but it means that sulfates are extremely effective at removing dirt and oil … in fact, theyre a little too effective. Sulfates are harsh on the hair and scalp, so they can strip away that natural moisture that keeps your hair shiny and soft.

On a deeper level, they may carry some hormone-disrupting agents along with them. According to Natural Society, many sulfates contain traces of dioxane, a known carcinogen. Dioxane is also thought to disrupt kidney function.

Parabens

Parabens are another widely hated group of chemicals that youve probably been told to avoid in your beauty and personal care products. Parabens are xenoestrogens, which means that they have a similar composition to hormones found in the human body. Xenoestrogens are thought to disrupt hormones and could even post a cancer risk.

Real Simple even noted that British scientistsfound evidence of parabens in samples of breast cancer tissue. Though this doesnt necessarily mean the parabens caused the cancer,most natural-minded folks try to avoid parabens completely.

Fragrance

Fragrances are bad, bad, bad. If the fragrance in your product comes from a natural essential oil, it will say so on the packaging. If all the manufacturers have chosen to tell you about the ingredient is that its a fragrance, thats generally bad news.

The term fragrance allows manufacturers to opt out of including a list of the ingredients used to create that fragrance, as the term is not regulated by the FDA. So really, if fragrance is listed on an ingredient list, theres no telling whats in there. Natural Society even notes that there are more than 3,100 chemicals used by the fragrance industry to concoct these suspicious-sounding additions to your shampoos and conditioners.

Triclosan

Triclosan is an antibacterial agent thats often added to personal care products as a preservative. Dr. Ben Kim notes that we still dont have enough conclusive evidence to say for sure whether or not triclosan is safe for use, but there have certainly been some warning signs to the contrary.

Triclosan is thought to be an endocrine disruptor, which means it can be harmful in the same fashion as xenoestrogens. Its also been linked to immune system problems, weight loss and uncontrolled cellular reproduction, according to Dr. Kim.

Polyethylene Glycol

Polyethylene glycol, or PEG, is also thought to interfere with the body. According to Natural Society, the state of California has classified the chemical as a developmental toxicant, which means that it may interfere with human development. Its also known to be contaminated by the aforementioned cancer-causer dioxane.

If youre looking for shampoos and conditioners that are made with safe, reliable, natural ingredients, you have lots of options at your fingertips. And if youre feeling more adventurous, of course, you could always try making your own homemade hair care products!

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Disclaimer: The views expressed above are solely those of the author and may not reflect those of Care2, Inc., its employees or advertisers.

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5 Ingredients to Avoid in Your Hair Products

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PR guru attempts the impossible: Convince everyone utility companies are all right

by JunkoHowden2 Posted on March 29, 2016

PR guru attempts the impossible: Convince everyone utility companies are all right

By on 29 Mar 2016commentsShare

This story was originally published by The Huffington Post and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The U.S. utility industry, beset by stricter pollution regulations and market forces that have made renewable energy more competitive, is seeking to rebrand itself into something more appealing to the public.

CEOs of many of the country’s major utilities met at a January board meeting of the Edison Electric Institute, the trade organization representing investor-owned electric companies. The institute revealed that it has hired a communications consultant who will help utilities upgrade their image. That includes shifting language, for example, from “utility-scale solar” to something friendlier, like “community solar.”

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“What we are seeing is generally a lot of negative attacks on our industry,” Brian Wolff, EEI’s executive vice president for public policy and external affairs, said at the meeting. Those attacks, he said, include ads that are “designed to harm our industry” and “create more distance between our companies and customers.”

The Huffington Post obtained a full audio recording of the meeting and a transcript from a source who was present, as well as a 2016 corporate goals document and a recap of 2015.

New environmental regulations limiting greenhouse gas emissions and other pollutants are forcing changes at power plants. Meanwhile, solar energy has gotten about 70 percent cheaper since 2009, spurring a rapid expansion. Some utilities have installed their own solar systems. In some cases, utilities have backed attacks on rooftop solar.

Wolff said the industry group had hired New York crisis communications expert Michael Maslansky to help develop a new communication plan that would be presented to members this month.

Maslansky’s firm has helped Toyota weather a massive recall for faulty accelerator pedals and helped Starbucks convince the public its instant coffee was somehow different from others. Maslansky previously worked with Republican messaging guru Frank Luntz, who is credited with getting Republicans to use the term “climate change” instead of “global warming” because it sounds less scary, and for christening President George W. Bush’s “Healthy Forests Initiative” (which benefited the timber industry) and “Clear Skies Act” (which actually relaxed air pollution regulations).

Wolff praised the efforts of companies outside the utility industry to relate to customers, pointing to an ExxonMobil ad showing Americans turning on light switches. But it’s utilities that provide electricity, Wolff pointed out, not oil companies.

“They’re actually using our product to enhance their image,” said Wolff. “The conversation here is one that we need to be leading, not other industries.”

The utility industry, Wolff told industry leaders, needs to talk about “reputation management.” He presented slides on “using the same language, having the same messages.” And he noted that those who are speaking for power producers are going to develop a plan for “language to use, language to lose.”

“Think of this as a style guide going forward,” Wolff said. “We don’t want to call this a campaign. I view this as something that we need to do year in, year out … We need to be able to think about something sustained, something repetitious, something ongoing.”

Maslansky conducted in-depth interviews and spoke with focus groups about the language the industry should use, Wolff said. The research found that many people had no strong opinions about utilities one way or another. But there were also people who held negative views, he said. “They view us a monopoly, no incentives to serve the customers. They view us as stuck in the past in terms of technology.”

Hence the desire to start using terms like “community solar” instead of “utility-scale solar.”

This is a particularly hot issue in the world of electricity policy. Across the country, the price of installing solar panels on homes and businesses has declined, thanks to market forces and policies like tax incentives that make it more appealing.

But in some states, utilities have begun pushing back against policies like net metering, which allows homes and businesses with their own solar power systems to sell excess energy back to the power grid. Policy battles over solar have played out in recent years in Arizona, Nevada, Florida and Hawaii, among other places. (A great Rolling Stone article last month outlined the stakes.)

Utilities argue that net-metering policies aren’t fair, since homeowners and businesses with solar panels don’t pay their share for transmission lines and infrastructure, and can make a profit selling energy to the grid. The utility companies say they’re not anti-solar. In fact, they say, they love their own massive solar installations, usually called “utility-scale” solar.

But advocates for rooftop solar like the idea of someone other than utilities having the opportunity to own solar panels, and the incentives that make that possible. Rooftop solar gives individuals and businesses independence, and expands energy sources beyond utility companies. “Utility-scale” solar is nice, the advocates say, but people and communities should also be producing energy from the sun.

The messaging plan the utility industry is developing seeks to tap into that sentiment by dropping the term “utility-scale solar” in favor of “community solar.”

“‘Community solar’ really resonated with customers … They really wanted something that defined what it meant to be community,” Wolff said at the meeting.

“‘Utility-scale solar,’ owned by the utility, sounds like the utilities are going to be in complete control,” he continued. “We say, ‘Community solar for all.’ Again, there is a way to get around this without trying to get too complicated here. They like the word ‘community solar.’ It conveys the benefits of what we are talking about here.”

“We should proceed with the terminology that is more favorable to us,” he said. “And ‘community’ is clearly more favorable to us.”

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One problem, though: “Community solar” is already a term in use to describe something outside the utility industry. It refers to solar projects owned by the public or a joint entity — panels on a shared housing complex, for example, or an array shared by multiple businesses pooling their funds. There are 91 community solar projects around the country, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association.

Wolff told HuffPost in an interview that Maslansky’s work is part of a larger effort to reshape the utility industry’s communication with customers, which typically only occurs through monthly bills, or when there’s a major storm or outage.

It’s “not really a communications plan as much as it is language that our customers can understand,” Wolff said.

Wolff noted that utilities are making big investments in solar, installing new solar capacity at record rates. “We’re trying to bring our customers along on the journey we’re on, which is a journey of transformation,” he said.

Wolff said he foresees no problems with using the term “community solar.” “Community-scale solar is larger” than simply solar panels, he said. “It’s really universal solar is what it is, because you’re providing to cities, communities.”

Maslansky said the communication project is an effort to help power companies better relate to their customers. “Basically, the industry is more customer focused than ever before,” he told HuffPost in an email. “And they want to make sure that customers understand the steps they are taking to prepare for the future. Customer feedback has told them that their language could improve on both fronts.”

But solar advocates are suspicious. Bryan Miller, a vice president at the rooftop solar company Sunrun and president of the Alliance for Solar Choice, said he thinks the branding effort reflects utilities’ growing concern about rooftop power systems taking a chunk out of their business. He called the co-option of community solar “dishonest politics,” given the fight utilities have waged against rooftop solar in some states.

“Instead of renaming their actions, they should change their actions,” said Miller. “Then they wouldn’t have to worry about how to spin them.”

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PR guru attempts the impossible: Convince everyone utility companies are all right

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Earthquakes caused by oil drillers are now so common that the government just assumes they’re coming

by YaniraHobson Posted on March 29, 2016

Earthquakes caused by oil drillers are now so common that the government just assumes they’re coming

By on 28 Mar 2016commentsShare

Earthquake risk is on the rise, and we mostly have ourselves to blame — or, more specifically, the oil and gas industry.

In a new report, the U.S. Geological Survey maps out earthquake hazards for the coming year, and for the first time, its assessment includes the risk of human-induced earthquakes. There’s now so much earthquake activity caused by the oil industry injecting wastewater underground that 7 million Americans in the central and eastern U.S. are at risk of experiencing a damaging tremor this year.

In parts of north-central Oklahoma and southern Kansas, the risk of dangerous shaking is now about 5–12 percent per year — a riskiness on par with traditionally earthquake-prone California. The difference, of course, is that the Californian quakes as we currently understand them mostly stem from natural processes.

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Fracking itself is not to blame for the increased earthquake risk, USGS says. Rather, it’s the oil and gas industry’s disposal of wastewater that can cause problems. Sometimes that wastewater is the result of fracking, and sometimes it’s the result of traditional drilling processes. After water is pumped into the earth to help extract oil and gas, it comes back up polluted, salty, and altogether undrinkable. To keep it away from people and other critters, it’s often injected back into the earth into deeper formations (below the aquifers we tap for drinking water). This kind of injection can lead to increased pressure at fault zones, which can cause the kind of slippage associated with earthquakes.

The following map shows the new distribution of risk for damaging earthquakes across the United States. Note that the portion on the right — the area updated in the USGS report — includes both natural and human-induced earthquakes, while the portion on the left includes only natural quakes (due to methodological differences).

Click to embiggen.

USGS

Assessing the risk of human-induced earthquakes is tricky because these quakes can potentially be influenced by policy decisions. For example, in Oklahoma — which has already experienced several large quakes this year, including a 5.1-magnitude event in February — regulators are taking steps to curb wastewater injection. It’s the kind of directive that could lead to a lower risk assessment in the future.

Between 1973 and 2008, the U.S. averaged only 24 earthquakes of 3.0 magnitude or larger each year. By 2015, that number had grown to 1,010 — about a 4,000 percent increase over that earlier average. Already by mid-March this year, the earthquake tally stands at 226 in the central United States alone.

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