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Gary Johnson’s Supporters Aren’t Worried About His Aleppo Gaffe

by ChandraCrandall Posted on September 11, 2016

Mother Jones

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Gary Johnson, the Libertarian Party’s quirky nominee for president, opened his speech at a New York City rally Saturday with an unusual statement for a politician: an apology. During a disastrous appearance two days earlier on MSNBC, the former New Mexico governor had replied to a question about Aleppo, Syria—a besieged city that has been devastated by the country’s five-year civil war—by asking, “What is Aleppo?” Johnson later claimed that he had simply “blanked,” but the comment went viral, making the candidate appear uninformed.

“I wanna start off with an apology to all of you, this whole Aleppo gaffe,” he said to the crowd at the beginning of his speech. “Really, all of us work so hard. We care so much about these issues, and I want you to know that I really, really care about these issues.”

Many who attended today’s rally, however, said Johnson’s misstep did not affect their willingness to vote for him in a contest that has been defined by, among other things, Donald’s Trump’s controversial comments about Muslims, women, and Mexican immigrants.

“If you’re gonna judge a whole candidate based on that then you can’t really vote for Clinton or Trump…both of them have said way worse things,” said Morgan Spicer, a 26-year-old illustrator who is also considering voting for Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate. The fact that Johnson admitted he messed up made a difference for her. “He was a gentleman about it,” she said.

Others at the event, including Kyra Chamberlain, 47—who said she and her husband Chris are volunteer coordinators for Johnson in Maine—expressed similar sentiments.

“The fact that he responded right away with an honest and open answer…we needed to get over that stuff and just get back to the issues,” Chamberlain said.

Many of Johnson’s supporters at the New York rally, including several who said they had backed Bernie Sanders during the Democratic primaries, are attracted to Johnson’s non-interventionist foreign policy, his support for the legalization of marijuana, and his support for marriage equality and abortion rights. But for some, Johnson’s demeanor is also a selling point.

“I like his positivity,” said Eric Antisell, 24, who said that he also voted for Johnson in 2012. “He’s not running on fear,” Antisell added.

Of the half dozen supporters interviewed by Mother Jones at the event, the majority said they would not consider voting for Trump or Hillary Clinton.

“The two candidates from the major parties are just two sides of the same coin,” Chamberlain said.

That is an argument that Johnson and his running mate, former Massachusetts Gov. William Weld, both made in their speeches Saturday. “The two parties in Washington really seem to live with no other thought than to destroy each other rather than getting the people’s business done,” said Weld. Though they now tout the appeal of a third-party option, both Johnson and Weld were Republicans when they served as governors.

While Johnson may have tried to put his Aleppo blunder behind him, not everything at the rally went quite according to plan. When an American flag hoisted on the stage behind him dropped to the floor, Johnson attributed it to something larger.

“Sometimes I think there is a conspiracy,” he said.

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Gary Johnson’s Supporters Aren’t Worried About His Aleppo Gaffe

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Writing Lessons From the Madly Prolific Joyce Carol Oates

by EstellaMassie Posted on September 10, 2016

Mother Jones

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To call Joyce Carol Oates merely prolific would be a towering understatement. Her debut novel, With Shuddering Fall, appeared back in 1964, and Oates, now 78, has been a prodigious presence in American literature ever since, pumping out novels, short stories, poetry, plays, nonfiction works, and even children’s books—more than 100 titles in all. There’s no shortage of accolades either. She’s won a National Humanities Medal, a National Book Award, the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction, two O Henry Awards, and the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, to name just a handful.

Soul at the White Heat, an essay collection out on September 20, is Oates’ third book this year and perhaps one of her more meditative. Drawing on an array of canonical authors past and contemporary, she investigates what motivates some of the most prominent literary voices in the English language to do what they do. The author, whose dedication to the craft is beyond question, also scrutinizes her own relationship with the written word. I reached out to Oates via email to inquire about her process, her myriad voices, and how she maintains this literary stamina.

Mother Jones: In the opening essay of Soul at the White Heat, you stake out the different approaches of famous writers pertaining to the place of politics (or social justice) in their writing. On one side we have the likes of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Upton Sinclair, Charles Dickens. On the other there are Oscar Wilde and Vladimir Nabokov, who dismissed this type of writing roundly (“mediocrity thrives on ideas”). What place do politics hold in your writing?

Joyce Carol Oates: The greatest works of literature seem to embody both “art” and “morality” (of some sort). We come away from the tragedies of Shakespeare with a profound sense of having encountered reality in its most pristine form—yet the art-work is elaborately artificial, the very genre of tragedy in poetry an anti-naturalist perspective. Of course, both Wilde & Nabokov believe in many things, and these things emerge in their writing clearly—for Wilde, the folly of humankind and the (romantic) grandeur of the heroic, lone individual (not unlike Wilde himself); for Nabokov, the possibility of a kind of transcendence through a great, prevailing, superior sort of love (especially in Ada, the most self-congratulatory of novels.) There is a greater art in Dickens than in either Wilde or Nabokov, but it isn’t at the expense of Dickens’ social conscience. It would be difficult for a writer of realism to avoid suggesting a political/moral perspective in his or her fiction. “Politics” per se is absent from my writing but there is usually a moral (if ironic) compass.

Art is about freedom of expression, and should not be molded to fit any propaganda or lofty ideal. I feel akin to Shakespeare in the sense that, as I see it, he lived to dramatize the unfailingly exciting, unfathomably strange interplay among human beings that constitutes “scenes” in his plays, and constitutes “story” in prose fiction. There is something thrilling in the mimesis of life’s surprising unfolding. Long ago I’d said that I am “fascinated by the phantasmagoria of human personality”—this is perhaps even truer now than years ago.

MJ: Fiction writers in particular, it seems, often have an almost filial closeness with their characters. Do you share this?

JCO: Yes, the characters’ voices are sometimes (to me) so absorbing, I feel a terrible loss when I (eventually must) complete a work of fiction. Sometimes I stumble upon a wonderfully irresistible (to me) voice, unexpectedly; the young narrator of Expensive People, for instance, which was my first extended experience of writing in a voice distinctly not my own. Another, the narrator of Zombie. Still another, the narrator of My Sister, My Love. These novels are so special to me. (I don’t expect that they will have nearly the same significance to anyone else.) They represent a kind of fiction I would love to pursue more or less constantly, but dare not. (Why not? Not sure.)

MJ: I’m curious whether you approach reading with the same ferocity you apply to your writing?

JCO: Well, I am more or less reading all the time. My first love was reading, which inspired me to write. Reading yields a wish to write, I think, except if the reading is dull and uninspiring. It’s impossible to read a distinctive stylist like Faulkner, Joyce, Kafka, Mann, Woolf, James—and many more—without wanting to write, however entirely different one’s writing will be. That is the mystery: Reading Henry James can yield prose that is contrary to James, yet inspired by him. Who can understand this?

MJ: So much of your personal life goes into your writing. Is there anything off limits?

JCO: I tend to think in dramatic terms. In life, there may be an actual drama, but it would be the fictionalized, imagined drama that engaged me. Whenever I write about something that is (if remotely) real, it is imbued with the surreal and invented, as in most of my “real” settings like Detroit (them, and Do With Me What You Will), Syracuse (I’ll Take You There), Princeton (American Appetites, The Accursed). Nabokov said, “Ordinary reality begins to rot and stink if the imagination does not transform it.” For me, ordinary reality is a starting point. (Of course there is nothing “ordinary” about reality. Look what Joyce did with Dublin.)

MJ: I’m wondering what drives you to write so much, and what you hope to convey at this point in your career.

JCO: I don’t really seem, to myself, to write “so much”—nor do I write quickly. You would be surprised, perhaps stunned, to see how much revising I do in a typical morning. Obviously, there is pleasure in the execution of any sort of art, and using language, as Nabokov felt also, is an exquisite process. Writing allows for fictitious voices—the voices of persons unlike myself—that might otherwise be muted.

MJ: As someone whose first name is Joyce, who has taught James Joyce extensively, whose writing seems influenced by Joyce, do you ever feel like your literary life was a product of predestination?

JCO: I don’t believe in predestination—except for genetic predilections. Much in our lives is chance. I did not consider that I would lead a literary life. I’d thought initially, as a young girl, that I would be a teacher, since I so admired many of my teachers. And though I loved writing, I did not ever think of myself as a writer.

MJ: Soul and the White Heat contains reviews and literary analyses that have withstood the test of time. Are there works of literature about which you’ve had a radical change of opinion?

JCO: Nothing really comes to mind. I did not appreciate D.H. Lawrence so much as a younger writer as I did some years later, and I have not ever quite appreciated Virginia Woolf as so many others do, though I admire her diary enormously—it is one of the great diaries. Each time I undertake to reread Woolf, I am somewhat baffled by the signature breathlessness and relentlessly “poetic” tone, the shimmering impressionism, so very different from the vivid, precise, magisterial (and often very funny) prose of her contemporary James Joyce.

MJ: Tell me a bit more about your own writing process.

JCO: One of the qualities of writing that is not much stressed is its problem-solving aspect, having to do with the presentation of material: how to structure it, what sort of sentences (direct, elliptical, simple or compound, syntactically elaborate), what tone (in art, “tone” is everything), pacing. Paragraphing is a way of dramatization, as the look of a poem on a page is dramatic; where to break lines, where to end sentences. It’s always a challenge to discover the most effective first sentence, and the most effective final sentence, in a chapter for instance, and in the book as a whole. All these elements are particularly intriguing when a collection of short stories is assembled, for each story relates to the others thematically, and first stories and last stories should be related. It is important for me to discover the ideal title, for without this title the story or novel isn’t quite in focus.

All of these processes are constantly undergoing change, of course. “The first sentence can’t be written until the final sentence has been written.” Only when you have completed a novel, or a story, can you return to the beginning and revise or rewrite. Though I revise constantly as I write, I will usually revise much of the work again after I’ve reached the ending. We have not discussed genres, but each genre exerts a considerable spell, as a kind of “form” to be filled, as a Shakespearean sonnet is filled.

I should stress that, for me, voice is predominant. I rarely write in my own voice except in book reviews and memoirs; otherwise, I am writing in mediated voices, modulated in terms of the characters whom the voices express. To choose the ideal voice for a character is to give a character an ardent and vivid life, to allow him or her to speak, rather than speaking for them, in an older style of omniscient narration. If Shakespeare’s great plays are variants of stories, even novels, you can see how each character is telling his story from his perspective; each is vying with the others for dominance, but in the end, in tragedy, most of these voices will die, to be replaced by the yet more vigorous voice of a younger generation. Shakespeare would seem to have been a person for whom the human voice/personality in all its splendid idiosyncrasy was absolutely enthralling.

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Writing Lessons From the Madly Prolific Joyce Carol Oates

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Larry King Dupes Donald Trump Into Interview on Russian TV

by AbbieBenes Posted on September 9, 2016

Mother Jones

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Today we learn just how easy it is to trick Donald Trump. Yesterday he was interviewed by Larry King on RT, a TV network funded by the Russian government. That’s probably not a good look, especially for a candidate already viewed as alarmingly cozy with Vladimir Putin. So what happened?

Poor Donald. He used to be so sharp. Probably suffering from dysphasia or something.

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Larry King Dupes Donald Trump Into Interview on Russian TV

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Inmates Are Kicking Off a Nationwide Prison Strike Today

by BrandiCade79652 Posted on September 9, 2016

Mother Jones

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Prisoners across the country are gearing up for what they hope will be one of the largest prison strikes in history. According to activists, today prisoners in at least 21 states, including at least 800 inmates in California, will refuse to go to work to protest what they call “modern-day slavery.”

“This is a call to end slavery,” reads the official call for the strike, which coincides with the 45th anniversary of the Attica prison uprising. “They cannot run these facilities without us.” Though there have been prison strikes in the past, including one in Texas in April and one in Alabama in May, this will be one of the first times that inmates have tried to coordinate a strike on a national level.

“Work is good for anyone,” says Melvin Ray, an inmate at the W.E. Donaldson Correctional Facility in Bessemer, Alabama, and a member of an organizing group called the Free Alabama Movement. “The problem is that our work is producing services that we’re being charged for, that we don’t get any compensation from.”

Inmates throughout the country generally hold jobs that help maintain their prisons, such as landscaping, cleaning, and kitchen work. Wages vary from state to state. In at least three states—Texas, Arkansas, and Georgia—prisoners are not paid anything for their labor. In federal prisons, inmates earn about 12 to 40 cents an hour. Nor can prisoners opt out of working, says Paul Wright, an editor at Prison Legal News. “Typically prisoners are required to work, and if they refuse to work, they can be punished by having their sentences lengthened and being placed in solitary confinement,” Wright says.

Phillip Ruiz, an organizer with the Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee (IWOC), was incarcerated in California for nearly 10 years. He recalls having a job baking bread that earned him just nine cents a month, while a can of soda at the commissary cost around $2 and a packet of ramen cost $1. “You have to save up for six months just to buy some food products,” he says. “It reminds me of a sweatshop on a huge, much larger level.”

Ray, who is serving a sentence for murder, says one of the strike’s goals is to raise awareness among prisoners “that not only do we have a significant role in our incarceration, we have a significant opportunity to bring about our own freedom.” The Free Alabama Movement came up with the idea for the strike. Last fall, it circulated a pamphlet encouraging prisoners in each state to come up with their own demands for improving prison conditions.

“We’re realistic. We know that all our demands aren’t going to be given to us,” Ruiz says of the strike. “The hope is that some concrete things develop as far as changing the conditions.” He hopes the protest will send the message to prison authorities that “You guys aren’t going to get away with what you’re doing to prisoners anymore.”

Cole Dorsey, an IWOC organizer in the Bay Area, says that inmates understand that going on strike comes with serious risks: inmates could be put into solitary confinement or segregation, and could lose phone call and visiting privileges—”all the things that prisoners look forward to,” says Ruiz. But both Dorsey and Ruiz say that inmates are prepared to face them. “It’s a slow death that we’re facing anyway,” says Dorsey, “so we’re going to confront the system head-on.”

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Inmates Are Kicking Off a Nationwide Prison Strike Today

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The Science of What to Feed Your Kids

by anunturigratuiteonlinebucuresti Posted on September 9, 2016

Mother Jones

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Bite is Mother Jones‘ new food politics podcast. Listen to all our episodes here, or by subscribing in iTunes or Stitcher or via RSS.

Almost eight months into my parenting adventure, I’ve developed a tolerance for dirty diapers, sleepless nights, and countless rounds of “Itsy Bitsy Spider.” Here’s what I still can’t stomach: the mommy blogosphere clickbait slideshows that keep appearing on my Facebook feed. I’ve been treated to no shortage of grammatically and factually wanting roundups of foods my kid (and I) should “never” eat. So junky are these pieces that I refuse to dignify them with a link.

So imagine my delight when Bite co-host Maddie Oatman and I interviewed a pair of parenting experts whose opinions on kids’ food is backed up by actual science. How refreshing! Journalists Tara Haelle and Emily Willingham, are the authors of The Informed Parent: A Science-Based Resource for Your First Four Years. The book covers many of the most controversial aspects of child-rearing, from sleep training to spanking, but we at Bite, of course, were interested in food. Below are Haelle and Willingham’s thoughts on a few hot topics.

On drinking the occasional glass of wine during pregnancy: “We will never know precisely how much alcohol may or may not affect a particular embryo or fetus because there are genetic markers that will determine that, and you won’t know in advance what your embryo or fetus’ genetic makeup is or which genes are flipped on or off in certain ways. It will also depend on your own metabolism.

However, I will say in the in vitro studies, where you’re looking at the impact of alcohol on embryos in petri dishes, where you see what alcohol does to those developing cells and then you imagine that any alcohol you consume goes straight through the placenta to the fetus—there’s no barrier there—it could be diluted to the point where it doesn’t have any affect, or it could be right at the moment where this crucial group of cells is turning into this other crucial group of cells, and we don’t have any way of knowing that. At the same time, I would say that women who have had several drinks and then find out they’re pregnant should not freak out, because the odds are still in their favor that there are not going to be any serious issues.

But I think we need to avoid the complacency of saying, ‘Oh a few drinks here, a few drinks there, no big deal’…There is no good evidence that even a small amount of alcohol is okay, and there is adequate in vitro evidence to suggest that even small amounts could have adverse effects, and it’s not possible to know how or when those effects will occur.”—Tara Haelle

On eating your baby’s placenta because of its supposed health benefits: “Right now, we can say, if you want to eat your placenta, be safe about it. Follow food-handling guidelines. But don’t expect that it’s going to have anything more than a placebo effect. The one thing I will say that’s very serious: If you are trying to eat your placenta or take placenta pills to ward off postpartum depression, the risk in that is that you might not notice when you are experiencing postpartum symptoms that need to be addressed. Beyond that, we can’t say it does or doesn’t help you.”—Tara Haelle

On whether it’s worth it to shell out for organics for your kid: “In my opinion, no. It’s kind of a luxury that lacks a solid evidence base. The science seems to come down on the really important factor: to make sure that they get foods that are high in nutrients that children need. And whether they’re conventionally or organically grown doesn’t seem to affect the nutrient profile in any way that’s significant. I think it places pressure on parents to spend more than they have, and it’s more important to focus on a variety of colors and a variety of foods that are fresh and as little processed as possible than whether they are conventionally or organically grown.”—Emily Willingham

Hear more fascinating facts—how what you eat during pregnancy can shape your kids’ tastes, the link between screen time and obesity, how long to breastfeed—in the full episode.

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The Science of What to Feed Your Kids

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Washington Post Admits the Hillary Clinton Email Mountain Is a Molehill After All

by NevaFulkerson78 Posted on September 9, 2016

Mother Jones

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The Washington Post writes today that the Hillary Clinton email story is “out of control”:

Judging by the amount of time NBC’s Matt Lauer spent pressing Hillary Clinton on her emails during Wednesday’s national security presidential forum, one would think that her homebrew server was one of the most important issues facing the country this election. It is not.

….Ironically, even as the email issue consumed so much precious airtime, several pieces of news reported Wednesday should have taken some steam out of the story. First is a memo FBI Director James B. Comey sent to his staff….Second is the emergence of an email exchange between Ms. Clinton and former secretary of state Colin Powell….Last is a finding that 30 Benghazi-related emails that were recovered during the FBI email investigation and recently attracted big headlines had nothing significant in them….The story has vastly exceeded the boundaries of the facts.

Imagine how history would judge today’s Americans if, looking back at this election, the record showed that voters empowered a dangerous man because of . . . a minor email scandal. There is no equivalence between Ms. Clinton’s wrongs and Mr. Trump’s manifest unfitness for office.

I’m not quite sure how to take this. On the one hand, hasn’t the Washington Post hyped the email story as much as anybody? On the other hand, even if they have, they still deserve credit for seeing the light.

The email story is one of the hardest kinds of stories for the press to handle appropriately. At the beginning of a story like this, it’s impossible to know if there’s something to it. Then the facts drip out slowly over the course of months as everyone chases leads. At some point it becomes clear that there’s no there there, but reasonable people can disagree on when that point is. Personally, I’d date it from sometime between October of last year, when Trey Gowdy’s committee was unable to find anything even marginally corrupt during an 11-hour inquisition of Clinton, and July of this year, when FBI director James Comey made it clear that she had done nothing remotely serious enough to warrant prosecution.

But that’s it. Since at least July we’ve basically known the contours of the entire affair. Clinton was foolish to use a single email account hosted on a personal server—which she’s acknowledged—but that’s it. Beyond that, it was an unclassified system and everyone treated it like one. The retroactively classified emails are more a spat between State and the intelligence community than anything else. Nor is there any evidence that Clinton was trying to evade FOIA by hosting her email on a private server. That would have been (a) deliberate and calculating deception on a Nixonian scale; (b) phenomenally stupid since nearly all of her emails were sent to state.gov addresses and were therefore accessible anyway; and (c) unusually half-assed since she retained the emails for years after she left office and turned them over as soon as State asked for them. Only an idiot would try to evade FOIA like this, and even her bitterest enemies don’t think Hillary Clinton is an idiot.

Emailgate has been investigated and reported to death. Unless some genuine bombshell drops, further leaks should be treated as obvious partisan attacks, not news, and further production of emails should be noted briefly on page A17. Let’s not turn this into another Whitewater.

And with that out of the way, can we now move on to the Clinton Foundation? It’s been investigated to death as well, and the only thing we’ve learned is that Doug Band needs to shut his pie hole a little more often. Aside from that, literally every shred of evidence points to (a) appropriate behavior from Hillary Clinton and her staff; (b) Bill Clinton leveraging his fame to raise money for charity; and (c) billions of dollars spent on worthy causes. Beyond that, you might find Bill’s personal moneymaking enterprises a little off-putting, but that’s all. So how about if we give the Foundation a rest too?

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Washington Post Admits the Hillary Clinton Email Mountain Is a Molehill After All

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A state.gov Email Account Is Not a Secure Account

by HungPrins1652809 Posted on September 5, 2016

Mother Jones

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I had a conversation today on Twitter that suggests there’s something that perhaps a lot of people don’t quite understand. Hillary Clinton says that she trusted her staff to make sure they sent only unclassified information to her email account. That’s fine for her close aides, who knew what she was doing, but what about people who didn’t realize she was using an account on a private server? Perhaps they felt free to send her classified material because they assumed she was on a state.gov account?

No. First of all, they could see her email address when they sent her stuff. But that’s not the real explanation. The real reason they made sure not to send her classified material was because they themselves were using unclassified systems. Here’s a typical email:

Philip Crowley is sending this email from his state.gov account. Reines, Mills and Verveer also have state.gov accounts. But that doesn’t mean they’re secure accounts. They aren’t. They’re supposed to be used only for nonsensitive material. If you want to exchanged classified information, there’s a separate State Department system. (Or you can do it in person, or over a secure phone or fax.)

That’s why Clinton trusted her staff to follow proper procedures. It didn’t matter whether she had a state.gov address or not. Even if she did, it would have been limited to unclassified material, and everyone knew it. With one trivial exception, everybody followed this rule faithfully: no one in four years sent Clinton anything via email that they thought was sensitive. This remains true even if some classification authorities in the intelligence community—which tends to be far more hypersensitive than State—disagreed several years later.

Bottom line: Whatever else you think of Clinton’s reasons for using a personal server, she wasn’t endangering classified material by using it. Everyone else was also using unsecure email, and they knew not to use it to send classified documents.

However, what Clinton was doing was endangering proper storage and retention of her emails. Why did she do that? I’ll have more about this tomorrow.

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A state.gov Email Account Is Not a Secure Account

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Accused of Tax Dodging, Apple Says It’s the World’s Largest Taxpayer

by MapleHogan4 Posted on September 2, 2016

Mother Jones

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In a landmark ruling handed down on Tuesday, the European Commission ordered Apple to pay $14.5 billion in back taxes to Ireland. The commission found that Ireland’s tax arrangement with Apple, set up in 1991, was a sweetheart deal that violated the European Union’s antitrust statutes and amounted to illegal state aid.

The ruling, while significant, is just a speeding ticket for the tech giant. Apple’s stock is valued at $570 billion, and it holds more than $230 billion in cash, more than 90 percent of which is kept offshore, beyond the reach of the IRS. The EU ruling implies that the company has been holding as much as $115 billion in profits tax-free in Ireland. That’s more than half of the profits Apple has stashed in its offshore subsidiaries, according to its latest financial filings.

Apple has a long and colorful history of tax minimization, having been deemed both a “pioneer” and a “poster child” of stashing corporate profits beyond the reach of tax collectors. In 2003, Apple paid an effective tax rate of just 1 percent on its profits from selling iPhones and iPads outside of the United States. By 2014, that effective tax rate was just 0.005 percent—or $50 in tax for every $1 million in profit.

Despite Ireland’s 12.5 percent corporate tax rate, Apple’s arrangement with the country allowed it to split its international profits between its Irish branch and a head office that existed only on paper. The company paid the already-low Irish rate on the profits it attributed to Ireland and allocated the rest to this phantom, stateless company, which is untaxable. According to CNN Money, Apple made 16 billion euros (roughly $22 billion) in international profits in 2011, attributing less than 50 million (just below $70 million) to its Irish branch. The rest was funneled through the tax-immune, employee-free “head office”. Via this arrangement, Apple has been able to shift up to two-thirds of its global profits to Irish-registered companies, paying an effective tax rate of one percent or less.

Nevertheless, Apple has roundly condemned the European Commission ruling, with CEO Tim Cook penning an open letter decrying it. Cook said that the “vast majority” of Apple’s profits are taxed in the United States, and claimed that Apple is the largest taxpayer in the United States, Ireland, and the world.

Verifying those claims isn’t easy. A 2014 report on corporate taxation by Citizens for Tax Justice omitted Apple due to the company’s “implausible geographic breakdowns of pretax profits.” In other words, it is very likely that profits Apple claimed in Ireland were actually earned in the United States, making it difficult to confirm Apple’s tax assertions. In particular, CTJ raised an eyebrow at Apple’s US tax rate. Apple claimed to have paid a 36.5 percent effective tax rate on its American profits from 2008 to 2012, even though the highest corporate tax rate is 35 percent. Using Apple’s 2015 filings, CTJ found that the company claimed its most recent tax rate was 46.7 percent. (Apple did not respond for a request comment.)

An Irish Times list of the country’s top taxpayers in 2016 gave the number one spot to the pharmaceutical group Medtronic, though Apple placed in the top ten. And as to Cook’s claim that the “vast majority” of Apple’s profits are taxed in the United States, Matthew Gardner, the executive director of the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, says that statement contradicts information in Apple’s own annual report.

Ireland may not be the only beneficiary of the European Commission ruling, which allows for other countries to partake of the penalty, including cash-strapped EU countries like Greece, as well as the United States. According Gardner, the decision provides a jumping-off point for the United States to recoup back taxes from Apple, which he estimates has avoided close to $70 billion in US taxes.

Yet the official US reaction to the ruling has been largely negative. The Treasury Department expressed disappointment, saying that the assessment was “unfair” and “contrary to well-established legal principles.” Last week, the department warned the European Commission against pursuing American companies for tax avoidance, on the grounds that clawback penalties could harm American efforts to collect taxes from domestic companies with international operations. Even though Apple’s $14.5 billion tax bill represents more than a third of Ireland’s total tax revenue and more than the entirety of Ireland’s annual health spending, Irish Finance Minister Michael Noonan has promised to appeal the ruling.

Google, Facebook, and Microsoft also hoard profits in Ireland, benefiting from its so-called “double Irish” tax structure, an arrangement which Ireland has promised to phase out by 2018. European competition regulators are currently investigating tax deals awarded to McDonald’s and Amazon by Luxembourg, as well as Anheuser-Busch InBev’s arrangement in Belgium. Tax deals given to Fiat/Chrysler (incorporated in Luxembourg) and Starbucks (incorporated in the Netherlands) were found illegal by the European Commission in October.

Even if the EU ruling stands, tax havens will not go away overnight. Fortune 500 companies have an estimated $2.4 trillion in offshore holdings, avoiding up $695 billion in US taxes. While President Obama has criticized corporate inversions, the process by which corporations move their headquarters offshore, Congress has been slow to act. The Treasury Department’s reaction indicates that that is unlikely to change.

Still, European regulators aren’t waiting around for American support. EU bodies are actively investigating possible anti-competitive behavior and tax avoidance by Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Netflix, with penalties expected to be announced sometime in the fall. Google is facing tax probes in Spain, Italy, and France, all of which claim the company should have declared more profits and paid more taxes. As James Wentworth, the vice president for Europe at the US-based Computer & Communications Industry Association, a tech lobbying group, tells the Wall Street Journal, “It’s an avalanche coming.”

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Accused of Tax Dodging, Apple Says It’s the World’s Largest Taxpayer

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When the Food in Silicon Valley Isn’t Spicy Enough

by DominikSommers Posted on September 2, 2016

Mother Jones

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In the back of an industrial park in Silicon Valley, Dewi Sutanto stands over a simmering pot of red and bright orange sauce. It’s over 80 degrees in the kitchen, and stacked food containers line the counter. Sutanto has filled about half of the day’s orders, mostly with beef rendang, a clove and cardamom-infused slow-cooked meat. She wipes her hands on her apron before lifting the lid off a steaming pot of white rice.

Sutanto, originally from an island near Sumatra, Indonesia, lives in Milpitas, California. When she moved to the United States 40 years ago, she brought her family’s recipes cooked for friends. Word of her food spread quickly among the Indonesian community, and Sutanto started a small catering business. But now, instead of relying on word-of-mouth to connect with customers, she’s using an app.

Nasi padang is a staple of Sumatra, a dish of steamed rice and miniature bites of fish, vegetables, and spicy meat. Photo courtesy TaroBites.com

Taro, named after the root vegetable commonly used in African and South Asian food, allows users to order straight from cooks who specialize in cuisine from regions around the world. About 50 chefs offer menus that range from Moroccan and West Indian, to Sumatran and Chinese fusion. Silicon Valley is in many ways the perfect place for these chefs to find loyal customers: Busy tech workers, often immigrants, don’t have time to cook but often yearn for the authentic tastes of home. Out of Sutanto’s estimated 300 customers, 250 are from Indonesia.

Krisha Mehra co-founded Taro earlier this year. He said after watching his aunt try to juggle orders for her Indian food via text message, he wanted to make the process easier—for her and her customers. She never wanted to open her own eatery, Mehra said; she just enjoyed making home-cooked Indian food.

“If somebody really cooks well, opening a restaurant is one of the worst things they can do for themselves,” Mehra said, citing high start-up costs and long hours. “A lot of the chefs are stay-at-home moms or people who have a family…they’re adventurous enough to try a business out once a week.”

Now that more people are finding Sutanto through the app, she admits there have been a few changes to her traditional menu, especially when she cooks for non-Indonesians: “Everyone says that my food is too spicy,” she says with a laugh.

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When the Food in Silicon Valley Isn’t Spicy Enough

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Women Say EPA Officials Sexually Harassed Them—and Their Bosses Did Nothing

by Maddiso5893 Posted on September 2, 2016

Mother Jones

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More than a year after troubling allegations of sexual harassment at an Environmental Protection Agency office were exposed in a congressional hearing, the agency’s watchdog says it will conduct an audit of how this office handles sexual-harassment complaints. The office under scrutiny? The same one embroiled in the Flint, Michigan, water crisis months ago.

In a letter sent in August to the EPA’s Region 5 office in Chicago, the agency’s inspector general’s office said it plans to “determine whether Region 5 managers appropriately handled allegations of sexual harassment.” The audit was first reported by the Washington Examiner.

Allegations of rampant sexual harassment in the scientific community have gained prominence in recent years, with institutions such as the University of Arizona and the University of California-Berkeley investigating science professors for alleged harassment of students. Last year, Rajendra Pachauri resigned as head of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change following an accusation of sexual harassment. (Pachauri has denied the allegations.) A 2014 study found that roughly two-thirds of female scientists said they had faced inappropriate sexual pressure during field research, and one quarter said they had been sexually assaulted.

In the case of the EPA, some of the allegations stem from claims made by several whistleblowers who testified before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee in July last year. According to two of the whistleblowers, in 2011 an intern approached Ronald Harris, the Region 5 Equal Employment Opportunity officer at the time, who helped her file an informal complaint alleging that she had been harassed by Paul Bertram, an environmental scientist then employed at the agency. “It bothered her,” said Harris in his testimony to the committee. “She was strong…She kept saying to me, ‘I just want it to stop. How do I get it to stop?'”

Carolyn Bohlen, who was Harris’ supervisor at the time of the allegations, told the committee that the harassment the intern experienced included “touching, groping her, kissing her.”

After more than a dozen attempts to contact Bertram through public records searches, former colleagues, and his former employer, he could not be reached for comment. Bertram retired from the EPA in 2011, according to the House Oversight Committee’s summary of the hearing.

Harris and Bohlen also told the committee that they had been retaliated against by their superiors after raising concerns about allegations brought by the intern and other women. In a written statement to the committee, Harris alleged that he and Bohlen were subjected to bullying and intimidation. Both have since been reassigned within the agency.

On September 1, 2015, the House Oversight Committee sent a letter to the office of the EPA inspector general requesting “a thorough investigation and finding of facts” in the wake of the allegations made at the hearing. The letter included a request to investigate “whether Region 5 managers appropriately handled allegations of sexual harassment, and whether managers retaliated against employees who raised concerns.”

The committee’s chairman, Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), has been an outspoken critic of how the EPA has been run by the Obama administration, blasting the agency for issuing what he described as “unlawful” regulations aimed at combating climate change. He previously voted to prevent the EPA from regulating greenhouse gas emissions to combat climate change. When it comes to the issue of possible harassment and mismanagement at the agency, however, Democratic House members such as Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), have shown solidarity with the chairman in questioning certain practices at the EPA. “Perhaps, and you may not see it, but it sounds like there’s a culture problem,” Cummings said at the hearing.”At least in some of the regions, there’s a culture problem.”

In addition to the newly announced audit of the Region 5 office’s sexual harassment policies and practices, a separate EPA inspector general investigation of the specific retaliation allegations made at the hearing is still ongoing, according to a source with knowledge of the issue. A spokesman from the inspector general’s office said it is agency policy to neither confirm nor deny the existence of an investigation.

This isn’t the only recent controversy involving the Region 5 office. In January, Susan Hedman resigned as the Region 5 administrator, after she was criticized for not having released a report that showed high levels of lead in Flint’s drinking water. The crisis over Flint’s toxic water led to criminal charges filed against state and city employees.

The EPA has faced other recent sexual-harassment allegations as well. Three months prior to the July 2015 hearing, the committee heard testimony from EPA officials, including EPA Inspector General Arthur Elkins, alleging that a high-level employee in the EPA Office of Homeland Security in Washington, DC, had sexually harassed multiple women. When senior officials in the agency were made aware of the man’s alleged conduct, they “did not take any actions” against him, according to Patrick Sullivan, an official with the inspector general’s office who testified at the April 2015 hearing.

The inspector general’s investigation found that the man, Peter Jutro, had “engaged in unwelcomed conduct” with more than a dozen women over the course of 10 years, “including touching, hugging, kissing, photographing, and making double entendre comments with sexual connotations,” according to Sullivan’s testimony before the committee.

In an email to Mother Jones, Jutro called the testimony a “vast exaggeration” and said it “contains many elements that are simply untrue.” Jutro added:

It is true that I have hugged many people, both men and women, and have done so since childhood. My parents were German Jewish refugees who detested the coldness of their former country in the 1930s and strongly encouraged this warmer behavior in me. I also learned to sometimes kiss a person on the cheek or head as a greeting or farewell. In no case was there ever a sexual component to this. I recognize in retrospect that my behavior might have made someone uncomfortable and I feel bad and embarrassed about that, but it was never my intent. There may be actual sexual harassment at EPA, but I was not a part of it.

Karen Kellen, the former president of the largest union representing EPA employees, testified at the July 2015 hearing that during a staff discussion about the sexual-harassment allegations against Jutro, “EPA senior management did not want to hear about the extent of the harassment.”

A spokeswoman for the EPA told Mother Jones in an email, “Harassment of any kind is prohibited at the EPA and will not be tolerated.”

But Chaffetz doesn’t think the agency is doing enough to deal with the issue.

“One of the most toxic environments we have is at the EPA,” he said at the July 2015 hearing. “The mission of the EPA is to protect the environment, protect the people. The problem is the EPA doesn’t protect its own employees.”

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Women Say EPA Officials Sexually Harassed Them—and Their Bosses Did Nothing

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