Tag Archives: world

Could we get climate action from … Republicans?

by AnaFinlayczw Posted on April 13, 2017

You can’t fight what you can’t measure. But Davida Herzl has a solution: Her company, Aclima, builds sensor networks that monitor environmental impacts at a hyperlocal scale. Clients can deploy sensors on city streets, inside buildings, even on vehicles, to compile data on pollutants, carbon footprint, and more.

Think of it as a Fitbit for a planet trying to take more steps toward carbon reduction. In addition to working with the Environmental Protection Agency, Aclima has partnered with Google’s Street View fleet to map greenhouse gas emissions and air quality in California.

Herzl ultimately wants her sensor networks to create changes in behavior, both from large institutions and from individuals who can follow their lead. “One of the things we know is that emissions from non-electric vehicles influence climate change — but now we’ve learned that the proximity of my house to a freeway increases my health risk,” she says. “That can influence whether I choose to buy an electric vehicle or a nonrenewable-fuel-based vehicle … That personal moment motivates me every day.”

Workplace culture matters to Herzl, too: She sees Aclima’s multiracial, gender-diverse crew as part of a new vanguard in Silicon Valley dedicated to solving the world’s biggest problems through industry and innovation.

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

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Could we get climate action from … Republicans?

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The US Women’s Soccer Team Scored a Much-Needed Pay Bump

by KristinMickens3 Posted on April 5, 2017

Mother Jones

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On Wednesday, the US women’s national soccer team notched a notable victory in its pursuit for equal pay. After a multi-year labor dispute, the team came to an agreement with the US Soccer Federation that will carry a big bump in compensation and expanded benefits.

The deal, which was part of an ongoing collective bargaining negotiation, will last five years and include the 2019 World Cup and 2020 Olympics. It is expected to significantly raise players’ base compensation and game bonuses, match per diem stipends with their counterparts on the men’s national team, bolster travel benefits, and improve financial aid for players who are pregnant or adopting, ESPNW reported on Wednesday. The US Women’s National Team Players Association, the union representing the players, would also gain some rights to licensing and sponsorship deals.

This week’s announcement ends a long and contentious fight over the team’s union agreement with US Soccer, the governing body for the sport. The fight came to a boil last February when US Soccer sued the union. At odds was whether a 2013 memorandum of understanding between the two sides could stand in for an earlier, expired collective bargaining agreement. The legal challenge came after the union’s former executive director, Richard Nichols, allegedly told US Soccer officials that the memorandum wasn’t valid and that, if the two sides failed to come to an agreement by the end of that February, the national team would be free to strike before the Olympics in Rio (Nichols denied saying this). A federal judge eventually ruled that, under the 2013 agreement set to expire that December, the team could not strike. But after talks stalled late last year and the players’ union changed leadership, the two sides spent the last four months hashing out an agreement.

And last March, five top players on the women’s national team filed a complaint to the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission accusing the national soccer federation of wage discrimination. Financial details from the filing alleged that despite bringing in a projected $18 million in revenue to US Soccer, players on the women’s team earned four times less than their male colleagues. Jeffrey Kessler, who represents the players in the EEOC complaint, told Mother Jones that the charges remained pending and would continue.

As the New York Times reported, the enhanced pay announced this week is not necessarily on par with that of players on the men’s squad, though it means that some players could see their incomes double and earn between $200,000 and $300,000 in a year.

US Soccer president Sunil Gulati said in a statement that the new CBA represents “an important step to continue our longstanding efforts to drive the growth of women’s soccer in the United States.”

Current and former players also lauded the agreement. Megan Rapinoe, a midfielder on the women’s national team, said in a tweet that the agreement reflected a “crucial step” in the national team’s future.

The members of the women’s national soccer team aren’t the only women athletes who’ve made progress toward equal recently. Last week, after threatening to boycott the world championships in Michigan and earning the backing of several players’ unions and 20 US Senators, the US women’s hockey team reached a last-minute agreement with USA Hockey to improve compensation, benefits, and opportunities for future players. It included the prospect of each player making at least $70,000 before performance bonuses in the Olympics and world championships. Previously, the players were paid just $1,000 per month during a six-month training period before the Olympics.

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The US Women’s Soccer Team Scored a Much-Needed Pay Bump

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The Senate Should Grill Trump’s FDA Pick on Antibiotics

by Arterisa Posted on April 5, 2017

Mother Jones

When President Donald Trump tapped Scott Gottlieb to lead the Food and Drug Administration, the pharmaceutical industry breathed a “sigh of relief,” reported Reuters and the Financial Times. That’s because he is “entangled in an unprecedented web of Big Pharma ties,” as the watchdog group Public Citizen put it. If confirmed, he’ll jump to the federal agency that regulates the pharmaceutical industry from the boards of GlaxoSmithKline and several other pharma companies. His work for those industry players netted him “at least” $413,000 between 2013 and 2015, Public Citizen reports. Gottlieb is also a partner at New Enterprise Associates, a venture capital firm that invests in the health care sector.

But Gottlieb, whose Senate confirmation hearing is scheduled for Wednesday, has a scant track record on another aspect of the FDA job: managing the rising crisis of antibiotic resistance. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, germs that have evolved to resist antibiotics sicken at least 2 million people every year and kill at least 23,000. Last fall, all 193 countries in the United Nations—including the United States—signed a declaration calling antibiotic resistance the “biggest threat to modern medicine.”

The FDA’s most direct contribution to the battle to save antibiotics lies in its regulation of farms. About 70 percent of the antibiotics used in the United States go to livestock operations, and the FDA itself, along with the CDC, the World Health Organization, the UK government, and other public health authorities, warn that overuse of drugs in meat farming is a key generator of antibiotic-resistant pathogens.

Meat operations feed their animals regular low doses of antibiotics for two reasons—to help them gain weight faster, and to avoid infections despite tight, unsanitary conditions. Way back in 1977, the FDA acknowledged that these practices undermine the ability of antibiotics to fight human infections—and then for decades, it neglected to do anything about it, under severe pressure from the meat and pharmaceutical industries (more on that here).

On January 1, 2017, the agency at long last finalized a voluntary set of new rules designed to rein in the meat industry’s addiction to antibiotics. But even if meat companies comply with the new policy, the FDA’s plan leaves a gaping loophole: It asks farmers not to use the drugs as a growth promoter, but blesses the practice of using them to “prevent” disease. As the Pew Charitable Trust notes, the “lines between disease prevention and growth promotion are not always clear”—and for many antibiotics crucial to human medicine, farmers can continue as usual, changing only the language they use to describe their antibiotic reliance.

A recent report from the Government Accountability Office chastised the FDA for leaving the loophole, complaining that the agency failed to crack down on “long-term and open-ended use of medically important antibiotics for disease prevention.” It also found that the FDA doesn’t demand nearly enough usage data from meat companies or pharmaceutical suppliers to assess whether its voluntary program is working.

David Wallinga, who covers antibiotic resistance for the Natural Resources Defense Council, says the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, which will hold Gottlieb’s confirmation hearing, should grill him about how the agency will handle farm antibiotic use. A senator should brandish the GAO report and ask how the FDA nominee plans to address its criticisms of the agency’s current antibiotic policy.

Wallinga says that, despite all his ties to Big Pharma, Gottlieb does not seem to be directly involved with companies like Zoetis and Elanco, which specialize in animal drugs. But Gottlieb’s one public statement on antibiotic resistance does not inspire confidence that he fully grasps the issue. In a 2007 post for the conservative American Enterprise Institute, Gottlieb opined that “preventative efforts alone won’t solve our bacterial challenges.” What’s needed, he argued, are incentives for the pharmaceutical industry to develop new antibiotics, which aren’t profitable enough to draw the heavy investment in research and development required for new drugs. That’s true, Wallinga says, but any new antibiotics will quickly succumb to resistance, too, if farm use isn’t reined in.

And this issue is especially relevant for anyone dealing with cancer—that is, everyone. (Gottlieb himself is a cancer survivor, as Wallinga notes. Antibiotic resistance is one of the major threats to chemotherapy patients. A 2015 Lancet study found that at least 26 percent of pathogens causing infections after chemotherapy are resistant to common antibiotics.

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The Senate Should Grill Trump’s FDA Pick on Antibiotics

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Trump’s environmental executive order is everything we feared.

by OliveChristenson Posted on March 28, 2017

When Rebecca Burgess was working in villages across Asia, she saw the impacts of the clothing industry firsthand: waste, pollution, widespread health problems. But in these same communities, from Indonesia to Thailand, Burgess also saw working models of local textile production systems that didn’t harm anyone. She was inspired to build a sustainable clothing system — complete with natural dye farms, renewable energy-powered mills, and compostable clothes — back home in the United States.

The result is Fibershed, a movement to build networks of farmers, ranchers, designers, ecologists, sewers, dyers, and spinners in 54 communities around the world, mostly in North America. They are ex-coal miners growing hemp in Appalachia and workers in California’s first wool mill. In five years, Burgess plans to build complete soil-to-soil fiber systems in north-central California, south-central Colorado, and eastern Kentucky.

People have asked her, “This has already left to go overseas — you’re bringing it back? Are you sure?” She is. Mills provide solid, well-paying jobs for people “who can walk in off the street and be trained in six months,” Burgess says. “This is all about dressing human beings at the end of the day, in the most ethical way that we can, while providing jobs for our home communities and keeping farmers and ranchers on the land.”

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

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Trump’s environmental executive order is everything we feared.

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Raw Data: Health Care Spending Growth Around the World

by BlairGaskin Posted on March 16, 2017

Mother Jones

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I got into a conversation today about my contention from last night that national health care systems are better at controlling costs than the private sector. We all know that US health care costs are the highest in the world, but are they growing faster than the rest of the world? And how about different health care sectors in the US?

I haven’t looked at this in years, so I decided to dig up the data and see. First off, here is growth in health care spending among a representative group of rich countries during recent decades:

This data is a little tricky because some countries changed the way they calculated health care spending during this period. I didn’t use any of them, and it’s possible that one or two might have grown faster than us. But the US is certainly in the top two or three, if not at the very top.

One problem with international comparisons of health care spending is that some countries are aging faster than others, and it stands to reason that countries with older populations will spend more than those with younger populations. Here’s a look at spending growth during the period 1970-2002 that controls for aging:

During these earlier decades there are several countries with higher growth rates than the US. I’m a little surprised there weren’t more, given that postwar European countries were still catching up to the US during the first half of this period.

Finally, here’s a comparison of growth rates just within the US:

The data here tells a pretty consistent story. Despite starting at a higher base, the US is in the top two or three in the world—maybe at the very top—for health care spending growth over the past half century or so. Within the US, private health care spending growth has outpaced both Medicare and Medicaid. Both internationally and in the US, government-run health care programs appear to be better at controlling costs than the private sector.

Of course, there are other sources of data and other ways of doing comparisons, so don’t take this as the last word. If I come across any other studies that seem to have interesting ways of slicing the data, I’ll follow up.

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Raw Data: Health Care Spending Growth Around the World

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Fiscal Conservatives Should Love National Health Care

by BethanyPreece Posted on March 15, 2017

Mother Jones

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David Frum is a conservative, but he grew up in Canada and lacks an American conservative’s instinctive revulsion toward national health care. Today he writes that maybe American conservatives should put aside their revulsion too. After all, the debacle over the Republican health care plan suggests that the public is unwilling to see health coverage withdrawn from millions of people. Democrats seem to have finally won the battle over ensuring health coverage for all, and that means Republicans can’t control costs by simply denying health care to anyone who can’t afford it. They have to figure out other ways to bring down costs:

Republicans have had too many competing goals in health-care reform. They have wanted to lower costs (to free fiscal room for tax cuts and military spending), but also to avoid tangling with entrenched health-care interests….What that money has bought is a huge and costly health sector….“Patient-centered medicine” sought to transform the user of health-care services as the system’s decisive cost-controller. Confronted with the full cost of medicine, the patient would consume care more prudently—or forgo it altogether.

That hope is listing badly. When and if it finally sinks, Republicans may notice something else. The other advanced countries with universal coverage manage to buy significantly better outcomes at the expense of 11 or 12 percent of GDP instead of America’s 16 percent. That extra increment of GDP could pay for a lot of military spending and a lot of tax cuts. Once politics has eliminated coverage reduction as a means of forcing economy, other possibilities open before a center-right party—and indeed have opened for center-right parties across the rest of the English-speaking world. Perversely, the effort to keep government out of health care has empowered health care to consume more and more government dollars. Where government has been deployed more effectively than in the United States, health care has consumed less.

I dissent in part and agree in part. For starters, it’s true that the United States has by far the biggest health care bill of any country in the world:

However, our costs are high because we pay more for everything: doctors, nurses, pharmaceuticals, hospital stays, etc. Politically, it’s impossible to adopt a system that would suddenly cut everyone’s pay by a third. If America were to adopt national health care, our per capita costs would almost certainly start out right where they are now: far higher than any other country in the world.

In the long run, however, Frum is right. It’s ironic, but it turns out that central governments are a lot better at keeping a lid on health care costs than the private sector. The reason is taxes. National health care is paid for out of tax revenue, and the public pressure to keep taxes low is so strong that it universally translates into strong government pressure to keep health care costs low. By contrast, the private sector is so splintered that no corporation has the leverage to demand significantly lower costs. Besides, if health care costs go up, corporations can make up for it by keeping cash salaries low. This is part of the reason that median incomes have grown so slowly over the past 15 years. Corporations simply don’t care enough about high health care costs to really do anything about it.

Over the course of a few decades, then, our costs would probably converge on the rest of the world if we adopted universal health care. Contra Frum, this wouldn’t open any headroom for lower taxes or higher military spending—government spending would still go up even if overall health care spending slowed down—but it would make the country a better, safer, more efficient place. What’s not to like?

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Fiscal Conservatives Should Love National Health Care

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Stop Being Shocked That Teen Girls Give a Shit About Politics

by DNDHeikewgp Posted on March 5, 2017

Mother Jones

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Over the last few months, Teen Vogue‘s clear-eyed, accessible coverage of the Trump administration has caught the collective attention of the internet. A major force behind Teen Vogue‘s recent work is Lauren Duca, the magazine’s weekend editor. Her piece on Donald Trump’s gaslighting of the American people went viral back in December, as did her powerful response to Fox News host Tucker Carlson, after he suggested on air that instead of writing about politics, she should “stick to the thigh-high boots.” Cringe.

But Carlson’s comment was actually less annoying to Duca than the fawning masses who seem so surprised that a magazine for teenagers can also produce great news commentary. I talked to Duca, whose new column launched last week, about her role in shaping Teen Vogue‘s work—and why the magazine’s political coverage reaches far beyond its target demographic.

Lauren Duca

Mother Jones: How did you start writing politically opinionated pieces for Teen Vogue?

Lauren Duca: Their mode of coverage has been really rigorous and committed to informing their audience since I started in January 2016, and also earlier. I was on the weekend that the Pulse shooting happened. It was really a high level of support editorially for taking these things on in a way that was unflinching and honest. So it was honestly kind of an organic segue into becoming more political as things took on more urgency. My job on the weekends was just to be deciding what the coverage was for the weekend. So that meant everything from Selena Gomez has a new Pantene ad to Donald Trump is lying to the American public. That was the scope of possibilities.

I think the reason they hired me, too—it wasn’t just a random thing. I had a culture column called Middlebrow at HuffPost and a reporting background. But weekend editor is typically a more starting-level position, and they took someone who they knew did a lot of cultural analysis. And when I say “they,” I mean specifically Phil Picardi, the editorial director. So hiring me was a very deliberate choice. It was kind of like, these are the ethically driven people with skills that are already in place. And this was kind of the work that Teen Vogue was already doing. So people being shocked is a little annoying.

MJ: It seems like just since Trump was elected, Teen Vogue has really ratcheted up the coverage. Was there a particular moment that you felt a real shift at the magazine?

LD: When I came on, it was already the kind of place that was doing that kind of thing. The wellness stuff, for example, is political in a nontraditional way. LGBTQ work and mental health work and being frank about sexuality—all those kinds of areas where they’ve been “woke” for a long time. It’s just taking on that mode of informing young women, and just a natural segue into traditional politics.

MJ: So it’s annoying that everyone is kind of fawning and surprised that Teen Vogue is showing up with political coverage.

LD: Yeah, there’s a spectrum of those responses. There’s definitely a mode of stealthy condescension sometimes, where I’m almost relieved by the Tucker Carlson comment in a way. Because the sort of “stick to the thigh-high boots” denial of access to a political conversation is such an explicit version of what I was already kind of itching over with the response. Other versions of the Tucker Carlson comment: “Her last post was about Selena Gomez’s makeup.” And it’s like, yes, it’s possible to do both those things, especially because I was on weekends. That’s part of why I didn’t have a specific beat. But the moment we’re living in right now, a politically active voice is required of everyone, and they’re still allowed to have nonserious interests. And I don’t see why that’s not true for young women.

MJ: Right, it’s just sort of baffling, the idea that teens aren’t political.

LD: It’s so frustrating. Especially because there’s so much political potential for young people. Millennials are now as big of a segment of the population as baby boomers. If we can actually can get everyone to show up and vote and be active, there’s a potential to shape elections for the next 35 years based on those statistics. I think young people absolutely care. They care in different ways. That generational divide, how it shows up in political discussions is especially ugly. It’s all, “Ugh, millennials and selfishness and narcissism, and oh my god, they’re taking selfies.” It’s like, “No, this is how we’re interacting with our world, and it’s different from the way you interact with your world, and by the way, thanks for the mountains of debt.”

MJ: So when you write, are you writing for millennials or teenagers?

LD: The audience for Teen Vogue is young women specifically. I think the reason the Trump gaslighting article did so well was that it wasn’t like, “Hey, teen girls.” It was like, “hey everybody.” I think the idea of political coverage that’s accessible to young women, the reason it took off so much is because so much of political coverage—people feel alienated from it, they don’t necessarily have the news literacy to make sense of everything. Everything is legitimately confusing. I think that things that are accessible to more people are just going to empower more people with information. And I think there are more people reading Teen Vogue now. I certainly get a lot of letters like, “I’m a 64-year-old man, and I certainly never would have read Teen Vogue before.” It’s like, relax. In the column I’m starting, I’m hoping it can be breaking things down and providing resources on what to read and what to prioritize in thinking about all the drain clogging and disinformation from this administration. I would love if that went beyond the typical readership.

MJ: What are you hearing from the actual teen readers of Teen Vogue?

LD: I’m hearing some really cool stuff. I have people doing school projects on me, which is insanely amazing. Yesterday I got an email from a high school junior who was doing a speech on me and my work, and do I have a message for her audience. I was like, this is insane, this is incredible. So yes, it’s reaching the people it’s meant to reach, too.

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Stop Being Shocked That Teen Girls Give a Shit About Politics

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The Economy Is Not Booming

by UPNKatia977560 Posted on March 2, 2017

Mother Jones

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Neil Irwin writes about the fabulous Trump economy:

The stock market reached yet another new high on Wednesday, the latest development to make a mockery of what savvy economic commentators thought they knew about the world.

Consider how things looked one year ago. The world economy seemed hopelessly trapped in a cycle of low growth and inflation. Markets recoiled at the mere possibility that the Federal Reserve would raise interest rates. Populist political insurgencies seemed to threaten yet more financial market chaos.

Now, interest rates and inflation forecasts have risen substantially from last winter’s lows; financial markets are shrugging off — or even rallying at the possibility of — imminent Fed rate increases; and it is all taking place during Donald J. Trump’s presidency.

Why do we keep hearing this? Once again, here’s the S&P 500 since the end of the Great Recession. I’ve even adjusted it for inflation just to be super fair:

There nothing there. The stock market is growing at precisely the same rate as it has for the past eight years. If you zoom in and take look at the S&P 500 just since Election Day, you see the same thing: it’s been bouncing tightly around a trend line the entire time. There has been no rally at the possibility of interest rate increases from the Fed.

As for inflation, I’ve already dealt with that today. It’s been closely following a trendline too, and literally nothing new has happened since the election. However, it is true that inflationary expectations started rising last June—though a little context helps here:

If you start your chart in mid-2016, you can make it look like inflationary expectations are taking off like a rocket. But in reality, we’re still nowhere close to where we were five years after the end of the Great Recession, and expectations have flattened out in the past couple of months.

Finally, economic growth. You can talk about animal spirits all you want, but GDP growth in the US has been running steadily between 1 percent and 3 percent since 2010. Last quarter it was 1.9 percent, and there’s no particular reason to think it’s about to take a sustained jump. As for the rest of the world, the IMF doesn’t seem especially optimistic:

US growth might be a little sluggish, but it’s still a lot better than China and Europe, which are projected to decline in 2017 and 2018. The rest of the world will do a little better, but only a little.

However, there is one part of the economy that has unquestionably been booming since Trump was elected: big Wall Street banks.

Wall Street has been kicking major ass since November 8. And why not? The economy may or may not be booming, but they’re pretty sure that Trump is going to lower their taxes and ease up on all those pesky regulations that Obama tried to force on them. If I were a big bank, I’d be pretty excited too.

I’m not especially trying to badmouth the economy here. It’s doing fine, if not great. Growth is decent, wages are showing signs of life, we’re getting close to full employment, and inflation is under control. As labor markets tighten, we might even some real improvement in wages and living standards. That’s not bad, especially compared to the rest of the world. But there’s really not much evidence that we’ve been in any kind of boom times since November. Growth is steady, the stock market is steady, employment is steady, and inflation is steady. Just because Wall Street is excited doesn’t mean they know something we don’t.

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The Economy Is Not Booming

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Bannon Gives Team Trump a New Rallying Cry: "Deconstruct the Administrative State"

by OpalSkillen Posted on February 24, 2017

Mother Jones

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Steve Bannon says that President Trump appointed all his cabinet members with a common goal: “deconstruction of the administrative state.” Meaning what?

Meaning the system of taxes, regulations and trade pacts that the president says have stymied economic growth and infringed upon U.S. sovereignty. Bannon says that the post-World War II political and economic consensus is failing and should be replaced with a system that empowers ordinary people over coastal elites and international institutions.

At the core, Bannon said in his remarks, is a belief that “we’re a nation with an economy — not an economy just in some global marketplace with open borders, but we are a nation with a culture and a reason for being.”

Oh. Bannon is supposedly the brains behind the Trump operation, but this still sounds like gibberish to me. Combined with his calls for increased “sovereignty,” “economic nationalism,” and an epic twilight battle against Arabs for the soul of humanity, I assume this is just a politically correct phrase that describes his personal jihad against non-Christianity without quite saying so. In particular, Bannon’s “deconstruction” appears to encompass a war against Muslims, secular humanists, liberal Catholics, and maybe Jews. But it’s so crude to say that out loud, isn’t it?

In any case, I eagerly await huge crowds of Trump supporters waving signs that say “Deconstruct the Administrative State!!!” What will the competing signs say?

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Bannon Gives Team Trump a New Rallying Cry: "Deconstruct the Administrative State"

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Cleaning Up After Trump

by KayleeHuntingto Posted on February 20, 2017

Mother Jones

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From the Wall Street Journal:

Jim Mattis, on his first trip to Iraq as defense secretary, said he plans to assess the fight against Islamic State in the country and that the U.S. isn’t there to take its oil. “I think all of us here in this room, all of us in America, have paid for our gas and oil all along and I’m sure that we will continue to do so in the future,” he told reporters in Abu Dhabi the day before leaving for Iraq. “We are not in Iraq to seize anybody’s oil.”

So far, Mattis and VP Mike Pence have been fanning out across the world to assure our allies that President Trump thinks NATO is great; that America’s support for Europe is “unwavering”; that Trump will be tough on Russia; and that we’re not going to take Iraq’s oil. In other words, basically the opposite of everything Trump himself has said over the past year.

This is becoming the signature of the Trump administration. At home, Trump says something stupid, and Sean Spicer and Kellyanne Conway gamely go out to clean up the mess and claim that Trump didn’t really mean what he said. Abroad, Mattis and Pence and Rex Tillerson play the same role. They’re like the guys who follow the elephants at a parade.

I’ll bet they didn’t think this was how they’d be spending their time as some of the most powerful people in the world.

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Cleaning Up After Trump

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