Senator Dianne Feinstein, who died on Thursday evening at the age of 90, leaves behind a long and complex legacy on climate and environmental issues. Feinstein represented California as a Democrat in the U.S. Senate for more than 30 years, becoming the longest-serving woman in Senate history, and during that time she brokered a number of significant deals to protect and restore the natural…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
The state of California on Friday filed suit against ExxonMobil, Shell, BP, ConocoPhillips, and Chevron, accusing the five oil and gas giants of a decadeslong campaign to mislead the public about the threat fossil fuels pose to the climate. The lawsuit makes California the largest economy on the planet to take legal action against fossil fuel companies over their efforts to deceive the world about…
When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, it cleaved the United States in two. States like Florida, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota and Texas have all banned essential reproductive care and created a national public health crisis. These bans are particularly dangerous for survivors of rape and domestic violence and the advocates who fight for them. Other states, such as Colorado, New York…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Ramona Bowles began smoking commercial cigarettes when she was a teenager. For decades, she smoked as many as four packs a day. Then in 2021, the Pine Hill Indian Tribe, the First People of Fort Jackson in South Carolina, launched a smoking cessation program to address high usage rates among tribal members like Bowles. The program offered peer support, accountability, and an Indigenous lens to…
Lawyers for family say Saudi government took brother’s data in breach and ‘arrested, tortured, and imprisoned’ him and others
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The allegations by lawyers representing Areej al-Sadhan, whose brother Abdulrahman was one of thousands of Saudis whose confidential personal information was obtained by Saudi agents posing as Twitter employees in 2014-15, comes as Twitter Payments LLC, a subsidiary of X (the company formerly known as Twitter), is in the process of applying for money-transmitter licenses across the US.
California Attorney General Robert Bonta (D) announced earlier this week that his office will sue a school district in the state over its recently passed policies targeting transgender youth. In July, the Chino Valley Unified School District Board of Education enacted new standards for how to treat transgender and nonbinary youth in schools. The policies require parental notification any time an…
Janine Jackson interviewed Free Press Action’s Florín Nájera-Uresti about preserving journalism for the July 14, 2023, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: Headlines suggest the California Journalism Preservation Act is a pretty good thing: “Help Democracy by Helping Newspapers” and “What Stories Go Unreported When a Local Newspaper Fades?” evoke concern with the very real loss of local news and of journalism jobs, and the societal harms that come with that.
LA Times (6/7/23)
And “Making Google and Meta Pay for News They Profit From,” “Your Local Newspaper Does the Work; Big Tech Reaps the Ad Dollars,” “Meta Threatens to Pull News Posts From Facebook, Instagram if California Bill Becomes Law,” and “California Lawmakers Advance Journalism Bill, Resist Big Tech Bullying.”
Well, they all suggest that the legislation found the right enemies. So why do advocates like our guest think that it’s good news, really, that the act in its current form has been shelved for the moment?
Florín Nájera-Uresti is California campaign organizer for the advocacy group Free Press Action. She joins us now by phone from the Bay Area. Welcome to CounterSpin, Florín Nájera-Uresti.
Florín Nájera-Uresti: Thank you, Janine. Happy to be here.
JJ: Let me just ask you, what did the California Journalism Preservation Act, also known as Assembly Bill or AB886, what did it say it would do, and why is it that, at least in its current form, you don’t think it would get us there, and might even take us somewhere worse?
Florín Nájera-Uresti: “There is no guarantee that any of the money funneled through this bill would go to supporting high-quality local content and journalists.”
FN: So the California Journalism Preservation Act is a bill that was designed to create a mechanism that would allow news outlets to extract payments from Big Tech companies, including search engines that feature content linking to their news sites. And so there was a lot of excitement around the bill for that reason.
Unfortunately, due to the mechanism of the bill as a link tax, the intended outcome was unlikely to be achieved, and there is no guarantee that any of the money funneled through this bill would go to supporting high-quality local content and journalists.
This bill was modeled in many respects after the Federal Journalism Competition Preservation Act, which was recently reintroduced in Congress after failing to pass in the last session. The CJPA, the California version of the bill, differs from the proposed federal bill in that it creates an even more explicit link tax, where payment is based directly on the number of online impressions of links to news sites on social networks and search engines.
And because of this current approach that rewards clicks, it creates more of an incentive for the production of clickbait and low-quality journalism, in addition to altering the way the open internet works.
So the bill as drafted fails to consider the news and information needs of Californians, and instead of uplifting the production of civic information as a public good, it creates a giveaway to the bill’s most vocal proponents, which include large corporate media outlets, conglomerates. And these are the folks who have actually stopped investing in local news, and are responsible for a majority of the mass layoffs in local newsrooms.
Neiman Lab (4/20/22)
JJ: So when you say “link tax,” I think that’s something that might be a new phrase to people. That really was going to be, if a search engine or if Facebook links to a local news story, they were going to be taxed on that? I mean, is it as direct as it sounds?
FN: Yeah, that’s right. So the bill, as it was written, would essentially tax the number of impressions, or the amount of times a link is shown on social media sites and search engines.
Now, this doesn’t mean that the content of the publisher’s website is available on the social media or search engine site, but simply that it is linked to it, perhaps with a short snippet or a headline.
JJ: And then what turned up in pretty much all of the articles that I read was, with this tax—and we can talk about in a second who is going to be considered a journalistic outlet that can even get in this process—but the big selling point, as far as news coverage, was the proceeds from this tax, 70% of them, were going to be spent on “news journalists…and maintaining or enhancing the production and distribution of news or information.”
Free Press (4/23/23)
That, on its face, sounds good. And 70% sounds like a good number, but it wasn’t clear how that was going to work.
FN: Yeah, it’s exactly like you said. It seems like a very attractive point of the bill, but unfortunately, this provision that at first seems to hold publishers accountable for hiring more journalists or increasing salaries—salaries to the journalists that they already employ, actually, through regular accounting practices—could easily result in an extremely difficult way to track where these funds are spent.
Policy initiatives such as these rarely have this desired impact, because money is fungible, and it’s extremely difficult to ensure that these funds are spent according to the purpose or intent of this legislation.
JJ: I think language is so formative here. Like, bigger picture, including with the federal legislation, there’s a difference between “Let’s shore up our existing newspapers” and “Let’s meet the information needs of the community.” Obviously, there can be overlap or confluence there, but those are really two different goals, aren’t they? And they entail different processes.
FN: Exactly. That’s exactly what we’re trying to get at. What we want to uplift in our communities, and what Californians really need, is community-centered, truly local and responsive journalism, not just propping up an industry that the ad-supported market is already not supporting.
So what we want to see is the increase of this public good, and that’s where policy intervention should come in.
JJ: We often hear—and particularly with, as you know, the very imperfect work of legislative politics—we often hear not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Sometimes something starts out not great, but you work with it, and it gets better.
But we also know that inadequate or wrongly directed reform efforts can make it harder, then, for better ones to advance. People sort of feel like, well, we already tried that, or they just get issue fatigue.
So it seems important to say, with regard to this, that this is not just saying no to this, it’s the fact that we actually have better alternatives, right?
El Tímpano (6/2/23)
FN: Absolutely. And, fortunately, in our work partnering and working with local stakeholders and community newsrooms across the state, like El Tímpano, the coalition of local newsrooms known as LION Publishers, and other individuals, including local journalists, we know that there are much better alternatives to consider.
Our work in New Jersey and elsewhere has shown us that lawmakers can pass really innovative legislation that can actually lead to more informed communities, more reporters on the ground, and sustainable, independent and community-rooted locally.
JJ: And I always think, every time I talk about fighting privatization or making something public, making institutions more public or more accountable, it’s not just an outcome—it’s a process.
And I know that this is part of what you’ve been trying to say, is that it’s not like we’re going to make something for the community and then give it to them. People have to be involved in the earliest stages of creating something, so that it is accountable.
FN: Yeah. And we are in a position where lawmakers can really listen to the concerns of local news advocates and communities that have actually suffered due to the absence of this quality coverage.
So we really hope to work with both our communities and lawmakers in this next phase of the legislative process, to make sure that these folks are heard, and that this results in well-designed policy that actually achieves the goals we’re setting out to achieve.
JJ: We’ve been speaking with Florín Nájera-Uresti, California campaign organizer for Free Press Action. You can track their work online at FreePress.net. Florín Nájera-Uresti, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
FN: Thank you for having me, Janine.
The post ‘What Californians Really Need Is Community-Centered, Truly Local and Responsive Journalism’ appeared first on FAIR.
This post was originally published on FAIR.
This story was originally published by Modern Farmer and is republished with permission.
It starts out as unnoticeable, lying dormant for two or even four years. It’s undetectable. But slowly, the signs come out. Individual branches on a tree point to signs of a nutrient deficiency or perhaps overwatering. Branches will start to yellow and weaken, turning shriveled. Then, the fruit will turn, becoming small and refusing to ripen and, sometimes, dropping early. The fruit is safe for human consumption, but it tastes like battery acid.
And once the tree reaches that point, there’s no coming back. The tree will die within a few years no matter what intervention you try. That’s why when growers see trees infected with Huanglongbing, known as HLB or citrus greening, they immediately look to remove the tree. There’s no other option.
“We’re destroying all the trees that get infected. We’re monitoring and eradicating those where we can. We’re using biological controls with the loss. We’re using every tool in the bag,” says Jared Plumlee, senior vice president of farming at Booth Ranches, in Orange Cove, CA. Plumblee oversees about 7,000 acres in the central San Joaquin Valley, growing navel oranges, valencias, mandarins and even some lemons and grapefruits. There’s no sign of HLB in the Booth orchards yet, and Plumlee aims to keep it that way. The ranch also has its own packing house onsite, where they pack only their own product. That’s both to foster trust with consumers, so they know every piece of fruit in a Booth box came from that farm, and to keep potentially infected fruit out.
HLB is a disease spread by the insect Asian citrus psyllid, which infects trees with a slow-growing bacteria while it feeds on their shoots. It’s commonly spread as the insect travels across borders in fruit or tree cuttings, but a warming climate is speeding things along. The transmission of citrus greening depends on temperature—both to ensure that the psyllid survives and that the host trees are at their most vulnerable. Temperatures between 60 and 90 degrees Fahrenheit allow the disease to thrive. Research has shown that areas that stay within that range for at least half of the year have the most cases of HLB.
As global temperatures rise, citrus greening infestations can—and will—move further north. Tracking the spread of HLB is, in some ways, tracking the warming climate.
Growers can often, unknowingly, graft an infected tree limb onto their otherwise healthy stock. That’s how citrus groves in Texas, and most especially Florida, fell victim to the disease. HLB was first discovered in Florida in 2005, where it promptly tore through the state’s orange and grapefruit groves, infecting close to 90 percent of the citrus. Nearly 20 years later, last season’s orange production is a mere 16 percent of the yield in 2003. And overall citrus production continues to fall, every year for the past five years. This year’s orange yield is predicted to be 25 percent lower than last years’ final production.
Across the country, California growers have paid close attention to what their colleagues in Florida experienced, and they have no desire to go down the same road. “We see those numbers [from Florida], and it’s very, very frightening,” says Plumlee. As California’s annual temperatures fall squarely in the range for optimal HLB transmission, growers are as proactive as possible, even getting state legislation passed that allows citrus growers to essentially tax themselves and put the money towards research and eradication programs. “We’ve been fairly successful thus far; it still hasn’t been found in commercial orchards,” says Plumlee.
California is home to roughly 300,000 acres of citrus production across the state. There have been infected trees found in California, throughout Los Angeles and Orange counties and along the coast near San Diego. But, so far, the bacteria has stuck to residential trees or others easily removed.
“Last year, some nursery stock was sent from South Carolina from a nursery that had citrus canker,” says Victoria Hornbaker, director of the Citrus Pest and Disease Prevention Division at the California Department of Food and Agriculture. “But our team was able to react incredibly quickly to get out to those locations, collect that nursery stock, destroy it and do a one-mile survey of all citrus around those locations to make sure that we didn’t see any symptoms of citrus canker in the environment. So, that is a good example of how quickly we can mobilize and respond to potential issues regarding citrus.”
The citrus industry isn’t just important within California but across the country. Florida may be known for oranges, but it’s primarily grown oranges for juice. California has historically been the home of fresh citrus, growing 85 percent of the nation’s table fruit. “If we lose California citrus, we also lose our national and international market,” Hornbaker says. That means importing more citrus from outside the country, raising prices, and losing a tremendous amount of revenue all around.
That’s why California growers have such a focus on proactivity, and why there’s an incredible amount of research into citrus greening coming out of California institutions. University of California, Riverside is working on a treatment that effectively kills the bacteria, although it’s still being tested within industry. Growers are experimenting with higher-density planting, putting more trees in the ground per acre, to get a higher yield in a shorter amount of time. Although, as Plumlee explains, that also has a significant drawback. “The longevity of planting like that might not be 50 years; it may only be 25. Because once the trees fill in, you kind of hit this plateau on what your production level can be. So, in the face of HLB, you’re going to turn the ground over faster.”
Breeders are also working to find new varieties that are less susceptible to HLB. The Sugar Belle mandarin, the hybrid of a clementine and a Minneola, has shown promising resistance. The new variety was born out of research from the University of Florida and released to growers across the state in 2009. More than a decade later, the Sugar Belle is among the top-grown varieties in the state.
Oddly, there does seem to be a correlation between the size of the citrus and the resistance to the bacteria, although it’s not clear if size is a determining factor or simply a coincidence. But Neil McRoberts, a professor of plant pathology at University of California, Davis, says that grapefruit and large oranges are less resistant to the disease, with smaller mandarins showing more disease resistance. “Because our citrus comes from so few different progenitor lines, they don’t have any natural resistance to the bacterium. So, none of our favorite citrus types and varieties have much resistance in general,” McRoberts explains.
There could be a cure out there. But it won’t be on the horizon in five years or even 10. “I can see that, maybe in 20 years, we’ll be in a position where, if we don’t actually have a cure, we’ll at least have citrus that is able to stand up and keep producing a crop,” says McRoberts. “There are some promises out there, but it’s slow work.”
In the meantime, Plumlee and other growers have no choice but to keep going and keep growing. “You can’t just throw up your hands and quit. You keep doing the science and the trials and try to solve this puzzle. But, in the short term, there’s not a whole lot that you can do that we haven’t already done.” Growers like Plumlee have a crop that’s vital to the state and the nation and a disease that they are fighting to keep at bay. For now, they simply have to hold on—for a decade or two—until more effective methods are available.
“That is the scary part,” says Plumlee. “If we had something today, right out of the lab that works, we’re still 10 or 15 years from proving it out that it actually works. And then another 10, probably before it’s all implemented out in the industry. So, we know that time is not our friend.”
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline There’s no cure for citrus greening. California growers have no choice but to keep going. on Jul 16, 2023.
This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Emily Baron Cadloff, Modern Farmer.
As hot days become more extreme and common, California education researchers are urging that school districts be required to develop heat plans to keep students safe, just as they have policies for severe storms and active shooters. A policy brief published last month by the UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation offers a series of recommendations on how education and building codes can help schools…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
In arid southeastern California, just across the border from Nevada, sits the only large-scale rare earth element mine in the Western Hemisphere. Here at Mountain Pass, rocks are dug out of a 400-foot pit in the ground, crushed, and liquified into a concentrated soup of metals that are essential for the magnets inside consumer electronics, wind turbines, and electric vehicles, or EVs. Today, that metallic soup is shipped to China, where individual rare earths are separated before being refined into metals and forged into magnets. But MP Materials, the company that took ownership of the 70 year-old Mountain Pass mine in 2017, hopes to change that. This quarter, MP Materials plans to begin separating rare earths at Mountain Pass — the first time this key processing step will have occurred in the United States since 2015.
MP Materials says that the new U.S.-based rare earth supply chain it is building will be greener than its counterparts in Asia, where the mining and processing of rare earths have created nightmarish pollution problems. Some of its domestically processed rare earths will be used to make alloys and magnets for EVs, and others could help renewables developers build the wind turbines the U.S. desperately needs to decarbonize its power sector. MP Materials’ rare earths could also get used in everything from smartphones to military weapons like drones and missiles.
Julie Klinger, a geographer at the University of Delaware who studies the global rare earth industry, said MP Materials’ new processing capabilities have the potential to be a “best-case scenario in terms of diversifying the global supply chain and also doing so in a comparably robust regulatory environment.” However, Klinger cautioned that from a sustainability perspective, it’s important to minimize new mining overall. That could mean prioritizing the use of rare earths in clean energy versus military applications, or dramatically ramping up rare earth recycling, an industry still in its infancy.
Owing to their unique atomic structure, rare earth elements are able to generate stronger magnetic fields than other elements susceptible to magnetization, like iron. As a result, rare earths can be used to create the most powerful commercial magnets on the market today. Within the clean energy sector, they’re used in the types of generators popular for offshore wind turbines, as well as inside the motors of EVs and hybrid vehicles. These magnets get their strength from the “light,” or lower atomic weight, rare earth elements neodymium and praseodymium, which are often refined together as a compound called NdPr oxide. A pinch of dysprosium or terbium, two of the scarcer and more valuable “heavy” rare earth elements, is added to the mix to boost the magnet’s heat resistance.
Demand for rare earth magnets is growing quickly. By 2030, under an aggressive decarbonization scenario, the U.S. EV sector’s rare earth magnet demand could rise nearly sixfold compared with 2020 levels, according to a recent report by the U.S. Department of Energy, or DOE. Over the same time frame, rare earth magnet demand for the nascent offshore wind industry could rise from zero to 10,000 tons. These trends mirror what’s expected worldwide: In a report published in April, critical minerals research firm Adamas Intelligence forecasted that the value of the market for rare earths used in magnets will increase fivefold by 2040, driven by rapid growth of the EV and wind energy sectors. By that same year, the world could face a 90,000-ton-per-year shortfall of NdPr oxide, roughly equivalent to total global production in 2022.
As the U.S. competes with other nations for these critical resources, one country dominates their production. In 2020, China was responsible for 58 percent of rare earth mining, 89 percent of rare earth separations (including nearly 100 percent of heavy rare earth separations), 90 percent of rare earth refining, and 92 percent of magnet-making. While the Chinese government has attempted to reduce the rare earth industry’s environmental impact in recent years, decades of poorly regulated production, along with illegal mining, have caused significant air and water pollution, leaving behind nightmarish waste ponds filled with heavy metals and radioactive elements. (Rare earths tend to occur alongside the radioactive elements thorium and uranium, resulting in the production of low-level radioactive waste during mining and processing.) In neighboring Myanmar, where illegal rare earth mining is taking off today, the situation is equally bleak.
MP Materials is positioning itself as an alternative to Asian dominance of the rare earth supply chain and its questionable environmental legacy. The company assumed ownership of the Mountain Pass mine in 2017 after its previous owner, Molycorps, struggled to become profitable and ultimately filed for bankruptcy. Since then, MP Materials has been steadily ramping up rare earth production at Mountain Pass, generating 14,000 tons of rare earth oxides in 2018, and 28,000 tons the following year. Last year, Mountain Pass produced 42,499 metric tons of rare earths — the highest output in the mine’s history, and 14 percent of the global total.
The revival of Mountain Pass has already reconfigured the global rare earth mining landscape. Now, MP Materials seeks to redraw the rest of the supply chain. After rare earths are mined and concentrated in liquid form, companies use additional steps like roasting and leaching to separate out impurities and unwanted elements, such as cerium, a low-value light rare earth. From there, a series of chemical extraction processes separate elements of interest. Separated rare earth oxides are then converted into metals through processes like electrowinning, in which metals are extracted from a solution by running an electric current through it. Rare earth metals are then pressed, or sintered, into a magnetic block which can be cut into a desired shape.
MP Materials is in the process of investing $700 million to develop all of these capabilities in the U.S. In 2021, the company began upgrading the refinery at Mountain Pass to restore its processing capabilities, including rare earth separations. According to the company’s earnings call for the first quarter of 2023, the facility will begin separating NdPr oxide this quarter. With the help of a $35 million contract from the US Department of Defense, or DOD, the company is planning additional upgrades to separate the 11 elements classified as medium and heavy rare earths, focusing on the magnet elements dysprosium and terbium. Once these capabilities exist, MP Materials will ship processed rare earths from California to a new facility under construction in Fort Worth, Texas, where they will be used to make alloys and magnets for General Motors EVs.
While the concentrations of dysprosium and terbium in Mountain Pass ore is low, Matt Sloustcher, senior vice president of communications and policy at MP Materials, says MP Materials expects to produce enough of them to “cover the needs of its Texas magnetics factory.” MP Materials’ facilities will also be capable of refining material mined elsewhere, including material with a higher relative abundance of heavy rare earths.
According to Sloustcher, the company’s goal is to begin supplying General Motors with rare earth alloy later this year, and to produce finished magnets by 2025. At full capacity, MP Materials expects the magnetics factory to produce 1,000 tons of rare earth magnets a year, supporting the production of roughly half a million EV motors.
Under Molycorp’s ownership in the 1990s and early 2000s, the Mountain Pass mine was beset with environmental scandals related to the handling of radioactive wastewater, which Molycorp pumped into open-air evaporation ponds in the desert. To avoid repeating that history, MP Materials is operating Mountain Pass as a “zero discharge” facility, meaning all of the water it uses is recycled on site, with dry waste buried in lined landfills. It claims to be the only rare earth mine in the world to use this process.
From an environmental perspective, MP Materials’ water recycling process process is “a really big deal,” said Klinger. “It significantly reduces their waste footprint.”
The refining processes MP Materials is adding will inevitably increase its environmental footprint. Owing to their chemical similarity, separating rare earths from one another is extraordinarily complicated. Separation processes, which can include hundreds of different steps, consume large volumes of water, chemicals, and energy. The company says it is intent on minimizing resource use, and to that end is recycling chemicals throughout its process. In addition, it has introduced a roasting step to remove cerium before attempting to separate other elements, which MP Materials believes will improve the efficiency of the entire process. Cerium comprises nearly half of the rare earth mixture present in Mountain Pass ore.
Eric Schelter, a professor of chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania who studies rare earth separations, agrees that this roasting step will make it “relatively simpler” to separate the rare earths of value. But he says that if there is no market for the cerium, it must be disposed of as waste, driving up costs. In general, Schelter cautions that the economics of rare earth production are challenging and have worked against U.S. industry in the past.
“Personally, I think it would be great” if MP Materials were successful, Schelter said. “This is a really significant need. But ultimately, the marketplace is going to decide that it is, or is not, worthwhile to buy these magnets or buy these materials from them.”
Sloustcher, from MP Materials, agrees that profitably producing rare earths is challenging considering the large quantities of low-value materials that need to be sifted out first, including both cerium and the light rare earth lanthanum. However, he says the company has identified customers that are “eager for U.S.-produced cerium and lanthanum products,” which are used in water treatment and fuel manufacturing processes, among others. NdPr oxide, Sloustcher says, is the “key commodity that drives economic value” in the rare earth industry, and MP Materials believes it is “a low-cost NdPr producer globally.” Sloustcher added that the company has already proven it can produce rare earths at a profit for several years.
To ensure no valuable rare earth material is wasted, MP Materials is also planning to recycle the scrap produced during magnet fabrication, as well as end-of-life magnets. The goal, Sloustcher says, is re-introduce recyclable material at whatever point in the process flow it is most efficient, whether that means using scrap to produce new magnets directly or separating it back to individual elements. Schelter believes that the latter approach will make it easier to scale up recycling, because different types of magnets contain different amounts of rare earths.
An unknown but likely very small fraction of rare earths are recycled at end-of-life today.
“Recycling magnets from phones, hard drives, and wind turbines can provide magnets of different grades,” Schelter said. “Collecting them from different sources would be enabled by a chemistry that purified the individual rare earths back out again.”
Klinger, the University of Delaware researcher, is excited about MP Materials’ interest in rare earths recycling, and its pitch for a greener supply chain more broadly. However, any new rare earth production will have an environmental cost, and Klinger says that the extent of the impacts ultimately comes down to our consumption of rare earths — not just for clean energy and personal electronics, but also weapons of war. Rare earths are essential for a variety of defense applications, including drones, missile guidance, tank and aircraft motors, and advanced laser systems. In addition to investing tens of millions in both light and heavy rare earth processing at Mountain Pass, the DOD recently awarded Australian company Lynas a $120 million contract to build a rare earth separations facility in Texas, expected online in 2025.
The DOD declined to comment on the fraction of rare earths from these new U.S. processing facilities that could ultimately make their way into defense applications. However, a DOD official told Grist in an emailed statement that generally speaking, rare earth demand for civilian applications like clean energy “vastly exceeds projected defense demand.”
Nevertheless, Klinger worries that military industrial demand for rare earths will rise as conflicts intensify across the world and the global arms trade grows. She suspects that reining in this demand will lead to the “greatest gains” in terms of reducing the need for new mining overall, and she’s in the process of gathering data to explore the idea further.
“I am a little concerned,” Klinger said, “by what the overemphasis on the energy transition might be covering up.”
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A once-shuttered California mine is trying to transform the rare earth industry on Jun 15, 2023.
This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Maddie Stone.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
An LA Times report (6/6/23) about attacks on a Glendale, California, school’s Pride resolution lumped together “pro-and anti-LGBTQ+ demonstrators,” with “some waving American flags and others waving Pride flags.”
Violent outbursts and a handful of arrests at a protest against the Glendale Unified School District, in the Los Angeles suburbs, and its vote to recognize June as LGBTQ+ Pride Month, have thrust the town into the news (Washington Post, 6/7/23). The local police chief “blamed ‘agitators on both sides of the issue’ for inciting violence” (City News Service, 6/7/23).
The anti-trans movement has been targeting public schools for some time now. For far-right organizations and their media organs, it is a perfect storm of anti-education, anti-labor and anti-LGBTQ rage against a public institution, where they see unionized teachers on taxpayer salaries indoctrinating the youth with queer pornography. It’s an old moral hysteria that goes back to the Anita Bryant days, but it still works to rile up reactionary forces and generate headlines.
The battle in Glendale received national media attention (CBS, 6/6/23; CNN, 6/7/23; Fox News, 6/7/23; USA Today, 6/7/23), but it naturally was covered in the leading regional paper, the Los Angeles Times. Some Glendale parents are worried that the LA Times, a major source of information in Southern California, has downplayed the fact that the school district overwhelmingly supports LGBTQ rights in schools, and outside far-right activists have been driving much of the hostility.
While the Times (6/6/23) did note that the Proud Boys, a violent far-right group, had reportedly been on-hand at the protest, it also lumped activists on each side together, reporting that “hundreds of protesters had swarmed outside the building, some waving American flags and others waving Pride flags.” It suggested that the transphobic activists were motivated by concern for their children, noting that “those who were protesting the board’s LGBTQ+ policies chanted, ‘Leave our kids alone’ while naming each of the five members of the board.”
A Daily Beast (6/8/23) report on protests against Glendale’s Pride resolution noted that protesters “included a number of January 6 rioters and members of the alt-right Proud Boys,” and that “none of the far-right protesters the Daily Beast identified have children in the Glendale school district, or even live in Glendale.”
A report in the Daily Beast (6/8/23) painted a fuller picture, describing many of the far-right provocateurs at the meeting as not being Glendale school system parents, and identifying their ringleader as Jordan Henry. Henry, according to the Daily Beast, “moved to the district in 2021”; he “ran for Glendale City Council in 2022 but was not elected,” and “does not have children enrolled in local schools.” Nevertheless, he “has made frequent public comments at school board meetings, speaking against ‘cultural Marxism,’ critical race theory and LGBTQ-inclusive programs.”
Meanwhile, Henry, identified only as a former city council candidate, was quoted by the Times saying, “This is about, specifically, gender ideology being put upon and thrust upon children at Glendale Unified.”
The Times would have been well-served if it had researched its own records. A year ago, the paper (5/11/22) reported on how a records request filed by Henry, who was looking into “social justice learning standards,” led to a backlash against third-grade teacher Tammy Tiber for showing “videos celebrating gay pride to her students.” Henry’s activism prompted so many anti-LGBTQ threats that Tiber had to be “transferred from her classroom for safety reasons”—a controversy that was also covered by the Advocate (5/12/22) and Daily Kos (5/16/22).
In fact, there is a whole website devoted to tracking Henry’s time as a far-right crusader, showing that he is anything but a mere voice in the wind, as the most recent Times coverage portrayed him. There is also a series of YouTube videos documenting him.
Elizabeth Vitanza, a Glendale school district parent, told FAIR that the LA Times has missed an opportunity to put the conflict into context, especially as it pertains to Henry. She said:
The problem is they are not framing this for what it is: an extremist with no children in the schools here, connecting with other extremists like Proud Boys and January 6 insurgents to use our small, successful school district to raise his profile.
Vitanza added, “I find it incredibly frustrating that they don’t look at who’s behind it, just showing fighting in parking lots.”
She criticized a kind of “he said, she said” reporting that portrayed the two sides as equally legitimate voices on either side of the issue. For example, the LA Times (6/6/23) wrote: “GUSD Parents Voices, a conservative group, called for parents to attend Tuesday’s meeting, posting: ‘Join the fight against indoctrination in our schools.’” That sentence was followed by “LGBTQ+ advocacy organization glendaleOUT also urged supporters to attend Tuesday’s meeting.”
In fact, sources told FAIR, the Glendale community largely supports LGBTQ rights in schools, and many of the protesters against the school board were organized by the larger national right-wing push against LGBTQ inclusion.
An earlier LA Times article (5/11/22) about attacks on LGBTQ inclusion at Glendale noted that activist Jordan Henry, who provoked criticism of a teacher’s Pride celebration, was primarily interested in “critical race theory and other practices he finds objectionable.”
For Angela Givant, who organizes with the GUSD Parents for Public Schools, the situation is especially frustrating, because public school advocates had been monitoring the social media of far-right groups who were organizing in anticipation of the school board vote. She told FAIR in an email:
Our group of parent organizers had specifically reached out to the Times after a recent protest featured more violence and outside elements. We shared images and information outlining our concerns. I personally had been in touch with two LA Times reporters in 2022, when they covered Tammy Tiber and how Jordan [and] his group’s accusations had led to threats, causing her to be moved from her school to a different site. At the time, we wanted the Times to cover more deeply Henry’s anti-school organizing, and the group’s media he was publicly trying to connect with.
At the time, the reporters thought covering any further would only give him more attention. When his efforts and the attention he was getting escalated even more intensely in right-wing channels, I reached out again to the same two reporters I’d previously been in touch with, and noted the new connections to known extremists. I did not receive a reply.
But, as Givant explained, the LA Times reporters seem uninterested in the fact that Henry, who had formerly advocated against critical race theory in schools, and other far-right agitators are clearly in a minority against the area’s parents. “The Times still framed their coverage as a clash between ‘concerned parents and activists,’” she said, calling it
actively harmful framing, which denies the fact that those of us in support of our schools and long-standing legislation which protects children of all identities are also “concerned parents.”
And it’s having an impact on the public discussion, she said. “I’ve seen readers convinced that there are two equal opposing sides here, both with extreme elements,” Givant said. “The curriculum and legislation they oppose are extremely popular and supported by the majority of families.”
An LA Times editorial (6/9/23) did not both-sides the story, framing the issue as a school board taking a “courageous stand against an insidious strain of intolerance.”
The LA Times editorial board (6/9/23) supports the school district against the right, saying the school district “took a courageous stand against an insidious strain of intolerance that has been creeping into public school districts across the nation.” The paper’s news coverage does not condone the anti-LGBTQ rage. The problem is that news coverage doesn’t go deep enough, leaving the reader to think that there is homegrown outrage against a supposed sexualized curriculum, rather than a coordinated effort by far-right organizations.
And expect the coverage to become thinner: The LA Times just announced it was laying 0ff 74 news staff positions (Variety, 6/7/23).
Anti-trans rhetoric—and a larger outrage about LGBTQ “grooming,” the idea that education about the existence and rights of sexual minorities is somehow conditioning kids into a certain sexual way of life—is a major part of the contemporary right’s cultural agenda. And that’s amplified in the right’s corporate media (FAIR.org, 1/6/23, 3/30/23). But as the LA Times‘ coverage of the attacks on Glendale’s Pride commemoration shows, centrist elements of the corporate media can also inflict harm when their framing over-amplifies the right’s crusade against an incredibly marginalized segment of the population.
The post LA Times Frames School Board Melee as Clash of Protesters, Not Far-Right Attack appeared first on FAIR.
This post was originally published on FAIR.
Ecological crisis, rural deindustrialization, and real estate speculation have created conditions in which the far right thrives.
This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.
California lawmakers are weighing a bill that would reach well beyond the state’s borders by forcing large companies in the state to detail their greenhouse gas emissions — even those of their suppliers.
The bill, which cleared the state Senate on May 30, would require companies that operate in California and generate more than $1 billion a year to report greenhouse gas emissions across their supply chains. While a lot of companies measure and report at least some of their emissions without any legal requirements, many of them don’t account for all the emissions tied to their products. And they don’t all measure and report emissions in the same way. The Climate Corporate Data Accountability Act seeks to change that by making corporations — from giant banks like Wells Fargo to private, family-owned companies like In-N-Out Burger — follow the same protocol and account for all the emissions linked to their business.
“I think mandatory and standardized corporate climate disclosure is critically important — and even more important in an age of greenwashing,” said Kathy Mulvey, a climate accountability advocate at the Union of Concerned Scientists, referring to the idea that many companies overstate their environmental accomplishments.
To get through the state Assembly, the bill has to overcome ample opposition from industry lobbyists, who successfully stymied a similar proposal last year. The thought of a sweeping climate disclosure mandate has rankled the oil and gas industry, the California Chamber of Commerce, the California Cattlemen’s Association, other agricultural groups, and reportedly the state’s most popular fast-food business, In-N-Out. The burger conglomerate has spent $90,000 lobbying this session on the disclosure bill, among other pieces of legislation. (In-N-Out did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)
The proposed mandate is the latest example of an ambitious climate policy that’s been tied up at the federal level but taken up by California lawmakers. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the federal agency tasked with regulating markets and protecting investors, is considering a similar but less stringent rule requiring only public companies to report their emissions. As the draft SEC rule runs into industry headwinds and provokes legal questions that could prompt officials to whittle it down, California continues to serve as something of a climate-policy test kitchen for the rest of the country. And since many of the country’s biggest companies do business in the state, which boasts the fifth-largest economy in the world, a corporate disclosure mandate there would reach well beyond the state’s borders.
“States have a big responsibility to lead on climate because we’re not going to be able to get much done at the federal level given the politics around climate,” said Melissa Romero, the senior legislative affairs manager at California Environmental Voters. “States have to step up here. That’s literally the role California has played, and we have to play it once again.”
Climate advocates and policy analysts have long been saying that one of the first steps toward lowering greenhouse gas emissions is simply accounting for them. “You can’t manage a problem if you can’t first measure a problem,” said Steven Rothstein, managing director of the Ceres Accelerator for Sustainable Capital Markets, a nonprofit that advocates for market-based climate solutions (Both Ceres and California Environmental Voters have been working closely with legislators on the bill.)
But even as more investors see climate change as a financial risk and more companies, from McDonald’s to Mercedes-Benz, pledge climate action, there’s no shortage of empty promises. “There’s no one system” for accounting for emissions, Rothstein said. “If you’re a customer, or an investor, or a regulator, and you want to compare [companies’ disclosures], it’s very hard to do that.”
Supporters of the California bill say it would expose greenwashing not only by mandating corporate transparency but by implementing a standardized system. In-N-Out, McDonald’s, and Burger King, for example, would have to measure and report their emissions using the same protocol. The bill also would force companies to take into account the greenhouse gasses emitted up and down the supply chain — known as “Scope 3” emissions — not just from their own operations or energy use.
Globally, supply-chains make up, on average, 75 percent of a business’ emissions, but can top 90 percent in some industries, like finance and food. Raising cattle for beef puts a lot more heat-trapping gasses in the atmosphere than turning the lights on at a restaurant. One-third of global emissions are linked to food, and agriculture alone accounts for 10 percent of total U.S. emissions. But only about half of the world’s top 100 food and beverage companies measure, disclose, and set goals to reduce Scope 3 emissions.
Both in California and at the federal level, it’s the proposed requirement to disclose those kinds of emissions — from the cows, not just the kitchen — that has spawned the most resistance from industry groups. In a March 8 letter to legislators, the California Chamber of Commerce — leading a coalition of more than 50 groups — said the mandate would “necessarily require that large businesses stop doing business with small and medium businesses that will struggle to accurately measure their greenhouse gas emissions let alone meet ambitious carbon emission requirements, leaving these companies without the contracts that enable them to grow and employ more workers.” The American Farm Bureau Federation made a similar argument against the SEC rule when it was proposed last year, saying the rule would prove a major burden for farmers and ranchers who aren’t equipped to monitor and report climate pollution, like how much methane their cows burp.
Romero objected to those claims, noting that the Climate Corporate Data Accountability Act would allow companies to use industry averages in their calculations, rather than forcing suppliers to cough up primary data. She also noted that some companies — such as Patagonia, Ikea, and Sierra Nevada, the California-based brewery — have expressed support for the disclosure mandate as a way to help lower corporate emissions and hold companies accountable.
Although the bill narrowly failed in the Assembly last year, Romero said she’s more optimistic about its chances this session since there are several new climate-minded Assembly members. Governor Gavin Newsom, however, hasn’t taken a public position on it yet.
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A California bill could reveal corporate America’s climate secrets on Jun 8, 2023.
This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Max Graham.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s (D) public feud with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) took a new turn on Monday, following the transport from New Mexico to Sacramento of dozens of South American migrants seeking asylum in the U.S.. The flights were arranged by the same contractor that transported migrants from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard last year, The Los Angeles Times reported.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the fossil fuel industry’s challenge to a 2018 court-ordered moratorium on offshore fracking in federal Pacific Ocean waters off the coast of California, a rare victory for environmental groups and coastal conservationists who say producing oil and gas from under the seafloor poses a serious threat to ocean ecosystems and the climate.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
State Farm Insurance Company announced it would no longer take on new insurance clients in California due to the rising cost of fire-related losses. The company cited “rapidly growing” catastrophe risks like wildfires, “historic increases” in construction costs, and a challenging reinsurance market for its decision. The company says that it will continue to insure More
The post Wildfire and California Home Insurance Challenges appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by George Wuerthner.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
Secret United States government documents leaked onto social media platform Discord reveal how the US and its military is striving to reestablish hegemony — targeting adversaries and pressuring allies, report Malik Miah and Barry Sheppard.
This post was originally published on Green Left.
CNN (5/14/23) aired a special report on “What Happened to San Francisco?”—although what mainly happened to the city is that it became the target of right-wing attacks.
CNN has joined the media chorus decrying the death of San Francisco with a one-hour special (Whole Story, 5/14/23). On an episode hosted by Sara Sidner, the network declared that “the city by the bay is now at the forefront of the nation’s homelessness, mental illness and drug addiction crises,” while some “residents worry Northern California’s largest municipality could become a so-called failed city.”
The narrative of San Francisco’s demise has been building for some time. In the corporate press, the closure of a Whole Foods (Newsweek, 4/11/23; ABC, 4/12/23; New York Times, 4/30/23) is like the moment Afghans clung to a US Air Force plane as the nation fell to the Taliban. The story of this store’s exit is more complicated than criminal activity (48Hills, 4/11/23)—but no matter, the narrative holds that permissive policies protecting the homeless have allowed a zombie army of criminals to exert control over the city, countered only by a police force that can do nothing, Democratic politicians fearful to act and tech bosses cowering in fear.
CNN has had some more reasonable coverage of the city in the past, placing its crime statistics in a national context (4/7/23) and a fuller picture of why a much-hyped Nordstrom closure had less to do with crime and more with general retail trends (5/3/23).
But in the lead-up to the documentary, CNN (5/14/23) also told a heart-wrenching story about a San Francisco mother who lamented that the city’s policies led her son into drugs. She may genuinely feel that way, but that doesn’t make it so: West Virginia leads the nation in drug deaths (CBS, 8/2/22), with more than three times the per capita rate of California; why is there no media drumbeat against Gov. Jim Justice?
A local ABC reporter’s hyperbolic comment to CNN (5/14/23) becomes a Fox News headline (5/15/23)—because it’s San Francisco.
It’s normal for the Rupert Murdoch–owned press (Fox News, 5/11/23, 5/15/23; Wall Street Journal, 5/3/23; New York Post, 5/4/23) to obsess about San Francisco falling apart. Tucker Carlson, formerly Fox News’ most-watched host and a San Francisco native, ran a weeklong special on the city called “American Dystopia” (Fox News, 1/6/20), which Media Matters for America (1/13/20) described as “dehumanizing homeless people.”
But this trend is embraced by the more centrist corporate press, too. The New York Times gave space to venture capitalist Michael Moritz (2/26/23) to lament the excesses of Democratic governance and repeatedly eulogize the city’s retail establishments (12/17/22, 2/9/23, 4/30/23).
When tech boss Bob Lee was fatally stabbed “in an enclave of high-rise condominiums,” the Times (4/7/23) took at face value statements from fellow tech bosses about how he was the victim of the out-of-control anarchy allowed by progressive leaders. As it turned out, Lee was likely the victim of sex-and-drug-fueled, tech boss–on–tech boss violence (New York Post, 5/12/23, 5/14/23).
In another example of media outlets showing their hand, CBS (4/7/23) reported, “A brutal and brazen attack on former San Francisco Fire Commissioner Don Carmignani” left “him battling for his life and neighbors on edge.” The person who had attacked the former commish was unhoused, fueling the sentiment that the streets were filled with roving sociopaths targeting people of all ranks, including civic leaders. Along with the Lee killing, “both violent assaults have ignited an intense debate over safety in the city.” The New York Post (4/7/23) highlighted the attack as evidence that “no one is safe” in San Francisco.
The New York Times (4/7/23) presented the stabbing of tech exec Bob Lee as a symbol of “deepening frustration over the city’s homelessness crisis”—before another “tech leader” was arrested for his murder.
But as with the Lee story, the media assumptions were premature. Video evidence later revealed that Carmignani had attacked the homeless man with bear spray and that the homeless man acted in self-defense, although Carmignani disputed this (CBS, 4/26/23; CNN, 4/27/23; LA Times, 5/11/23). In fact, lawyers for the homeless man in the case “alleged that Carmignani may be involved in other incidents in which homeless people were sprayed in the Cow Hollow and Marina District neighborhoods” (NBC, 4/27/23). Carmignani also has his own checkered past: he resigned from his commissioner post “one day after he was arrested in connection with an alleged domestic violence incident” (SFGate, 9/24/13).
At the Atlantic (6/8/22), Nellie Bowles—a California heiress (SF Chronicle, 10/28/21; LA Times, 6/14/22), former New York Times writer, and a participant in the conservative and lucrative anti-woke propaganda network (Daily Mail, 11/5/21)—brought an out-of-touch upper-class perspective to a San Francisco she, like CNN, called a “failed city.” Her heart no doubt bleeds for suffering people on the street, but she placed the blame on a regional culture of permissiveness:
This approach to drug use and homelessness is distinctly San Franciscan, blending empathy-driven progressivism with California libertarianism. The roots of this belief system reach back to the ’60s, when hippies filled the streets with tents and weed. The city has always had a soft spot for vagabonds, and an admirable focus on care over punishment. Policy makers and residents largely embraced the exciting idea that people should be able to do whatever they want to do, including live in tent cities and have fun with drugs and make their own medical decisions, even if they are out of their mind sometimes.
San Francisco’s homicide rate has dropped by half since the early 2000s—prompting the Atlantic (6/8/22) to run an essay on “How San Francisco Became a Failed City.”
The casual use of the phrase “failed city” is insulting hyperbole. The analogous term “failed state” was popularized in an early ’90s Foreign Policy article (Winter/92–93), which defined the “failed nation-state” as one “utterly incapable of sustaining itself as a member of the international community”—a definition that seems designed to invite intervention by said “community.” (See University of Chicago Law Review, Fall/05.) A failed state is a technical term for a place, due to internal mismanagement and external pressure, where civil society has broken down amid collapse in central governance. There is no major world body that considers the loss of a Nordstrom store (SF Chronicle, 5/3/23) a valid metric of societal meltdown.
But even if we forgive journalists for their flexible poetic license, the media narrative that San Francisco stands outside the US norm runs contrary to reality.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data shows that the highest rates of drug overdose mortality are in West Virginia, Tennessee, Louisiana and Kentucky, with California far behind. US Department of Agriculture research shows that the highest poverty states are Louisiana, West Virginia, New Mexico and Mississippi. Forbes’ list (1/31/23) of the most dangerous cities cites New Orleans, Detroit, St. Louis and Memphis (as well as Mobile and Birmingham, Alabama), but not San Francisco. San Francisco/Oakland does appear on the list of cities with the highest homelessness rates—but seven cities have higher rates, including New York City, Los Angeles and Las Vegas.
Toro Castaño (KQED, 9/27/22) on homeless “sweeps”: “A lot of things they’re taking are warm clothes, warm jackets, blankets, things that you need just to survive.”
It’s a surreal media narrative for Zal Shroff, a senior attorney at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area, who recently helped win an injunction against what the group calls the city’s discrimination against homelessness. “On paper, the city has 3,000 shelter beds for 8,000 unhoused people,” he told FAIR, noting that while residents may be frustrated with street homelessness, there are often few places for the homeless to go.
“There is no avenue for an unhoused person to seek shelter. You can only get it after you’ve been harassed by police and beg for it,” he said. “You can’t go to the police and ask, they have to threaten you with citation and arrest, and then maybe they’ll ask to see if there is a shelter bed.”
Despite the media narrative about the city’s lawlessness, LCCRSF’s summary of the lawsuit states—and so far, one court agrees—that the city’s unhoused population are subjected to “brutal policing practices that violate [their] civil rights.” As Toro Castaño (48Hills, 9/27/22), who was homeless in the city from 2019 to 2021, told the court, “I was harassed by San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) and Department of Public Works (DPW) staff several times a week for the entirety of the two years I was homeless.” He noted in the court papers that while living on the street in May 2020, he was “harassed by police officers from the Castro beat every day for five weeks.”
KQED (9/27/22) noted that “Castaño had his belongings taken from him by the city four times during the pandemic, according to the complaint,” and that “while Castaño was unhoused, he said he was asked to move nearly every day.”
As Sarah Cronk, an unhoused person said in court papers, “If the City does not have adequate shelter or housing for us, then it should not be harassing us.” She and her partner “are just trying to scrape by and build as much of a life for ourselves as possible—with both dignity and safety,” Cronk said, but the city government “makes that impossible for us.”
This is hardly the “lunatics are running the asylum” image the media would have the public believe is the case.
For Shroff, the situation is frustrating, because while the injunction is meant to stop police harassment of the homeless while encouraging more affordable housing and shelter services, in the city’s narrative, his organization is calling for outright anarchy (SF Chronicle, 1/23/23; Law360, 4/26/23). “That’s the narrative that’s out there and is winning the day in the press,” he said, “which is interesting, because we’re winning this case.”
San Francisco did have a high murder rate in the early 2000s, but it has since fallen dramatically, to close to the US and California averages.
And then there’s the mythology of the city’s soaring crime. As the San Francisco Standard (12/22/22) reported, the city’s “crime totals cratered in 2020 when the city hunkered down for the first waves of Covid,” and then rose again. But “crime in San Francisco has not yet increased to pre-pandemic levels—with a few key exceptions.”
The online news outlet said crime rates “have fallen tremendously since peaks in the 1990s, which mirrors trends in cities across the country,” and that the “city’s most recent crime spikes came in 2013 for violent crime and 2017 for property crime.” (To put this admission into perspective, the Standard is financed by the aforementioned Michael Moritz.)
SFGate (1/7/22) also noted that violent crime rates in San Francisco matched national trends, and were not national outliers. Despite ideas of the city’s lawlessness and left-wing calls to “defund the police,” the “San Francisco Police Department budget increased overall by 4.4% from 2019 to 2022” (KGO-TV, 10/13/22), and Mayor London Breed has called for “a $27 million budget supplemental to fund police overtime citywide” (KGO-TV, 3/8/23). The right blamed the property crime spike on former District Attorney Chesa Boudin, but with his recall (FAIR.org, 7/11/22), there is no longer a George Soros–backed boogeyman to hold up as a scapegoat (The Hill, 6/9/22).
Oddly enough, the “failed city” has “the fastest growing economy in US” (SFGate, 11/16/22).
And while it is true that the city’s population has decreased (SF Chronicle, 1/26/23), the housing market is still hot, “with rents returning to pre-Covid levels, and a median one-bedroom there now priced at $3,100 a month, up 14% and the highest in two years” (Bloomberg, 7/26/22). The city’s tourism economy is currently booming, after the pandemic hurt the sector (SF Chronicle, 3/21/23). The city’s unemployment rate had been sitting at a low 2.9% (KPIX-TV, 3/10/23; SF Chronicle, 4/21/23) and has only recently spiked—not because of some progressive City Hall policy, but thanks to nationwide layoffs in the locally concentrated tech sector (SF Chronicle, 4/21/23). One report (SFGate, 11/16/22) showed that the “San Francisco Bay Area led the country in economic growth in 2022, with a 4.8% increase in GDP.”
The skyrocketing wealth is connected to the homelessness problem, Schroff said. While there is a mythology that street homelessness in San Francisco is the result of outsiders traveling there for the services and the mild weather, Schroff notes that LCCRSF research has shown that a bulk of unhoused people are long-time area residents who cannot find shelter.
The group’s lawsuit said “San Francisco failed to meet state targets for affordable housing production between 1999 and 2014—ultimately constructing 61,000 fewer very low-income units than needed.” From “2015 to 2022, the city only built 33% of the deeply affordable housing units it promised, and only 25% of actual housing production went to affordable housing.”
“The mental health services and the drug addiction services are robust, but that doesn’t solve that two thirds of unhoused people are reporting that they can’t find affordable housing,” Schroff said. “There is no exit option.”
New York Post (10/15/22): “San Francisco is governed by a leadership that is so enamored of the city’s progressive, humanitarian self-image that the idea of enforcing basic laws—even ones that save people’s lives like controlling drug sales and consumption—has come to be regarded as reactionary.”
In a country where a state like Texas has seen six mass shootings this year (USA Today, 5/8/23), why is San Francisco the object of such obsession? The San Francisco Bay Area, in the imagination of the American right, is the closest thing America has to Sodom and Gomorrah. San Francisco is identified as the epicenter of gay liberation, the home of the hippies, vegan restaurants and streets where Cantonese and Spanish are heard as much as English. Berkeley, just across the Bay, was a primary site of 1960s student radicalism and counter-culture, and the flagship UC campus continues to be a dreaded symbol of state-funded academic wokeness (Berkeleyside, 12/12/18; Washington Examiner, 8/21/22; Daily Beast, 10/31/22).
Affluenza has cleansed the Bay of much of its bohemia, but its national political legacy lives on in Democratic establishment titans like Nancy Pelosi and Dianne Feinstein. The area’s tech industry, like Hollywood in the southern end of the state, is a lucrative capitalist sector that the right, not incorrectly, associates with Democratic voting (Open Secrets, 1/12/21; Wall Street Journal, 2/20/21).
So to paint San Francisco as an example of failed governance is, in the right-wing narrative, to prove that the progressive urban experiment has broadly failed. The Nazi Joseph Goebbels probably didn’t say, “Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth,” but it remains a central principle of propaganda. The failure of San Francisco has been a drumbeat in the conservative press, and as a result, major corporate media are acting as if this is true, or at least arguable. CNN, the New York Times and the Atlantic, by buying into this mythology, are able to call into question compassion for the homeless and alternatives to aggressive policing.
In fact, the Washington Post (5/21/19) seemed a little lonely in the corporate press when it argued that it was an “earthquake of wealth” that permanently worsened the city’s character, not the poor or any overly compassionate social policy.
But all of the recent negative coverage surrounds the issue of homeless people. Homelessness and poverty are the tragic results of unfettered capitalism and raging inequality, whether it’s in rural West Virginia or in San Francisco’s Tenderloin. Drug addiction is a public health crisis that the US healthcare system neglects, like many other ailments. These media pieces aren’t appalled by the conditions that create seas of unhoused people, but are appalled that housed, professional people have to deal with them. The New York Times and CNN are in many ways different from Fox News and the New York Post, but this is where their worldviews meld.
This is media outrage focused not at systemic injustice, but based in disgust at the victims of injustice.
Correction (5/30/23): A previous version of this article incorrectly said that tech boss Bob Lee, a former resident of the Bay Area, was killed “near his home.”
The post The Character Assassination of San Francisco appeared first on FAIR.
This post was originally published on FAIR.
Congressman Ro Khanna announced on CNN Sunday that he will not run for U.S. Senate and is endorsing fellow California Democrat Rep. Barbara Lee in the closely watched 2024 race for retiring Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s seat.
“I have concluded that despite a lot of enthusiasm from Bernie folks, the best place, the most exciting place, action place, fit place, for me to serve as a progressive is in the House of Representatives,” said Khanna, who co-chaired the 2020 presidential campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).
“And I’m honored to be co-chairing Barbara Lee’s campaign for the Senate and endorsing her today. We need a strong anti-war senator and she will play that role,” the congressman told CNN‘s Jake Tapper on “State of the Union.”
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In a statement, Khanna stressed that “Barbara is the progressive leader Californians need right now, and her solid record as one of Congress’ most outspoken champions of justice speaks for itself.”
“I know Barbara will not only fight for, but will deliver on our progressive priorities that are long overdue like Medicare for All, a Green New Deal, and ending the filibuster,” he continued. “There’s a reason she’s beloved by Gen Z. Because Barbara understands the issues facing young people today and knows it is our responsibility to protect our rights, our democracy, and the planet for the next generation.”
“What’s more, I believe that representation matters. And for far too long, our country’s institutions have failed to reflect that reality,” added Khanna, noting that there is not currently a Black woman serving as a Democratic senator.
So far, Lee’s opponents are two other Democrats representing California in the U.S. House of Representatives: Katie Porter and Adam Schiff. Feinstein, who is 89, confirmed her long-anticipated retirement plans last month.
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
Union negotiators for about 30,000 school support staffers in California’s Los Angeles County struck a historic deal with the second-largest district in the United States on Friday after a three-day strike.
Members of Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 99, including bus drivers, cafeteria workers, special education assistants, teaching aides, and other school staff—backed by about 35,000 educators of United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA)—walked off the job on Tuesday and continued to strike through Thursday.
The tentative contract agreement, which must still be voted on by SEIU Local 99 members, was reached with the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) after mediation from Democratic Mayor Karen Bass.
The deal would increase the average annual salary from $25,000 to $33,000, raise wages by 30%, boost the district minimum wage to $22.52, provide a $1,000 Covid-19 pandemic bonus, secure healthcare benefits for part-time employees who work at least four hours a day, and guarantee seven hours of work for special education assistants.
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“The agreement addresses our key demands and sets us on a clear pathway to improving our livelihoods and securing the staffing we need to improve student services,” SEIU Local 99 said in a statement. “It was members’ dedication to winning respect from the district that made this agreement possible.”
The Los Angeles Times reports that during a Friday news conference at City Hall with Bass and Alberto Carvalho, the LAUSD superintendent, Local 99 executive director Max Arias declared that “here in California this agreement will set new standards, not just for Los Angeles, but the entire state.”
“I want to appreciate the 30,000 members that sacrificed three days of work, despite low income, to raise the issue to society, that we as a society need to do better for all workers, all working people, for everyone,” Arias added.
While the strike meant about 400,000 K-12 students weren’t in classes for three days this week, “many parents stood in support of union employees,” according to KTLA, with one local parent saying that “it’s obvious all over the schools that we’re really not putting the support where it’s needed and our children are suffering because of that.”
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In a series of tweets, Local 99 thanked people from across the country for their solidarity this past week and stressed that the LA mayor, who has no formal authority over LAUSD, “was instrumental to getting the district to finally start hearing our demands.”
Bass, in a statement, thanked Arias and Carvalho “for working together with me to put our families first” and emphasized that “we must continue working together to address our city’s high cost of living, to grow opportunity, and to support more funding for LA’s public schools, which are the most powerful determinant of our city’s future.”
Carvalho said Friday that “when we started negotiating with SEIU, we promised to deliver on three goals. We wanted to honor and elevate the dignity of our workforce and correct well-known, decadeslong inequities impacting the lowest-wage earners. We wanted to continue supporting critical services for our students. We wanted to protect the financial viability of the district for the long haul. Promises made, promises delivered.”
Contract talks with district teachers are ongoing. When announcing support for Local 99’s strike earlier this month, UTLA president Cecily Myart-Cruz said that “despite LAUSD having one of the largest school budgets and largest reserves in the nation—teachers and essential school workers are struggling to support their own families and live in the communities they work for.”
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The strike and pending deal in California come amid a rejuvenated labor organizing movement across the United States, with employees of major corporations including Amazon and Starbucks fighting for unions.
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
On Monday, California’s First District Court of Appeals ruled that a 2020 ballot initiative classifying drivers for gig companies as independent contractors rather than employees was largely constitutional. The ballot initiative, Proposition 22, passed with 59% of the vote and has been critiqued by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) as having been financed and lobbied for by gig…
California is ending its agreement with retail pharmacy Walgreens after reports revealed that the company has caved to pressure from far right politicians and restricted the sale of abortion medication, even in states where the pills are legal. The state, led by Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, is terminating a $54 million contract with the company that was set to be renewed in May.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
The words “housing is a human right” used to appear in bright colors on a painted placard at the gateway to Wood Street Commons, which until recently was the largest unhoused encampment in northern California. But this February, the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) demonstrated how vehemently it disagrees with the placard’s assertion. Caltrans, which owns the land under an…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
The train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, highlighted safety regulation failures, indifference and anti-union bias, writes Malik Miah.
This post was originally published on Green Left.
As of Monday, more than 500 physicians and other medical professionals had signed on to a letter urging federal regulators to prevent the expansion of a fracked gas pipeline in the Pacific Northwest.
The sign-on campaign comes as the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) is expected to weigh in on TC Energy’s Gas Transmission Northwest (GTN) Xpress project as soon as this month.
The Canadian company’s proposed expansion would boost the capacity of a pipeline that runs through British Columbia, Canada and the U.S. states of Idaho, Washington, Oregon, and California.
“FERC should deny the permit for this pipeline expansion proposal, which is both unnecessary to meet our energy needs and harmful to people in our communities.”
“We are in a climate crisis, where we are already experiencing the devastating effects of rising temperatures, the direct result of burning fossil fuels, including so-called ‘natural gas,’ i.e., methane,” the health professionals wrote, noting that methane has more than 80 times the warming power of carbon dioxide over its first 20 years.
Dr. Ann Turner of Oregon Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR) said that “as medical practitioners, we see the impact the climate crisis has on people each and every day. And we have a responsibility to sound the alarm. We urge FERC to prioritize the health of our most vulnerable communities over profit.”
As the letter explains:
TC Energy proposes to increase the amount of gas in its existing pipelines by expanding compressor stations which provide the force which propels gas through pipelines. These compressor stations emit significant amounts of air pollution, both from the operation of the engine which powers the pump as well as from venting. Compressor stations and meter stations vent methane, volatile organic compounds like formaldehyde, particulate matter, nitrogen dioxide, and carbon monoxide. All of these air pollutants have serious health impacts, including increased risks of stroke, cancer, asthma and low birth weight, and premature babies. Compressor stations also produce significant noise pollution. The air and noise pollution from these compressor stations disproportionately harms the rural, low-income, and minority communities that already experience significant health disparities, especially those that are living in proximity to the pipeline expansion project.
“In addition to the health consequences from the pipeline expansion project itself, gas in the GTN pipeline is extracted by fracking in Canada,” the letter highlights. “Fracking degrades the environment including contamination of soil, water, and air by toxic chemicals. Communities exposed to these toxins experience elevated rates of birth defects, cancer, and asthma.”
“The negative health impacts of methane gas, and its contribution to warming the climate and polluting the air, are unacceptable impacts that disproportionately affect Black, Indigenous, and people of color and low-income communities,” the letter adds, arguing that the project is inconsistent with both global and regional goals to reduce planet-heating emissions.
Organizations supporting the letter include Wild Idaho Rising Tide as well as the San Francisco, Oregon, and Washington arms of PSR—which have previously joined other local groups in speaking out against the project alongside regional political figures including U.S. Democratic Sens. Jeff Merkley and Ron Wyden, both of Oregon.
\u201cTAKE ACTION: Sign on to the letter urging the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to deny the bid to expand shipments of fracked gas through WA.\nhttps://t.co/A86LLz8lRY\u201d— Washington Physicians for Social Responsibility (@Washington Physicians for Social Responsibility) 1678146398
“Idahoans dread FERC approval of the GTN Xpress expansion project, which would force greater fracked gas volumes and hazardous emissions through the aging GTN pipeline,” according to Helen Yost of Wild Idaho Rising Tide.
“This expansion project would further threaten and harm the health and safety of rural communities, environments, and recreation economies for decades,” she warned. “This proposed expansion does not support the best interests of concerned Northwesterners living and working near compressor stations and the pipeline route.”
Dr. Mark Vossler, a board member at Washington PSR, pointed out that “states in the Northwest have made great strides in reducing our dependence on fossil fuels and creating healthier communities.”
“I urge FERC to consider the human health impact of the proposed pipeline expansion and respect the leadership of local, state, and tribal governments in addressing the climate crisis,” he said. “FERC should deny the permit for this pipeline expansion proposal, which is both unnecessary to meet our energy needs and harmful to people in our communities.”
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
As discussions about reparations for Black Americans gain some ground, the first state with a task force on the issue is hearing that it needs to think bigger. African Americans in California have been telling the state’s reparations task force that a one-time payout would mean little if they don’t have equal access to education, employment, health care or housing. A payment, they said…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
“Guns, pick up your guns, pick up your guns, and put the pigs on the run, pick up your guns,” sang a group of Black youths, their voices ringing clearly through the pixelated footage of my pirated copy of The Black Power Mixtape. The youth in the documentary clip were students at an Oakland Black Panther Party School, where the only use for a gun was in community self-defense. From the video…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.