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Wednesday, 31 October 2018
FedEx Ends NRA Discount Program, Citing Low Shipping Volume
White woman fired after video of her harassing her black neighbor goes viral
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Doctor Who Treated HIV-Positive Patients Honored After Dying In Pittsburgh Synagogue
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Lion Air passenger flight carrying 189 people crashes into sea in Indonesia
An Indonesian aircraft with 189 people on board crashed into the sea on Monday as it tried to circle back to the capital, Jakarta, from where it had taken off minutes earlier, and there were likely no survivors, officials said.
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The synagogue massacre was actually in Mister Rogers's neighborhood. What would he say?
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Butler High School Classes Resumed After Shooting For Safety Reasons, Superintendent Says
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WikiLeaks' Assange says Ecuador seeking to end his asylum
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Protests greet world's biggest statue in remote corner of India
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With racial tension high in Florida race, Trump calls Gillum a 'thief'
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Suspicious Package Bound For CNN Intercepted In Atlanta, CNN Reports
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Top 10 pet Halloween costumes sold on eBay
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Cory Booker After Synagogue Shooting: 'We Need To Understand That Words Matter'
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Who is Gab founder Andrew Torba?
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Rabbi cites Jesus in prayer for synagogue victims with Pence
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Trump blames 'Fake News Media' for 'division and hatred'
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GOP State Senate Contender Accused Of Sending Anti-Semitic Mailer
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What It’s Worth: $250,000
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Rick Scott’s Halloween party is a Trump rally
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FBI warns potential targets that suspicious packages may still be in the mail
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Turkey presses Saudi to say who sent Khashoggi killers: Erdogan
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Global wildlife populations fall 60 per cent as WWF declares state of emergency for natural world
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After years of fighting insurgencies, the Army pivots to training for a major war
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Correction: Shooting-Synagogue-The Latest story
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10 Things to Know for Today
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Democrats Are Going Bland To Beat Scott Walker — And It Might Just Work
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Tesla Includes Model 3 Performance Upgrade as Standard on Top Version
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Kellyanne Conway’s Husband Shreds Trump Proposal To End Birthright Citizenship
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'Project Gold' Porsche becomes most expensive 993 Turbo ever
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UN rights chief wants 'international experts' to help probe Khashoggi hit
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The Citizenship Clause Means What It Says
“It is proper to take alarm at the first experiment on our liberties,” James Madison wrote in 1785. President Donald Trump confirmed Tuesday that he plans to move from experimentation on liberty into widespread application of the tyrant’s playbook.
In an interview with Axios on HBO, Trump confirmed what had been suspected since last summer: He is planning an executive order that would try to change the meaning of the Constitution as it has been applied for the past 150 years—and declare open season on millions of native-born Americans.
The order would apparently instruct federal agencies to refuse to recognize the citizenship of children born in the United States if their parents are not citizens. The Axios report was unclear on whether the order would target only American-born children of undocumented immigrants, children of foreigners visiting the U.S. on nonpermanent visas—or the children of any noncitizen.
[Garrett Epps: The Fourteenth Amendment can’t be revoked by executive order].
No matter which of these options Trump pursues, the news is very somber. A nation that can rid itself of groups it dislikes has journeyed far down the road to authoritarian rule.
The idea behind the attack on birthright citizenship is often obscured by a wall of dubious originalist rhetoric and legalese. At its base, the claim is that children born in the U.S. are not citizens if they are born to noncitizen parents. The idea contradicts the Fourteenth Amendment’s citizenship clause, it flies in the face of more than a century of practice, and it would create a shadow population of American-born people who have no state, no legal protection, and no real rights that the government is bound to respect.
It would set the stage for an internal witch hunt worse than almost anything since the anti-immigrant rage of the 1920s.
Birthright citizenship is a term that many Americans had not heard until recently. But it is a key to the egalitarian, democratic Constitution that emerged from the slaughter of the Civil War. In 1857, the pro-slavery majority of the Supreme Court held that citizenship was racial; in Dred Scott v. Sandford, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney wrote that people of African descent were not American citizens—and never could become citizens, even through an act of Congress. At the time the Constitution was written, he wrote, black people were “regarded [by whites] as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”
[Read: Trump’s plan to end birthright citizenship takes direct aim at the Constitution.]
The decision spurred a wave of revulsion throughout the free states and probably hastened the start of the Civil War. In fact, almost since the founding of the republic in 1789, opponents of slavery insisted that American citizenship had always been the birthright of all people born in the United States. After Appomattox, the 39th Congress met with the urgent purpose of undoing the constitutional damage wrought by Taney and what they called the “Slave Power.” The result was the Fourteenth Amendment. Here is the wording of Section 1:
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
This is a fairly intricate piece of legal machinery, set in place after months of deliberation by some very acute legal minds. Its centerpiece is the idea that citizenship in the United States is universal—that we are one nation, with one class of citizens, and that citizenship extends to everyone born here. Citizens have rights that neither the federal government nor any state can revoke at will; even undocumented immigrants—“persons,” in the language of the amendment—have rights to due process and equal protection of the law.
The citizenship-denial lobby has focused on the words subject to the jurisdiction. Its members argue that citizens of foreign countries, even if they live in the U.S., are not subject to U.S. jurisdiction, and thus their children are not covered by the clause. To test this idea, ask yourself: If a foreign citizen rear-ends your car on your drive home today, will you, or the police, allow him to drive away on the grounds that a foreign citizen cannot be arrested, ticketed, or sued?
For those scoring at home, the answer is no.
Foreign citizens are “subject to the jurisdiction” of our police and courts when they are in the U.S., whether as tourists, legal residents, or undocumented immigrants. Only one group is not “subject to the jurisdiction”—accredited foreign diplomats and their families, who can be expelled by the federal government but not arrested or tried.
That’s who the framers of the clause were discussing in Section 1—along with one other group. In 1866, when the amendment was framed, Indians living under tribal rule were not U.S. citizens. Under the law as it was then, American police could not arrest them, and American citizens could not sue them. Relations with Indian tribes were handled government to government, like relations with foreign nations: If Native people left the reservation and harmed American citizens, those citizens had to apply to the U.S. government, which would officially protest and seek compensation from the tribal government. In that respect, Indians living under tribal government were as protected as foreign diplomats are today.
But over and over in the Fourteenth Amendment debates, the framers of the amendment made clear that there would be no other exclusions from the clause. Children of immigrants? They were citizens. Even children of Chinese immigrants, who themselves weren’t eligible to naturalize? Yes, them too. Mysterious foreign “Gypsies,” who supposedly spoke an unknown language and worshipped strange gods and observed no American laws? Yes, the sponsors explained, it covered them too.
[Read: The thousands of children who go to immigration court alone]
The framers of the clause understood about immigration. The issue had been a divisive one throughout the 1850s, spawning the Know-Nothing movement and state attempts to bar immigrants from citizenship. The percentage of foreign-born residents of the U.S. in 1866 was just over 13 percent—roughly what it is today.
And in the ranks of the Union Army that saved the nation, roughly 20 percent of soldiers were foreign-born.
Three decades later, the government tried to meddle with the clause by denying citizenship to Wong Kim Ark, the child of Chinese immigrants who were themselves not eligible for citizenship. The Supreme Court reaffirmed that the clause meant what it said. No matter where their parents were born, no matter what their parents’ status, American-born children are Americans. And that’s how it should be.
The assault on birthright citizenship is an onslaught on civic equality for all of us. Nativists have grown more strident over the past decade or so. First, they advocated for a constitutional amendment to strip citizenship from the children of aliens; then they argued that citizenship could be stripped by statute; now, in the Trump era, they claim that it can be done with the stroke of a pen. It is an idea that has crawled slowly from the fever swamps of the far right into the center of our discourse, growing more outlandish with each step.
The executive-order idea was floated as a trial balloon in July in an op-ed piece in The Washington Post by former White House official Michael Anton. Anton’s sole book is The Suit: A Machiavellian Approach to Men’s Style, which details a Florentine Renaissance approach to menswear on the job. In the Post piece, Anton inaccurately reproduced a quote from Senator Jacob Howard, the sponsor of the Fourteenth Amendment, in a manner that made Howard seem to support Anton’s position (the Post, under enormous criticism, eventually acknowledged the alteration). And in fact, every bit of the scant scholarship Anton relies on in that piece is as phony as a Confederate $100 bill. (I once debated the scholar who was the source of most of it, and pointed out that almost all his evidence was not just erroneous, but faked.)
That is one of the two takeaways from today’s news: Trump, Anton, and their enablers are relying on phony history and altered documents in an attempt to change the American constitutional order. (The facts are readily available; for my own contributions, see here, here, here, here, and here.) Those who don’t want to take my word for it can consult this essay by James C. Ho, a conservative “originalist” who was recently appointed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit by Donald Trump. Ho and I agree on little except this: The citizenship clause means what it says.
If the administration attempts to strip citizenship from millions of Americans—millions of people who have never known any other country—the trapdoor to dictatorship will have fallen open. The executive order cannot be enforced without a huge apparatus of internal control. Immigration and Customs Enforcement will, of necessity, become the skeleton of a nationwide citizenship police. Each of us must be prepared to prove our membership in the nation at any moment. And the new population of stateless Americans will face persecution, detention, and abuse; Korematsu-style internment camps would be a logical next step.
Our Constitution is a gift to us from the generations that went before, and particularly the millions who died in the Civil War; the Fourteenth Amendment is the centerpiece of that Constitution. If we let Donald Trump destroy it, then history will regard both him and us with equal contempt.
from The Atlantic https://ift.tt/2yBYhck
Paul Volcker’s Guide to the Almighty Dollar
Paul Volcker’s 6-foot-7-inch frame was draped over a chaise longue when I spoke with him recently in his Upper East Side apartment, in Manhattan. He is in his 91st year and very ill, and he tires easily. But his voice is still gruff, and his brain is still sharp.
We talked about his forthcoming memoir, Keeping at It: The Quest for Sound Money and Good Government—about why he wrote the book and the lessons he hopes to impart. Volcker is not a vain man, but he knows that his public life was consequential, and he wants posterity to get it right. He also does not mince words. In our conversation, he assailed the “greed and grasping” of the banks and corporate leadership, and the gross skewing of income distribution in America.
Keeping at It, written with Christine Harper, an editor at Bloomberg, is primarily the chronicle of Paul Volcker’s public life, which was spent in the thin air of global finance. After graduating from Princeton in 1949, he studied economics at Harvard and then in London, where he focused on the operations of the Bank of England. For the next 20 years, his career cycled between the U.S. Treasury and the Chase Manhattan Bank, with a particular focus on monetary affairs.
Few Americans had heard of Volcker until he was nominated, in 1979, to be chairman of the Federal Reserve Board by President Jimmy Carter, a post he held for the next eight years. During that time, he almost single-handedly pulled the nation back from a near-Weimar-scale financial collapse. If there were a Nobel Prize for government service, Paul Volcker’s name would surely be on the short list.
Volcker’s career spanned nearly the entire postwar era. World War II had ended with the United States effectively controlling the major part of the world’s wealth. In a supreme act of statesmanship, Washington offered to provide trade credits and other aid to allies and former enemies alike, so long as they adopted reasonably democratic values. The American dollar effectively became the world’s currency at its 1934 peg—$35 per ounce of gold. That worked splendidly while America’s allies were in recovery mode, but by the 1960s most industrialized countries were competitive with the United States. Swiss currency traders, the nefarious “gnomes of Zurich,” realized that America’s gold reserves could no longer support its dollar issuance. So they started testing the dollar with sudden spasms of dollar sales in the hope of forcing a devaluation.
The classic method of meeting an attack on a currency is to raise interest rates to increase the attractiveness of holding it. But this was the early 1960s, and John F. Kennedy had promised to “get this country moving again.” Higher interest rates would have scuttled that ambition. The Treasury Department hit on a temporizing solution: a tax on foreign security purchases to curb the foreign traders’ enthusiasm for holding dollars. Volcker, then a deputy undersecretary at Treasury, drafted the enabling legislation. It did not take long, however, for traders to engineer an end run around the new tax by simply keeping their dollars overseas. Thus was born the “Eurodollar,” which would proliferate wildly, quite out of the control of the Federal Reserve.
Volcker returned to Chase for several years before rejoining Treasury as undersecretary for monetary affairs in the Nixon administration. The war in Vietnam—paid for by deficit spending rather than new taxes—had triggered serious inflation. Oil imports were surging, and currency traders smelled blood. But Richard Nixon had a genius for the bold stroke. Along with John Connally, his outsize Treasury secretary, Nixon in August 1971 brought virtually his entire economics team to Camp David, where he announced that he would cut taxes, impose wage and price controls, levy a tax surcharge on all imports, and rescind the commitment to redeem dollars in gold. In his 1975 book, Before the Fall, Nixon’s über-speechwriter, William Safire, recalled, “Volcker was undergoing an especially searing experience; he was schooled in the international monetary system, almost bred to defend it.” Everyone he had worked with “trusted each other in crisis to respect the rules and cling to the few constants like the convertibility of gold.” Volcker was charged with drafting the announcement of Nixon’s new economic policies, but his moroseness showed through. Safire did the final draft, proclaiming “a triumph and a fresh start.” About Volcker himself, Safire wrote, “It was not a happy weekend for him.”
As the ’70s wound down, the dollar became a debased currency—but one that, for want of an alternative, still served as the world’s most important reserve currency. Nations might make other provisions, but that could take years. To make matters worse, an ideological cleavage between Milton Friedman’s “freshwater” Chicago monetarists and East and West Coast “saltwater” economists added an unusual testiness to the board’s discussions. Monetarists looked to the supply of money, which is the multiple of physical money—M1 in the jargon—times its velocity, or turnover rate. Friedman’s rigid version of monetarism assumed that the velocity of money was fairly stable over time, so policy makers could ignore it and steer solely by M1. (Indeed, Friedman also believed that you could eliminate the Federal Reserve Board.) Traditionalists, such as Volcker and most other saltwater economists, looked first to interest rates as a policy tool.
By the time Volcker was sworn in at the Fed, in 1979, inflation in the U.S. was running about 1 percent a month, and rising. In 1973, the OPEC countries had forsaken the hallowed $3 peg for a barrel of oil—tripling their prices and tripling them again six years later. By then, spot prices for gold were bouncing around from $235 to $578 per ounce. When the U.S. Treasury, in the early 1980s, needed to raise money, it would be forced to float bond issues in marks and yen, so far had the almighty dollar fallen.
Two months into his new job, Volcker attended a conference of central bankers in Belgrade and was shocked to find himself harangued by his peers. As he explains in his memoir, German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, who was a friend, lectured Volcker for almost an hour “about waffling American policymakers who had let inflation run amok and undermined confidence in the dollar.” A shaken Volcker cut his trip short, got his fellow Fed members on board, and called an unusual evening press conference. Most dramatically, he stressed that he was shifting his key policy tool to monetarism. As a hedge, he also raised the Fed’s discount rate by a full point. The New York Times editorialized about the rate hike under the headline “Mr. Volcker’s Verdun,” noting that when it came to holding the line on inflation, the Fed chairman’s message echoed that of Marshal Pétain: “They shall not pass.”
At first, the experiment seemed to work. The objective was to reduce the money supply and thereby bring down prices. By January 1980, however, the numbers were going haywire. Perversely, inflation took off—it reached an annual rate of almost 15 percent. The Fed’s technical staff ruefully admitted that Friedman’s money-supply theory was not precise enough to form a basis for effective policy. The Fed board maintained its monetarist rhetoric, but Volcker shifted back to raising interest rates in order to wring inflation from the economy. This was language that all businesspeople understood. The bank prime rate eventually jumped to 21.5 percent, T-bills hit 17 percent, and prime mortgages were at 18 percent. Those rates were the highest the country had ever seen. Volcker went on a grueling speaking tour to bolster the case for what he was doing.
By the time Ronald Reagan was inaugurated, in 1981, the U.S. economy had slipped into a deep recession, one for which the Volcker Shock was largely blamed. Unemployment neared 11 percent. Volcker became a target of popular anger. One welcome ray of sunshine came from the White House, with Reagan giving full support to the continuation of Volcker’s program. (Volcker later said, “I don’t kiss men, but I was tempted.”) Another came from the American Home Builders Association, in early 1982. Its industry had been badly hit by the recession, but Volcker gave a tough speech to the association about staying the course against inflation, and was amazed to get a standing ovation.
Inflation—blessedly—broke in mid-1982. The second half of the year saw a flat consumer price index. Real GDP for 1983 was a very respectable 4.6 percent and a blistering 7.2 in 1984. By 1986 annual inflation had come down to only 2 percent. The crisis was effectively over. After 1982, Americans enjoyed the lowest interest rates (with a blip here and there) among the major industrial countries, and interest rates are low to this day. The second half of the 1990s was one of the most prosperous periods in history—there was a twin boom in high technology and in housing. Volcker attributes the crash that came in both industries to the same “greed and grasping” he cited when we spoke.
Volcker served two terms as the chairman of the Fed, giving way to Alan Greenspan in 1987. By that time, the challenges confronting the Fed had moved to new arenas—like the reckless “oil lending” by the big American banks to Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, and a string of smaller countries. In Keeping at It, Volcker writes, “Looking back, I see Latin America today as a sad culmination of hard-fought, constructive efforts to deal with a debt crisis that, aided and abetted by reckless bank lending practices, grew out of a chronic absence of suitably disciplined economic policies.” Volcker will never escape a Fed-inflected prose style, but his assessment is spot-on.
Retirement has treated Volcker well. He did some teaching and loved it. He spent 10 contented years as the chief executive of Wolfensohn & Company, an old-fashioned investment bank, which mostly gave advice on mergers and acquisitions. When he retired, he had plenty of time for nonprofit activities and was much in demand. He chaired inquiries into the ownership of Jewish art sequestered in Swiss bank vaults; the massive theft from food and medical programs after the Iraq War; and corruption in the World Bank.
Volcker also played an important role in the cleanup after the 2008–2009 crash. His advice was widely solicited, if not always followed. In his memoir, he describes sitting at a conference and listening to bankers warn that new regulations must not inhibit trading and “innovation.” He finally exploded: “Wake up, gentlemen. I can only say that your response is inadequate. I wish that somebody would give me some shred of neutral evidence about the relationship between financial innovation recently and the growth of the economy, just one shred of information.” His lasting contribution from this period is the so-called Volcker Rule, which bars traders from taking risky positions with depositors’ funds, and which he summarizes as “Thou shall not gamble with the public’s money.”
[Read more: Wall Street has basically the same culture that led to the 2008 crash. ]
Keeping at It is not a tell-all book. Volcker’s subject matter is economic policy, and his praise or criticism is almost entirely directed at specific ideas and actions. His first wife, Barbara Bahnson, died in 1998. In 2010, he married his longtime assistant, Anke Dening. There is not much of a personal nature in the book, and yet, unwittingly, it paints an accurate personal portrait. The picture that emerges is of a man of granitic integrity, committed to what he perceives as wise policies—committed, that is, to what he calls The Verities: stable prices, sound finance, and good government.
The secret of Paul Volcker was his father. Paul Adolph Volcker Sr. was almost as tall as his son. He was an engineer, with a degree from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and he went on to become a city manager. The city he was most identified with was Teaneck, New Jersey, a municipality that had fallen prey to a corrupt political machine. It was the kind of challenge that Paul Sr. leaped at. In his son’s memoir, Paul Sr. is always working; even after a long day, he drove around his modest empire and made note of broken traffic lights, spilled garbage, and other petty violations. They were not petty to him. The city fathers once tried to can him for hiring a professional police chief. They couldn’t fire him, but they could stop paying him. Paul Sr. went to court and got his pay—and got his police chief. Exactly what his son would have done.
There are few people like Paul Volcker in the U.S. government today, or in business, for that matter—respected and trusted by everyone, whatever the disagreements, and motivated by public service. Volcker reveled in his middle-class status. He notes in his memoir that, in the 1960s and 1970s, Washington was “mostly populated by middle-class professionals, including families of civil servants and members of Congress,” and that “there wasn’t great wealth.” Now, he writes, Washington is “dominated by wealth” and by “lobbyists who are joined at the hip” with people in government, whether on the Hill or in the executive branch.
As a result, he says simply, “I stay away.”
from The Atlantic https://ift.tt/2CRHiWA
Trump's Plan to End Birthright Citizenship Takes Direct Aim at the Constitution
President Donald Trump is proposing removing the right to U.S. citizenship for children born to noncitizens on U.S. soil—a move that could spark fierce debate over the Fourteenth Amendment and American identity. In a new interview with Axios, the president said he intends to revoke birthright citizenship through an executive order.
“It was always told to me that you needed a constitutional amendment. Guess what? You don’t,” Trump said in the interview, part of which aired Tuesday morning. He continued: “You can definitely do it with an act of Congress. But now they’re saying I can do it just with an executive order.”
This isn’t the first time the president has suggested he’d like to end the right. In 2015, then-candidate Trump also expressed an intent to end birthright citizenship, calling it “the biggest magnet for illegal immigration.” His stated intent takes direct aim at the Constitution and the millions of people who were born in the United States to immigrant parents.
“This is one of the longest-standing debates under the Constitution,” said Jonathan Turley, a law professor at George Washington University. The Fourteenth Amendment says that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” That clause “has proven to be maddening since it was written,” Turley said. “Various people who were involved in drafting the Fourteenth Amendment suggested that this was a condition that people be citizens or at least legal residents in the United States to be ‘subject to the jurisdiction thereof.’”
But what’s particularly tricky in this instance is the way in which Trump intends to revoke birthright citizenship: through executive order. Any attempt to do so will immediately be met with legal challenges that could end up in the Supreme Court.
[Garrett Epps: The Fourteenth Amendment can’t be revoked by executive order].
The Court has had to contend with the clause before. In an 1898 case, United States v. Wong Kim Ark, the Court, citing the citizenship provision, ultimately ruled that Wong Kim Ark, the son of Chinese immigrant parents, had acquired U.S. citizenship at birth.
The historian Martha Jones, the author of Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America, citing Wong’s case, noted in a July Washington Post piece that “birthright has been affirmed, again and again, ensuring that no matter how racist the regime, the Constitution grants citizenship to all people born in the United States.”
The debate, Turley notes, has to do with scope—whether the clause should be interpreted to include the children of undocumented immigrants, for example, or interpreted more narrowly. With the addition of Justice Brett Kavanaugh, Trump may have an advantage on the Court should the executive order reach it, Turley said.
[Adam Serwer: The Supreme Court is headed back to the 19th century].
In the interview with Axios, Trump falsely claimed that the United States is the only nation with birthright citizenship. “We’re the only country in the world where a person comes in and has a baby, and the baby is essentially a citizen of the United States for 85 years with all of those benefits,” he said. “It’s ridiculous. It’s ridiculous. And it has to end.” NumbersUSA, a group that supports reduced immigration, has compiled a list of 33 nations that also offer birthright citizenship, including Canada, Mexico, and Brazil.
It’s not clear whether and when Trump would sign an executive order on birthright citizenship. He said in the interview that he’s discussed the matter with White House counsel, and did not provide a time frame. But it fits into a larger pattern by the administration to more narrowly consider the definition of American, and it comes amid a broader crackdown on both illegal and legal immigration.
from The Atlantic https://ift.tt/2qiOpj6
The Bitter Class Struggle Behind Our Definition of a Kilogram
Meters, kilograms, degrees Celsius. To most Americans, these units of measurement are little more than funny inconveniences on trips abroad. To scientists, they’re the very standards that allow for meaningful comparisons of experiments. But to historians of metrology—the study of measurement—those innocuous-looking units are something else entirely: the culmination of a long, fraught battle against tyranny.
In centuries past, lords and ministers in Europe and beyond often manipulated units to steal land, fix commodities markets, cheat peasants out of goods, and wring extra labor and taxes out of them. Fluctuating units also helped concentrate power in the hands of despots. Using a ruler or scale might not seem like a political act, but according to the late Polish historian Witold Kula, in his book Measures and Men, units of length, weight, and volume in the past were both “instrument[s] of asserting class privilege” and “the center of a bitter class struggle” dating back several millennia.
Next month, the 26th meeting of the General Conference on Weights and Measures will likely adopt new methods of defining four basic international units, including the kilogram. The kilogram is the very last international unit based on a human-made object: a platinum-iridium cylinder in an underground, high-security vault in Paris. This cylinder has, by definition, a mass of 1.0000 … kilogram, to as many decimal places as you like. But it also has a problem: On an infinitesimal level, its mass has changed over the years, causing all sorts of complications.
The new definition will be based on universal constants of nature—quantities that don’t change, like the charge of an electron—which will allow any lab around the world to reproduce a one-kilogram mass on its own by rigging up the right equipment. (You can read about the new definitions here and here.) But far from simply tidying up a few loose metrological ends, these new definitions will also close a chapter on our past—an era when units of measure weren’t just humdrum tools, but a real frontier in the struggle for equality.
Stories about this new, universal kilogram usually portray it as a triumph of progress. Look how far we’ve come! And it’s true that the kilogram and other components of the metric system (the official standard everywhere in the world save Burma, Liberia, and the United States) do seem eminently rational compared to the metrological chaos of yesteryear. Way back when, the same units often differed significantly from village to village. A “bushel” in one town wasn’t the same as a “bushel” in another. In medieval Geneva, a “pound” could be 15, 16, or 18 ounces, depending on the goods being sold. Cloth wholesalers might use one length, cloth retailers another, and fishermen measured the width of their nets using one unit and the breadth using another.
[Read: Why doesn’t the United States use the metric system?]
Units were often divvied up in maddening ways as well. The metric system is based on units of 10: There are 10 millimeters in a centimeter, 10 centimeters in a decimeter, 10 decimeters in a full meter, and so on. This makes bouncing up and down the scale easy. In contrast, consider this 18th-century French system, as described in an old questionnaire that Kula quotes in his book: “To measure dry goods we use the resal and its divisions. The resal consists of eight units called bichot, each of these dividing into six pots. The pot divides into two pintes, the pinte into two chopmes, the chopine into two setters, and the setter into three verres.” As Kula writes, they eventually ended up with one-1,152nd of the resal.
The old units did have a few advantages. Yes, 1,152 is an ugly number. But unlike 10, you can divide it into thirds, quarters, sixths, eighths, or twelfths without decimals or fractions, which made commerce easier for commoners. Variable units also gave the economic system needed flexibility. In centuries past, commodity prices were often fixed and immutable: You always paid 25 shillings or whatever for a bushel of grain, and “that [price] may not be altered by man other than sinfully,” as Kula puts it. So the only way to respond to market conditions was by varying the size of the bushel. Prices could remain fixed, in other words, as long as quantity fluctuated.
Still, we shouldn’t romanticize ye olde units, because that flexibility also enabled chicanery and abuse. Peasants often paid tributes to feudal lords in the form of goods—X baskets of grain a year, or Y yards of cloth. Those numbers were fixed by custom, and lords couldn’t raise them without incurring hellfire and damnation. So they cheated their vassals in other ways. A lord might loan you five regular baskets of grain to get through a drought, but demand repayment in larger ones. Greedy landlords could goose an extra 25 percent from their subjects this way. (This wasn’t just a European problem. Chinese landlords pulled the same shenanigans, and in Burma, the peasants under one egregious landowner nicknamed the basket he used for receiving tributes “the cart-breaker.”)
Another shady practice involved land measurement. European lords often measured fields with a unit of distance called an ell (short for an elbow or forearm, the upper-body equivalent of feet). Serfs might have to plow or weed a certain number of square ells to fulfill their obligations. But in places where that number was fixed by custom, lords could always employ an extra-long ell to expand the area and extract more work.
Even the humble alehouse couldn’t escape cheating. After a hard week’s labor, drinkers wanted to make sure they were getting a full volume of booze. So people insisted that tavern keepers compare their serving cups to a community standard. Some towns even required barkeeps to prepare wooden labels attesting to a “just measure” of spirits. These labels were then attached to every cup with strings, which dangled down whenever people raised their wrists to quaff. And woe betide anyone who violated this custom: Many Polish churches had murals depicting sinners suffering in hell, and one prominent victim was often an innkeeper who shorted his patrons on vodka.
Overall, as the anthropologist James C. Scott remarks in Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, “every act of measurement was an act marked by the play of power relations”—usually in favor of the nobles. As a result, most peasants grew to hate fluctuating units and wanted to establish standards: fixed volumes, fixed lengths, and fixed weights.
Oddly enough, peasants found an ally in absolute monarchs, who also opposed fluctuating units. They did so partly in support of their subjects. Monarchs sat above lords in the political hierarchy, and playing the people against the lords was smart politics. But even more than that, as Scott emphasizes, metrological chaos made kingdoms a nightmare to administer. Without consistent units, a king’s ministers had a devil of a time determining how much grain or cloth or iron a region produced. This in turn made levying taxes almost impossible. Even drawing up conversion charts to compare one region’s units with another’s was a Herculean task—and often futile, given how frequently units shifted.
Beyond being a bureaucratic mess, haphazard units led to social strife. Kings would inadvertently charge some places more in taxes than they could afford, while letting other places off easy—a sure recipe for resentment and rebellion. Even worse, poor knowledge of the kingdom’s food supply could exacerbate famines and droughts, threatening state security. And unable to levy fair taxes on goods, monarchs often relied on other sources of revenue—like selling offices and titles—that bred corruption.
For these reasons, rulers throughout history—Charlemagne, Alexander the Great, Louis XIV, Moses—all tried, in vain, to impose standard units across their kingdom. (In the Old Testament, God tells Moses, “You shall do no unrighteousness in judgment regarding measures in length, weight, or quantity. You shall have honest balances, honest weights … ” The Koran condemns such cheating, too.) Only in the late 1700s did a few places, especially France, show any success. The reason is complex, but a few factors stand out. First, the power of feudal-style lords—who considered it a sovereign right to change units at their whim—began to wane. Second, an increasingly powerful merchant class began to push for standard measures to grease long-distance trade. Third, natural philosophers—the precursors of modern scientists—developed the metric system during the Enlightenment and promoted it as a rational alternative to metrological chaos.
[Read: A brief history of applause, the “big data” of the ancient world]
Far from being the driving force behind standard units, scientists were probably the weakest leg, often dismissed as starry-eyed utopians. Only the upheavals of the French Revolution—and the subsequent rise of Napoleon, who was strong enough to impose the metric system on his empire—gave the idea of standard units real traction and allowed the practice to spread, however fitfully, across Europe. As Kula remarks, “The meter followed the flag.”
(Indeed, the impotence of natural philosophers is most clear in the reforms they didn’t achieve. Beyond weights and measures, they also proposed reforming the clock and calendar. Under so-called metric time, days would last 10 “hours,” hours would last 100 “minutes,” and minutes would last 100 “seconds.” The leaders of the French Revolution actually implemented this system in 1793, alongside the meter and kilogram. But most people loathed the new clock, and without the support of commoners, metric time wilted and died.)
So did the poor finally get a fair shake under the new, standardized system of weights and measures? Of course not. The powerful found new ways to cheat the powerless, and in some cases, the metrological revolution weakened the political power of the masses. By helping monarchs administer their kingdom, standard units gave them a way to collect more taxes and thereby bolster their strength. With more accurate and stable land measures, they could also produce better maps of the kingdom. This allowed them to surveil their subjects more effectively and snatch up all unclaimed territories for the crown.
In the short term, then, the natural philosophers’ brilliant new units probably helped concentrate power in the hands of kings and despots. “As in many other walks of life, so in metrology, the state authority of enlightened absolutism had little difficulty in securing the cooperation of men of learning,” Kula writes.
Still, in the long run, we’ve all benefited. Establishing standard units cut down on old forms of abuse, and the efficient administration of kingdoms also boosted public-welfare programs like health and sanitation projects. If nothing else, the metric system is the foundation of modern science and technology, which has lifted innumerable people out of poverty and saved countless lives.
It’s hard to imagine nowadays that mundane units of measure sometimes, as Kula puts it, “horrified and terrified the people.” But like with vaccines and clean drinking water, it’s often the little, taken-for-granted innovations that improve our life the most. So when the new definition of the kilogram is anticipated to officially take effect (on World Metrology Day, May 20), take a moment to reflect on how far we’ve come. Or better yet, raise a glass of wine or beer—knowing full well that you’ll get your “just measure”—and remember all of our poor, put-upon ancestors who weren’t so lucky.
from The Atlantic https://ift.tt/2OYzN7b
The Hosts of Pod Save America Are Embracing the ‘Partisan’ Label
Before the Pod Save America podcast even existed, there was Keepin’ It 1600, a breezy political roundtable hosted by four strategists and speechwriters who used to work in Barack Obama’s administration—Jon Favreau, Dan Pfeiffer, Jon Lovett, and Tommy Vietor. In the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election, they offered their perspectives from campaigns past, discussed strategies for Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, and commented, aghast, on the rise of Republican nominee Donald Trump. “I thought of Keepin’ It 1600 as the last thing I was gonna do in politics,” Pfeiffer recalled recently in an Atlantic interview with the four hosts.
The election, of course, didn’t go the way they expected, and that initial calculation about Keepin’ It 1600 quickly shifted. We had “watched political punditry for all those years, become frustrated by it, and now we had a podcast where we could blow off some steam,” Favreau said. “What changed with Trump’s election was us thinking—instead of us being purely reactive to political punditry, instead of us talking about what might happen—we should talk more about what should happen.” Keepin’ It 1600 became Pod Save America, which is part of Crooked Media—a larger network of podcasts, opinion writing, and grassroots organizing geared toward left-wing activism.
The entire enterprise has now found its way onto television, with four Pod Save America specials airing Fridays on HBO in the weeks leading up to the November 6 midterm elections. The episodes show the four hosts—and special guests—visiting battleground states such as Florida, Georgia, and Texas; talking with Democratic Senate and gubernatorial candidates; and essentially acting as a get-out-the-vote operation. (The hosts are on tour; HBO films and airs their live shows.) Crooked Media is an unusual mix of entertainment, news, and engagement, designed to exist in a media ecosystem where Democrats often struggle to push their message through. In a way, the hosts have become something they often rail against—political pundits—except that, unlike many MSNBC and Fox News commentators, they’re transparent about their advocacy.
The quartet spoke with me in New York in the middle of their tour and laid out how their approach to broadcasting and organizing has evolved during Trump’s presidency. Lovett, the funniest of the group (he created the sitcom 1600 Penn after leaving the Obama White House), is also the most eager to upend his party’s reputation for equivocation. “Democrats spent a long time thinking about electability and then losing all the elections,” he said. “What we wanted to talk about is not how it’ll play, not about polls, not about the horse races, but what do we want candidates to advocate for?”
That question pointed Pod Save America to figures such as Beto O’Rourke (running for U.S. Senate in Texas), Stacey Abrams (running for governor of Georgia), and Andrew Gillum (running for governor of Florida). Though they’re not perfectly ideologically aligned, they’re all running more openly left-wing campaigns in conservative-leaning states where Democrats are often told to tack to the middle. To Lovett, Donald Trump’s election was “permission” to cast that advice aside. “Republicans paint everything that Democrats have been for as socialism, too far to the left, as extreme, and it didn’t matter how moderated it was, it didn’t matter that Obamacare started out as a compromise,” he said. “You might as well say what you’re actually for, and show what you really are.” (Lovett has previously written for The Atlantic.)
Pod Save America is an expression of that kind of bullishness, which is much more commonplace in conservative media. The show has tapped into a young, progressive audience that’s keen to push back in an openly hostile political climate, and delighted to wear Crooked Media T-shirts branded with slogans like “Repeal and go f*ck yourself.” “The [podcast’s] listenership is a little less siloed or bubbled than you’d think,” Vietor said. “I think Texas is the third-, fourth-, or fifth-biggest state for [our] listeners. We’re not a candidate; we’re not trying to get votes. We’re just trying to inspire people to get engaged and think about democracy.” The HBO specials reflect that sense of group enthusiasm; the show is a cross between a comedic panel and a grassroots rally, with the live audience giving things a grander vibe than the podcast (which airs twice weekly).
[Read: Young people might actually turn out for the midterms. ]
Divided social-media feeds, partisan podcasts, and a splintered media landscape suggest a country that’s unable to bridge its ideological differences, and Pod Save America is certainly part of that, speaking to a devoted but self-selecting audience. The extreme partisanship online, Lovett said, “is a natural response to a new experience, which is being neighbors with everybody. We are so close to so many people all the time, [and] so many views that used to be harder to access or harder to reach are in your face. I think some people respond to that by protecting themselves and siloing themselves off; some people go crazy and respond to every tweet.”
“We think of bubbles as: There’s a liberal bubble and a conservative bubble,” added Favreau. “But there are also different communities that care about different issues ... that aren’t political. We don’t really think we’re going to pierce the conservative bubble anytime soon, but we have been thinking, over the last couple years: How do we reach people who may have the same values that we have, but don’t necessarily pay as close attention to politics?” As a result, political outreach is a crucial cog of the Crooked Media machine: Its website includes a ballot guide and the registration aid Vote Save America.
But to Pfeiffer, “conservative” and “liberal” media cannot be easily compared. “When you look at studies of media diets, conservatives consume only conservative media, which is trash,” he said. “Liberals consume mainstream news: CNN, The New York Times, NBC, ABC … You have these outlets on the right whose job is to try and win elections for Republicans. Prior to Crooked Media, there was really nothing like that on the left: a media outlet centered on encouraging progressive activism with an actual goal.” The show is, in a way, an answer to Fox News and the other right-leaning news outlets that exasperated the Pod Save America hosts when they worked for the Obama White House.
“People ask us if we’re biased. Yes. I wear it on my sleeve; I donate money, I speak at fund-raisers. I tell you that,” Vietor said. “I think there is a way to do this [in a way] that is a little more honest.” Pod Save America is attempting to combat the “asymmetry of the bias,” he explained, whereby left-leaning editorial boards for outlets such as The New York Times try to give ample space to right-wing voices, but the same (in his eyes) does not happen at right-leaning organizations such as The Wall Street Journal.
“We try to make sure that the facts and information we provide people are true, and when they’re not and we make mistakes, we try to correct them,” Favreau said. “While we’re biased and have an opinion, that’s different from allowing yourself to be a propaganda machine.” That belief, to him, is what sets Pod Save America and the Crooked enterprise apart from the partisan news organizations they’re opposing. “You have to fight it by calling it out for what it is. I think print journalists do a great job of this. I think television networks do a poor job.”
“I think the problem that Democrats have failed to grapple with is: How do we adjust our strategies and tactics and how do we build campaigns to adjust to this new media environment?” Pfeiffer added. In the old world, “the way you got your message [out] was you told it to the press, and the press told it to voters. … We believed that the media had the power and the authority to put consequences on politicians who lied. That is not true anymore, so we are just screaming into the void.”
Pod Save America was created out of the quartet’s shock that the widely predicted outcome of the 2016 election—the victory of Hillary Clinton—didn’t come to pass, but the project has been fueled by the combativeness of politics since then. As the hosts look to the midterms and beyond, they’re careful not to predict anything, having been burned by the many data-fueled guarantees of Clinton’s win in 2016. “Never again will we cherry-pick information in that way to make people feel good. Right now, it’s fucking 50-50 at best that [Democrats] take the House and likely lose the Senate. I think that kind of honesty is hopefully motivational,” Vietor said.
The future holds a different kind of ideological battle for the podcast, one that all its listeners might not agree on. “Once this is over, whether we win or lose, the next conversation is: Who do the Democrats want to put forward in 2020?” Favreau said. “In some ways, it’s more liberating: What do we want to stand for. Who do we want to talk about?”
“We’ve said for so long, ‘Now is not the time for infighting.’ The day after the election, [we said] ‘Let’s do it. Infighting as much as you want!’” Lovett joked. Pod Save America didn’t exist during the 2016 primaries, but its hosts’ ideas are now being put to the test. “The antidote to pessimism is not optimism—it’s activism,” Favreau mused. The coming years appear to promise plenty of all three.
from The Atlantic https://ift.tt/2OeoF15
Why Women’s Shoes Are So Painful
It’s not that I think wearing Toms with socks to work is a good look, per se.
I admire your d’Orsay oxfords and fun mules. But unfortunately, when it comes to shoes, my only criteria is “Will these cause my feet to dribble blood all over my open-plan office?”
I am simply not meant to wear professional office flats. I can’t wear Payless flats, but I also can’t wear the premium, handcrafted-in-Italy, join-the-wait-list flats. I don’t even attempt heels. No matter what brand they are, what width or size, any shoes that you can’t play basketball in will, inevitably, rub Medieval-looking holes into my foot skin.
Every month, I succumb to an Instagram advertisement or a Strategist post purporting to have found the holy grail of women’s footwear: comfortable and work-appropriate. Reluctantly, my shoe-price ceiling has risen with the number of subcutaneous infections brewing on my heels. I buy them with a renewed sense of hope every time. Every time, I eagerly unwrap the shoes, slide them on in my carpeted apartment, and note how comfortable they feel—You get what you pay for, I think smugly.
Then I hit the streets, where it all goes wrong. The unyielding little back digs itself into the area right below my Achilles tendon, then shreds it with every step. And so every time, I send boxes of bloody shoes back in the mail like a serial killer. (I will say that you do get the return policies you pay for.)
I always thought this was just part of being female. You wake up, you apply powders to your face to make parts of it different colors, you walk to work, your feet bleed. There is simply no way to look as professional in a shift dress and Allbirds as you can in a fleece vest and Allbirds. Beauty is pain, I figured, and so is professionalism.
[Derek Thompson: Everything you wear is athleisure.]
More women than men suffer pain from their footwear, according to podiatric surveys, and similarly, more women than men say they’ll suffer for the sake of their shoes. A few years ago, there were stories of, ahem, well-heeled women getting “pinky tucks” and toe-shortening surgery so their feet could fit their shoes, rather than the other way around.
Studies reveal the excruciating outcomes of this disparity: “In women ... those who wore good shoes in the past were 67 percent less likely to report hind-foot pain, after adjusting for age and weight,” one big study from 2009 notes. “In men,” the authors added, “there was no association between foot pain, at any location, and shoewear,” possibly because fewer than 2 percent of men in the study wore “bad” shoes.
My own bad-shoe wearing peaked in college. My friends and I would walk home from bars so wracked by agony that we would take our shoes off and walk on the freezing, filthy cement. Only recently, when I was in so much pain after work that I seriously considered reliving my college days—walking down the Metro escalator barefoot and carrying a pair of blood-splattered loafers—did I decide to take this problem to a couple of podiatrists.
The foot doctors, first, validated my feelings. “Women’s shoes are tighter; they’re meant to fit tighter around the toes and the heel,” Cary Zinkin, a spokesman for the American Podiatric Medical Association, told me. “They’re made to make your foot look as slim as possible.”
But Marlene Reid, a podiatric physician in Naperville, Illinois, told me “it’s not normal” to be julienned by your own footwear, as I am on a regular basis. I was surprised to learn that you shouldn’t have to “break in” shoes. They should not be painful the first few days you wear them. “If you try on a shoe that hurts from the outset, don’t buy it,” Zinkin said.
All feet are different, and so are all shoe sizes. Any shoe that’s too loose or too tight can cause a blister, Zinkin said, and a lot of friction can actually rub away the skin, which appears to be what’s happening to me.
My feet don’t look like any of the feet that show up in a Google-Image search for this, but Reid suspected that I might have what’s called a “pump bump,” a bony growth on the back of the heel that makes it hard to wear pumps—and other kinds of dressy shoes, apparently. She suggested that I try “heel lifts,” little insertable wedges that might hoist my bump out of harm’s way.
Both Reid and Zinkin recommended that I use moleskin, gel pads, or even lubricants—like the body glide that athletes use to keep their nipples from chafing—to help me tolerate any shoes I just can’t bear to part with. Zinkin told me that skin tends to be more blister-prone if it’s dry, so I guess I could also try to lotion up my heels, as though I’m preparing to make a coat of my own skin.
One reason so many women are injured by their shoes these days might be the rise of online shopping—you don’t know how the shoe fits until you’ve already bought it. Instead, you’re supposed to shop in the store, preferably in the afternoon, after your feet have swollen to their fullest. When you shop, you’re also supposed to bring along whatever tights you wear, plus any gel pads or heel lifts you use, and stick the whole contraption inside the shoe when you try it on. Also, most shoe stores are carpeted, Reid said, so you want to walk to an area of the store that has tile or wood.
If you bring the shoes home and they’re still too tight, take them to a shoemaker to stretch them. (Just keep in mind that natural fabrics like leather stretch more than synthetics.) Reid debunked the common notion that flats are always better for you than heels. “Some of the flats that have been out there are really hard and don’t stretch,” Reid said. “They’re rigid. I’d rather someone wear a heel that they can tolerate than wear a flat.” She recommended the Fly London brand as a good mix of comfortable and acceptable for work, and while they look a little too ’90s punk for me, to each her own.
Reid also told me something that I didn’t want to hear: Ultimately, I’d have to spend even more money on an already-expensive problem. “If you have the same recurring problem with multiple pairs of shoes, see your podiatrist,” she said. “They will show you how to wear shoes that work with your feet.”
Something tells me their answer is gonna be Toms—preferably with socks.
from The Atlantic https://ift.tt/2OdzxvZ
Three Ways to Combat Climate Change Through the Courts
Climate change is crashing into America’s courts. As the science gets more conclusive, the reality more sobering, and the predictions more dire, the executive and legislative branches have refused to act. That leaves the judicial branch.
In theory, courts are a good place for climate science. Unlike legislative bodies, where bills based on science can be derailed just because a few people say they don’t “believe in” climate change, the courts have evidentiary standards. If something’s real, it’s real. The facts accepted by 98 percent of scientists worldwide represent pretty convincing evidence.
In the past couple of years, activists and attorneys and even state governments have been trying to use the courts to force action, protect those who take matters into their own hands, and wring payouts from offending companies.
These climate cases are taking a number of different forms. And they’re lined up to the horizon.
First there are civil-rights cases, which fault the government for not protecting American citizens.
In a case now on hold in federal court in Oregon, 21 young people are suing the government for failing to curb climate-change-causing CO2 emissions and thus violating their “fundamental constitutional rights to freedom from deprivation of life, liberty and property.” Juliana v. United States was filed in 2015 under Barack Obama and has survived years of challenges. With the trial originally scheduled to begin October 29, the Supreme Court—which previously ruled unanimously in July that the trial could proceed—has now issued a temporary stay while it considers a last-minute challenge from the Justice Department. Attorneys plan to call a spectacular array of expert witnesses, including the former NASA climate scientist James Hansen, who first testified before Congress in 1988 that climate change was already underway.
[Garrett Epps: The government is trying to silence 21 kids hurt by climate change.]
Philip Gregory, one of the attorneys representing the young plaintiffs in Juliana, says he hopes for an act of judicial courage such as in Brown v. Board of Education, in which segregation was proven to harm children and the high court agreed that the federal government had to protect them.
“We’re not asking the Supreme Court to find new rights,” Gregory said. “Based on the evidence that we will introduce at trial, these children are being harmed, the federal government is harming them, and it is up to the judiciary to issue orders to stop the harm.”
Civil-rights suits like this are gaining traction globally. On October 9, a Dutch appeals court upheld one such decision forcing the Netherlands to drastically cut its greenhouse-gas emissions. Similar cases are ongoing in other European countries.
The advocacy group supporting Juliana, Our Children’s Trust, has also helped young people advance similar cases in state courts across the country. Since 2011, it’s filed petitions in all 50 states to force government agencies to use the best climate science in rule making; it brings civil-rights cases when those petitions are denied. In Alaska, for example, 16 youths are suing the state, and as in Juliana, they are not asking for money. They are asking for “science-based numeric reductions in Alaska’s … emissions consistent with global emissions reduction rates necessary to stabilize the climate system.”
[Read: Donald Trump is the first demagogue of the Anthropocene.]
Since those reductions are not happening anytime soon, lawyers are also trying another approach to environmentalism in the courts: The “necessity defense,” or the argument that government inaction on climate change essentially compelled their clients to act unlawfully.
On October 8 and 9, I covered the Minnesota trial of Emily Johnston, 52, Annette Klapstein, 66, and Ben Joldersma, 40, who were granted the first-ever U.S. trial in which a judge planned to instruct the jury to consider a climate necessity defense. The three broke into an oil-pipeline facility owned by the Canadian multinational company Enbridge near tiny Leonard, Minnesota, in 2016, cut the locks on large shutoff valves, and stopped the flow of oil. Together with three other principle activists who carried out similar acts on the same day in North Dakota, Montana, and Washington State, the “Valve Turners,” as they became known, cut off most of the tar-sands oil coming into the U.S. from deposits in Alberta, Canada.
The necessity defense, which has been used in the past by anti-abortion and anti-nuclear-weapons protesters, is a prize long sought by climate activists. Judge Robert Tiffany’s decision to grant it shocked just about everyone. It was denied at the other three Valve Turner trials, in which judges ruled that activists had plenty of other options for legal action. In Minnesota, defendants were ready to argue that climate change was so threatening, and that the government had taken so little action despite their decades of activist work such as lobbying and protesting and voting, that shutting down the pipeline was their only recourse.
But they never got a chance to say their piece: They were acquitted mid-trial, when Tiffany ruled that cutting a lock didn’t count as damage. (The main charge against them was damaging a pipeline.) So they went free.
Klapstein, a retired attorney, said, “I’m not inside this judge’s mind, but it does seem like they find some way to back off [the necessity defense] every time it gets close.”
It’s getting closer and closer. In 2016, climate activists known as the Delta Five, who’d blocked an oil train in Everett, Washington, were allowed to present a necessity defense. However, the judge then told the jury to ignore that information, even as he praised the defendants. In 2018, a judge in Massachusetts found that 13 people who had blocked the construction of a new gas pipeline were “not responsible” by reason of climate necessity. But it wasn’t a jury trial. These cases are happening across the country. On October 25, three climate activists pleaded their necessity to a judge in Cortlandt, New York, after they stopped a Spectra/Enbridge pipeline project for 18 hours. The decision in that case is expected later this year.
[Read: Trump’s new view of climate change]
The Minnesota trial holds a door open for more jury cases. The state appealed the use of the necessity defense in a jury trial, and it was upheld all the way to the state supreme court.
Lauren Regan, the lead attorney on all four of the Valve Turner trials, said that her office, the Civil Liberties Defense Center in Eugene, Oregon, has trained more than 1,000 activists on legal defense in the past few years, and she tries to impress upon them that using the necessity defense has very stringent legal requirements. But she still gets at least one call a week from someone planning to use it. Just like in Minnesota, it’s going to take a judge who is willing to let a jury decide.
“Judges are abrogating the role of juries in favor of the fossil-fuel industry, and whether you’re talking about the Our Children’s Trust case or the Valve Turners or any cases in the future, if we do not reinstate the role and the power of a jury, then he who has the most money is also going to control the courtroom,” Regan said.
Money may be a last recourse if policy-oriented suits fail. Since 2017, local governments getting hammered by hurricanes, wildfires, and new sea-rise infrastructure bills have been going after Big Oil. They’re seeking either monetary damages or, in the latest development, to force fossil-fuel companies to reimburse shareholders for hiding their liability for climate change.
The City of Baltimore, for example, sued BP, ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch Shell, and 23 other oil companies in July 2018, alleging that they’ve contributed directly to a projected 2.1-foot rise in sea level from 2000 to 2050, life-threatening heat waves, more severe flooding, increased drought, and a continued increase in adverse health effects like asthma. All of these problems are costing the city money right now as it tries to adapt.
“There are a couple of things that make these cases especially timely,” said Vic Sher, whose firm, Sher Edling, is representing Baltimore and seven other communities, including the state of Rhode Island, in similar suits. “One is the development of science in the last decade that allows really robust connections causally between emissions on the one hand and a range of climate-change-related impacts on the other, as well as the ability to attribute emissions to particular companies.”
The other, he adds, is the discovery that oil companies have known about the effects of climate change for as long as 50 years. They misrepresented future climate-change costs to their boards and shareholders, and actively fomented climate denial as a strategy to prevent regulatory action.
“The combination of those three factors—causation, attribution, and culpability—is really what underlies the strength of the current generation of cases,” Sher said.
Similar cases were filed by New York City, San Francisco, and Oakland, and were dismissed earlier this year by judges who ruled that the federal legislative or executive branches would have to pass a law that deals explicitly with this issue. Those cases are now on appeal. The lead attorney on those complaints, Steve Berman of Hagens Berman, said they were similar to the public-nuisance cases he won against Big Tobacco.
“Nuisance law has been around for hundreds of years,” Berman said. “This is just the latest, in my view, of the evolution of the law responding to new facts and new injuries created by mankind.”
If he wins one of his appeals, he points out, it is certain to go to the Supreme Court. Asked how he felt about that prospect, Berman said only, “I don’t like beer.”
In the latest twist, on October 24, New York Attorney General Barbara Underwood sued the nation’s largest oil company, ExxonMobil, for hiding the financial risk that climate change posed to the company, and thus defrauding investors. Because of a powerful New York State securities law, many observers believe this case has a chance.
Like the rest of the country, the courts are starting to feel the effects of climate change. May a sane and science-based policy take root there, and quickly.
from The Atlantic https://ift.tt/2SsjJZP