Anti-union challengers are on the verge of victory at Supreme Court

USA Today

Anti-union challengers are on the verge of victory at Supreme Court

Richard Wolf, USA Today February 8, 2018

(Photo: Jacquelyn Martin, AP)

WASHINGTON — Dianne Knox describes herself as “a child of the ’60’s.” Pam Harris grew up a butcher’s daughter in a proud union household. Rebecca Friedrichs was secretary of her local teachers’ union. Mark Janus supports the rights of workers to organize.

But as the lead plaintiffs in four successive Supreme Court cases challenging the power of public employee unions, Knox, Harris, Friedrichs and Janus take pride in helping conservative groups reach a tipping point in their decade-long, anti-union campaign.

What Knox in 2012, Harris in 2014, Friedrichs in 2016 and Janus in 2018 have done is put the justices within one vote of overruling a 40-year-old precedent that allows the unions to collect fees from non-members for the cost of representation. In a case that will be heard this month, the court appears to have that additional vote in the form of Justice Neil Gorsuch.

A 5-4 decision against the unions would free about 5 million government workers, teachers, police and firefighters, and others in 22 states from being forced to pay “fair share” fees — a potentially staggering blow to public employee unions.

The challengers’ battles against the Service Employees International Union, the National Education Association, the American Federation of Teachers and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Workers are based on disagreements with the political and policy priorities of the national leadership.

“This is not my father’s or my grandfather’s union,” says Harris, recalling the Amalgamated Meat Cutters to which they belonged. “This is a money-making scheme. It is a way to advance political agendas.”

Union leaders see the opposite — a power grab by what they call corporate billionaires and right-wing special interests to cripple the unions standing in their way.

“It is a defunding strategy,” Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said at a press conference with other union leaders Wednesday. “They want the economy to be further rigged in their favor.”

More: Supreme Court may deal major blow to labor unions

More: Trump’s impact felt in Supreme Court labor rights cases

More: Supreme Court faces blockbuster term — and Trump

It’s no coincidence that the four cases have emerged from California and Illinois, states with strong public employee unions and strained state budgets. They are among 22 states without so-called “right-to-work” laws, which make union membership and contributions voluntary.

Already in the 22 states, workers do not have to contribute to the unions’ political activities. A ruling by the Supreme Court that they do not have to contribute anything at all could save objecting workers $1,000 or more annually — at a huge cost to unions.

“The point is, who decides whether the union is worthy of their support — the workers themselves or the state on their behalf?” says Jacob Huebert, director of litigation at the Liberty Justice Center, which is representing Janus. “The First Amendment should be a non-partisan issue.”

From Knox’s relatively lonely effort in 2012 to Janus’ potentially landmark case this year, the legal fight has gained adherents on both sides. Only three friend-of-the-court briefs were filed at the Supreme Court in 2012. The number grew to 17 in 2014, 48 in 2016 and 67 this year.

Two early victories

Knox’s beef with the unions dates to 2005, when the SEIU established a “Political Fight-Back Fund” to oppose an effort by then-governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to reduce the clout of California’s public employee unions. Even non-members were expected to contribute.

“I’m sure in a lot of places, they do good,” Knox says. “But I don’t think we should be required as a condition of employment to pay for a union.”

Seven workers, with Knox in the leading role, sought help from the National Right to Work Foundation. They eventually won a 7-2 verdict from the Supreme Court in 2012; Justice Samuel Alito said the union didn’t inform workers of their right to refuse payment.

“My little case,” says Knox, now 70 and retired in Sacramento, “opened the door for these other cases.”

Harris — not your typical union-buster — was next. She met her husband at a Democratic fundraiser for former Chicago mayor Richard M. Daley. But she registered as a Republican during her legal fight against Illinois’ effort to unionize home-care workers.

At 59, Harris spends her days caring for her 29-year-old son Josh, who has a rare physical and cognitive disability called Rubinstein-Taybi syndrome. She is paid out of her son’s Medicaid waiver, which is slightly more than $2,000 a month.

“My employer is not the state. My employer is Josh,” Harris says. “The union had no business taking our sons’ and daughters’ Medicaid dollars.”

The Supreme Court sided with her in 2014, ruling 5-4 that home care workers paid by Medicaid rather than the state should not have to contribute to the local union. But the justices limited their ruling to Harris and other home care workers, leaving intact the unions’ right to collect fees from most non-members.

In his majority opinion, Alito cited the “bedrock principle that, except perhaps in the rarest of circumstances, no person in this country may be compelled to subsidize speech by a third party that he or she does not wish to support.” His words signaled that the court’s majority might be willing to go further in a subsequent case.

A tie vote’s aftermath

That case came two years later, courtesy of Friedrichs, an elementary school teacher in Anaheim, Calif. She says she grew disenchanted with the California Teachers Association when it refused to let teachers in her school district consider a pay cut to avoid layoffs.

“I actually love unions. I love the local association,” says Friedrichs, 52. On the other hand, she says, “the state and national level are completely tone-deaf. They’re out of touch with us. They could care less what we really want.”

Her challenge looked like a sure winner during oral arguments in January 2016. “Everything that is collectively bargained with the government is within the political sphere, almost by definition,” Justice Antonin Scalia said.

But a month later, Scalia died, leaving the court deadlocked and only able to let a lower court verdict against Friedrichs stand. The unions had dodged a third bullet.

The current case grew out of that near-miss and returned the dispute from California to Illinois, where Janus works as a child support specialist.

Like his predecessors, the 65-year-old claims no malice toward unions. But he says their pay and benefit demands have helped put Illinois in dire financial straits, with the lowest credit rating in the nation.

“I don’t oppose the right of workers to organize,” Janus says. “But it ought to be up to the workers to make that decision. … All I’m trying to do is level the playing field and let the worker decide whether they want to join.”

Two years ago, Janus waited in freezing weather outside the Supreme Court to hear the oral argument in Friedrichs’ case. Now Friedrichs plans to return the favor.

“If we do win, I’m going to help restore workers’ rights in this country,” Janus says. “I’m very proud to be a part of that.”

Rust Belt no more: Chicago should be capital of the Water Belt

Chicago Tribune – Commentary

Rust Belt no more: Chicago should be capital of the Water Belt

Rachel Havrelock February 9, 2018

A low fog skims over Lake Michigan at Montrose where a fisherman, surrounded in the swirling fog, tries to catch Coho salmon Thursday Jan. 11, 2018. (Nancy Stone / Chicago Tribune)

The Rust Belt: The words evoke decaying factories, segregated cities and swing states with harsh winters. Places where jobs have dried up, population has dwindled and deep legacies of industrial pollution may be left to fester by an Environmental Protection Agency uninterested in the protection of anything.

We’ve got the place all wrong. We should focus on what actually causes things to rust — water.

The Great Lakes — Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie and Superior — hold 20 percent of the world’s fresh water and the key to survival in the era of climate change. With crippling drought and overwhelming floods occurring in so many corners of America combined with EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt’s mounting attack on wetlands, streams and other small bodies of water, there is a need to transform our much-maligned Rust Belt into a Water Belt, a freshwater oasis for the world. As the region’s biggest city, with shuttered factories that could hum again and a skilled workforce ready to spring into action, Chicago can lead the way.

How does the Rust Belt become the Water Belt? Through three steps that need to begin now, before this precious resource slips through our fingers and leaves us standing in the rust.

Keep water public. President Donald Trump’s infrastructure plan opens the door to the rapid privatization of public waters. By reducing the federal money available to upgrade treatment, pipes and sewage while subsidizing corporate investment, the plan allows multinationals that have no interest in the health of water or local communities to abscond with our most valuable public resource. Water privatization in Chicago would cause particular damage, distancing residents from a public asset whose value will soon skyrocket. Illinois cities where corporations such as Illinois American Water and Aqua Illinois have privatized water service have seen ballooning water rates and increased wait times for repairs. Perched on the shore of Lake Michigan and set within the Great Lakes watershed, Chicago should own the pipelines and set the rates for water to its neighboring towns and suburbs.
Keep corporations out. Multinational corporations understand just how valuable clean, fresh water is becoming and look to enter the market through any available gate. We need to keep our eyes on Veolia, a global water management company. The city of Flint, Mich., brought Veolia on board as a consultant right before residents were poisoned by corrosive water running through lead pipes. At present, Veolia only has a hand in Chicago’s wastewater, processing biosolids at the Stickney Water Reclamation Plant, but we should not cede more control even if federal funding decreases.
Stop the dismantling of the Great Lakes EPA office. The region’s economy and the health of our bodies depend upon smart limits on how much drinking water is extracted from the Great Lakes and what gets pumped into them. Cathy Stepp, who has scrubbed websites of scientific data and facilitated the rapid deterioration of public waters in Wisconsin, was recently appointed head of the Midwest region’s EPA. Her record indicates that she may accelerate dumping and toxic runoff into our lakes, endangering public health, food production and real estate values.

Some will claim that allowing multinational corporations to privatize water maximizes efficiency and provides struggling municipalities with needed revenue, but this is short-term thinking. Great Lakes water not only sustains us now, but ensures that shrinking cities become livable, vibrant places in the future. To get there, we’re going to need to make sure that polluters pay and that corporations reimburse taxpayers the true cost of withdrawing our water. With this revenue, we can explore the replacement of dangerous lead pipes and the implementation of cutting-edge technologies for water filtration and reuse.

The water of the Great Lakes belongs to us. This collective ownership can ensure a future of social stability and economic revival, but Trump administration cuts to federal funding combined with the unleashing of water profiteers could dash these dreams. Nowhere do we have more to lose than in the Great Lakes region.

Rachel Havrelock is director of the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Freshwater Lab.

Is Trump’s EPA chief bluffing? Or will he go after California’s tough standards on greenhouse gases?

Miami Herald

Is Trump’s EPA chief bluffing? Or will he go after California’s tough standards on greenhouse gases?

By Stuart Leavenworth February 9, 2018

Exhaust wafts from a car tailpipe in this 2009 photo from Olympia, Washington. California, Washington and other states have adopted tailpipe emission rules stronger than the federal standard. Recent rhetoric from EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt has heightened fears the Trump administration may seek to block those states from implementing their standards. Steve Bloom The Olympian

Washington: California officials and clean air advocates are increasingly concerned the Trump administration may attempt to unravel a key program to drive down greenhouse gas emissions from automobile fleets while also jeopardizing the ability of California and other states to set pollution standards stronger than federal rules.

Backed by automakers, Trump officials are in talks with their California counterparts to weaken tough vehicle tailpipe standards approved by the Obama administration. The standards are aimed at reducing greenhouse gases, but could also help reduce emissions that cause smog and particulate pollution, and 13 other states have adopted them, including Washington, Pennsylvania and New York.

California has long enjoyed the authority to set pollution standards stronger than the federal government’s, a legacy of the state’s early battles against urban smog, which predated the 1970 Clean Air Act. But in testimony to a Senate committee last week, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt left open the possibilty he might seek to revoke California’s authority.

“Federalism doesn’t mean that one state can dictate to the rest of the country,” Pruitt told the Senate Environmental and Public Works Committee. He then added that “we recognize California’s special status in the statute and we are working with them to find consensus around these issues.”

Three days after Pruitt’s comments, the chair of the California Air Resources Board issued her own warning shot against possible EPA intervention.

“I think there would be a war with many states lining up with California,” said CARB Chairwoman Mary Nichols, speaking at a Palo Alto conference sponsored by Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

Nichols and other state officials note that the EPA, under the Obama administration, granted California a 2013 waiver to implement its own, tougher tailpipe standards. Never before has an EPA administrator attempted to revoke a waiver previously granted to the state.

“The EPA would have to take unprecedented legal action to try to revoke that waiver,” Nichols said during the Feb. 2 conference. “Our best legal judgment is that that can’t be done.”

I THINK THERE WOULD BE A WAR WITH MANY STATES LINING UP WITH CALIFORNIA

Mary Nichols, chairwoman of the California Air Resources Board

Trump’s latest spat with California and other states comes as the president works to shore up his support among the auto industry in Detroit and Michigan, a state he won, to the surprise of Democrats, in 2016. Since then, Trump has kept his focus on Michigan, pledging in his State of the Union address to cut government mandates and “get the Motor City revving its engines.”

The U.S. auto industry has long opposed conflicting state and federal standards for tailpipe emissions and fuel economy. Auto manufacturers say such conflicts force them to design and make different versions of the same vehicle, driving up prices.

When the Obama administration was in office, it struck a grand bargain with California and automakers to raise the average fuel economy of new cars and light trucks to more than 50 miles per gallon by 2025, as a way to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. The deal, however, included a “midterm review” in 2018 to determine if the final requirements were feasible.

Before leaving office, the Obama administration kept the final requirements in place, over protests of the auto industry. In August, Pruitt and the Transportation Department officially announced they were reviewing and possibly rewriting those standards, which would affect the 2022-2025 model years.

The Trump administration’s plans will be known soon. The EPA plans to decide on future tailpipe emission standards by April 1, and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration will reveal its new federal fuel economy standards for cars and light trucks by March 30.

Even if Trump revises the Obama-era rules, California and other states could still implement its tougher restrictions, a prospect that concerns many automakers.

“For us, one national program is very important,” said Gloria Bergquist, Vice President for Communication at the Alliance of Auto Manufacturers in Washington, D.C. “It’s good for consumers, and it avoids duplicative programs with duplicative costs.”

In December, several federal officials met with the California Air Resources Board in Sacramento to discuss a possible national standard. The meeting, first reported by Reuters, included William Wehrum, who leads the EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation, National Highway Traffic Safety Administration deputy chief Heidi King, and Mike Catanzaro, a senior White House aide.

Asked about the status of talks, an EPA spokesman directed McClatchy to Wehrum’s recent comments to reporters, saying he had held “productive discussions” with CARB. Wehrum added he “had no interest whatsoever in withdrawing California’s ability to regulate,” a comment that provoked some laughs back in California.

When Wehrum served in the EPA during the George W. Bush administration, he was a key figure in rejecting California’s original request for a waiver to reduce greenhouse gases from automobiles. California sued over that decision, which was ultimately reversed when Obama came to office.

The potential for California to strike a deal with the Trump administration concerns some environmentalists, but they doubt it will happen. “I’m not sure that there is any room for compromise on California’s part,” said Irene Gutierrez, a San Francisco-based lawyer with the Natural Resources Defense Council, a leading environmental group. CARB officials did not respond to an inquiry.

Gutierrez said California has spent years documenting how its standards are feasible and crucial to the state’s goals of reducing greenhouse gases. California law requires it to cut carbon dioxide emissions to 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2030.

A big part of that program is transitioning to electric and other zero-emission vehicles. At his recent State of the State speech, Gov. Jerry Brown unveiled plans to have 5 million zero-emission vehicles in California by 2030, up from a planned 1.5 million in 2025.

California showed further defiance toward the Trump EPA on Thursday. The California Air Resource Board voted to retain two Obama-era rules on greenhouse gas emissions from medium-and-heavy duty trucks, after the EPA claimed it lacked the authority to enact the rules.

If EPA’s Pruitt sought to revoke California’s tailpipe emissions waiver, he would likely unravel the peace treaty struck under Obama, which halted years of litigation involving California, the auto industry and other players. EPA would have to go through a rulemaking process to revoke the waiver, which could take years, and then prevail in expected litigation.

As Oklahoma Attorney General, Pruitt filed numerous lawsuits against EPA, often claiming the agency was stomping on state sovereignty.

That makes his current position somewhat ironic, said Gutierrez. “He was all about states rights when he was attorney general,” she said.

Scientists rebuff EPA chief’s claim that global warming may be good

USA Today

Scientists rebuff EPA chief’s claim that global warming may be good

John Bacon, USA Today February 8, 2018

(Photo: Pete Marovich)

EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt’s assertion that global warming might be beneficial because “humans have most flourished” during warming trends is drawing heavy skepticism from many climate-change experts.

Pruitt, in an interview with KSNV-TV in Las Vegas this week, acknowledged that “human activity” contributes to global warming, thus walking back his previous statements questioning whether carbon dioxide levels driven higher by human pollution play a role in climate change.

“No one disputes the climate changes,” Pruitt said. “We obviously contribute to it … our activity contributes to it.”

But Pruitt questioned whether climate change is an “existential threat.”

“We know humans have most flourished during times of what? Warming trends,” Pruitt said. “I think there are assumptions made that because the climate is warming, that that necessarily is a bad thing. Do we really know what the ideal surface temperature should be in the year 2100, in the year 2018? That is fairly arrogant, for us to think we know exactly what it should be in 2100.”

Michael Mann, a professor of atmospheric sciences at Penn State and co-author of The Madhouse Effect, said Pruitt’s claims are a “wonderful example of what we call the ‘stages of denial.'”

The only consistency in the various arguments of climate change deniers is that we should continue to burn fossil fuels, Mann said.

“As the evidence becomes ever more compelling that climate change is real and human caused, the forces of denial turn to other specious argument, like ‘it will be good for us,'” Mann said.

Stanford environment professor Chris Field, who oversaw a United Nations and World Meteorological Organization scientific report on climate change, echoed Mann’s sentiments. Field said “thousands” of studies document that a warming planet causes a host of problems, not just from high temperatures but also from heat waves, higher seas, heavier downpours, and more frequent destructive hurricanes and wildfires.

“With all these impacts, you can imagine the occasional business that benefits,” he said. “For example, homebuilders after a fire or flood. But the vast majority of the people experience losses, sometimes catastrophic losses.”

Speculation “isn’t helpful,” Field said. “The evidence based on real observations of real events is overwhelming.”

Lynn Goldman, dean of the Milken Institute School of Public Health at the George Washington University, said the impact of global warming on health and the sustainability of the food supply are “not good.”

“Because of local variability there are locations where warming has had some benefit,” Goldman acknowledged, adding that “things are worse, overall.”

Pruitt said he wants an “honest, open, transparent debate about what do we know, what don’t we know, so the American people can be informed and they can make decisions on their own with respect to these issues.”

Pruitt also questioned what role his agency should have in curbing the carbon dioxide footprint. He said EPA efforts to do so during the Obama administration were mostly rejected by the courts, and that his job is to “execute, not legislate” pollution laws.

Before taking over the EPA, Pruitt served as Oklahoma’s attorney general. In that roll the Republican sued 14 times to block clean air and water safeguards established by the EPA, the agency he now leads.

The Trump administration has worked to roll back the Clean Power Plan that the Obama White House pushed out in 2015 to combat climate change. And Trump’s decision to bow out of the Paris Agreement, an international accord to reduce carbon emissions, has drawn outrage from Democrats and environmental groups.

GOP congressman powers his off-grid solar home with a Tesla battery

ThinkProgress

GOP congressman powers his off-grid solar home with a Tesla battery

But libertarian, MIT grad Rep. Massie (R-KY) is still a climate science denier

Joe Romm February 8, 2018

Screenshot of Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) in his garage, before he salvages a Tesla car battery pack to run his off-grid home.

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) is an MIT-trained engineer and libertarian who has been living off-grid with his family for over a decade and driving a Tesla Model S for five years.

On Sunday, he posted a YouTube video on his “DIY battery quest” to replace the 12-year-old lead-acid batteries with some new Tesla lithium batteries. As he explains, while living off-grid is expensive, the new batteries could cut his nighttime electricity costs in half, from $0.25 a kilowatt hour to $0.12 a kilowatt hour, which is close to the price of retail electricity.

But while Elon Musk makes his popular Powerwall battery for use with residential solar systems, Tesla doesn’t sell one for off-grid use. And Tesla won’t sell you Model S batteries by themselves.

Tesla Announces New Product To ‘Fundamentally Change The Way The World Uses Energy’

So, being an engineer, Massie decided to see if he could buy a wrecked Tesla vehicle, salvage the batteries, and then retool them for use in his home.

This 23-minute video documents what he calls a “pretty dag-gone exciting” do-it-yourself adventure, in which he travels to Georgia to buy a wrecked Tesla Model S for $15,000 and successfully uses its lithium battery to replace the messy and high maintenance lead-acid batteries.

Massie was motivated by his strong libertarian streak, as he told the center-right website Rare.us Wednesday: “When you go off-the-grid, you have more choices for where to build your house. Land that wasn’t developable because of a lack of access to public utilities suddenly becomes viable by going off the grid. Plus homeowners won’t have to run wires across their neighbors’ land.”

But while Massie is not your typical partisan Republican — he won the first Lemelson-MIT Student Prize for inventiveness ever awarded — he doesn’t embrace climate science. He told Science magazine back in 2012, “Most of the public is still debating whether the earth is heating up. But I think the real question is by how much? I’m still looking for an answer I can hold onto.”

Massie added, “I honestly think that it’s an open question… I think the jury is still out on the contribution of our activities to the change in the earth’s climate.”

One fact about climate change that’s worth repeating

In fact, the overwhelming majority of climate scientists — over 97 percent — understand that humans are the primary cause of climate change, and that the best estimate is that humans are responsible for all recent warming. And they have known that for years.

Why Trump’s parade will lead Republicans over a cliff

Yahoo News – Matt Bai’s Political World

Why Trump’s parade will lead Republicans over a cliff

Matt Bai, National Political Columnist February 8, 2018

Yahoo News photo Illustration; photos: AP, Getty

Markets are careening all over the place. Congress is struggling, again, to keep the Capitol open. The White House is at war with the FBI, and the special counsel’s investigation into Russian influence is about to touch off a constitutional crisis. If you’re the president, what’s your next bold move?

A parade, obviously.

Not just any parade. What President Trump has in mind — what he has, in fact, ordered the Pentagon to spend weeks of time and millions of dollars planning, if the fake Washington Post can be trusted — is a garish show of military power, with tanks and missiles followed by warriors in full regalia marching up Pennsylvania Avenue for no apparent reason, except I guess that parades are super-fun and often involve things like cotton candy and sparklers, and that’s a hard thing for a grown man to resist.

Actually, Trump got this particular idea in Paris back in July, when he visited Emmanuel Macron and witnessed a similar display. Because you know, when you think about military might, your mind immediately goes to France.

Critics of the president see in this the aspirations of a strongman. They point out that the whole thing has a certain Kim Jong Un feel to it, with Trump and his ruling generals solemnly reviewing the troops as they high-kick it past the White House. It’s a show of force that could only be interpreted as threatening toward adversaries abroad, if not to the investigators working a few miles away.

But I give Trump more credit than that. I don’t actually think he’s motivated by some secret agenda to install himself as a small-handed dictator. I doubt he’s read enough history to understand why a parade like this might make a lot of thinking people nauseous.

No, I think Trump’s real agenda is getting clearer every day, and his silly parade fits in perfectly. His goal is to govern at the dawn of the Cold War, in the 1950s America he knew as a boy, when it wasn’t so uncommon for presidents to march alongside tanks and batteries.

He’s stuck in a moment most Americans can’t remember, and he wants the rest of us stuck there with him.

You can see it in Trump’s approach to foreign policy generally. A year into office, he’s moving to restart the nuclear arms race that darkened the second half of the 20th century, and he’s seeking billions more to ramp up conventional forces, rather than modernize them, in case we have to fight another land war on the Korean Peninsula.

Trump’s personal taunting of the North Korean leader, his boast about the superior size of his “nuclear button,” brings to mind America’s bygone fixation with Khrushchev or Castro. All that’s missing is the black-and-white TV.

About the only way Trump’s foreign policy isn’t lifted directly from the Cold War is that he just can’t summon any real antipathy for the Russians, no matter how menacing they become. Go figure.

You can see it in the way Trump fetishizes the stock market as the only indicator of economic progress, as if we still lived in the moment when the state of General Motors and IBM told you everything you needed to know about the state of the American worker. You can see it in the way he champions protectionism, as if American manufacturers could still subsist without foreign markets.

You can see it in the way he throws around explosive charges of treason and disloyalty, in the mold of Joe McCarthy and Dick Nixon (not to mention Trump’s idol, Roy Cohn). You can see it, not least of all, in the way he baldly mythologizes pre-civil-rights America for the thousands of resentful white men who still wear the red hats at his rallies.

(And just by the way, you can hear it in the way he called Stormy Daniels, his alleged onetime paramour, “honeybunch.” Seriously. The last time someone used that term to refer to something other than breakfast cereal, man hadn’t yet walked on the moon.)

This is, after all, what making America great again was really all about. A more precise slogan would have been “Make America Eisenhower’s Again.” Minus the dignity and statesmanship.

It amazes me, still, that even now Republicans in Washington can’t seem to grasp the existential peril in all of this time traveling. Make no mistake: They don’t love Trump, and they wouldn’t prefer him as president. They’ve just decided, by and large, that protecting Trump from judgment is the likeliest route to protecting their majorities.

But I wonder if the Devin Nuneses and Paul Ryans of the world managed to put down their beers and weenies long enough to watch the Super Bowl last Sunday. If they did, they might have noticed that the companies who advertised to the largest single audience of the year wanted nothing to do with this Trumpian vision of lost greatness.

If Republican leaders sat through the commercials, they would have seen an almost endless array of multiracial faces, untraditional families and not-so-subtle messages about social progress and leaving the past behind.

For all the controversy stirred up by that boneheaded ad that had Martin Luther King hawking Dodge trucks, what was lost is that the company was clearly trying to repossess this limited concept of American greatness. However much that spot may have offended King’s admirers, its intended message was a rebuke of Trump’s core appeal.

So I ask you, Washington Republicans: Who do you figure knows more about where American society is headed? Would that be the most sophisticated corporations in America, which spend hundreds of millions of dollars on consumer research, or the president of the United States, whose approval after the customary State of the Union bump barely broke 40 percent?

Why don’t you call all those companies that market-tested the shih tzu puppy out of those Super Bowl ads and ask them whether Cold War nostalgia will be an especially sellable commodity over the next decade of American life?

This is a crisis for modern Republicans. The larger point, though, is that however much Trump’s 1950s fantasy may endanger his party, I fear it endangers his country more.

Every day spent thinking about more tanks and nukes we don’t need is a day closer to the moment when European powers and China are seen as the indispensable peacemakers on the world stage.

Every day spent obsessing over stock prices and tariffs (something plenty of retro Democrats do, too) is another day spent not thinking about how to maintain our influence in global markets or how to retool the social contract so we can compete in this century, rather than the last one.

Everybody loves a parade, right up until the moment it passes you by.

Trump now claims the stock market is rigged against him

ThinkProgress

Trump now claims the stock market is rigged against him

The buck always stops somewhere else.

Aaron Rupar February 7, 2018

Trump on Tuesday. Credit: Chris Kleponis – Pool/Getty Images

As recently as last week, President Trump was bragging about how stock market gains he purportedly engineered were propelling an economic surge benefiting all Americans.

“[It’s] smashed one record after another, gaining $8 trillion in value,” Trump said during the State of the Union. “That is great news for Americans’ 401(k), retirement, pension and college saving accounts.”

The speech capped off a year in which Trump repeatedly linked the stock market’s steady rise — a rise that began under President Obama in 2009 — with the fortunes of all Americans, roughly half of whom don’t have any investments.

Donald Trump: The Stock Market has been creating tremendous benefits for our country in the form of not only Record Setting Stock Prices, but present and future Jobs, Jobs, Jobs. Seven TRILLION dollars of value created since our big election win!

Donald Trump: With the great vote on Cutting Taxes, this could be a big day for the Stock Market – and YOU!

Donald Trump: Looks like another great day for the Stock Market. Consumer Confidence is at Record High. I guess somebody likes me (my policies)!

But now, days after the largest single-day point drop in the history of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, Trump is claiming the exact opposite — that the stock market is rigged against him because it tanked in response to good economic news he helped engineer.

“In the ‘old days,’ when good news was reported, the Stock Market would go up,” Trump tweeted on Wednesday. “Today, when good news is reported, the Stock Market goes down. Big mistake, and we have so much good (great) news about the economy!”

Donald Trump: In the “old days,” when good news was reported, the Stock Market would go up. Today, when good news is reported, the Stock Market goes down. Big mistake, and we have so much good (great) news about the economy!

The historic Dow Jones drop that occurred on Monday was in part a reaction to Friday’s jobs report, which showed stronger wage growth than at any point since 2009. As companies sink more money into wages, there’s less left for shareholders.

Wage growth also contributes to concerns about inflation — another drag on corporate profits and the expectation thereof, which is what motivates the stock market. That dynamic, coupled with the fact that many Americans don’t have investments, is a big reason why economists differentiate between economic news that is actually good for working-class people and stock market gains.

The relationship between wage growth and inflationary pressures on one hand and downward pressure on stock prices isn’t new, so it’s unclear what Trump — who attended the Wharton business school — means when he refers to the “old days.”

Monday’s sell-off created an awkward visual for Trump, who was giving a speech in Ohio bragging about how good the economy is right as the Dow Jones tanked. Fox News even cut away from Trump’s speech to cover the roughly 1,100-point drop. Roughly half of those losses were recovered during trading on Tuesday and Wednesday.

The megalomania of Donald Trump

Washington Post – Opinions

The megalomania of Donald Trump

By Ann Telnaes February 6, 2018

In his latest efforts to undermine dissent, President Trump calls the Democrats “un-American” and “treasonous.”

Donald Trump wants to bring coal back, even though it’s killing miners

Salon

Donald Trump wants to bring coal back, even though it’s killing miners

In his promises to bring back the coal industry, Trump has conveniently omitted his concern for miners’ health

Charlie May February 7, 2018

(Credit: AP/Steve Helber)

It’s no secret that President Donald Trump has vowed to revitalize the coal industry, an industry that has been on its last legs for probably far too long. But aside from all of the obvious flaws with the president’s logic to turn back the clock on fossil fuels and usher in an era of “clean coal,” one major flaw has been vastly overlooked: mining for coal is a fatally unhealthy means of employment.

In a letter published in the Journal of the American Medical Association on Tuesday, epidemiologists at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health confirmed “416 cases of progressive massive fibrosis or complicated black lung in three clinics in central Appalachia from 2013 to 2017,” NPR reported. The clinics are run by Stone Mountain Health Services, and they treat coal miners primarily from Virginia, Kentucky and West Virginia.

“This is the largest cluster of progressive massive fibrosis ever reported in the scientific literature,” Scott Laney, a NIOSH epidemiologist who was involved with the study told NPR. “We’ve gone from having nearly eradicated PMF in the mid-1990’s to the highest concentration of cases that anyone has ever seen.”

Clinics would see roughly just under 10 cases per year, but are now seeing them as often as every two weeks — an unprecedented rate that has sparked concern, as well as calls for a national health emergency, NPR reported.

“We are seeing something that we haven’t seen before,” Ron Carson, who directs Stone Mountain’s black lung program, told NPR.

The only cure for the disease is a lung transplant, which is only applicable to miners who can safely undergo such a procedure. There is zero doubt that years of working in coal mines causes this type of lung deterioration, and the industry’s decline has played a significant role as well.

NPR elaborated: PMF, or complicated black lung, encompasses the worst stages of the disease, which is caused by inhalation of coal and silica dust at both underground and surface coal mines. Miners gradually lose the ability to breathe, as they wheeze and gasp for air.

The NPR investigation also found that the likely cause of the epidemic is longer work shifts for miners and the mining of thinner coal seams. Massive mining machines must cut rock with coal and the resulting dust contains silica, which is far more toxic than coal dust. The spike in PMF diagnoses is also due to layoffs and retirements brought on by the decline in coal mining. Miners who had put off getting checked for black lung earlier began streaming into clinics, especially if they needed the medical and wage replacement benefits provided by black lung compensation programs.

PMF cases are also affecting much younger miners. In the 1990’s, for example, PMF was diagnosed to miners who were typically in their 60’s, 70’s and 80’s, while now miners who are in their 50’s, 40’s and even 30’s — all with much less mining experience — have been diagnosed.

The study showed that “a high proportion” of miners had the disease, even with a “coal mining tenure of less than 20 years, which are indications of exceptionally severe and rapidly progressive disease.”

In his pie in the sky pledge to bring the coal industry back to life, put miners back to work and massively produce “clean coal” Trump has utterly failed to acknowledge the health ramifications felt by the American workers he has championed. That’s because his outlandish promises have always been intended for fossil fuel corporations, not its workers.

Charlie May is a news writer at Salon.

EPA chief Pruitt reveals Trump climate policy is built on a lie

ThinkProgress

EPA chief Pruitt reveals Trump climate policy is built on a lie

Pruitt says humans ‘most flourished’ during warming trends. Science says otherwise.

Joe Romm February 7, 2018

EPA Chief Scott Pruitt and President Donald Trump announcing the U.S. plan to withdraw from Paris Climate Accord. June 1, 2017. Photo: Win McNamee/Getty Images

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt has been working overtime to promote fossil fuels and rollback U.S. climate action; policies that climate scientists and over 190 nations say will lead to catastrophic levels of warming.

On Tuesday, Pruitt, who has long denied basic climate science, explained part of his underlying motivation for the Trump administration’s dangerous policies: the idea that more global warming could be a good thing that helps the world “flourish.”

Pruitt told KSNV television in Nevada, “I think there’s assumptions made that because the climate is warming, that that necessarily is a bad thing.” He falsely asserted, “We know that humans have most flourished during times of, what, warming trends?”

In fact, the scientific literature could not be clearer that humans have flourished when the climate is stable.

TEMPERATURE CHANGE OVER PAST 11,000 YEARS (IN BLUE) PLUS PROJECTED WARMING OVER THE NEXT CENTURY ON HUMANITY’S CURRENT EMISSIONS PATH.

Indeed, stable temperatures enabled the development of modern civilization, global agriculture, and a world that could sustain a vast population.

The policies of climate science deniers like Pruitt and Trump would serve only to speed up the destruction of a livable climate, a key reason scientists have been increasingly outspoken against them.

“As the evidence becomes ever more compelling that climate change is real and human caused, the forces of denial turn to other specious argument, like ‘it will be good for us’,” climatologist Michael Mann told ThinkProgress. “And that keeps their funders like the Koch brothers, very happy.”

Even Fox News slams EPA chief’s climate denial: ‘All kinds of studies contradict you’

Chris Wallace utterly debunks Scott Pruitt’s lies about the central role carbon pollution plays in warming.

This isn’t the first time Pruitt has used a specious talking point this year. In January, he told Reuters, “The debate is how do we know what the ideal surface temperature is in 2100?” Even though scientists debunked him at the time, Pruitt actually got snarky Tuesday saying, “Do we really know what the ideal surface temperature is in the year 2100–in the year 2018? It’s fairly arrogant for us to think that we know exactly what it should be in 2100.”

In fact, as climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe explained last month, “There is no one perfect temperature for the earth, but there is for us humans, and that’s the temperature we’ve had over the last few thousands of years when we built our civilization, agriculture, economy, and infrastructure.”

She noted: “Two-thirds of the world’s largest cities are located within a meter of sea level. What happens when sea level rises a meter or more, as it’s likely to this century? We can’t pick up Shanghai or London or New York and move them. Most of our arable land is already carefully allocated and farmed. ”

Hayhoe put together an explainer video for PBS on the very talking point Pruitt is now pushing:

Bottom line: It’s not arrogant for us to listen to the overwhelming consensus of climate scientists, and join with the rest of the world in the fight to avoid catastrophic temperature changes. What’s arrogant is ignoring science while jeopardizing the health and well-being of Americans and billions of people around the globe.