PBS NewsHour full episode December 21, 2017

JUDY WOODRUFF: Good evening.
I'm Judy Woodruff.
On the "NewsHour" tonight: As Republicans celebrate the most significant rewrite of
the tax code in decades, we break down the sweeping changes in the final bill.
Then: harassment on the job.
I sit down with the chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to talk about the challenges
women face when they file a complaint.
And what's the beef with beef?
As the fake burger industry heats up, we bite into the debate over red meat.
MICHAEL POLLAN, Author, "Omnivore's Dilemma": I think there is a place for animals in sustainable
agriculture.
However, that's not the kind of meat we're eating now.
JUDY WOODRUFF: All that and more on tonight's "PBS NewsHour."
(BREAK)
JUDY WOODRUFF: Congress moved this evening to pass a temporary spending bill that will
keep the federal government running through January 19.
The House of Representatives passed a Republican measure, and the Senate moved to follow suit.
It includes short-term health care funding for veterans and children from low-income
families.
But the two political parties still argued over the outcome.
REP.
RODNEY FRELINGHUYSEN (R), New Jersey: Without action on this bill, existing government funding
will expire tomorrow and the government will shut down.
This legislation provides a simple, clean extension of current funding levels through
January of 2018.
REP.
BARBARA LEE (D), California: This reckless short-term resolution, it ignores our critical
year-end priorities, like passing a bipartisan, long-term reauthorization of the Children's
Health Insurance Program.
JUDY WOODRUFF: The House also approved on a separate $81 billion disaster aid package.
Republican leaders formally sent their tax overhaul to President Trump today for his
signature.
House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Finance Chair Orrin Hatch made it official at a Capitol
ceremony.
Dozens of their colleagues looked on.
The White House said later there's a very good chance that Mr. Trump will sign the bill
tomorrow.
The United Nations General Assembly defied President Trump today, and rejected his policy
shift on Jerusalem.
Hari Sreenivasan has our report from New York.
MAN: I now give the floor to the distinguished representative of the United States.
HARI SREENIVASAN: It was the United States vs. most of the world.
The U.N. resolution declared President Trump's recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital
null and void, that despite Ambassador Nikki Haley's warnings.
NIKKI HALEY, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations: The United States will remember this
day in which it was singled out for attack in the General Assembly for the very act of
exercising our right as a sovereign nation.
We will remember it when we are called upon to once again make the world's largest contribution
to the United Nations.
HARI SREENIVASAN: Haley had earlier said Washington would take names of those who disavowed its
decision.
President Trump put it even more bluntly yesterday:
DONALD TRUMP, President of the United States: They take hundreds of millions of dollars
and even billions of dollars and then they vote against us.
Well, we're watching those votes.
Let them vote against us.
We will save a lot.
We don't care.
HARI SREENIVASAN: But the warnings sparked defiance by many.
NATO ally Turkey co-sponsored the resolution.
MEVLUT CAVUSOGLU, Turkish Foreign Minister: This is bullying, and this chamber will not
bow to do that.
It is unethical to think that the words and dignity of member states are for sale.
Let me put it in this way: We will not be intimidated.
HARI SREENIVASAN: In the end, 128 of the U.N.'s 193 members voted for the resolution.
They included four of the top five recipients of U.S. foreign assistance, Iraq, Afghanistan,
Egypt and Jordan; 35 countries abstained, including Canada and Mexico; 21 nations were
absent.
Only seven joined the U.S. and Israel in voting no.
The Israeli ambassador dismissed the resolution.
DANNY DANON, Israeli Ambassador to the United States: This vote is nothing more than a performance
of delusion.
The Palestinians know this resolution is a fraud.
They know this resolution does absolutely nothing for the lives of the Palestinian people.
HARI SREENIVASAN: But the Palestinian foreign minister insisted his people have an inalienable
right to East Jerusalem as their future capital.
RIYAD AL-MALIKI, Palestinian National Authority Foreign Minister: The American decision will
not impact the status and position of the Holy City.
Rather, it naturally affects the status of the United States as a mediator of peace.
HARI SREENIVASAN: The resolution is nonbinding, and Ambassador Haley insisted it will have
no effect on plans to move the American Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
For the "PBS NewsHour," I'm Hari Sreenivasan.
JUDY WOODRUFF: As that U.N. vote was under way, Vice President Mike Pence was making
a surprise visit to Afghanistan.
He didn't mention the Afghan government's support for the resolution on Jerusalem.
Instead, he spoke to U.S. troops at Bagram Air Base outside Kabul, and said he believes
that victory is closer than ever before.
MIKE PENCE, Vice President of the United States: Under President Donald Trump, the armed forces
of the United States will remain engaged in Afghanistan until we eliminate the terrorist
threat to our homeland, our people once and for all.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Also today, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis gave a pep talk to troops at the
U.S. prison for terrorism suspects in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
He was the first defense chief to visit there since 2002.
The U.S. imposed economic sanctions today on a top general in Myanmar over atrocities
against Rohingya Muslims.
Until last month, he was a military commander in a region where there's evidence of mass
killing and rapes.
Some 650,000 Rohingya have fled to Bangladesh.
In Yemen, the International Red Cross reports that the number of suspected cholera cases
has now topped one million.
It blames the war between Shiite rebels backed by Iran, and a coalition of Sunni nations
led by Saudi Arabia and supported by the United States.
The Saudis said yesterday that they are easing their blockade of a key Yemeni port, in order
to let in food and medicine.
In Spain, the people of Catalonia went to the polls today, and parties that want to
secede again won a majority.
The previous Catalan regime had declared independence, only to be ousted by the central government
in Madrid.
Today, voters endured long lines to cast ballots, amid heavy turnout, and many voiced hope that
something good will emerge from the turmoil.
MAN (through translator): I think that life will give us what we deserve.
It's the same to me, independence or no to independence, as long as you live in a better
country, more just, more social.
I would be satisfied with this.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Several pro-independence Catalan leaders are now in jail or in exile.
Back in this country, life expectancy is down for a second straight year, and opioids are
getting the blame.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that, in 2016, more than 42,000 drug
overdose deaths were opioid-related.
That's a 28 percent increase over 2015, and it accounts for two-thirds of all drug deaths.
As a result, average life expectancy slipped about a month, to 78 years and seven months.
It turns out that a surprising 8.8 million people signed up for health insurance under
Obamacare on the federal exchange this fall.
That's 400,000 below last year's total, but the Trump administration had cut the sign-up
period in half this year and it had dialed back publicity about the effort.
A jury here in Washington, D.C., has acquitted six people of all charges in violent protests
during President Trump's inauguration.
They were the first to be tried out of more than 200 arrested.
Prosecutors said they joined a group that left a trail of damage over 16 city blocks.
The defense said that police never identified the actual culprits.
Democratic Senator Al Franken of Minnesota painted a dire picture of national politics
today in his farewell address to Congress.
Franken will step down on January 2 after facing sexual misconduct allegations.
Today, he urged voters to insist on truth.
SEN.
AL FRANKEN (D), Minnesota: I have to admit that it feels like we're losing the war for
truth, and maybe it's already lost.
It's going to take ordinary Americans deciding to become more informed consumers of political
news and opinion and deciding that they're willing to be part of the argument themselves,
instead of simply tuning out all of the noise.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Franken is one of seven federal lawmakers who've decided to resign, or not
run for reelection, after being accused of sexual misconduct.
And on Wall Street today, the Dow Jones industrial average gained 55 points to close at 24782.
The Nasdaq rose four, and the S&P 500 added five.
Still to come on the "NewsHour": nonprofits fearing fewer donations because of the Republican
tax plan; how President Trump could influence the judiciary long after he leaves office;
the head of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission on handling sexual harassment complaints;
and much more.
One of the most significant changes in the tax overhaul is a doubling of the standard
deduction.
That's what most people can take without itemizing deductible expenses.
The final bill increases that maximum standard amount next year to $12,000 for an individual,
$24,000 for couples.
Charities are already expressing worry that fewer people will itemize, and, without the
tax break, that that will reduce incentives for giving.
One estimate found that the number of Americans who itemize could drop from 46 million to
fewer than 20 million.
Stacy Palmer is the editor of "The Chronicle of Philanthropy," and she joins me now.
Stacy Palmer, welcome to the "NewsHour."
So, remind us, first of all, how does the current tax law operate now when it comes
to charitable giving?
STACY PALMER, "The Chronicle of Philanthropy": Now there's the charitable deduction that
we're all very familiar with.
And when you itemize on your tax returns, you get to take that deduction for what you
give.
So, let's say you want to give $100, and you might get 30 back in your taxes because you're
at that 30 percent rate.
So it's a good deal.
You haven't -- out of pocket, you have only spent $70.
That encourages a lot of us to give, but it's still available to only those of us who itemize.
If you don't itemize, you don't get the deduction.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Right.
And that charitable deduction will still be there in the new tax law.
STACY PALMER: Exactly.
JUDY WOODRUFF: But something else is going to change, as we mentioned.
What is that?
STACY PALMER: Right.
The number of people who itemize is expected to drop really sharply.
Part of the simplification of the tax law was to say you don't need to itemize and to
raise the standard deduction.
Most people won't need to itemize.
But that has a big impact on charities, because many middle-class and upper-middle-class people
are ones who aren't going to itemize anymore.
They won't have that charitable deduction.
JUDY WOODRUFF: So, the thinking is that they won't think about making the contribution
because it won't add to their ability to reduce their tax bill; is that it?
STACY PALMER: They may think about making a contribution.
They change the amount that they're going to give.
So, certainly, they don't feel that they have that incentive that they have now to give,
maybe to give a little bit more generously.
So I don't think people think Americans are going to stop giving entirely because of this,
but certainly they're going to drop the amount that they will give.
JUDY WOODRUFF: So, you are in charge of a magazine, "The Chronicle of Philanthropy,"
that looks at this, at charitable giving all the time.
How worried are charities about this?
STACY PALMER: Charities are very worried.
The estimates are that as much as $20 billion might not be given next year because of the
change.
Now, $20 billion is a lot of money, and it affects a lot of charities.
But we're a very generous country, and we give more than $300 billion.
So it's not a giant hit, but it certainly is important, and what charities are worried
about most is that it may be an uneven hit.
Community charities, local groups, smaller nonprofits, those are the ones that may feel
more of the pain.
And so most charities are very upset that not every American gets this encouragement
to give, that now the very wealthiest are the only ones who get that special incentive
to give.
JUDY WOODRUFF: I wanted to ask you about that, because I guess the research shows that people,
even people of middle income, now do a lot of giving in this country.
I think I read that two-thirds of Americans make charitable contributions.
STACY PALMER: Absolutely.
But one of the things we have seen is a decline in the number of Americans who are giving,
and it's mostly those middle-class donors.
This is yet just another reason for people to think twice about their charitable gift.
JUDY WOODRUFF: So, what are charities going to try to do in order to head some of this
off or to mitigate some of the damage they expect?
STACY PALMER: We can all expect to get a lot of solicitations, more appeals, more talk
about the meaning of your gift, the impact of your donation and why we need you more
now than ever.
So, I expect that we're going to get intensified advocacy for charitable giving, so everybody
expect your phone to be ringing, your e-mail appeals to keep flowing in.
And nonprofits may try to go back and persuade Congress that, shouldn't we pass some kind
of rule that everybody should be allowed to take a deduction?
It's what people call a universal deduction.
And it's the 100th anniversary of the charitable deduction.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Ah.
STACY PALMER: So charities are going to try to push and hope that maybe Congress will
say, this would be a good idea to encourage charitable giving.
JUDY WOODRUFF: So, Stacy Palmer, we have got, what, 10 days left in December before the
year, before it becomes 2018.
What could people do now, if they want to try to head this off in some way or make sure
that they do the giving that they want to do?
STACY PALMER: It's a good year to give very generously.
And a lot of people are doing that.
And you have until December 31.
If you make an online gift, as long as it's on your credit card right up until then, you
still have some time to take advantage of it and take advantage of current law.
And a lot of people are doing that now and pre-paying as much as they can.
JUDY WOODRUFF: And I read that there is also some advice for older Americans.
There is a way they can talk to their accountant about how they take retirement.
STACY PALMER: Exactly.
There is something where you can give from your retirement account.
And that rule didn't change.
And you can give very generously.
You're required to give every year out of your retirement account if you're 70-and-a-half
and older, and that's a great year to give tax-free.
JUDY WOODRUFF: All right, Stacy Palmer with "The Chronicle of Philanthropy," thank you
very much.
STACY PALMER: Thank you.
JUDY WOODRUFF: While President Trump had to wait until December to see his long-wished-for
tax overhaul pass the Congress, as John Yang reports, he and Senate Republicans have used
the year to begin quietly and systematically reshaping the federal court system.
JOHN YANG: Hearings for judicial nominees can be sleepy affairs, but late last week...
SEN.
JOHN KENNEDY (R), Louisiana: Do you know what a motion in limine is?
MATTHEW PETERSEN, Judicial Nominee: I probably wouldn't be able to give you a good definition
right here at this table.
SEN.
JOHN KENNEDY: Do you know what the Younger abstention doctrine is?
MATTHEW PETERSEN: I have heard of it, but I again...
SEN.
JOHN KENNEDY: How about the Pullman abstention doctrine?
You will all see that a lot in federal court.
OK.
JOHN YANG: Matthew Petersen's inability to answer Republican Senator John Kennedy's basic
questions about legal procedure led him to drop out of consideration for a seat on the
powerful district court in Washington.
He was the third of President Trump's court picks to step aside in a week amid questions
about their qualifications and temperament.
Brett Talley dropped his bid after questions were raised about his background and his failure
to disclose a conflict of interest.
His wife is a White House lawyer.
A 2015 video surfaced of nominee Jeff Mateer criticizing same-sex marriage and calling
transgender children evidence of Satan's plan.
DONALD TRUMP, President of the United States: We will set records in the terms of number
of judges.
JOHN YANG: Despite these setbacks, the Senate has confirmed a record 12 Trump picks for
influential federal appeals courts, the fastest success rate for any president ever.
DONALD TRUMP: There has never been anything like what we have been able to do together
with judges.
JOHN YANG: Yale Law Professor Akhil Reed Amar:
AKHIL REED AMAR, Yale Law School: The biggest thing people are missing is that they may
have noticed several of President Trump's spectacular failures among district court
nominees, pulled nominations, viral videos and the like.
That's all very interesting, but a bit distracting, because he's been spectacularly successful
at the federal court of appeals level, and that's where the real action is, because those
are the judges that will change the law and shape the law going forward for the next 30
years.
JOHN YANG: The Supreme Court hears only dozens of case as year.
That means federal appeals courts have the final word on tens of thousands of matters
that don't reach the justices.
So far this year, lower courts have blocked Trump administration policies, like the travel
ban, the transgender military ban and on so-called sanctuary cities.
In 2013, the then majority Democrats changed Senate rules to require only 51 votes for
judicial confirmations.
Now Republicans are using that to reshape the federal judiciary.
AKHIL REED AMAR: He's picking conservative idea people of all sorts of different flavors
of conservatism.
They tend to be largely, overwhelmingly really, white.
They are more male than President Obama's appointees on average were, and they're younger.
So these are folks who are going to be around for a very long time, shaping the law.
JOHN YANG: Even picks who have won confirmation have generated controversy.
One was appeals court nominee Leonard Steven Grasz, who took heat for past statements on
abortion and same-sex marriage.
SEN.
SHELDON WHITEHOUSE (D), Rhode Island: You are the first circuit court nominee since
2006 to receive a unanimous not-qualified rating from the ABA.
LEONARD STEVEN GRASZ, Judicial Nominee: I do respectfully disagree with the result.
JOHN YANG: Grasz was confirmed this month along party lines.
And now confirmed Judge John Bush was grilled about blog posts that compared abortion to
slavery.
Mr. Trump still has more than 40 nominees pending and more than 100 vacancies yet to
fill.
For two different perspectives on this, we're joined by Vanita Gupta.
She's head of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, and she ran the Civil
Rights Division in the Obama Justice Department.
Also by Ilya Shapiro, he's a senior fellow in constitutional studies at the Cato Institute,
which is a libertarian think thank here in Washington.
Thank you both for joining us.
Ilya, let me begin with you.
We saw in the tape piece the three recent nominees who withdrew.
That's leading a lot of critics to say this process is moving too fast, they're not vetting
them carefully enough, the nominees carefully enough, and not only that, but the administration
is more interested in ideology, rather than traditional experience and background.
What do you say to those critics?
ILYA SHAPIRO, Cato Institute: Well, it depends what you mean by ideology.
I think there is an emphasis on finding people who are committed intellectually and by their
experience have a paper trail that defends originalism and textualism, not simply a crony
or a hack that has spent all their time in the Bar Association or something like that.
So it's not those so-called traditional qualifications.
But, certainly, as we have seen from the circuit court nominees, the dozen that have been confirmed
and others, a lot of folks that have clerked on the Supreme Court, that have made Donald
Trump's not-so-short short list for elevation to the Supreme Court, really stellar reputations
nationwide.
So, yes, you could have a few bad apples here and there, but I think the emphasis on youth
-- certainly, you want to have a long-term impact -- and on having a jurisprudential
focus so that you actually have people committed to a certain vision of policy.
JOHN YANG: Focusing on a certain vision, what do you think of that, Vanita?
VANITA GUPTA, Former Assistant U.S. Attorney General: Well, I think it's -- you need to
have qualified people.
And I think what you saw with folks like Brett Talley and Jeff Mateer are not just a concern
about qualifications, but a real concern about bias.
When you had Jeff Mateer saying that transgender children are part of Satan's plan, you have
Brett Talley, who is actually at the Justice Department, supposed to know how vetting works
and is overseeing that operation, fail to disclose on the confirmation papers that his
wife works for the White House Council's Office, by way of potentially presenting a conflict,
that goes to something deeper.
And there's concerns not only -- with Petersen, you had a concern about lack of basic knowledge
of legal doctrines.
Here, it's a concern about qualifications, it's a concern about bias.
Federal judges have lifetime appointments, and they're considering some of the most important,
crucial matters of life and liberty in people's lives.
And it's an incredibly important thing for people to be able to feel like they can have
an impartial hearing before a federal judge.
JOHN YANG: Ilya, another point that critics are making is that the majority of the nominees,
of the Trump nominees, have been white men.
Should diversity matter, that sort of diversity, matter in judicial appointments?
ILYA SHAPIRO: Well, it depends on the pool you're looking for.
If you're looking at conservatives and libertarians, if you're looking at originalists and textualists,
there's just not that many, say, female -- females of color in that pool.
That's just the way things are.
And so if you are looking for a particular intellectual and jurisprudential background,
you know, even if a lot of them are white men, you still have stellar nominees.
There's Amy Coney Barrett and Joan Larsen and Allison Eid, for that matter, Amul Thapar
and Jim Ho.
So, it's not uniformly white men.
It's the best of different -- in that pool without regard to race or sex.
JOHN YANG: Vanita?
VANITA GUPTA: The numbers actually on Trump's nominees are really stark.
Ninety percent of the nominees being put forth are white; 80 percent are male.
That's a pretty striking number.
And I think Ilya's response to say that the reason why you don't see more diverse political
candidates is because the judicial philosophy that is putting for is really mostly adhered
to by white men, I think that says everything that you need to know about what's happening
with these nominees and the vision that they're putting forth.
But it matters for people, to be able to have confidence in the justice system, to believe
that it represents the community in which the courts sit.
And that can have a real impact.
That's why diversity matters.
It isn't sufficient.
You have got to have proper, adequate qualifications, but it certainly matters.
JOHN YANG: One thing I want to ask is that, as we have this process of one side sort of
-- the process has become politicized.
And I don't think it's anything new.
After all, the Robert Bork hearings were 30 years ago.
Are we in danger of having a judiciary that's as polarized as the legislature with -- through
this process, Ilya?
ILYA SHAPIRO: Well, I think it's unhealthy for our body politic to have people think
of judges in partisan terms, the same way they think of legislators.
But it's essentially unavoidable, because we have parties that are more ideologically
incoherent than they have been in quite some time and polarized, more polarized than they
have been, and judicial philosophies that track those partisan divisions.
And so there really aren't any good solutions to this.
Judges matter.
They're deciding important things.
And if you have such radically different perspectives on things, then of course there are going
to be these political fights.
So I don't blame the senators for acting as they do.
JOHN YANG: Vanita?
VANITA GUPTA: Yes, I agree.
I think it isn't good for the judiciary to be considered so partisan.
And I think, frankly, you saw with this president attacking federal judges for decisions that
they have made that, they have rendered that he doesn't agree with.
All of that adds to the gross politicization of the federal judiciary.
I think that senators do have a responsibility.
This is what was so striking, again, about what Senator Kennedy did.
A conservative Republican senator from Louisiana took his job really seriously about the need
to make sure that, with these lifetime appointments, that the right people are going to be on the
bench with lifetime appointments.
JOHN YANG: Vanita Gupta, the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, Ilya Shapiro of
the Cato Institute, thanks so much.
ILYA SHAPIRO: Thank you.
VANITA GUPTA: Thank you.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Stay with us.
Coming up on the "NewsHour": adding up the costs of our meat-loving habits; the man who
leaked the Pentagon Papers warns of nuclear war; and how hip-hop influences an American
poet.
But first: sexual harassment in the workplace.
We have spent time talking about what may change in light of the conversation around
MeToo.
One of the questions up for discussion is what happens when workers file complaints
with the government.
Anyone who wants to bring a lawsuit must first file a complaint with the federal Equal Employment
Opportunity Commission, or EEOC, or an equivalent state agency.
Last year, more than 6,700 harassment complaints were filed.
That's expected to spike substantially this year.
And there remain a backlog of cases.
Victoria Lipnic is the acting chair of the EEOC.
She also co-authored a major report on harassment in the workplace.
Victoria Lipnic, welcome to the "NewsHour."
VICTORIA LIPNIC, Acting Chair, Equal Employment Opportunity Commission: Good to be with you.
JUDY WOODRUFF: So, what is the roll of the EEOC, generally, in protecting the rights
of American workers?
VICTORIA LIPNIC: The EEOC is the federal civil rights agency that enforces all our federal
anti-discrimination laws in employment.
So, sex discrimination, race discrimination, disability discrimination and sexual harassment
would fall under the sex discrimination.
JUDY WOODRUFF: So how would a complaint about sexual harassment end up at the EEOC?
VICTORIA LIPNIC: So, an individual would come to any one of our 53 offices across the country,
and they would file what we call a charge of discrimination.
Once they file that charge of discrimination, then we serve that charge on their employer,
and then we take steps to either try to mediate it or investigate it and, ultimately make
some determination about the charge.
JUDY WOODRUFF: But they have to have already -- before they come to you, they have to have
already gone to their employer.
Is that correct?
VICTORIA LIPNIC: Right.
As a matter of case law, they need to go to their -- make a complaint internally to their
employer, and their employer should take action to investigate the complaint of discrimination,
of harassment and, once they do the investigation, make some determination about some corrective
action.
JUDY WOODRUFF: So even if there's no human resources department with that employer or
if the employer himself is involved in the harassment, you're saying they have got to
do this?
VICTORIA LIPNIC: They need to do that before they come to the EEOC to file a charge with
us.
JUDY WOODRUFF: So once they come to the EEOC, how complicated a process are we talking about?
VICTORIA LIPNIC: Well, first, when they filed the charge with us, the first thing we will
do, once we serve the charge on the employer, then we will ask if the parties want to mediate,
and mediation in front of the EEOC is voluntary, so both parties have to agree to it.
We have a pretty high success rate in terms of mediation, when both parties come to the
table.
We had a pretty high success rate last year in sexual harassment cases.
But...
JUDY WOODRUFF: In mediating.
VICTORIA LIPNIC: In mediating them, correct, right.
After -- if they decide not to mediate or if mediation fails, then the EEOC conducts
an investigation, and that can take quite some time, because, at that point in time,
we are getting a response from the employer, we are interviewing witnesses, we may be getting
documents, if that's necessary.
We're doing a full-blown investigation at that point.
JUDY WOODRUFF: But I was reading some of the research that suggests that most people who
experience harassment don't go to this trouble.
I mean, they end up either giving up or quitting.
VICTORIA LIPNIC: Right.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Is that correct?
VICTORIA LIPNIC: That is correct.
And, you know, the problem, first of all, it takes a lot of wherewithal for anyone to
file a discrimination charge with the federal government.
That is even more so when it's a case of harassment, particularly sexual harassment.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Because they have to hire a lawyer.
They have got to put out money to do this, right?
It's an expensive, time-consuming process.
VICTORIA LIPNIC: And daunting.
It's a daunting process.
JUDY WOODRUFF: And it may be threatening to their career as well.
VICTORIA LIPNIC: Well, that's one of the big things that we know from the study we did
about harassment last year in a report that we issued, that the biggest reason that people
do not come to the EEOC -- and, honestly, three out of four people don't even file -- go
to their own employer internally, we know from the research, because they fear for what
will happen to them.
Either they will be retaliated against within their own company, or no one will believe
them in the first place.
JUDY WOODRUFF: You were telling me earlier that a number of states, or, in fact, most
states, have their own equivalent of an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
VICTORIA LIPNIC: Right.
JUDY WOODRUFF: So people do have that option as well.
VICTORIA LIPNIC: Right.
JUDY WOODRUFF: How much of an increase in compliance have you seen, Victoria Lipnic,
since the Harvey Weinstein revelations came out in early October?
VICTORIA LIPNIC: Well, it's a little too soon for us to tell in terms of actual charges
of discrimination filed with the EEOC on harassment.
But we have seen about a four-fold increase of people going to our Web site, looking for
information about -- specifically about sexual harassment.
Now, we are expecting that much of that will ultimately be turned into charges filed with
us.
JUDY WOODRUFF: So what advice to you give people?
If you hear from someone in some -- however way they can communicate with the EEOC that
they can't get the help they need through their own human resources department, what
do you suggest that they do?
VICTORIA LIPNIC: Well, certainly, we want them to file a charge with us, if that's the
case.
They ultimately are coming to us if they have been dissatisfied with what process has taken
place with their own employer.
But they should also contact private legal counsel, to begin with.
From the minute they're starting the process, they will get a lot of support and a lot of
advice along the way, if they do that.
JUDY WOODRUFF: So this has to have been a pretty serious claim for them to call and
get a lawyer and then think about going to a federal agency.
VICTORIA LIPNIC: Yes.
I mean, it is not easy for anyone in any type of employment situation to, you know, file
some claim against their employer.
And again, that is particularly so in sexual harassment situations.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Do you believe more people should be taking formal action, or should
they be -- should there be more ways to resolve these cases informally in the work environment?
VICTORIA LIPNIC: Right.
I think it has to be a combination of both.
So one of the things that we found, and the reason that we put a task force together almost
three years ago to look into this issue, is that liability as a cure for harassment has
not worked particularly well, and that there have to be other things that are explored
as a prevention measure.
Most people who are in a situation where they are being harassed at work, what they want
more than anything is for the harassment to stop.
They're not thinking they want a lawsuit or that they want to go to the federal government
about it.
They want some immediate corrective action.
JUDY WOODRUFF: So if the threat of liability on the part of the employer isn't enough,
what is going to be enough?
VICTORIA LIPNIC: Well, we need a sea change in how all of this is approached.
There are a number of things that we made recommendations about a year ago, five sort
of core principles.
There has got to be leadership from the top in an organization.
There has to be demonstrated accountability.
They have to have policies in place that are communicated to people, so they know what
to do.
They have to have procedures in place that are trusted by the employees.
And there has to be training, but training that is meaningful, training that explains
to people how to deal with harassment situations in their own workplace and what to do if they
are experiencing it.
JUDY WOODRUFF: And just quickly, is it your sense that these things are happening now
because of all these revelations?
VICTORIA LIPNIC: They certainly have been happening for the last 30 years in different
measures, depending upon the employer.
What I think we're seeing now -- and certainly we hope that we will see more so at the EEOC
-- is that there is much more attention and there is much more vigilance about all of
these sort of holistic efforts that need to take place within an organization that, you
know, may be taking place piecemeal now.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Victoria Lipnic, a huge subject we're discussing.
VICTORIA LIPNIC: Indeed.
JUDY WOODRUFF: The acting chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, thank you.
VICTORIA LIPNIC: Thanks for having me.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Now, before you gather for that holiday meal, our economics correspondent,
Paul Solman, asks, what's the beef people have about beef?
There have long been debates over the environmental effects of the meat industry and moral arguments
made against killing animals.
The rise in popularity of new meatless options adds a different dimension to the discussion.
Paul examines the questions tonight.
It's part of his weekly reporting for Making Sense.
NARRATOR: To avoid catastrophic climate change.
PAUL SOLMAN: Yup, ex-Governor, ex-Terminator Arnold Schwarzenegger in a video created to
indict beef.
ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER (R), Former Governor of California: Less meat, less heat, more
life.
PAUL SOLMAN: So trending, beef is bad, as this new documentary luridly asserts.
WOMAN: When you consider the devastation it's having on our planet, as well as the oceans.
PAUL SOLMAN: No wonder the plant-based-meat start-ups profiled recently here on Making
Sense want to chop meat from our diets, and the planet, entirely, and replace it with
products like the Beyond Burger, or with Beyond's main rival, the Impossible Burger.
Biochemist Pat Brown, CEO of Impossible Foods, wants to replace grazing animals entirely.
By when?
PAT BROWN, CEO, Impossible Foods: By 2035.
The use of animals to produce food is the most destructive technology in use on Earth
today.
PAUL SOLMAN: And here's the CEO of rival Beyond Meat.
ETHAN BROWN, CEO, Beyond Meat: You look at heart disease, diabetes and cancer, those
things, there's a correlation between those things and the levels of meat and the type
of meat that we're eating.
PAUL SOLMAN: Besides the argument against killing animals for food, the beef against
beef features a trio of charges, bad for the land, bad for the air, bad for the body.
Negative externalities, they're called in economics, costs that the price of the product
doesn't include.
So let's hear the case, one externality at a time, starting with lays waste to the land.
Impossible's Pat Brown:
PAT BROWN: We could produce all the protein required by the world's population in 2050
with 2 percent of Earth's land if we did it the way we're producing our meat, as opposed
to more than 45 percent of Earth's land that's currently being used raising animals for food.
PAUL SOLMAN: Right, says his rival CEO, Ethan Brown.
ETHAN BROWN: We can get this right, and once we do it, we can liberate those fields.
They don't have to be serving that really inefficient master.
They can even start planning things directly there that are protein for human consumption.
PAUL SOLMAN: The mighty master steer, that is, so inefficient that:
JONATHAN FOLEY, Executive Director, California Academy of Sciences: If you take the 30 calories
of corn grown in Iowa and turn it into a hamburger, you're lucky to get one calorie of new beef
that we actually eat.
PAUL SOLMAN: Jonathan Foley of the California Academy of Science.
JONATHAN FOLEY: Well, cows and goats and sheep and things are in the brown areas.
PAUL SOLMAN: Foley has actually mapped the land use problem.
JONATHAN FOLEY: This is showing the footprint of agriculture on the planet.
What really surprises people sometimes is that 38 percent of all the land on Earth is
covered in food.
For example, all of this land 75 percent of it, all of those red areas and a lot of the
green areas, are used to produce meat, either directly by grazing or by growing crops, so
we then later feed to animals in a feed lot.
PAUL SOLMAN: In addition, says Jonathan Foley, growing beef consumption in the less developed
world leads to deforestation, clearing the land for cattle.
So, what says the defense?
Look at this guy.
Would they respond to me, or no?
BILL NIMAN, Rancher: Anybody that would come out here in an outfit like that, I doubt that
they would respond to someone like you.
PAUL SOLMAN: In Marin County, California, grass-fed guru Bill Niman and wife Nicolette,
defender of beef.
NICOLETTE NIMAN, Rancher: What's so miraculous about these animals is they're basically just
taking the energy of the sunlight that's going into the vegetation, and they are converting
it, with very little input from humans.
PAUL SOLMAN: Humans, who can't eat grass.
BILL NIMAN: These animals can convert cellulosic material to nutritious and delicious food
for human consumption.
And I don't think you can do that in a lab.
PAUL SOLMAN: Ag Professor Frank Mitloehner echoes the Nimans.
FRANK MITLOEHNER, University of California, Davis: Here in California, half of all land
in the state is marginal land, is rangeland used for cattle.
And without them, you could not use that land for human food production.
Two-thirds of all agricultural land in the world could not be used for food production
for people.
PAUL SOLMAN: So removing grazing animals entirely would leave unfarmable acreage four times
the size of California.
But what about waste in water?
It takes nearly 2,000 gallons to produce one pound of beef.
Compare that to broccoli and cauliflower.
The lowly legumes require just 34 gallons a pound.
But, says Nicolette Niman:
NICOLETTE NIMAN: And so the whole ecosystem holds a lot more water in it when you have
grazing animals, when they're well-managed.
You also have just a lot more biological activity in the soil.
And that turns out to be the cornerstone of sustainability for the whole food system.
PAUL SOLMAN: Biological activity enhanced, she says, by a very positive externality of
cattle.
That cow is pooping as we speak.
NICOLETTE NIMAN: Yay!
Poop is good.
(LAUGHTER)
PAUL SOLMAN: Moreover, animals provide half our farm fertilizer.
If poop goes, do bad-for-the-planet nitrates replace it?
OK, but what about externality two, greenhouse gases?
What percentage of greenhouse gases are accounted for, in your estimation, by livestock?
JONATHAN FOLEY: Somewhere in the neighborhood 15 to 18 percent, yes.
PAUL SOLMAN: That's globally.
Bovine bubble.
So explain to me what this is?
FRANK MITLOEHNER: So these are bovine bubbles that we use to measure the impact of livestock
on the air.
PAUL SOLMAN: His measures, says Professor Mitloehner, show that emissions in America
are much smaller than the global average.
FRANK MITLOEHNER: Why?
Because the efficiencies of livestock production in the United States have reduced our carbon
footprint to historical levels.
These heifers here will be finished, meaning go into slaughter, when they are 14 months
of age.
So, they're still very young.
If they were on pasture their whole life, they would go to slaughter twice that age.
PAUL SOLMAN: If the rest of the world followed suit, Mitloehner says, the greenhouse effect
would drop dramatically.
But can it?
Moreover, Jonathan Foley adds, American efficiency generates plenty of negative externalities
itself.
JONATHAN FOLEY: There's 100 million acres of corn that are basically being turned into
cows.
There's another 80 million acres of soy beans here.
PAUL SOLMAN: All right, that's land and air.
What about bad for the body?
WALTER WILLETT, Harvard University: We do see that higher amounts of red meat in the
diet are associated with many adverse health outcomes.
PAUL SOLMAN: Harvard nutrition expert Walter Willett.
WALTER WILLETT: Cardiovascular disease, more cancer, more diabetes, higher total mortality.
PAUL SOLMAN: Adds food advocate Anna Lappe:
ANNA LAPPE, Food Activist: And right now in the United States, we consume basically twice
as much, on average, protein as our bodies need.
PAUL SOLMAN: Impossible Foods' technology raises another concern.
The FDA asked the company to re-test a key ingredient, soy leghemoglobin, to make sure
it isn't an allergen.
But, hey, it's about time for the final verdict.
Who better to reach it, I thought, than "Omnivore's Dilemma" author Michael Pollan, who famously
chronicled the foreshortened life of Number 534, a steer he bought and tracked from birth
to feed lot to slaughter.
MICHAEL POLLAN, Author, "Omnivore's Dilemma": I think meat is a delicious food that humans
have been eating for a very, very long time, and I think there is a place for animals in
sustainable agriculture.
However, that's not the kind of meat we're eating now.
We're eating the products of a wasteful and polluting feed lot system, and that allows
us to eat an unnaturally large amount of meat.
PAUL SOLMAN: Should plant-based meat replace meat-on-the-hoof completely?
MICHAEL POLLAN: The realistic goal is not to destroy the meat industry.
People are going to continue to eat meat.
It's to shrink it.
It's to bring it back to a scale where we can raise cattle without destroying the environment.
PAUL SOLMAN: And it turns out even the Nimans aren't telling us to gorge on their never-seen-a-feed-lot
friends.
And, finally, what about plant-based meat?
NICOLETTE NIMAN: When you're taking something in the diet that is simple and nourishing
as eggs, meat, and milk, and you're telling people, you should replace it with this thing
I created in a laboratory, I don't think it's going to work.
PAUL SOLMAN: I guess we will see.
For the "PBS NewsHour," this is economics correspondent Paul Solman.
Come cattle!
Let's come!
Trying to call the cows, while reporting from California.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Next: from the whistle-blower who released the Pentagon Papers about the
Vietnam War, a new book about the dangers of America's nuclear program.
William Brangham has that story from the "NewsHour" Bookshelf.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM: It was 1971 when military analyst Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon
Papers to the press.
They were a top-secret Defense Department study of U.S. military involvement in the
Vietnam War.
Their controversial publication blew the lid off what one famous journalist called a bright
shining lie.
But few know that, in the decade before that, during some of the Cold War's most dangerous
hair-trigger moments, Daniel Ellsberg also spent years analyzing America's nuclear weapons
policy.
His new memoir chronicles that period.
It's called "The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner."
And in it, Ellsberg argues very little has changed about what he calls our immoral and
insane policies regarding nuclear weapons.
Daniel Ellsberg welcome to the "NewsHour."
DANIEL ELLSBERG, Author, "The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner": Thank
you.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM: The title of your book comes from the famous Stanley Kubrick movie where
a rogue U.S. military officer launches an attack on the Soviets, and as those weapons
are flying, it's suddenly revealed that the Soviets have built a doomsday machine, this
enormous global booby-trap that, if they're attacked, will kill every single thing on
Earth.
ACTOR: It is not a thing a sane man would do.
The doomsday machine is designed to trigger itself automatically.
ACTOR: But surely you can disarm it somehow.
ACTOR: No, it is designed to explode if any attempt is ever made to un-trigger it.
ACTOR: Automatically?
ACTOR: Ah, it's an obvious commie trick, Mr. President.
We're wasting valuable time.
They're getting ready to clobber us.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM: At the time, it was somewhat considered a fantasy idea, but you argue in
this book -- and this is the title of your book -- that that's really what we have on
our hands, is a doomsday machine.
DANIEL ELLSBERG: Yes, and we had it then.
Kubrick got that idea from Herman Kahn, a colleague of mine and a friend of mine at
the RAND Corporation, who put it forth as a hypothetical device for deterrence.
But he said, that would kill too many people.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM: Surely, no one would build a device like that.
DANIEL ELLSBERG: Killing everyone.
He said, no one would.
No one had done it.
And no one, he felt, would ever do it.
Well, he was mistaken.
There was a doomsday machine at that time.
We didn't know actually until another 20 years about the phenomenon of nuclear winter, that
the military targets we were going to hit in cities -- and, actually, in those days,
they planned to hit every city over 25,000 in the Soviet Union and in China.
If we were in war with the Soviet Union, we would also hit China.
Those cities burning would have lofted in firestorms, not ordinary fires, but as in
Hiroshima or Tokyo or Dresden, that would loft the smoke and soot by tens of millions
of tons into the stratosphere, where it wouldn't rain out.
It would be for over a decade, and it would lower the sun's temperatures on the Earth,
the sunshine, by about 70 percent.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM: That's an agricultural holocaust as well.
DANIEL ELLSBERG: All the harvests would be killed for years, basically, and everyone,
nearly everyone, would starve.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM: In 1961, as a young consultant to the secretary of defense, Ellsberg remembers
being shocked after seeing a top-secret document estimating how millions of people would be
killed with a U.S. nuclear strike on the Soviets.
DANIEL ELLSBERG: And when I held that piece of paper in my hand, the word in my mind was
evil.
Evil.
This shouldn't exist.
This was the operational plan annually for the Joint Chiefs of Staff that had been approved
by General Eisenhower.
And I thought, there shouldn't be anything in the world that corresponds to this.
But there has been then and ever since.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM: Your book documents many of the mishaps and mistakes and near misses
that many Americans may not be aware of in the last 40 years of our nuclear era.
But yet somehow we have escaped annihilating ourselves.
Why is that?
DANIEL ELLSBERG: Luck.
Will it work for another 70 years?
I'm not confident of that.
At this very moment, for example, we are making nuclear threats against a nuclear weapon state,
a state with nuclear weapons.
(CROSSTALK)
WILLIAM BRANGHAM: You're referring to President Trump saying we will rain fire and fury on
the North Koreans.
DANIEL ELLSBERG: North Korea.
That's right.
Now, fire and fury could include napalm, white phosphorous, a lot of high explosives, which
they have experienced before, by the way, in the 1950s.
They have been through.
And it's not something they want again.
But that could quickly escalate.
They didn't have nuclear weapons then.
There has been no imminent threat of any attack, really, or a nuclear attack on a nuclear weapons
state since the Cuban Missile Crisis.
That was half-a-century ago.
I was part of that.
And I have concluded, after 40 years of research, that neither Kennedy nor Khrushchev intended
at all to carry out their threats of armed conflict.
I believe they both believed in their own minds they were bluffing and that they would
back off if necessary.
And yet events got away from them.
I think we came within a hand's breadth of blowing up the world.
So, this problem didn't start with Donald Trump, and it won't really end with it.
The system that puts everything on the decisions of one man, it's crazy.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM: In addition to his book, Ellsberg is back in the public eye again because
of this.
Steven Spielberg's new movie details The Washington Post's decision to publish parts of the Pentagon
Papers, the ones Ellsberg leaked, and which the Nixon administration tried to stop.
The legal fight went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.
The movie is called "The Post," and it's in theaters this month.
I'm just curious why you think the story of the Pentagon Papers is still resonant today.
DANIEL ELLSBERG: We have had a war going on against the media, and it didn't start with
Donald Trump.
Barack Obama prosecuted three times as many people for leaking as all previous presidents
put together.
I was the first to face such a prosecution.
That's why my name is coming up now, I think, more.
There were two after me before Obama, and then nine or 10, depending how you count some
of them, under Obama.
I believe that Donald Trump has shown every sign that he will continue that, though he
hasn't yet.
He's actually berated his attorney general for not coming up with indictments for leaks
right now.
I have no doubt that Attorney General Sessions will meet his demands.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM: The book is called "The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear
War Planner."
Daniel Ellsberg, thank you so much.
DANIEL ELLSBERG: Thank you for having me.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Next, we turn to another installment of our weekly Brief But Spectacular series,
where we ask people about their passions.
Tonight, we hear from award-winning poet Marcus Wicker.
His most recent book, "Silencer," highlights the complexities of being a black man in America.
MARCUS WICKER, Author, "Silencer": I'm a child of hip-hop, and grew up with it, especially
in the '90s.
I can't help it.
It's always on in the background, you know, when I'm riding to the cleaners or on my way
to teach.
And so, because of that, the cadences and the rhythms of hip-hop sort of come out naturally
in my thought patterns.
And so I can't help that they sort of spill out onto the page as I'm writing.
I think that there's no better hip-hop group than A Tribe Called Quest.
Always liked Wu-Tang.
There are poems where I sample Kendrick Lamar.
So, for instance, he's got a line: What you want you, a house, you a car, 40 acres and
a mule, a piano, a guitar?
And so I use that, right?
I sample the lyrics.
And then I say, what you need you, a bond, you a tree, 40 acres and a mule, a Monopoly
piece?
And then the poem goes out from there.
I was living in Southern Indiana and teaching.
And twice a month, I had this guy dinner.
We'd go out.
We would get suited and booted.
Me, as a college professor.
Another guy was a lawyer.
There was a cat who was a skateboarder and another guy who built fences for a living.
And so you can imagine like the topics.
We just go from one thing to the other.
But whenever I brought up gone violence and gun violence perpetrated against the black
body, all the police shootings that I was seeing in the news, it got very quiet, as
if I was being silenced.
And so I did the passive-aggressive thing that you do as a poet.
You write a poem about it.
I'm going to read to you "Conjecture on the Stained Glass Image of White Christ at Ebenezer
Baptist Church."
The title refers to the famous church in Atlanta, Georgia, where you can still see the image
of a white Jesus at the pulpit in a predominantly black church.
"If in his image made am I, then make me a miracle.
Make my shrine a copper faucet leaking everlasting Evian to the masses.
Make this empty water glass a goblet of long-legged French wine.
Make mine a Prince-purple body bag designed by Crown Royal for tax collectors to spill
over and tithe into just before I rise.
"If in his image made am I, then make my vessel a pearl Coupe de Ville.
Make mine the body of a 28-year-old black woman in a blue patterned maxi dress cruising
through Hell on Earth, Texas, again alive.
"If in his image made are we, then why the endless string of effigies?
Why so many mortal blasphemes?
Why crucify me in H.D. across a scrolling news ticker, tied to a clothesline of broken
necks long as time?"
It's my hope that writing about these things, sometimes quietly, the absence of those details,
the blood and the gore that you see on the news, that that'll be something, that that'll
be arresting, and that'll be enough to move someone to do something.
My name is Marcus Wicker, and this is my Brief But Spectacular take on beats, rhymes and
poetry.
JUDY WOODRUFF: And you can watch additional Brief But Spectacular episodes on our Web
site, PBS.org/NewsHour/Brief.
On the "NewsHour" online right now: What's the best gift you have ever been given?
We asked 13 of the writers, musicians and other creative people we interviewed this
year, including Jonathan Franzen, Trombone Shorty, and Ken Burns.
You can find their answers on our Web site, PBS.org/NewsHour.
All that and more is on our Web site.
You can find it there.
And that's the "NewsHour" for tonight.
I'm Judy Woodruff.
Join us online and again right here tomorrow evening with Mark Shields and David Brooks.
For all of us at the "PBS NewsHour," thank you, and we will see you soon.
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