Rob Walton, Walmart board member, shows off his socks featuring pink flamingoes during the annual Walmart shareholders meeting event on June 1, 2018, in Fayetteville, Arkansas. | Rick T. Wilking/Getty Images

A new state law requires all public companies to have at least one woman on their board.

A libertarian group is suing California for alleged discrimination — against men.

The Pacific Legal Foundation filed a lawsuit Wednesday challenging a new state law that requires California companies to have at least one woman on their board of directors by the end of 2019. The largest California companies will need a total of three female directors by 2022.

In September, California became the first US state to mandate board room gender diversity. About a quarter of the state’s companies don’t have any female directors, and the rest have very few. The law is part of a growing movement to get more women into lucrative positions that have long been held by men.

But attorneys for the legal group argue that the so-called “woman quota” is unlawful and that it violates the Constitution’s equal protection clause, according to the lawsuit filed in Sacramento federal court. Their plaintiff, Creighton Meland, is a retired Chicago attorney who owns stock in a California-based company that has no women in its boardroom.

Meland believes that the new rules will force shareholders to “discriminate on the basis of sex” when they vote for potential board members. In other words, Meland seems worried that the law discriminates against men. But his attorneys also insist that the rule is bad for women.

“This law is built on the condescending belief that women aren’t capable of getting into the boardroom unless the government opens the door for them,” said his attorney, Anastasia Boden, in a statement Wednesday.

The legal challenge is the latest “reverse discrimination” claim related to policies and legislation that aim to level the playing field for historically underrepresented groups. It’s particularly interesting that the Pacific Legal Foundation considers the law discriminatory and “condescending” when it was intended to counteract the pervasive gender bias that has long kept women out of corner offices and boardrooms. It also overlooks a company’s best financial interests: Research shows that having more women on corporate boards is good for a company’s bottom line.

The US could do better

The United States lags other developed countries when it comes to gender diversity in the boardroom. In 18 countries, including Austria, Poland, and South Africa, all large companies have at least one female director. The United States has not yet made that list. In fact, the global research firm Egon Zehnder said progress for women has slowed in the US since 2012.

Silicon Valley, in particular, has been long criticized for its lack of representation. Last year, the majority of tech startups (63 percent) had no female board members. But among publicly traded companies in the state, the tech industry is not even the worst offender. Health care and biotech companies in California are the least likely to hire women to serve on boards.

Only 12.8 percent of the board seats at these companies are held by women. And about one-third (33.9 percent) have no women at all. In fact, California companies have fewer female directors than the nationwide average.

Board Governance Research, 2017

That’s not a great look for the state. California has one of the largest economies in the world, so any progress that happens there has global impact. Without a mandate, California companies likely wouldn’t change a thing.

The new law, SB-826, explained

By the end of this year, every publicly traded company based in California is supposed to have at least one woman on its board of directors. By 2022, that number will increase depending on a company’s size. For example, a corporation with five directors must have a minimum of two female directors and a company with six or more directors must have at least three female directors.

That means Google’s parent company, Alphabet, would need to give another board seat to a woman within the next two years. Right now, the company has 10 seats and only two female directors. Any company that doesn’t meet the quota would be fined $100,000 for the first violation and $300,000 for any following violations.

The seeds for the law were planted in 2013 when the state Senate passed a resolution that set a target for companies. The plan was that, by 2017, each public company in California would have at least one woman on its board, and up to three, depending on the size.

California was the first state in the US to adopt this type of resolution, and five other states have since passed similar measures. The problem is that it didn’t work because it wasn’t legally binding. By 2017, fewer than 20 percent of the 3,000 largest US companies based in California had met the target.

Lawmakers decided that a mandate was the only way for things to change. It’s not such a wild idea. Several European countries have mandated gender diversity on corporate boards. In 2003, Norway was the first to require that 40 percent of board seats be held by women, followed by France and Belgium. In 2015, Germany mandated that 30 percent of corporate board seats be held by women.

The lawsuit is about a problem that doesn’t exist

The new California law seems like a reasonable policy. But the Pacific Legal Foundation thinks it’s an egregious abuse of individual rights. More specifically, the group argues that it’s infringing on the rights of men.

The plaintiff, Meland, is a shareholder in OSI, a medical and security device manufacturer based in Hawthorne, California. Men hold each of the company’s seven board seats, but the company will need to give three of those seats to women by 2022.

“The Woman Quota imposes a sex-based quota directly on shareholders, and seeks to force shareholders to perpetuate sex-based discrimination,” Meland’s attorney claims, according to the court filing.

In other words, Meland is arguing that the law discriminates against men and infringes on his rights as a shareholder to vote for whomever he wants on the board. What he fails to note is that gender bias is what has kept so many women off of US boards.

That’s because directors usually recommend CEOs and other corporate executives to serve on their boards. “Relying on current directors’ recommendations will generally produce candidates much like those directors,” say Deloitte researchers in the company’s 2017 board diversity survey.

The low percentage of women candidates (16 percent) is striking, as is that of racial minorities (19 percent). However, that may be a logical outcome of a process favoring selecting candidates with board experience — who historically have tended to be white and male.

Women hold less than a third of executive positions in corporate America. White men hold 63 percent. Research shows that men have more opportunities to network, and that is often more important to career advancement than performance. Gender stereotypes, like the idea that women are not primary breadwinners, still hold back women from climbing the corporate ladder.

But here’s the thing: research also shows that companies with more female directors perform better.

Diversity in the board room pays off

Studies have shown that companies with higher levels of gender diversity have stronger financial performance and a more engaged workforce.

In particular, a growing body of research shows that having three women on a corporate board represents a “tipping point” in impacting a firm’s financial performance, according to a 2016 study by the research firm MSCI ERG.

The firm analyzed financing results for US companies over a five-year period, from 2011 to 2016. Those that started with at least three women on the board saw gains in equity returns of about 10 percentage points and a 37 percent increase in earnings per share. In contrast, companies that began the period with no female directors experienced negative results (-1 percent and -8 percent, respectively).

Credit Suisse conducted a six-year global research study from 2006 to 2012 with more than 2,000 companies worldwide, showing that having women in the board room is correlated with higher performance. For companies with a market capitalization of more than $10 billion, stocks for companies with female directors outperformed those with all-male boards by 26 percent.

Requiring companies to diversify their board rooms seems hardly controversial. Yet in 2019, some men still think that women’s advancement is a direct threat.

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Ambassador William Taylor and Deputy Assistant Secretary George Kent arrive for an impeachment inquiry on November 13, 2019. | Bonnie Jo Mount/The Washington Post via Getty Images

Outlets should know better by now than comparing politics to reality TV. Alas.

The first public impeachment hearing on Wednesday featured testimony from two State Department officials, Bill Taylor and George Kent, who detailed why they concluded that President Donald Trump’s Ukraine policy was not about the national interest, but about digging up dirt on his political opponents. It also included a new revelation about a July phone call involving Trump that indicated just how focused the president was on cajoling the Ukrainian government into undertaking politically beneficial investigations.

The proceedings got to the very core of what the office of the presidency is supposed to be about in our country. It was the stuff of history. But to hear Reuters and NBC tell it, one of the major faults of the hearing was that it simply lacked pizzazz.

Both outlets were roundly dragged for posting news analysis stories that focused on the entertainment value (or purported lack thereof) of the hearing. NBC’s piece, authored by Jonathan Allen, claimed that the hearing “lacked the pizazz necessary to capture public attention” — a turn of phrase that quickly became a meme and echoed the talking points Trump family members and administration officials used.

Meanwhile, Reuters’ Jeff Mason and Patricia Zengerle wrote that the hearing was “dull” and lacked “bang.”

Mason and Zengerle’s lede bizarrely compared the impeachment hearing to reality television.

“Democratic lawmakers tried their hand at reality television with mixed results on Wednesday as they presented arguments to the American public for the impeachment of a former star of the genre, Donald Trump,” it said. (In a similar vein, NBC’s piece said the hearing “felt more like the dress rehearsal for a serious one-act play than the opening night of a hit Broadway musical.”)

That sort of framing isn’t just a self-fulfilling analysis signaling to prospective news consumers that they can safely tune out the unexciting impeachment hearings. It’s also, as anyone who remembers lengthy cable news shots of Trump’s empty podium can attest, the exact sort of fixation on entertainment and optics over substance that played a key role in helping Trump win in 2016 in the first place. But if you hoped that major outlets learned something from that experience, the framing of the NBC and Reuters dispatches about the first public impeachment hearing was disappointing.

Fox News’s coverage, predictably, was even worse. While some of its programming also focused on how purportedly boring the first hearing was, Hannity guest and Trump favorite Mark Levin trashed Kent and Taylor as “two homeless guys.” Not to be outdone, a guest on Tucker Carlson’s show — former State Department adviser Christian Whiton — said Kent and Taylor “looked like people who sat by themselves at recess.”

These deflections and ad hominem attacks illustrate a dynamic that was also on display during Wednesday’s hearing: Trump’s Republican defenders are having a hard time coming up with a coherent defense of his conduct. Instead, when they’re not demeaning the messengers, they’re pushing conspiracy theories and turning reality on its head by trying to portray Trump as a principled opponent of corruption.

Wednesday’s relatively orderly proceedings may not have made compelling television the way Corey Lewandowski’s trainwreck hearing in September did, but it nonetheless revealed a great deal not only about how Trump views the office of the presidency but also about how ill-equipped his Republican backers are to defend him. Politics is not supposed to be a reality show, despite what Reuters and company would have you believe.

The ratings of Wednesday’s hearing suggest the public found the proceedings to be more interesting than some DC journalists. According to Variety, “[t]he first day of the impeachment hearings against President Donald Trump drew over 13 million total viewers across the broadcast and news networks combined” — a number that doesn’t even include those who streamed it online. Meanwhile, one of the Democrats who is participating in the impeachment hearings, Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA), told reporters he’s sorry-not-sorry if people found it boring.

“Yeah, I’m sorry if, you know, we didn’t entertain them, but that wasn’t the goal for today,” Swalwell said, according to the HuffPost.

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The news moves fast. To stay updated, follow Aaron Rupar on Twitter, and read more of Vox’s policy and politics coverage

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The hippie aesthetic owes a lot to Art Nouveau.

When you picture hippies, you probably think of bell bottoms, long hair, and LSD. You might also think of a very specific graphic design and illustration style, seen on concert posters and album covers: curly, cloudy, barely legible lettering; trippy color combinations; and decorative meandering borders.

This style was first conceived in San Francisco by a handful of designers in the late 1960s. Their job? Make posters for bands like The Byrds, the Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, Steve Miller Band, Jimi Hendrix — all of whom were just getting their start, competing for nightly stage time at venues like the Fillmore and the Avalon.

But these designers didn’t invent that now-iconic style. In fact, they were heavily influenced by an art movement that started in the late 1800s called Art Nouveau.

Watch the video above to learn more about this game-changing painting. You can find this video and all of Vox’s videos on YouTube. And if you’re interested in supporting our video journalism, you can become a member of the Vox Video Lab on YouTube.

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Algerian protesters hold national flags as they chant during an anti-government rally in the centre of the capital Algiers on November 12, 2019. | Ryad Kramdi/AFP/Getty Images

Algerians have been protesting since February. Here’s why you haven’t heard much about them.

An Algerian court on Wednesday sentenced over 20 protesters to several months of jail time for threatening national unity by waving a flag representing the country’s Berber minority at anti-government demonstrations.

The story made international headlines — and shined a spotlight on something most of the world had largely forgotten: that the peaceful protests that began in Algeria nearly nine months ago are still happening.

Since February 22, Algerians have been in the streets protesting for big structural changes to their government. They initially took to the streets to demand the resignation of then-President Abdelaziz Bouteflika. As Vox’s Alex Ward explained at the time, the 82-year-old president had led Algeria since 1999 despite suffering a stroke in 2013 that left him paralyzed and basically mute.

But despite being in poor health, “he remained in power — even if in name only — because Algeria’s military, business, and political elites wanted to keep their privileged positions.” Ward continued:

Those same elites announced earlier this year that Bouteflika would run for a fifth term. More than 1 million Algerians since February took to the streets to call for his ouster, a development that shocked Bouteflika loyalists. After initially making smaller concessions, including that he would cancel this year’s elections (which in Algeria are neither free nor fair), it seems he has finally caved to the people’s will.

After his resignation, Bouteflika’s associates faced a steady stream of corruption charges as the government attempts to clean house to regain the people’s trust.

Army Chief of Staff Ahmed Gaïd Salah turned on his former president and aligned himself with the initial protester demands that Bouteflika was no longer suited to rule. This allowed him to hold a significant amount of sway in the interim government, officially presided over by former Interior Minister Noureddine Bedoui and leader of the Senate Abdelkader Bensalah.

Salah called two elections — one on July 4 that was canceled and another for December 12 — and maintained that the army has no political ambitions. But Rochdi Alloui, an expert on North Africa, told me the elections are unlikely to put an end to the demonstrations unless a large portion of the country actually comes out to vote.

“The biggest question for Algeria is: Will this election solve the crisis?” Alloui said. “I think only if there is a large turnout for the elections. If not, it says that the Algerian people didn’t buy into what the candidates, and then the new president, were selling. If this happens, then the crisis will continue and it will actually worsen.”

But there’s perhaps an even bigger question that many in the country’s protest movement are asking right now: Why, in a world where protests in Hong Kong, Chile, Bolivia, Iraq, Lebanon, and elsewhere are closely followed by the international news media, are Algeria’s voices not being given the same attention?

“This is a media issue, really”

Dalia Ghanem, an expert on Algeria at the Carnegie Middle East Center in Lebanon who attended of some of the early protests, told me she’s disappointed with the media response to Algeria’s uprising.

“This is a media issue really,” Ghanem said. “They’re attracted by blood and violence, not the sight of people peacefully marching on the streets in civil protests. We all remember how the Yellow Vests [protesters in France] attracted so much attention, likely because of the destruction they brought.”

However, she said the sparse coverage doesn’t mean that Europeans and Americans are uninterested in the unrest.

John Entelis, a professor of political science at Fordham University who began studying and traveling to Algeria in the 1970s, offered a different explanation for why the media is less focused on Algeria.

“If you go down the list of [widely covered] protests, they’re all in countries accessible to the media,” Entelis told me. “Of course, journalists are able to travel [to Algeria], but it is very difficult for outsiders — journalists, visitors, tourists — to have access and understanding.”

There is perhaps a third reason — one that has more to do with the protest movement itself than the media.

Political movement in response to the protests has stalled, in part because of the disorganization of the protesters and the lack of a public figure to call on as a partner in realizing their demands. At first, this lack of organization made it hard for the authorities to marginalize the protesters, Ghanem told me, “but now it is a weakness.”

“Now, it is difficult for the protests to have a clear map going forward and also hard for them to be able to negotiate,” Ghanem said. “There will be a moment where the movement will need to either restructure itself or go with someone to steps forward.”

Khaldoun Khelil, a scholar at the Middle East Institute, said he understands why no one has come out to lead the protest, but thinks it is a big detriment to the demonstrators achieving any goals.

“It’s a double-edged sword,” Khelil said. “If anyone stands up and speaks up, those people disappear. When [the government says] there’s no one to talk to, it’s because those people have been arrested or processed.”

He continued: “I completely understand why there is no trust for anyone who’s been a part of the state, but I don’t know who is going to be able to step up and help them implement their demands. Without someone with deep knowledge of system to navigate it, the they’re basically asking for a failed attempt.”

Still, Algerians across the country — from the steps of the iconic “Grande Poste” post office in downtown Algiers all the way to the country’s border with Tunisia — continue to gather, mostly on Fridays, to demand a new political system.

When she traveled to a border town in March, Ghanem told me she saw protesters marching in a familiar nonviolent way. “They said: ‘We did it, we followed your model in Algiers,’” Ghanem said. “Even all the way out there, people were in the streets.”

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Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and US Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) have introduced a bill that would upgrade public housing to be more energy efficient and run on renewable energy. | Stephen Maturen/Getty Images

The $172 billion proposal aims to upgrade 1.2 million units of public housing to curb emissions.

Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have fused two major presidential campaign issues — housing and climate change — in a $172 billion policy proposal released Thursday.

Dubbed the Green New Deal for Public Housing Act, the proposal aims to transform the entire stock of public housing in the US, 1.2 million units, into energy-efficient homes powered by onsite renewable energy. Authors say the bill would create about 240,000 jobs per year and reduce greenhouse emissions equivalent to taking 1.2 million cars off the road.

This is the first piece of legislation with official Green New Deal branding and is co-written by Sanders, one of the progressive frontrunners for the 2020 presidential race. The initial Green New Deal resolution released in March by Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) was a broad framework that laid out principles for a comprehensive strategy to limit climate change, like the need for a just transition toward cleaner energy. This new bill actually starts constructing policy within that framework.

“This is really important, it’s an exemplary specification of what targeted green investment would look like,” said Daniel Aldana Cohen, the lead researcher on a Green New Deal study by progressive think tank Data for Progress.

By starting with housing, the legislators appear to be trying to make inroads with a broad political base and avoid some of the more contentious aspects of the Green New Deal, like the transition away from fossil fuels. That issue in particular has divided labor unions because it would lead to the end of mining and drilling jobs.

The Green New Deal has risen in popularity since the resolution was introduced in February; an NPR/PBS Newshour/Marist poll this summer showed 60 percent of registered voters supported it, including 86 percent of Democrats and 64 percent of independents (Republicans were decidedly less in favor).

Both public housing and climate change have also emerged as critical issues in the 2020 campaign for president. Sanders already has a housing-for-all plan, and fellow contenders including Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and former HUD Secretary Julián Castro have also released in-depth housing plans. And Democratic primary voters rank climate change and housing as high priorities.

But to make a difference, the Green New Deal housing bill has to do more than rally climate and housing activists; it must build up a broad base of support throughout the country and in government. The prospects of passing such legislation are dim in the current Congress, but it could tee up a policy agenda for the next administration. Regardless of the outcome of the next election, climate change and housing will not go away as national concerns.

Public housing is an important venue for fighting climate change

Buildings — homes, hotels, offices, and stores — account for 40 percent of US greenhouse gas emissions. Though building codes have ramped up efficiency standards for new construction, many older, leakier, draftier homes and offices remain and will continue to be occupied for decades. Overall energy use in buildings is still rising. That means upgrading and retrofitting structures to use less energy and emit less is a critical tactic in fighting climate change.

Since most real estate is in private hands, public housing offers an avenue for the federal government to get involved. The 1.2 million units range from single-family homes to apartments in high-rises, making it a useful policy laboratory for different kinds of energy interventions.

While these homes receive federal support, they are often managed by local authorities. And many of these homes are in dire need of maintenance and improvement: According to the Urban Institute, most public housing in the US is at least 40 years old “and needs major capital repairs like new windows, plumbing, roofs, and heating systems to keep it operational.”

The Green New Deal housing bill would issue grants to upgrade buildings to make them more energy efficient, including installing solar panels and insulating walls and windows. Upgrades would also be made to things inside the units, including installing all-electric modern appliances, energy-efficient lightbulbs, and low-flow toilets to reduce water usage. Lead pipes leaching toxins into drinking water would be replaced, and public housing in areas vulnerable to effects of climate change would be made more resilient.

Public housing residents typically have lower incomes, which means they would benefit immensely from the grants. A 2016 report from the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy found that low-income households pay double the share of income for energy compared to the US median. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, energy costs can eat up almost one-fifth of the annual income for single, elderly, poor, and disabled persons living on Social Security. The national average of income spent on energy is 4 percent.

So directing energy efficiency upgrades to public housing yields dividends for many of the people who need it most. And deploying such measures means creating jobs in these communities.

The Green New Deal for Public Housing Act aims to use jobs to spread the benefits of a transition to clean energy across the country

Beyond its already ambitious target of retrofitting all public housing to become more energy-efficient, the Green New Deal for Public Housing Act has another massive component: It aims to employ the people who live in the public housing units to do these 1.2 million upgrades around the country.

Data for Progress research estimates the bill would create over 240,000 jobs per year across the United States — and not just in blue states. The research estimated it would create up to 17,489 skilled construction and maintenance jobs per year in red states, compared to up to 9,428 of those jobs in blue states. But of course, that would depend on red states deciding to accept federal money — which history shows isn’t always a given.

Data for Progress

“If Republicans are going to oppose this, they’re going to have to defend keeping jobs and benefits away from their own constituents,” said Aldana Cohen. “Public housing is a national issue across party lines. Why should red places miss out on the green 21st century economy? It doesn’t make sense.”

Much of the bill’s funding would come from repealing the 2017 tax cuts passed by Republicans. “I refuse to allow Republicans to set a progressive policy to fail because they decided to run up a credit card to tax to give freebies to their friends,” Ocasio-Cortez told the Washington Post.

The bill also calls for hiring workers “to the greatest extent practicable” from public housing residents, people living within 50 miles of work sites, armed forces veterans, formerly incarcerated people, and union workers. And it repeals the Faircloth Amendment to the Housing Act of 1937. This provision prevents HUD from funding projects that would increase the number of housing units under its management. This amendment has been a major hurdle for constructing new public housing.

Housing is a major campaign issue in the 2020 campaign for president, but many of these problems can’t be solved from the White House

Public housing is just one front in a vast reckoning over where and how people will live in the US. California is one of many states suffering from an acute housing shortage, which is driving up the cost of living and forcing people into substandard housing or out of cities altogether.

Across the US, there is a growing movement to change zoning to allow higher-density housing to relieve pressure on the market. Some cities are experiencing a rise in homelessness.

But housing policies are largely governed at the state and local level, which means the president has few levers for shaping how people live. As Vox’s Matt Yglesias explained, federal housing subsidies and bolstering the social safety net would go a long way to help low-income families secure housing. But the thornier problem of not enough homes in areas with the best job opportunities requires a more coordinated response across all levels of government.

The Green New Deal public housing bill is a step toward solving this by creating more jobs and more housing at the same time.

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Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) holds her weekly news conference in the House Visitors Center at the U.S. Capitol November 14, 2019 in Washington, DC.  | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Democrats are well into the public phase of their impeachment inquiry.

House Democrats began presenting their case for impeachment to the American people on Wednesday, with the first public hearing in a series that will continue on Friday and into next week. And for a small but growing number of them, what comes next is obvious: drafting the actual articles of impeachment.

For now, polling shows the public supports Democrats’ inquiry, but is a little less certain about whether the House should actually pull the trigger on impeaching President Donald Trump. And top Democrats, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and House Intelligence Committee Chair Adam Schiff (D-CA), have been careful to say that no final decision has yet been made to move toward articles of impeachment.

“We haven’t even made a decision to impeach, that’s what the inquiry is about,” Pelosi told reporters Thursday. “The committees will decide that, they will decide what the articles are.”

But talk to the rank-and-file, and it’s clear: At least some Democrats don’t necessarily feel like waiting around for the public’s stamp of approval. In conversations with Vox after Wednesday’s hearing, half a dozen lawmakers said the evidence they’ve seen gives them grave concerns about Trump’s conduct, and they hope the public feels the same after the hearings conclude.

“Our job is to shape public opinion, not just follow public opinion,” Rep. Tom Malinowski (D-NJ), a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee who has sat in on depositions, told Vox. “It’s to do what we think is right, for our country, for our national security, and to persuade people of that.”

For at least one member who has sat in on depositions, impeaching Trump is a given — it’s the ensuing Senate trial for which the public opinion matters.

“Look — anyone of any objectivity would understand there are sufficient facts here to sustain high crimes and misdemeanors. There’s just no question about it,” said Rep. Stephen Lynch (D-MA), a member of the House Oversight Committee. “So I think impeachment will carry, based on my attendance of the depositions. However, the question is should the president be removed, and that’s really the question that’s going to be decided on by the Senate.”

Another member also emphasized that Democrats’ initial decision to launch the impeachment inquiry was counter to what public polling suggested at the time.

“When we finally decided based on Ukraine that we were going to cross the rubicon, at that point, polling still said ‘loser,’ ‘big risk,’” House Oversight member Gerry Connolly (D-VA) told Vox. “For once, you might want to give us a little credit, that we’re motivated to protect the Constitution.”

The role of public opinion in impeachment

Going into this week, about half of the American public supported the impeachment investigation, but fewer are sure about the House taking the step of impeaching Trump and sending him to a trial in the Senate.

A FiveThirtyEight polling average showed 51 percent of the American public supports the impeachment inquiry, while a slightly smaller percentage — 47 percent — supports impeachment and removal of the president from office.

And while this week and next week’s hearings are attempts to shape public opinion, new polling from Politico and Morning Consult suggests that many members of the public have already made up their minds.

The poll showed 62 percent of voters said there was no chance they would change their minds about impeachment, with 19 percent saying there was only a “small chance” they would change their minds. The percentages of those who said they were open to persuasion was much lower; 8 percent said there was “some chance” they’d change their minds, and just a sliver of 2 percent said there was a “strong” chance.

In some ways this makes sense; there’s already a ton of information floating around about what happened in the private, closed-door depositions over the past month. Bombshell pieces of testimony leaked shortly after the depositions were finished, and Schiff spent last week releasing the official transcript from each one. Certainly, there was at least one new bombshell dropped at yesterday’s hearing, when diplomat Bill Taylor relayed new information about a previously unknown phone call, allegedly between Trump and European Union Ambassador Gordon Sondland about Ukraine “investigations” the president wanted done. But generally, discovering new information isn’t the goal of the public hearings, members told Vox. It’s more painting a picture for those who haven’t had the same access.

“It’s sort of trickled out while these depositions were ongoing, so I’m not sure how the actual testimony — live on TV — is actually moving public opinion,” Lynch said. “I’m just not sure how many people are watching, and whether it was lively enough to catch the attention of the public.”

Ultimately, pursuing articles of impeachment will be a decision of members of the House, committee leaders, and House leadership.

“The Constitution doesn’t provide for a vote of the American public on this,” said Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), a member of the House Judiciary Committee. “It’s committed to Congress. But the House and Senate are aware of their own constituents’ views and it matters.”

At Pelosi’s weekly press conference on Thursday, she said the committees of jurisdiction will ultimately be tasked with deciding to move toward articles of impeachment. The second-ranking Democrat in the House largely agreed that it should ultimately be the decision of individual members whether or not to vote for impeachment.

“This is not a question about polls, this a question about each member deciding about whether or not they believe conduct that clearly has been corroborated by many, many witnesses rises to high crimes and misdemeanors,” said House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD).

The public phase of the impeachment inquiry has just begun

Wednesday’s hearings marked the start of the public phase of the impeachment inquiry — and the first of a series of panels featuring witnesses who could speak to Trump’s conduct with Ukraine.

As Vox’s Alex Ward has written, these hearings are central to laying out the facts of inquiry to the American people — and House members emphasized this as well. “Certainly this is the beginning of the public phase, so I think there’s plenty that Americans would want to know about abuse of power by the president, trying to get a foreign country to interfere in our elections,” says House Judiciary member Madeleine Dean (D-PA).

There are a slew of public hearings over the next week: Former Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch testifies Friday, and White House Ukraine adviser Alexander Vindman will come before the committee on Tuesday, along with a number of other witnesses that day and the following two.

The hearings are also just one of several moves lawmakers are taking before the House Judiciary Committee considers drawing up potential articles of impeachment. The House committees are still holding closed-door depositions with individuals such as David Holmes, a staffer to acting Ambassador to Ukraine Bill Taylor. Once the House Intelligence, Oversight and Foreign Affairs Committees complete their interviews and document requests, they’ll put together a report that’s sent to the House Judiciary Committee.

“As we follow the facts, we are then prepared to receive the report that’s going to be given by the [investigatory] committees, and then the House Judiciary Committee will have the opportunity to call witnesses as well. We’ll follow the facts there,” said House Judiciary member Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX).

Jackson Lee emphasized that the decision to advance possible articles would be based on the information lawmakers encounter throughout this process.

“I’ll listen to both sides and if I feel that conduct rises to the level of impeachment, I’ll act accordingly,” she told Vox. “There’s no public push.”

And if following the facts leads them to articles of impeachment, polling may not be a huge part of the decision.

“I don’t know anybody on the Democratic side who’s doing this because of polling,” Malinowski said. “A lot of members like myself from the most contested districts have obviously no incentive to do this, other than our belief that it’s the right thing.”

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Hasan Minhaj in Netflix’s Patriot Act. | Cara Howe/Netflix

A week after CEO Reed Hastings said Netflix was in the entertainment business, not the “truth to power business,” another exec takes a stab at it. Tldr: It’s still going to get censored.

Last week, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings said his company was in the entertainment business, not the “truth to power business.”

That didn’t go over well, because Hastings was justifying why his company had censored one of its shows, Patriot Act With Hasan Minhaj, to satisfy the government of Saudi Arabia earlier this year.

On Thursday, Ted Sarandos, Netflix’s chief content officer, tried to clarify Hastings’s comments: Netflix is in the truth to power business. It’s just that the truth to power business is also the entertainment business. And taking down shows because a government tells you to do so is part of doing business if you distribute shows around the world.

Does that sound better?

If you were upset by Hastings’s comments — perhaps because you’re against censorship or perhaps because you make TV shows and movies for Netflix — then I’m not sure you’ll be mollified by Sarandos’s edit.

The context: Sarandos was speaking at an event sponsored by the Paley Center in New York City, where he was interviewed by Saturday Night Live cast member Chris Redd (who also appeared in Disjointed, a Netflix show that ran for 20 episodes). Redd referenced last week’s comments from Hastings, which was in reference to Netflix’s move to take down an episode of Patriot Act, which criticized Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

Here’s an excerpt of their discussion:

Chris Redd: Do you think entertainment companies like Netflix are in the business of telling “truth to power?”

Ted Sarandos: I think all entertainment is truth to power, all creative expression is truth to power … it was not a great choice of words, misspoken, whatever …

I think what [Hastings] was getting at is that we’re not really in the breaking news business. I think standup comedy is certainly truth to power. A lot of great films which have changed the course of history, it’s all about truth to power … it [was] just a misuse of words. We’re just not in the breaking news business is what he means. Which we’re comfortable [with]. It’s just not what we do.

We don’t have reporters and editors, we’re not in that business of creating and being great at delivering the news. That’s just not what we do. We’re an entertainment company, primarily. That’s what I think he meant when he said that.

Redd: Hasan’s show is so brilliant. It’s definitely about the news.

Sarandos: Yeah, about the news for sure. But it isn’t the news itself, it’s a digest of it. … It’s more like standup. You’re talking about something … and in that particular case, it was in Saudi Arabia, it ran afoul of the law, in that particular country. That was the context that he was talking about.

That’s one of the challenges, as we are a more global company, different standards and different laws and different regulations, and you have to figure out how to navigate.

Redd: Man, you’re good at this thing.

Sarandos: [Laughs]

It’s worth noting that Hastings did say Netflix wouldn’t take down some kinds of programming if the Saudi government complained, like shows that feature gay characters. Also of note: For whatever reason, Netflix has concluded that it can’t do business in China, which has severe content restrictions for internet companies.

But it doesn’t matter whether Netflix thinks that news is different from entertainment or whether things you enjoy watching can also have political messages. What Netflix is saying, consistently, is that it distributes content globally, which means that it has to work with different governments around the world and follow their rules, and that’s not going to change.

That’s not an argument many people want to hear, but it is one you hear all the time, whether it’s Apple explaining why it took down an app used by protestors in Hong Kong or Facebook taking down videos and posts when they offend Turkey’s censors.

It is also nearly impossible to imagine that changing, since every giant internet company intends to reach as many people as it can. So all of them are going to deal with versions of this problem, no matter how they choose to describe it.

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We need more copper. Is it worth destroying this place?

Northeastern Minnesota is home to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (BWCAW), a network of thousands of pristine lakes that have been federally protected since 1968. The protections are so strong that you can’t build a road inside the 1 million acres of wilderness. You also can’t fly a plane over it without federal approval and you can’t drive a boat with a motor. The experience of being in a place without a human footprint draws more than 200,000 visitors a year to the region.

But just outside of this wilderness area is one of the largest untapped sources of copper in the world. A 2018 decision by the Trump administration to remove a ban on mineral extraction within the Superior National Forest paved the way for a Chilean copper mining company (whose CEO is also Ivanka Trump’s landlord) to open a mine near the BWCAW.

The policy shift has mired the region in the age-old jobs vs environment debate. On the one hand, the prospect of well-paying mining jobs for this economically depressed region is alluring. But if the mine opens it could threaten another industry that depends on the wilderness staying intact: recreation and tourism.

The Trump administration’s decision to remove protections from the Superior National Forest is part of a broader policy shift away from conservation and in favor of extractive industries. The fear for some in Minnesota is that this copper mine will leave the same legacy of pollution as countless others have since the Gold Rush era in the West. Heavy metal mining is one of the most toxic extractive industries in the US because it leaches heavy metals into groundwater.

But copper presents a perplexing paradox: It’s in nearly every part of our contemporary lives. It’s the wiring in our phones, and it’s in the pipes of our buildings. As we transition to greener technology, we will need it even more: electric cars, for example, require nine times more copper than gas-burning vehicles. We need copper for solar panels and wind turbines, too.

There is no alternative to the conductive abilities of copper, therefore there isn’t the same conversation about a copperless future as there is for fossil fuels. So the question looms: If we don’t mine for copper near the BWCAW — where will we get it?

You can find this video and all of Vox’s videos on YouTube. And if you’re interested in supporting our video journalism, you can become a member of the Vox Video Lab on YouTube.

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Drug resistance is a reaction to our overuse of antibiotics. | UIG via Getty Images

In the US, one person dies every 15 minutes because of drug resistance.

Every 15 minutes, one person in the US dies because of an infection that antibiotics can no longer treat effectively.

That’s 35,000 deaths a year.

This striking estimate comes from a major new report, released Wednesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), on the urgent problem of antibiotic resistance.

Although the report focuses on the US, this is a global crisis: 700,000 people around the world die of drug-resistant diseases each year. And if we don’t make a radical change now, that could rise to 10 million by 2050.

Drug resistance is what happens when we overuse antibiotics in the treatment of humans, animals, and crops. When a new antibiotic is introduced, it can have great, even life-saving results — for a while. But then the bacteria adapt. Gradually, the antibiotic becomes less effective and we’re left with a disease that we don’t know how to treat.

And it’s not just diseases like tuberculosis. Common problems like STDs and urinary tract infections are also becoming more resistant to treatment. Routine hospital procedures like C-sections and joint replacements could become more dangerous, too, as the risk associated with infection increases. Two of the most urgent current threats are C. difficile (an infection sometimes brought on by antibiotic use) and drug-resistant N. gonorrhoeae (sometimes dubbed “super gonorrhea”).

Experts have been warning for years that we’re approaching a post-antibiotic era — a time when our antibiotics are pretty much useless and drug-resistant superbugs can all too easily decimate our health. Yet we continue to dole out too many antibiotics, driving the resistance. Doctors prescribe antibiotics for conditions that don’t require them and don’t even benefit from them, like colds and flus. And animal farmers use them copiously on livestock and poultry, sometimes to compensate for poor industrial farming conditions.

It’s not all bad news. Some professionals, especially in hospitals, have heeded experts’ warnings — with encouraging results. Take staph infections, for example. The report notes that rates of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) have dropped. Vancomycin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (VRSA) is no longer considered a threat. Overall, deaths caused by drug resistance decreased by 18 percent since the CDC’s landmark 2013 report on this issue.

But even if deaths are down, this is still very much an emergency.

“Stop referring to a coming post-antibiotic era — it’s already here,” the CDC report says. “You and I are living in a time when some miracle drugs no longer perform miracles and families are being ripped apart by a microscopic enemy.”

Doctors like Amy Mathers, who directs the University of Virginia’s Sink Lab, have seen this firsthand. She told me that over the past decade there’s been a surge of US patients infected with bacteria for which there’s no effective antibiotic. “Ten years ago, that was a rarity,” she said. And now? “I see that once a month.”

Here’s what the CDC experts recommend we all do

The report emphasizes three main ways to curb the problem. They apply to professionals like health care providers and veterinarians, and they also apply to you, even if you don’t work with sick people or animals.

1) Preventing infections in the first place

Prevention is the best medicine — it’s a cliché for a reason. Doctors should ask patients if they recently received care in another hospital or traveled to another country (germs can be spread easily across borders) and make sure patients receive recommended vaccines.

You, as an individual, can help prevent infections by cleaning your hands, practicing safe sex, and, if you’re going to be traveling, getting the appropriate vaccines and sticking to food and drinks that are unlikely to be contaminated.

2) Slowing the development of resistance through improved antibiotic use

The CDC estimates that US doctors’ offices and emergency departments prescribe 47 million antibiotic courses each year — for infections that don’t need antibiotics. That’s 30 percent of all antibiotics prescribed at these sites. Health care providers, as well as people in the agriculture industry, can slow resistance by using antibiotics only when necessary.

The same goes for you, too. If you’ve got a nasty cold, flu, traveler’s diarrhea, or something that’s likely to go away on its own in a few days, ask your doctor whether your symptoms merit taking antibiotics or whether you’ll be fine if you go without.

3) Stopping the spread of resistance when it does develop

Health care providers should learn when to report cases to the health department to identify unusual resistance and deploy a containment strategy if needed.

For example, earlier this year, a patient in Orange County, California, tested positive for C. auris, a multidrug-resistant yeast that can cause invasive infection and death. An extensive, aggressive containment response followed that involved screening hundreds of patients, according to the CDC report. When a new patient was identified as carrying or infected with C. auris, they were immediately put under special precautions. That helped prevent spread to hundreds of vulnerable patients.

At this point, you may be wondering why we don’t just develop new antibiotics if our old ones stop working. The CDC experts say we can’t count on that. As a result of scientific obstacles and limited business incentives, between 1962 and 2000, no new major classes of antibiotics were approved to treat common and lethal infections. And since 1990, 78 percent of major drug companies have scaled back antibiotic research — or cut it altogether. To understand why that’s the case, we need to dig into the companies’ financial incentives.

Companies could research and develop new antibiotics. Why don’t they?

The problem of drug resistance could be addressed really cheaply. If each person in high- and middle-income countries invested $2 a year in this cause, we could research new drugs and implement effective measures to reduce the threat of resistance, according to an important UN report released in May.

“For the US, the total cost to fix the broken antibiotics model is $1.5-2 billion per year,” Kevin Outterson, a Boston University professor who specializes in antibiotic resistance, told me. “It’s the equivalent of what we spend on toilet paper every few months.”

What’s more, unlike climate change, this is an issue on which there’s both scientific and political consensus — it’s not as though the right and the left disagree as to whether the problem is real.

Which raises the question: If there’s a cost-effective way to solve such a high-impact problem and it’s ideologically uncontroversial, why aren’t we all over it?

Unfortunately, it takes many years and lots of funding to do the research and development needed to bring a new antibiotic to market. Most new compounds fail. Even when they succeed, the payoff is small: An antibiotic — which is, at least in theory, a drug of last resort — doesn’t sell as well as a drug that needs to be taken daily. So for biotech companies, the financial incentive just isn’t there.

Although drug resistance affects high-income and low-income countries alike, wealthy Western countries may be better equipped to respond to a health crisis and thus feel less urgency about tackling the problem proactively.

The UN report and a number of outside experts have argued that to solve this issue, we need to stop treating antibiotics as though they’re any other product on the free market. Instead, we should think of antibiotics as public goods that are crucial to a functioning society — like infrastructure or national security. And the government should fund their research and development.

“This is a product where we want to sell as little as possible,” Outterson explained. “The ideal would be an amazing antibiotic that just sits on a shelf for decades, waiting for when we need it. That’s great for public health, but it’s a freaking disaster for a company.”

This mismatch with the pharmaceutical industry’s profit-making imperative is why the government (and ideally also the private sector and civil society) needs to step in, according to the UN report. That could include incentives like grant funding and tax credits to support early-stage research. The report also urged wealthy countries to help poorer nations improve their health systems, and recommended the creation of a major new intergovernmental panel — like the one on climate change, but for drug resistance.

Yet for governments to mobilize around this issue, the public may first have to push it as a priority — and it’s not clear that enough Americans see it as such.

“I do not think the political will or even the knowledge base is present in the US to make this a high-enough priority to solve the problem today,” Mathers told me. She believes the first thing we need is more public education to bring this threat into focus for the average American.

Outterson, for his part, told me he fears the death toll may have to climb very high before a critical mass of people start noticing, caring, and mobilizing. “We will eventually respond,” he said. “The question is how many people will have to die before we start that response.”

Sign up for the Future Perfect newsletter. Twice a week, you’ll get a roundup of ideas and solutions for tackling our biggest challenges: improving public health, decreasing human and animal suffering, easing catastrophic risks, and — to put it simply — getting better at doing good.

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Sen. Elizabeth Warren at a North Carolina campaign rally in November 2019. | Sara D. Davis/Getty Images

Psst, rich guys: It might be better for you if you stop talking about Elizabeth Warren.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren is not shying away from the parade of ultra-rich guys fretting about her in the press — instead, she appears to be egging them on. From a tax calculator meant for billionaires to a new campaign ad, a twist on a popular meme, and campaign coffee mug reading “BILLIONAIRE TEARS,” the Massachusetts Democrat is leaning into her billionaire battle.

It’s a way to fire up supporters and a signal of her campaign’s calculation that billionaires complaining about her helps and doesn’t hurt. At the current moment, the word billionaire is accompanied with almost a villainous connotation among much of the American public, especially on the left, and Warren appears to be trying to capitalize on it. And taking on billionaires is also a way to remind voters of her past as a longtime critic of the financial industry, Wall Street, and the big banks.

On Wednesday, Warren’s campaign launched a new ad titled “Elizabeth Warren stands up to billionaires.” It features Warren on the campaign trail touting her proposed wealth tax and remarking, “I’ve heard that there are some billionaires who don’t support this plan.” The ad then cuts to excerpts of interviews with billionaires talking about her in interviews — hedge funder Leon Cooperman, TD Ameritrade founder John Ricketts, former Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, and entrepreneur Peter Thiel. And it takes shots at them — Cooperman’s settlement on insider trading, Ricketts’s Republican donations, Blankfein’s earnings during the financial crisis, Thiel’s ties to Facebook and Donald Trump — all while noting their net worths.

What’s notable about the ad isn’t just what’s in it, but also where the senator’s team is placing it: on CNBC. The financial news outlet reported that the ad was going to be shown during two of its most popular shows on Thursday. Warren is taking aim at rich guys, and she wants them to know it.

CNBC has been fanning the flames of the billionaires vs. Warren narrative, perhaps especially when it comes to Cooperman, who spent 25 years at Goldman Sachs before starting a hedge fund, Omega Advisors, that he has since converted to a family office. In September, Cooperman told CNBC he thought the stock market would fall by 25 percent if Warren wins the presidency, if it opens at all. The pair have been engaged in a war of words since, much of which is occurring on CNBC.

In response to Warren’s new ad, Cooperman told CNBC’s Brian Schwartz that Warren is “disgraceful.” He continued, “She doesn’t know who the fuck she’s tweeting. I gave away more in the year than she has in her whole fucking lifetime.”

Warren’s team responded to Schwartz’s tweet with “ok billionaire,” a play on the “ok boomer” meme rampant across the internet.

And Warren just keeps getting in digs. Her campaign is now selling mugs that read “BILLIONAIRE TEARS.” The nicer read: It’s an anti-elitism take on a well-worn meme that spans the political spectrum. The meaner interpretation, though, is that it’s a reference to Cooperman, who in an interview earlier this month on, yet again, CNBC grew emotional when talking about the 2020 election and Warren.

Last week, Warren’s campaign also unveiled a “calculator for billionaires” that lets people estimate how much they would pay under her wealth tax. It name-checks Cooperman specifically, as well as former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who is considering a presidential bid, and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, who joked about the wealth tax and asked whether Warren was “open-minded” to meeting with him last week.

Rich guys might be better off staying mum about Elizabeth Warren

There has been a plethora of stories about how Wall Street and rich people are afraid of Warren — including one I wrote — saying the choice between Warren and Trump is like the “decision between sickness and death” and calling her the one candidate who is “toxic for the business community.” And news outlets are leaning into it — why not get some comments from billionaires bashing a presidential candidate? But for their purposes, it would probably behoove guys like Cooperman to stop taking CNBC’s calls.

Warren and Bernie Sanders are the two most progressive candidates in the 2020 Democratic primary, and their bases are not, well, fans of billionaires. On the campaign trail, Warren talks about a “rigged system,” and Sanders has throughout his career railed against the “billionaire class.”

By playing up how much billionaires don’t like her, Warren is also playing up her progressive credentials as someone who is on the side of the little guy in the face of powerful interests. It might also be an attempt to appeal to voters who are also enticed by Sanders’ adversarial stance. Warren is pointing out that there’s a reason the Leon Coopermans and Jamie Dimons of the world don’t like her — they think if she is in the White House, she will make life harder for them. And they’re not the most sympathetic characters. But it appears many billionaires just can’t help themselves when it comes to criticizing her.

On Thursday, Blankfein, who has also been publicly sparring with Sanders for years and in 2016 was also shown in a Trump campaign ad, responded to Warren’s billionaire video on Twitter. “Not my candidate, but we align on many issues,” he wrote. He also made a thinly-veiled reference to Warren’s claims of Native American ancestry.

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