Recession 'not completely off the table,' keeping Colorado River healthy: 5 Things podcast

On today's episode of the 5 Things podcast: Recession 'not completely off the table,' Treasury Secretary Yellen says

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen says recession is not off the table. Plus, USA TODAY Senior Reporter Jessica Guynn explains why some Asian Americans in tech are suing, utilities are leaving lead pipe in the ground, Arizona Republic Environment Reporter Brandon Loomis looks at efforts to keep the Colorado River healthy, and parts of the country can see the northern lights this week.

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Hit play on the player above to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript below. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.

Taylor Wilson:

Good morning. I'm Taylor Wilson and this is 5 Things you need to know Monday, the 10th of July 2023. Today, the Treasury Secretary takes the bad with the good from recent jobs numbers. Plus, why some Asian Americans in tech are suing, and we hear about efforts to keep the Colorado River healthy.

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Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen expressed cautious optimism about the US economy on CBS's Face the Nation yesterday. She said the country appears to be on the right path to bring down inflation, but critically she also said that a recession is, "not completely off the table." That's after the June jobs report was the weakest showing since December of 2020. According to the National Bureau of Economic Research, a recession is a significant decline in economic activity spread across the economy and lasting more than a few months. But Yellen added that the jobs report was to be expected given the labor market's expansion in recent months. She also attributed the labor market to President Joe Biden's economic policies, which she said contributed to a dramatic rebound of the US economy.

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In a series of recently filed lawsuits, a number of Asian Americans denied leadership roles in Silicon Valley say that racial biases have shut them out of management and executive positions with greater power, profile and pay. I spoke with USA TODAY Senior Reporter Jessica Guynn to learn more. Welcome back to the show, Jessica.

Jessica Guynn:

Thank you so much for having me.

Taylor Wilson:

Jessica, what are they arguing in these suits?

Jessica Guynn:

A growing number of Asian Americans are filing lawsuits alleging they are being passed over for promotions because of stereotypes in the tech industry that they're essentially not leadership material. The problem in the tech industry dates back decades. While I was researching the story, I stumbled on an article from the New York Times from 1992. In it, David Lam, one of the earliest Chinese entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley, talked about how he tried to get a job overseeing a technical group at Hewlett Packard. The company ended up giving the position to someone he had hired out of college 11 months earlier. He was so angry he quit and started his own company. And as founder of Lam Research, he went on to be the first Asian American CEO to take a company public on the Nasdaq. And at the time, this is what he told The Times, "Many Asian engineers are not being looked at as having management talent. They're looked upon as good workhorses and not racehorses. And it's that sentiment that's driving this new generation to try to hold the industry accountable."

Taylor Wilson:

Powerful quote. So Jessica, what do the numbers say about Asian Americans in the tech industry?

Jessica Guynn:

The Ascend Foundation has done really groundbreaking research into the disparities between Asian Americans and professional roles in Silicon Valley tech companies versus Asian Americans in management and executive roles. And when I looked at the nation's top tech companies, I found those same patterns.

Take for example, Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram. 46% of employees are Asian American. That's more Asian employees than white employees, but just 27% become executives at Meta. Meaning there's this barrier which is sometimes referred to as a bamboo ceiling that keeps Asian Americans from advancing at the company. And then when we looked at white employees at the company, they make up 39% of Meta's workforce, but they are 58% of executives.

Taylor Wilson:

And Jessica, you write about this idea of benign neglect in your piece. What does that mean in this context?

Jessica Guynn:

Well, Buck Gee, who did the research for the Ascend Foundation, uses that term because he thinks the tech industry just isn't paying attention. For one, they don't realize they have a diversity problem because they see Asian Americans in the executive pipeline and sometimes they outnumber white employees, but they're only 6% of the US population. But Buck says companies are confusing racial diversity with racial equity. He says when the diversity chief at Apple was asked why the company was not making efforts to increase the number of Asian American executives, which were at about 18%, the diversity chief responded that they were using that 6% figure as their metric and had not considered the fact that white executives were being promoted at a rate three times that of Asian Americans.

Taylor Wilson:

And we saw this wave of anti-Asian hate crop up during the pandemic. How did anti-Asian hate during COVID spur more Asian Americans to call out bias in the workplace?

Jessica Guynn:

I've interviewed Asian Americans for several stories about representation in the workplace and a very common refrain is that the anti-Asian hate and violence during the pandemic changed everything for them. For years they put up with microaggressions, they put up with being passed over for promotion, but as they watched their elders being attacked in the streets, they said they felt this growing sense of responsibility to speak up about what they were experiencing at work. That has included filing lawsuits and sharing their stories publicly.

Silicon Valley has also maintained traditionally this culture of silence. Employees who speak out about mistreatment are shunned and speaking publicly can basically end your career. I think that's why it felt so important to document this moment with a growing number of Asian Americans, not just filing lawsuits but publicly sharing what are for them deeply painful and traumatic experiences and forming a support network to help each other do it.

Taylor Wilson:

Jessica Guynn covers tech and economic opportunity for USA TODAY. Thanks, Jessica.

Jessica Guynn:

Thanks so much for having me.

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Taylor Wilson:

Around the country, utilities have been leaving lead pipe in the ground. And even worse, they sometimes remove sections, disturb the pipe and then leave the rest, potentially spiking lead levels. That's according to an investigation from the Associated Press. Experts and advocates say that leaving lead pipe should have stopped a long time ago. The metal is especially dangerous for young children. It can lower IQ and problem solving skills. Yana Lumber Nido, co-founder of the Campaign for Lead-Free Water, says utilities have tried to reduce cost and dodge responsibility. Many cities say they can leave the pipes and use chemical treatment instead, but the Biden administration has said it wants all 9.2 million lead pipes in the US replaced. Experts say cities have often ignored that, leaving lead pipe in the ground potentially hundreds of thousands of times. The AP review found that it's happened in Chicago, St. Louis, Providence, Nashville, and a host of other cities.

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It's not easy keeping the Colorado River healthy thanks to a constant demand for water in the west many of the river systems' natural processes are out of whack. Now nature needs a hand from humans if it's going to survive what humans have done to it. I spoke with Arizona Republic Environment Reporter Brandon Loomis for more. Thanks for hopping on the show, Brandon.

Brandon Loomis:

Thank you.

Taylor Wilson:

So I want to start here. Why is the Colorado River so important to an entire region?

Brandon Loomis:

It's really the water source for both farms and cities. It supplies on the order of 40 million people, and within that the largest share goes to farms for vegetables and for livestock and so on. It's a major economic and lifeline supply.

Taylor Wilson:

And Brandon, you write that the Colorado River is on life support. Those are very strong words. Why are things so dire?

Brandon Loomis:

The life support that I'm writing about in this piece, it's not just about the last 20 years when we've been having what we call a mega drought. It really goes back to the construction of the dams. We have the two largest man-made reservoirs in the US on the Colorado River, Lake Powell and Lake Mead. Those dams store several years worth of the river's supply when they're full, hydropower. But building the dams created an environment that was unnatural for species of plants, animals, birds, fish. Really their habitat was destroyed in a sense. To the degree that there's any water left in the river, there's still some habitat there, but if you want to have fish and wildlife maintained into the future, you have to do something about that. And so the life support that I'm talking about is actually going in and building habitat. Building habitat that nature used to build by floods and so on, and also assisting the wildlife that lives there. Going in there and by hand helping them live their lifecycle basically.

Taylor Wilson:

So let's go into some more specifics there. How do volunteers and government efforts work to give the river a lifeline after so many of these natural processes that you mentioned have been lost?

Brandon Loomis:

I guess I could back up and talk about what the river used to do when it would flood. The floods would come in, they'd scour out areas. The river would move around. It would take out some older trees, which in turn allows new trees to grow. And some birds like new trees, some birds like old trees, some birds like the undergrowth and so on. And so that was just the cycle that the river had. Now it doesn't do that, and so you can end up with a lot of non-native trees or shrubs and it becomes a more static environment.

So to overcome that, this program, it's paid for about half by the feds and half by the states, it builds habitat. I mean, actually we saw bulldozers. You're digging up ponds basically out of the desert and then you're using irrigation. Basically you're using canals and pipes to move water into these ponds so that you have marshes that would've been there naturally before. They're not there anymore so now you're building something that seems a semblance of nature.

Along the way the volunteers come in and the nonprofits come in where you need to plant a lot of trees. You need to do it in perpetuity in these places where you can get water to. So there are places along the river where groups like the Sonoran Institute in Arizona or Pronatura in Mexico will basically dedicate themselves to keeping these riverside forests going for birds basically.

The same thing for fish. There are endangered fish in the Colorado River. On the lower Colorado there, a lot of it is species of suckers, which are fairly good sized fish. I'd liken them to maybe a sockeye salmon, if people are familiar with that. They don't do so well in the environment that exists now. Part of that is the water situation, but part of it is that there are a lot of fish that weren't there before. There are bass and things like that that will eat little fish.

They have to go in and actually catch these fish when they're little, I mean like larval stage, and take them to a hatchery where they can live safely until they get bigger, big enough to be safe, and then go back and put them in the river. Those are a couple of examples of sort of the lengths that we have to go to keep these things alive.

Taylor Wilson:

All right, Arizona Republic Environment Reporter Brandon Loomis. Thanks for your time and insight on this. Really appreciate it.

Brandon Loomis:

Thanks for having me.

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Taylor Wilson:

More than a dozen states might have a chance to see the Northern Lights this week, also known as Aurora Borealis. The lights are a luminous glow seen around the magnetic pole in the Northern Hemisphere, while the Southern Hemisphere has its own version, Aurora Australis. The Auroras create ribbons of colorful lights and are a result of the sun interacting with Earth's atmosphere. A collision between electrically charged particles from the sun and gases in Earth's atmosphere produce a series of flashes which appear as moving lights. The best viewing times this week will be between 10:00 PM and 2:00 AM. They can be seen in a number of states from Alaska to Maine. Check out a link in today's show notes for whether you can see them from your neck of the woods.

Thanks for listening to 5 Things. If you like the show, please subscribe and leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts. And if you have any comments, you can reach us at podcasts@usatoday.com. I'm back tomorrow with more of 5 Things from USA TODAY.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Recession 'not off the table,' Colorado river struggling: 5 Things podcast