2:18

Stock markets around the world plunged this week as investors absorbed more evidence that China’s economy is slowing. In the US, the Dow suffered its worst week since 2011.

Transcript

SCOTT SIMON, HOST:

The stock market had its worst one-day crash in four years yesterday. The Dow Industrial Average plunged 531 points, and that was it in just one day. Last week saw a global sell-off that sent markets around the world sharply lower. NPR’s Chris Arnold reports.

CHRIS ARNOLD, BYLINE: Investors were dumping stocks overboard like sailors trying to lighten a sinking ship on Friday. The one-word answer as to why, China. China is reporting a surprise slowdown in growth, and investors don’t like that kind of surprise from the world’s second-largest economy.

KAMEL MELLAHI: There is an air of fragility among the Chinese economy.

ARNOLD: Kamel Mellahi is a professor at the Warwick Business School in England, and he studies emerging markets. And he says some slowdown in China is by design. The Chinese government, he says, has been raising the minimum wage and trying to transform the country from a Third World, low-cost manufacturing center into a more mature economy. But rising wages, among other things, means…

MELLAHI: China is becoming less competitive in terms of labor cost and production of cheap goods.

ARNOLD: Now, people who follow China understand this. But the slowdown in manufacturing there was bigger than expected. And that, along with some uncertainty about U.S. interest rates and the weak overall economy in Europe, all this appears to have sparked the sell-off. Still, many money managers so far see this as an orderly correction for stocks and not a panic-driven disaster.

DAVID KOTOK: I think we got a correction. It’s about time.

ARNOLD: David Kotok is chief investment officer of Cumberland Advisors.

And what makes it about time?

KOTOK: Well, markets can’t go up forever. They have to correct. They have to restore balance. To do that, they have to sell off. They have to do it with violence, volatility. They have to make people nervous. That’s good.

ARNOLD: Kotok says it’s good because that’s what stops stocks from getting into dangerous bubble territory. But he says looking over the long term, the U.S. economy is continuing to recover. And over the next few years, he thinks stocks will rise well above where they were before this sell-off. Chris Arnold, NPR News.

Copyright © 2015 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by a contractor for NPR, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio.

---

2:41

One of the most prestigious names in health care is taking a stand on food.

This week, Cleveland Clinic announced it would sever ties with McDonald’s. As of Sept. 18, the McDonald’s branch located in the Cleveland Clinic cafeteria will turn off its fryers and close its doors for good. Its lease will not be renewed.

The move is part of a wider effort by Cleveland Clinic leaders to promote a culture of wellness. Employees are offered free gym access and Weight Watchers memberships. And nudging out McDonald’s is one of many steps the medical center has taken in the cafeteria to offer more healthful fare.

“Cleveland Clinic wants to help patients and visitors and our employees turn to healthier lifestyles and healthier choices,” clinic spokeswoman Eileen Sheil tells The Salt.

And, burgers and french fries, well, they don’t make the cut.

The move is not a huge surprise. As we’ve reported, Cleveland Clinic tried to terminate its lease contract with McDonald’s several years back, but failed.

In the meantime, other facilities have had better success — what advocates for more healthful fare say is part of a trend.

“Cleveland Clinic is the seventh hospital since 2009” to cut ties with McDonald’s, says Sriram Madhusoodanan of the advocacy group Corporate Accountability International.

He points to Vanderbilt Medical Center in Nashville, Tenn., Riley Hospital for Children in Indianapolis and Truman Medical Centers in Kansas City, Mo.

Now, McDonald’s does offer more fresh food than it used to — everything from Cuties California Clementines in Happy Meals to its recent experiments with kale salads. And the company is scrambling to remake itself into, in the words of its CEO, a “progressive burger company.”

But Madhusoodanan says many of its customers still go for the traditional menu.

“McDonald’s most profitable items remain burgers, fries and soda,” Madhusoodanan says. And that’s a lot of sugar, salt and fat.

Some of those loyal customers are unhappy with the decision to shutter the Golden Arches at Cleveland Clinic — or elsewhere.

In Cleveland, some commenters on a local news site have complained that the loss of Mickey D’s at the clinic amounts to the loss of the most affordable option. And another commenter wrote: “No one should be able to dictate lifestyle choices.”

Cleveland Clinic’s Sheil tells us that the medical center is aware of the need for good value. And, she says, as it considers replacements for McDonald’s, the idea is to find a vendor that offers more healthful food and affordable prices.

4:04

Walking alongside the River Elbe, it’s easy to get the sense of Hamburg’s long history as a port. Brick warehouses in the German city date to the mid-19th century, though most of those have been converted to offices or museums.

But walk farther along the river toward the North Sea — and you can see the 21st century global economy in action. Tall cranes hoist cargo on and off massive ships. A lot of the shipments involve finished goods. But much of what moves through this port is big and bulky.

“Here we handle about 10 million tons of iron ore and coal for coal refineries or iron or steel production somewhere in the hinterland,” says Axel Mattern, CEO of the Port of Hamburg Marketing Association.

The hinterland, in Hamburg’s case, means not just inland Germany but all of Central Europe. The coal moving through Hamburg powers the factories that produce the goods that then come back here to be shipped out.

“Imports and exports are relatively balanced,” says Stefan Matz, who heads the international section at the Hamburg Business Development Corp. “We import machinery, we import electronics, we import chemicals, and many other products, and we also export most of [those] products as well.”

The United States is one of the biggest partners in this two-way trade. The Port of Hamburg’s trade volume has more than doubled since 1990 and is projected to double again by 2030.

One way to increase this flow of goods would be to complete a trade pact between the U.S. and the European Union. The Obama administration is pushing just such a deal, called the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, or TTIP.

This year, trade talks with Europeans have been largely overshadowed in the U.S. by controversy over a separate deal with Pacific Rim countries. Negotiations involving that pact are expected to wrap up this year. And then next year, the focus will shift to the European talks.

Here in Hamburg, business leaders strongly back TTIP.

“If we do not do this with one of our biggest partner countries like the U.S., there will be other countries in the world — our big competitors, for example China — who will then set the standards. And those standards may not be the standards that are related to our Western values,” says Corinna Nienstedt, who heads the international department of the Hamburg Chamber of Commerce.

As popular as TTIP is in Hamburg, polls show that more than a third of Germans oppose it. They fear corporations will use it as a way to slip in lower health and environmental standards.

“It will be only the big multinational corporations that will benefit from this trade,” says Boris Loheide, an activist with the Cologne branch of Attac, a group trying to stop the treaty. “If you hear about the anti-TTIP movement being anti-American, just don’t believe it. It’s not about you. It’s about big companies, and I don’t care where they are from.”

Even if U.S. and European negotiators do reach an agreement on TTIP in 2016, it’s unlikely Congress would vote on it before 2017, under a new administration.

4:37

NPR’s Audie Cornish speaks with Justin Fox, columnist for Bloomberg View, about Amazon’s work culture, following a scathing article in The New York Times.

Transcript

AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:

If the reviews are so mixed, why do people continue to seek work at Amazon? Justin Fox is a business columnist for Bloomberg View, and he’s written about Amazon on and off for 20 years. Welcome to the program.

JUSTIN FOX: Thank you for having me.

CORNISH: You write in the end that this hiring approach feels a little like traditional law or consulting firm set up, where you kind of bring in people knowing that, like, most of them won’t stick around by the time you get to partner level, right?

FOX: Yeah, and that’s sort of the bargain at those places. Really smart, really ambitious young people come in, and they know from the beginning that it’s pretty unlikely that they’ll make partner, but it’s worth it anyway ’cause they learn a lot. They meet important people. They get useful skills that they can use somewhere else. And it feels a little that way at Amazon, too – that, you know, if you stick around long enough in all your stock vests, you can make a whole lot of money. But the people who only stay for a couple years really don’t. They actually get less than you would at other tech companies.

CORNISH: Right, so that doesn’t sound good. And then, as you point out, this arrangement has been unraveling lately in the law, right? So is this a model that you think is sustainable?

FOX: Well, it’s unraveling in the law because the growth stopped in the law. I mean, it’s this model that’s predicated on continuing to grow. And, you know, you look at how big Amazon is now and how giant its market capitalization is, and it’s enough to make you scratch your head. At the same time, people have been expressing doubts about this company from the very beginning, and it has kept confounding most of them. I mean, occasionally it screws up in a big way, but it sort of plows through and has kept finding ways to get bigger and become a more central part of our economy. And so I’m not going to predict that it’s unraveling anytime soon.

CORNISH: But you’re asking the question of how long can Amazon keep this up? I mean, is it really doing something so different from Google, Apple, Facebook, right – all places where I’m sure, you know, in the world of tech, there’s high turnover?

FOX: The main difference from Amazon is that there’s a lot less in the way of perks, like the free food and the great benefits that you sometimes will get at a Google or a Facebook. And then they do seem to just ratchet up the intensity another level.

CORNISH: Although the difference, I would think, is also profits, right? I mean, Amazon isn’t making what a Google or Apple is.

FOX: No, it’s not. And in a lot of ways, its main competitive advantage is its ability to keep going without making much in the way of profits and get continued support from Wall Street and investors. And I think the reason for that continued support is because of the company’s ambition. I mean, Jeff Bezos makes it very clear that they’re planning to be a lot more than they are right now. And, I mean, early on, when it was just a bookstore, it didn’t take long before he was making clear that they wanted to be doing more than just selling books that you couldn’t find at Barnes and Noble.

CORNISH: So is this report as sort of damning as people are implying?

FOX: I didn’t see it as damning. There’s really nothing in this report that surprises you. This is this sort of intense culture that Jeff Bezos has been pushing at this company for two decades. Obviously, when you read about people getting forced out because they have thyroid cancer, that’s pretty gross, and clearly Jeff Bezos acknowledged that, too. He didn’t say that this had never happened. He simply wrote in his memo to employees, if you see something like that happening, send me an email.

CORNISH: But are people being dismissive of this because it’s white-collar workers, right? I mean, there was outcry when Amazon was accused of building a distribution center in Pennsylvania with no air conditioning, right, and having paramedics outside instead of air conditioning. Now, here’s this report about the conditions for white-collar workers, and in this environment and in this economy, is this any more fair?

FOX: Well, I mean, I think what Amazon did in the warehouse in Pennsylvania and elsewhere was horrible, and they were shamed into putting in air conditioners after the Morning Call newspaper wrote about it. Most of this stuff in this article doesn’t come to this level – that level. These are well-educated, white-collar workers who could get jobs in other places talking about what an intense work environment they work in. If I were were someone considering employment at Amazon, I would pay a lot of attention to it. I think it’s a bit much, as a customer, to say that this is the thing that’s going to turn you off from the company if, you know, forcing workers into heat prostration in Pennsylvania was not enough already.

CORNISH: Columnist Justin Fox – he writes for Bloomberg View. Thank you so much for speaking with us.

FOX: Thank you for having me, Audie.

Copyright © 2015 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by a contractor for NPR, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio.

3:57

Copyright law is complicated to begin with.

But many American companies have run into extra trouble trying to do business in China, where trademark laws are completely different than they are here in the United States.

Take a chain of shoe and athletic wear stores in China, where things might look a little familiar. Looming above the columns of shoes and rows of clothes is the store’s logo: a silhouette of a basketball player, mid-air, his outstretched arm holding a basketball.

The name of the chain is Qiaodan (pronounced cheow-dahn). It’s the Chinese transliteration of Jordan — as in Michael Jordan, the six-time NBA champ who has a famous line of shoes called Air Jordans.

But the Chinese company Qiaodan Sports has no relation whatsoever to Nike’s Air Jordan brand. They are totally separate.

One store employee says people who come in usually know the difference, and if they don’t, they just have to ask and the staff will explain.

But many people don’t think to ask — because they assume the companies are connected.

Outside of a store in Shanghai, two customers told NPR that they didn’t know about the difference until the lawsuit hit the news.

“We used to buy Qiaodan because we thought it had something to do with Michael Jordan,” Alex Kong says. Now, he buys them a little less often.

Another customer asked the big questions when we spoke with her: “Why do they use the same name? Are they allowed to use it?”

As for why they use the same name, we can’t speculate. But they are indeed allowed to use it. Here’s how.

When Nike expanded the Air Jordan brand to China back in the 1990s, they only registered the English version of “Jordan.”

A few years later, a family-owned shoe company from Fujian province came along and registered “Qiaodan,” the Chinese version. Since then, Qiaodan Sports has registered dozens of other trademarks that seem related to Michael Jordan, including their own silhouette logo and the names of Jordan’s two sons in both Chinese and English.

Qiaodan Sports has since expanded to about 6,000 locations across China. They do hundreds of millions of dollars in in business each year.

Jordan sued the company in 2012. In a video explaining his take on the case, he emphasizes how much his name means to him.

“It’s something that I own. When someone takes advantage and misrepresents that, I think it’s left up to me to protect that,” he says. “I have no other choice but to turn to the courts.”

Qiaodan counter-sued in 2013, saying Jordan’s original suit had prevented them from going public.

The first rulings came down in April. The Beijing High People’s Court found Jordan’s claims against Qiaodan to be insufficient. Jordan asked for a retrial; earlier this summer, he lost that too.

Attorney Dan Harris has dealt with this time and again. He says Michael Jordan ran into a problem that’s common among American companies.

“Most countries, including China, give trademarks to whomever files for it first,” he explains. “But [in] the United States, it’s whoever uses it first.”

His firm Harris Moure specializes in helping American companies wade the waters of Chinese law. His firm gets a call or two a month about this exact issue.

“They become very unhappy when we have to tell them that instead of hiring us to sue that company, they should hire us to negotiate with that company,” Harris says. “That is not what they want to hear.”

Many American companies have run into this problem, including Gucci, New Balance and Tesla. Apple had to pay $60 million to a Chinese screen maker called Proview for the trademark to the iPad. Some companies aren’t even planning to sell their product in China — but even manufacturing product there can result in issues if the company hasn’t secured the trademark.

Since 2001, China has had a law that protects international trademarks that are very well-known in China. Starbucks won a case this way, against a Chinese coffee shop chain called Xingbake (xing means “star” in Chinese, and “bake” sounds similar to “bucks”). But victories for American companies are still rare.

Jordan’s camp say they plan to appeal to China’s Supreme Court. Harris thinks the superstar has a long row to hoe.

But maybe that persistence shouldn’t be a surprise coming from the guy who’s famous for saying, “I can accept failure … but I can’t accept not trying.”

3:48

This week, oil prices plunged, falling below $43 a barrel. A year ago, a barrel of West Texas crude oil was selling for more than twice that. Consumers in most of the country are reaping the benefits. But the downside of low prices means tough times for oil field workers. In a small Texas city, nearly everyone is feeling the pain of low oil prices.

Transcript

MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:

Oil prices took another plunge this week, falling below $43 a barrel. That’s less than half last year’s price. Consumers in much of the country are benefiting, but not all, and we’ll get to that in a moment. The downside of low prices also means tough times for oil companies and their workers. Mose Buchele of member station KUT reports from a south Texas town where nearly everyone is feeling the pain of low oil prices.

MOSE BUCHELE, BYLINE: Carlos Garcia grew up in the south Texas oils fields in a small town called Alice, Texas. He was raised with the ups and downs of the oil business.

CARLOS GARCIA: My dad was a roughneck himself. He was a driller years back in the ’80s.

BUCHELE: That was during the last big Texas boom. The bus came to Alice around ’83. The reasons were the same as today. Oil wasn’t worth the cost of drilling for it.

GARCIA: And when it did hit rock-bottom back then, we lost out. My dad lost his home he had just built, and I lived through it.

BUCHELE: Eventually, things picked back up. Garcia followed in his dad’s footsteps. He worked on oil derricks and did well. But that was up until last year when prices dropped. He lost his job. He lost his truck. He says he’s going to lose his car next.

GARCIA: I’m looking for a little work. My wife is working a part-time job. It ain’t making the bill, you know?

BUCHELE: So he’s got to scrimp and save.

GARCIA: Pinch every penny we’ve got, and we’ll just eat here and eat at my mom’s.

BUCHELE: When he says eat here, he’s talking about the Alice Food Pantry, a local charity. It’s a busy operation off the old Main Street. Volunteers push creaky carts of canned goods, bread and tortillas from a small warehouse to cars waiting in the alley. Bonnie Whitley runs the place. She’s seeing more people like Garcia here – first-time visitors.

BONNIE WHITLEY: Men come in, which is very unusual. Usually the women come in.

BUCHELE: She thinks they need more than free food.

WHITLEY: A lot of people are in depression right now and in denial. They just – they can’t come to grips with what’s happened.

TANYA HINOJOSA: My name is Tanya Hinojosa, and I’m a waitress. I’ve been serving tables for the past 15 years.

BUCHELE: You remember Carlos Garcia said his family’s been eating in? So have a lot of families. Hinojosa used to pull in $65 to $100 a day in tips. Now, she’s sometimes clearing just 25 bucks, so she biked to the Pantry for some food.

HINOJOSA: I have never, ever made $25 in a day. It’s always been more than that.

BUCHELE: She and her kids have moved in with her mom, and she’s scrimping in other ways.

HINOJOSA: We try to buy $5 shirts for school, pants, minimum shoes – $30. No more $80 shoes. No more excessive spending.

BUCHELE: And that’s hurting people like Lidia Escobar. I met her at her family-owned children’s clothing store down the street.

LIDIA ESCOBAR: It feels like a ghost town. You can tell people are just – don’t have jobs right now and the extra money to spend on stuff.

BUCHELE: It was the same at a paint store and a car dealership. Able Perez owns a frozen yogurt shop. He wishes the town’s economy was more diversified, but…

ABLE PEREZ: Everybody here now is involved in the oil business whether we like it or not.

BUCHELE: So they keep tabs on oil prices and hope they go up again quickly. Back at the Food Pantry, Carlos Garcia, the unemployed roughneck, says it’s hard to believe how fast things seem to fall apart.

GARCIA: It was going good. Everybody was making money, and everybody was spoiling themselves, you know? And I can hear the cry all over town now. Everybody is suffering.

BUCHELE: He has advice for the town’s young people.

GARCIA: Stick to school. And like I’ve always said, we chose the industry. It didn’t choose us. And we’re just paying for it now.

BUCHELE: It’s just, in a place like Alice, there really weren’t a whole lot of other options. For NPR News, I’m Mose Buchele.

Copyright © 2015 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by a contractor for NPR, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio.

8:05

Baskets of perfectly seasoned deep-fried chicken sizzle during lunch hour at Dooky Chase Restaurant in New Orleans, a city famous for its food. But the real magic happens early in the morning, when Leah Chase, 92, arrives to prepare the day’s specials.

“I made meatloaf today. Smothered pork chops. I did oyster and artichoke soup,” says Chase.

Dooky Chase is a landmark in the city’s historically African-American Treme neighborhood.

Resting her legs at a table in the bustling kitchen, Chase says when her father-in-law Dooky and his wife, Emily, first opened the restaurant in 1941, it was groundbreaking.

“The so-called Creoles of color didn’t have any place to go. But they knew my father-in-law and my mother. So they would come here,” Chase says.

In the decades that followed, Dooky Chase became a fine-dining destination for civil rights leaders, musicians and more recently presidents.

After Hurricane Katrina devastated the city 10 years ago, the storied restaurant, along with many others, was 5 feet underwater. But Chase had no hesitation about rebuilding: “I knew I had to come back. I knew I could come back,” she said.

Dooky Chase received an outpouring of financial support from around the country. The family moved into a FEMA trailer across the street and started over, reopening in two years.

“I was fortunate, really. So now what I try to do is do what I can to help get the rest of us up going. Get the rest of our city — you got to battle, you got to go all the way,” she says.

That resolve was inspirational, says food writer Lolis Eric Elie, who was also a story editor for HBO’s Treme.

“Each time a restaurant like Dooky Chase came back online, it reminded us that others among us were dedicated to the return of our city,” Elie says.

It took nearly eight years for another Treme landmark, the Circle Food Store, to get back on its feet. The city’s first African-American owned grocery originally opened its doors in 1939.

Elie says the return of such authentic neighborhood places is a comfort: “The big fear was that New Orleans would come back as a caricature of itself, as a sort of Disneyfied version of itself.”

That didn’t happen, in part due to the raw determination of locals to preserve what they had despite the chaos of government response after Katrina.

Chef Donald Link had opened his downtown restaurant Herbsaint and was about to launch another, Cochon, in 2005.

“Here you are evacuated from your home, and knowing your home is destroyed and most of the city is gone. And if you listen to the media: ‘It’ll be another six to nine months before anybody can come home,’ and I mean … you can’t say that. This is my city, it’s my home. Nobody’s going to tell me when I can come back,” Link says.

Two weeks after Katrina, Link says, he and his father fashioned fake passes in order to get past the national guard checkpoints that surrounded the city.

Herbsaint was not flooded. Link says he found the tables still set, but the food had spoiled.

“A hundred degrees, no a/c, no electricity. It was rotten. It was bad. Real bad,” Link says.

He wore a gas mask to clean out the walk-in cooler, and tried to reach staff spread around the country. In five weeks, Herbsaint was serving food again. Link says being able to eat from real china was like therapy for people who had lost everything.

“Inside these walls, everything felt normal. It’s just kind of like the first restaurants that opened were like this beacon of hope that everything’s gonna be all right. It can be done,” Link says.

Link has since opened four more acclaimed restaurants in New Orleans, part of a food renaissance that has spread to parts of the city that had languished even before the storm.

On Oretha Castle Haley Boulevard, named for a local civil rights leader, the city has targeted a once-blighted commercial corridor for redevelopment. Along with storefront churches, a fresh food market is preparing to open. There are new museums, art and cultural centers, nonprofit headquarters and restaurants.

Chef Adolfo Garcia opened his restaurant Primitivo earlier this year along with his partners Jared Ralls and Ron Copeland. Garcia had one restaurant before Katrina. Now he’s involved in four.

Garcia says the post-Katrina rebuilding period has opened the door for more experimentation in what had been a mostly traditional restaurant scene.

“It’s given opportunity to other people … next generation, they don’t have to have a trout meuniere restaurant, they can do whatever they want. They can do Filipino food, Asian, Latin food. There’s all these opportunities out there,” Garcia says.

Elie says seeing the new commerce on the boulevard is encouraging, but “Unfortunately I don’t see the people who have lived in this community for generations as being the customers for this kind of place.”

That’s been a recurring concern as New Orleans has come back. The city’s population is up to about 80 percent of pre-Katrina levels, but it has about 30 percent fewer black residents than it did before.

“The battle of New Orleans now is between needs and demands of the new people moving in and the needs and demands of the people who’ve been here forever, and I don’t think either one should outright win. But bottom line is that the folks who’ve been here forever are the ones who built this city,” Elie says.

Questions of gentrification have swirled around another redevelopment project touted by the city — the historical St. Roch Market. The light-filled hall lined with food stalls opened earlier this year in the shell of an open-air market that dates back to 1875.

Retired policeman Ed Perkins is waiting at a counter for a spicy chicken sandwich, reminiscent of the po’boys once sold there. He’s not troubled by the new look, he says, because St. Roch has been abandoned for so long.

“These were rough areas. Most people drove through here at 60 mph with windows rolled up. But it’s turned around,” Perkins says.

He says it’s only fitting that food is part of the city’s recovery: “New Orleans is food, music and hospitality. I love it. This is tradition. This is New Orleans. This is the real New Orleans.”