Author Archives: AdriannHaggard

Could This Anti-Immigrant Hardliner Grab a Top Border Patrol Spot?

by AdriannHaggard Posted on February 2, 2017

Mother Jones

As the Trump administration rolled out its “Muslim ban,” detaining hundreds of travelers and sparking protests at airports across the country, the agency in charge of implementing the order was operating without a chief of staff. Who might get the No. 3 spot at Customs and Border Protection (CBP) remains a mystery despite reports that it will be an anti-immigration hardliner.

Last week, the Southern Poverty Law Center reported that President Donald Trump had named Julie Kirchner, the former executive director of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), as CBP’s new chief of staff. That report was based on a tweet by an immigration policy analyst at the Cato Institute, as well as a Politico story that reported that Kirchner was serving “a temporary political appointment” at CBP.

However, CBP has not officially named Kirchner or anyone else as its new chief of staff. After issuing several cagey responses to questions about the alleged appointment, the agency’s press office confirmed that Kirchner is working as “an advisor to the commissioner’s office” and “her status hasn’t changed.” Attempts to reach Kirchner for comment were unsuccessful. Trump named his new chief of Border Patrol, Ronald Vitiello,* on Tuesday.

If Kirchner is indeed Trump’s pick, it would be another sign that he’s doubling down on his promises to crack down on immigrants. Like Trump, Kirchner has characterized immigrants and refugees as dangerous and costly. Last September, Breitbart published parts of a statement written by Kirchner, who was then working as an adviser to the Trump campaign. “Before President Obama’s failed presidency comes to an end, he is trying to force Americans to accept 30 percent more refugees—providing ISIS a path for their terrorists to enter the country,” she claimed. “In recent years, hundreds of foreign born terrorists have been apprehended in the United States alone.” She also wrote that “instead of providing free healthcare to millions of refugees, we must focus on rebuilding our inner cities and bringing jobs back to America.”

Kirchner joined FAIR in 2005 as its director of government relations. In 2007, she became the organization’s executive director. During her tenure, FAIR launched an initiative to end the 14th Amendment’s birthright citizenship provision, which grants citizenship to all children born on American soil, regardless of whether their parents are legal residents. In 2010, FAIR’s legal arm, the Immigration Reform Law Institute, had a hand in crafting Arizona Senate Bill 1070, which required police to detain individuals suspected of being illegal immigrants and made it a misdemeanor for immigrants not to carry their immigration papers. (The Supreme Court subsequently found most of SB 1070’s provisions unconstitutional.)

FAIR describes itself as a nonpartisan organization focused on limiting all immigration. The Southern Poverty Law Center has characterized it as a “hate group” with nativist ties. In return, FAIR has called SPLC a “basket of partisan propaganda artists masquerading as public policy advocates” and has filed a complaint with the IRS alleging that the group is engaged in illegal political activity.

FAIR and its representatives have a history of taking extreme stands and making racially charged statements. In a 1997 Wall Street Journal article, Tucker Carlson quoted FAIR’s current president, Dan Stein, as saying, “Should we be subsidizing people with low IQs to have as many children as possible, and not those with high ones?” One of FAIR’s field representatives wrote in 2005 that Mexicans were at risk of turning California into a “third world cesspool.” FAIR’s founder and former director John Tanton has warned of the “Latin onslaught” and has said the United States should remain a majority-white country, writing, “One of my prime concerns is about the decline of folks who look like you and me.” After a 2011 New York Times article exposed Tanton’s racist statements and ties to Holocaust deniers, eugenicists, and racists, he quietly dialed back his role in the organization. He remains on its advisory board.

Trump’s ties to FAIR also extend through Kellyanne Conway, his campaign manager, who conducted polling and research for the group beginning in the mid-1990s. Last December, Stein, FAIR’s president, said Conway’s work for FAIR had a visible impact on Trump’s immigration policies: “We saw that influence helping to shape Donald Trump’s positions and statements once she came on board.”

In August 2015, Kirchner left FAIR to join Trump’s campaign as an immigration adviser. During her time with the campaign, Trump made his promises to build a massive border wall and implement a ban on “Muslim immigration.” Last August, Trump visited Arizona to deliver an inflammatory speech on immigration. “We also have to be honest about the fact that not everyone who seeks to join our country will be able to successfully assimilate,” he said. “It is our right as a sovereign nation to choose immigrants that we think are the likeliest to thrive and flourish here.” Trump emphasized immigrants’ ties to violent crime and claimed that illegal immigration costs the United States $113 billion annually—a figure taken from a debunked study published by FAIR under Kirchner’s watch.

Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly identified Ronald Vitiello.

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Could This Anti-Immigrant Hardliner Grab a Top Border Patrol Spot?

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Disturbing New Evidence About What Common Pesticides Can Do to Brains

by AdriannHaggard Posted on April 13, 2016

Mother Jones

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For defense against the fungal pathogens that attack crops—think the blight that bedeviled Irish potato fields in the 19th century—farmers turn to fungicides. They’re widely sprayed on fruit, vegetable, and nut crops, and in the past decade, they’ve become quite common in the corn and soybean fields (see here and here for more). But as the use of fungicides has ramped up in recent years, some scientists are starting to wonder: What are these chemicals doing to the ecosystems they touch, and to us?

A new paper in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Communications adds to a disturbing body of evidence that fungicides might be doing more than just killing fungi. For the study, a team of University of North Carolina Neuroscience Center researchers led by Mark Zylka subjected mouse cortical neuron cultures—which are similar in cellular and molecular terms to the the human brain—to 294 chemicals “commonly found in the environment and on food.” The idea was to see whether any of them triggered changes that mimicked patterns found in brain samples from people with autism, advanced age, and neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s.

Eight chemicals fit the bill, the researchers found. Of them, the two most widely used are from a relatively new class of fungicides called “quinone outside inhibitors,” which have surged in use since being introduced in US farm fields in the early 2000s: pyraclostrobin and trifloxystrobin.

Now, it’s important to note, Zylka told me in an interview, that in vitro research like the kind his team conducted for this study is only the first step in determining whether a chemical poses risk to people. The project identified chemicals that can cause harm to brain cells in a lab setting, but it did not establish that they harm human brains as they’re currently used. Nailing that down will involve careful epidemiological studies, Zylka said: Scientists will have to track populations that have been exposed to the chemicals—say farm workers—to see if they show a heightened propensity for brain disorders, and also test people who eat foods with residues of suspect chemicals to see if they show up in their bodies at significant levels.

That work remains to be done, Zylka said. “What’s most disturbing to me is that we’ve allowed these chemicals to be widely used, widely found on food and in the environment, without knowing more about their potential effects,” he said.

How widely are they used? The paper points to US Geological Survey data for pyraclostrobin, a fungicide that landed on the UNC team’s list of chemicals that trigger “changes in vitro that are similar to those seen in brain samples from humans with autism, advanced age and neurodegeneration.” It’s marketed by the German chemical giant BASF’s US unit under the brand name Headline, for use on corn, soybeans, citrus fruit, dried beans, and more. BASF calls Headline the “nation’s leading fungicide.” The USGS chart below shows just how rapidly it has become a blockbuster on US farm fields.

Use of pyraclostrobin in the United States has spiked since 2002.

Then there’s trifloxystrobin, which also made the UNC team’s list. Marketed by another German chemical giant, Bayer, trifloxystrobin, too, boasts an impressive USGS chart, reproduced below.

US Trifloxystrobin use has boomed since 1999. USGS

In an emailed statement, a BASF spokeswoman wrote that cell-tissue studies like Zylka’s “have not demonstrated relevance compared with results from studies conducted on live animals.” She added: “While the study adds to the debate of some scientific questions, it provides no evidence that the chemicals contribute to the development of some diseases of the central nervous system. This publication has no impact on the established safety of pyraclostrobin when used according to label instructions in agricultural settings.” A Bayer spokesman told me that the company’s scientists are looking into the Zylka study and “don’t have any initial feedback to offer right now.” He added that “our products are rigorously tested and their safety and efficacy is our focus.”

As Zylka’s team points out, both of these chemicals turn up on food samples in the US Department of Agriculture’s routine testing program. Pyraclostrobin residues, according to USDA data compiled by Pesticide Action Network, have been found on spinach, kale, and grapes, among others, in recent years, while trifloxystrobin has been detected on grapes, cherry tomatoes, and sweet bell peppers. Again, there hasn’t been sufficient research to establish whether these traces are causing us harm, Zylka stressed, but since they are entering out bodies through food, he thinks more research is imperative.

Meanwhile, a disturbing picture of the ecosystem impacts is emerging. These same chemicals also leave the farm via water. A 2012 US Geological Survey study found pyraclostrobin in 40 percent of streams in three farming-intensive areas. In another 2012 USGS study, researchers looked for a variety of pesticides in the bed sediments of ponds located within amphibian habitats in California, Colorado, Georgia, Idaho, Louisiana, Maine, and Oregon. Pyraclostrobin was the most often-detected chemical of all, turning up in more than 40 percent of tested sites.

Studies suggest that as the fungicides leach out into the larger environment, they’re harmful to more than just fungi. Oklahoma State researchers found BASF’s pyraclostrobin-based fungicide Headline deadly to tadpoles at levels frequently encountered in ponds. And a 2013 study by German and Swiss researchers found that frogs sprayed with Headline at the rate recommended on the label die within an hour—a stunning result for a chemical meant to kill funguses, not frogs. I wrote about the study when it came out. “These studies were performed under unrealistic laboratory conditions,” a BASF spokeswoman told me at the time. “The study design neither reflects conditions of realistic agricultural use in practice nor the natural behavior of the animals.”

Then there are honeybees. In a 2013 study, a team of USDA researchers found pyraclostrobin and several other fungicides and insecticides in the pollen of beehives placed near farm fields—and that bees fed pyraclostrobin-laced pollen were nearly three times more likely to die from common gut pathogen called Nosema ceranae than the unexposed control group (more here).

Meanwhile, the industry is enthusiastically marketing these products. “Headline fungicide helps growers control diseases and improve overall Plant Health. That means potentially higher yields, better ROI and, ultimately, better profits,” BASF”s website states. “It can help secure a family’s future, fund a college education, finance an equipment upgrade, or maybe buy just a bit more of a vacation for the whole family.” Such supposed benefits aside, I wish we knew more about the environmental and public-health costs of these increasingly ubiquitous chemicals.

Originally posted here – 

Disturbing New Evidence About What Common Pesticides Can Do to Brains

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