Category Archives: Everyone

Here Are the Very Best Signs From New York City’s Big LGBT Solidarity March

by Darrell6Martin932@gmail.comDarrell6Martin932@gmail.comDarrell6Martin932@gmail.comDarrell6Martin932 Posted on February 4, 2017

Mother Jones

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Emptying out from brunch spots wielding wickedly pointed signs, and chanting, “We want a leader, not a creepy tweeter!” thousands of anti-Trump demonstrators from the LGBT community met for a rally on hallowed turf on Saturday afternoon: the plaza outside the Stonewall nightclub in New York City’s West Village—recently designated by the Obama administration as a National Monument for its historic role in the long fight for gay rights.

Eugene Lovendusky, 31, works in not-for-profit financing in New York City. James West

Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), the Senate minority leader, received a mixed reception when he appeared in front of the microphone. “Grow some balls!” several people shouted. “Block everything!”—a reference to the ground-swell of progressive voters demanding Schumer lead Senate Democrats in styming President Trump’s agenda and appointments. (Protesters also gathered on Tuesday night outside the minority leader’s Brooklyn apartment.)

Schumer’s pledge to block Betsy DeVos, Trump’s pick for education secretary—”She can take her conversion therapy back to Michigan!”—was, on the other hand, met with cheers and applause.

James West

But it was clear from talking to multiple people in the LGBT community and their allies on this chilly but sunny Saturday that battle-lines have been drawn: many felt there could be no compromise with the Trump administration.

“It’s time to stop giving in,” said Alan Brodherson, a 52-year-old attorney. “Over the years, that’s what the Democrats have consistently done.”

“I don’t believe in complacency,” he said. “Be vigilant.”

Taylor James, a 29-year-old Canadian dancer and photographer who now lives in Los Angeles, was also impressed by the renewed sense of purpose amongst protesters. “It’s inspiring. In 50 years, in 40 years, I’ll look back to see how I stood up,” he said. “It feels very personal.”

Trump, he said, “forces us to show up.”

Taylor James, 29: “When you’re a liberal, you’re fighting to get to ground zero.”

Most people I spoke to said they turned up to show solidarity with the immigrants and refugees targeted by President Donald Trump’s executive order temporarily barring travel from seven predominantly Muslim countries, along with suspending America’s refugee program. (The Trump administration suffered a set-back on Friday night when Judge James Robart of Federal District Court in Seattle issued an order temporarily blocking Trump’s executive action.)

Jaimie McGovern, 29, showed up simply because “the LGBT community is across every spectrum. We’re Muslim, we’re Hispanic.” She surveyed the turnout: “This is fantastic.”

Marissa Nargi, left, and Jaimie McGovern, both students, turned out to show their support for immigrants and refugees. James West

“We’re not going to stand by while Trump takes away rights one by one,” said IT worker David Vazquez, 31. “It seems like every day he comes out with something new. We need to keep from being discouraged.”

Mike Hisey, dressed as Kellyanne Conway with a blond wig and an outfit that evoked her now-famous inauguration getup, stood outside Stonewall itself, attracting a constant stream of requests for photographs with a deadpan face. “Protesting and march works,” he said.

“I’ve been protesting for 30 years.”

Mike Hisey, a.k.a. “Alt-Fact Kelly,” outside Stonewall nightclub in Manhattan’s West Village. James West

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Here Are the Very Best Signs From New York City’s Big LGBT Solidarity March

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Lyrical Genius John Darnielle Has a Scary New Novel

by LoriePercy Posted on February 4, 2017

Mother Jones

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Cult indie-folk band the Mountain Goats is known for having fans that are rabidly devoted—and you’d almost have to be like that just to keep up. Led by John Darnielle—a charmingly nerdy 49-year-old songwriter whose professed admirers include Stephen Colbert, and whom Rolling Stone recently dubbed rock’s “best storyteller”—the Goats have put out 15 albums since 1994, using simple chord structures as a framework for Darnielle’s complex lyrical narratives. Fans have even petitioned to make him America’s Poet Laureate, so maybe it’s no surprise that Darnielle recently stumbled into literary success as well.

His debut novel, Wolf in White Van, about a reclusive, disfigured game designer who seeks refuge in a role-playing game, was a 2014 National Book Award finalist. Out February 7, Darnielle’s latest, an enchanting horror mystery called Universal Harvester, follows a video store clerk in small-town Iowa whose customers begin complaining of disturbing footage spliced into their rented VHS tapes. (The paperback review copy came sheathed in a plastic VHS clamshell.) When he’s not writing something, Darnielle, raised in a progressive activist household, is out fighting for reproductive justice—serving, for instance, on the board of the National Abortion Rights Action League and performing in support of Planned Parenthood.

Mother Jones: So you’re this celebrated songwriter and touring musician, and one morning you wake up as a novelist?

John Darnielle: It was much slower than that! An editor from Continuum asked me how come I hadn’t pitched to “33 1/3” a series of books about individual LPs. I pitched Black Sabbath’s Master of Reality. He liked it, so I wrote it. The critique was housed in this fictional narrative, the longest long-form narrative I’d ever attempted—at least since I wrote a very long poem cycle in the late ’80s. An album you write a bunch of songs and put them together, but with this, the focus it required was exhilarating. I submitted the manuscript, and while waiting to hear back I just started writing something else—I ended up writing what became the last chapter of Wolf in White Van. It was just something to do. A lot of good work sort of starts in idleness and becomes labor. Labor for a lot of people has a negative connotation. But not for me. I always want to be working.

MJ: And you got a National Book Award nomination straight out of the gate!

JD: I’m still kind of processing that. I thought that people wouldn’t hate it, but really, I was in shock. That happened two days after it got published! My editor calls me, “Hey, you’re not gonna believe this.” Laughs.

MJ: So, many successful first-time authors struggle with their second novel.

JD: It’s both easier and harder. The easier part is you know you can do it, whereas at a certain point on Wolf in White Van I’m sitting on the floor in the hallway with the manuscript all over the place, cutting up with scissors, trying to figure out what went where. There was a point where I was like, “This is going to be a mess. I’ll never put it get it back together.” If I hadn’t done it out in physical space, it would’ve never gotten finished. The second one, you know well enough to be planning ahead. A lot of the time with Wolf, I would find out what was going to happen as I wrote the sentence: click click click click…Oh! He went to a hospital! You can ad-lib a song. A novel is a performance you have to plan.

MJ: In the new book, as we often see in your music, there’s this horror motif.

JD: When I was a kid, I was a big science fiction fan, but current horror books were harder to get your hands on. You’d get, you know, Poe and Lovecraft. So there was this zine called Whispers. They would publish things by Robert Aikman, Manly Wade Wellmann, and Dennis Etchison, big names in a very small pond. Whispers was very hard to find, but it was really cool. Aikman would write horror stories that weren’t gore, they weren’t slashers, and they weren’t monster stories either. He called them ghost stories. The main thing about them was the vibe. It was really disquieting. He wanted to sketch the scene so that you could see it and know the characters and get a feel for the motion—and then ask yourself why and not get a final answer. Leave something that itches. I loved that! Etchison would write stories that were just punch lines at the end. You wouldn’t realize something horrific was happening until the last paragraph.

MJ: So what scares you most?

JD: The possibility of disaster remains horrific to me. Like when you know everything’s about to go wrong in a way that’s not controllable or knowable. What’s scary is the unknown, the stuff you can’t put your finger on. Hauntings are also scary—the notion that there are things from the past that render, that you can’t wash out, that you can’t be free of. The notion of the mark—the mark of Cain—is scary. Stuff clinging to you is scary.

MJ: Did you ever work in a video store?

JD: I worked the AV counter at the Roland Heights public library in the ’80s.

MJ: Did people ever record weird stuff on the tapes?

JD: No, I made that up. My best story from the library was the time a couple asked for a recommendation, and I recommended Raising Arizona and they absolutely hated it. They came back hungry for blood. I was on my lunch break and my boss came out and said, “Hey kid, you need to come talk to these people. They totally hate Arizona.” And he said, “Arizona‘s a dog; nobody gets that movie.” I said, “What’re you talking about! All my friends love that movie.” Laughs.

MJ: Was it your idea to package the book in a VHS case?

JD: No. This is the funny thing about me. People think John just comes up with all the ideas. I’m honored. People think I have a big old brain, but actually I am the sum of the people I work with. I do a few things pretty well. I write good songs, I hope I write good books, and I’m a pretty bitchin’ performer, I will say—you come to a Mountain Goats show and you’re gonna have a good time. But I consider myself a prep cook. The stuff I do is indispensable to the meal, but it’s not the whole meal.

MJ: You write so many songs. Do you ever get bored of it?

JD: Nah. People don’t tend to notice, but in the past 10 years especially there’s been a lot of growth in how I write songs and what goes into them. You can listen to Mountain Goats from 1991 to 2007 and never hear a seventh chord. In 2007 or 2008, I started working on the piano to grow as a songwriter. I started throwing major sevens in and sixes and more interesting stuff. I still write in 4/4 time. Maybe not the next hurdle, but one I want to meet in a couple years, is writing something in three or in six.

MJ: Wait, you’re going to turn the Mountain Goats into math rock?

JD: Well, six is not that complicated, but 13—I’d like to write something in 13!

MJ: You officially retired your song “Going to Georgia.” Have you retired others?

JD: Yeah, I think that’s pretty natural. I suspect by the time the Beatles were writing the White Album, they didn’t go, “‘I Wanna Hold Your Hand!’ I wanna play that!” It’s like if somebody asked you to put on the clothes you wore in high school. Well, no. No!

MJ: What was it like growing up in this intensely pro-choice household?

JD: It was exciting, insofar as I was thinking about things that few of my peers were. Young people like to feel self-righteous, like they’re on the right side of things.

MJ: In recent years, abortion rights have come under serious assault.

JD: If you’re working at the very local level and there are nine of you and six of the other people, you can strong-arm them. The anti-choice forces stole that tactic from the left! They’ve learned that if you act locally, you can get stuff on the books that will take forever to undo. It’s the same with redistricting. It’s hard to get people from far away to give a shit. That’s the issue! It’s easy to follow national politics and weigh in on social media, but if I’m tweeting stuff about Chatham County, no one cares. All you can do is wait until they make a move that’s unconstitutional, and then you have to sue, and you appeal—that’s how it works.

MJ: You’re based in Durham, North Carolina, these days?

JD: Yessir. We’re actually right next door to Wade County, where the first targeted regulation of abortion provider (TRAP) laws were enacted. They can’t outlaw abortion, so they say, “Well, you can have an abortion, but the operating table has to be a Möbius strip, and the public restroom has to be 1,000 yards from the operating table.” It’s so playground! It’s: “Cross this line and I’m gonna punch you in the face,” and then they draw the line in back of you.

MJ: North Carolina recently has been on the vanguard of being against trans rights and eroding voting rights and so on.

JD: North Carolina was on the vanguard of being for those things, and that’s why we’re seeing this pushback. The conservatives noticed that there had been a lot of progress and they tried to tamp it down. Conservative forces in the South have a lot of power—almost dynastic—dating back many years. Our former governor Pat McCrory was supposed to be a moderate, but he found himself beholden to people who have much more draconian ideas. I think he assumed this stuff flew under the radar.

MJ: The Black Lives Matter movement in Charlotte seems pretty robust.

JD: Durham was gonna vote Democrat regardless of whether the Republicans nominated this madman—it’s a very blue county. Charlotte—things are a little different. But over the past 40 years, the tradition of Southern progressivism has been somewhat successfully erased by right-wing revisionist historians. The South actually has a very strong tradition of activism. The civil rights movement came from down here! It was black activists demanding that their voices be heard. People say these are red states. No they’re not! They’re hotbeds of progressivism that have been legislated against and redistricted out of existence. The fighting spirit remains in the voice of the people down here.

MJ: Are you tempted to infuse your songs and books with your politics?

JD: No. I have a hunger for justice, but art is a place I’ve always enjoyed being able to be free—to live in worlds that you don’t have to be thinking about that all the time. I don’t see myself writing Upton Sinclair books. My books are to entertain, although to me, entertainment is to make you feel sadness or to get in touch with your own pain—or fear, or to remember somebody who has gone missing from your life. That’s my calling. There are real teachers out there; I don’t pretend to have their mantle.

MJ: Are there any writers you’ve tried to emulate?

JD: There are stylists I really love. I’m a huge Joan Didion fan—if I wrote something that she might like, then I’d feel very proud. I want the action to move as quickly as it does in A Book of Common Prayer, where one thing bonks right into another very quickly, but I want the effect to be a little more velvety—simple language that has lush effects.

MJ: Had you ever written fiction prior to Wolf?

JD: I wrote short stories when I was a teenager, but they weren’t any good and I kinda knew it. I was 14 or 15 when I discovered poetry, and I pretty much stopped writing prose until Master of Reality. I did a lot of music criticism. I don’t think much of it was any good. I think I wanted to show off a lot when I was younger. Now I just want people to enjoy the story. If it were possible to publish anonymously, that would be awesome.

MJ: A lot of your fans seem to know your entire catalog. They sing along at shows and shout out constant requests. What does that feel like?

JD: It’s a a huge honor. I try not to dwell on it, because anything that might lead to me being too egocentric is not healthy. I’ll look at them and try to have a moment with them, but I hope it’s more of a shared experience than a didactic one.

MJ: Do the requests get annoying?

JD: Generally no. A good show—and this is on the band as much as on the audience—people will get a sense of the rhythm, so they won’t yell out a request after some song where everyone has gotten real sad together. That would be unkind. But I don’t really have any position to complain about my job. Yeah, every job has its moments like, “Ah, you know, it’s Wednesday.” But I’m blessed. I love my work.

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Lyrical Genius John Darnielle Has a Scary New Novel

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Buying a Home Is Nearly Impossible for Teachers in These Cities

by Lenore55Fuug Posted on February 4, 2017

Mother Jones

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Lauren Paquette dreams of owning a home with a pool. But the 34-year-old fifth-grade science teacher knows it’s a pipe dream: She recently had to find a roommate to help with the monthly rent of $1,425 on her three-bedroom house in Houston. Although that’s relatively cheap compared with rents across the country, it’s tough on a teacher’s salary. Saving up for a down payment is out of the question, said Paquette, a single mother.

“It’s not like I went into this job thinking I’d make a bunch of money, but I expected to be able to make ends meet,” Paquette said. Finances have been easier since she left North Carolina for Texas (North Carolina ranks in the lower tenth of states for teacher pay), but Paquette’s struggles aren’t unique.

As housing prices have soared in all the usual major metropolitan areas—as well as in cites like Las Vegas, Sacramento, Atlanta, and Minneapolis—teachers’ wages haven’t kept pace. And with school districts already struggling to recruit and retain educators, this rising gap is just another barrier to keeping teachers in the profession.

Redfin, a real estate brokerage firm, compared listed home prices in more than 30 cities with average teachers’ salaries to gauge what percentage of available homes teachers could afford. (Administrators, principals, and special-education teachers were not included in the data, and New York City was not studied.) The number of homes within reach for a single teacher has declined in some places by more than 25 percent since 2012.

That’s no surprise in San Francisco, where just 14 out of the 2,244 listed houses were within reach on the average teacher salary of $71,000. But the dearth of affordable options has worsened in Las Vegas, Sacramento, Chicago, and Dallas, where in each city less than 25 percent of listed houses are affordable for teachers.

Of course, home ownership—traditionally an economic engine of the middle class—isn’t out of reach for just teachers. High housing prices are pushing middle-class workers out of many cities. Redfin chief economist Nela Richardson said the notion that civil servants live in the communities they serve is becoming a thing of the past: “These are middle-class salaries, but middle-class people can’t afford to buy homes.”

Rental prices mirror the housing market, so teachers who rent are also getting pushed out of the cities in which they teach. Meanwhile, attempts to fix the crisis in Los Angeles have backfired, and other novel solutions—like Sen. Corey Booker’s eight-building Teacher Village in Newark, New Jersey, or plans for teacher-only residential units in the San Francisco Bay Area—either just opened or are still years away. Despite creative housing solutions for our cities’ educators, many critics of these plans argue that the real solution is simply paying teachers higher salaries.

David Fisher, the vice president of the Sacramento City Teachers Association, lived in a studio apartment with his wife and son for 15 years before he could afford a house in Sacramento. “These aren’t McMansions in the suburbs,” Fisher said. “These are modest houses is modest neighborhoods.” Besides, he said, most teachers are concerned with paying off student loan debt before even considering buying a home.

There are a few cities where it’s not so bad. In Philadelphia, where teachers’ salaries saw a 15 percent increase since 2012, more than 35 percent of houses for sale are affordable for teachers. Like most civil servants, teachers have more options anywhere the housing supply is larger.

Paquette, the science teacher, figures that she may be able to buy a house in 10 years—and says she’ll stay in Houston as long as she can afford it. Whether she’ll stay in education is another question. “I get that itch quite often,” she said, “to leave the classroom.”

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Buying a Home Is Nearly Impossible for Teachers in These Cities

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Retirement Advisors Now Free to Rip You Off Again

by LinaFrodsham Posted on February 3, 2017

Mother Jones

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Nine months ago President Obama signed an executive order that required retirement advisers to act in the best interest of their client. That seems like a good idea, doesn’t it? Maybe to you it does, but as it turns out, Republicans hate it. It’s just more nanny state-ism. They think everyone should have the freedom to pick financial advisors who get secret kickbacks for steering you into lousy investments.

Donald Trump doesn’t actually seem to care one way or another, but whatever. If Republicans want to repeal it, what the hell:

So that’s that. A few seconds after he signed the EO, a reporter tried to ask him a question about Iran. “They’re not behaving,” Trump said, and the pool was escorted out.

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Retirement Advisors Now Free to Rip You Off Again

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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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This Industry Just Found Out What It’s Like to Do Business in Trump’s America

by debbiemurch611 Posted on January 27, 2017

Mother Jones

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American farms overflow with certain foods: Our almond, corn, soybean, cotton, and wheat farms, and hog, chicken, and beef feedlots all churn out more than we can eat, wear, or burn in our cars as biofuel. That’s why industrial-scale US agriculture needs robust and growing export markets. During the campaign, Donald Trump courted support from these agribusiness interests, assembling a 60-plus-person advisory panel of farm-state politicians and industry flacks, and thundering from the stump against the “radical regulation” of farms.

But on the question of trade, Trump strayed far from his flock of agribiz supporters, lashing out against the very deals that Big Ag has been pushing for a generation and trash-talking China, a prized destination for our farm goods. In the first days of his presidency, Trump has already shown he meant business. He formally removed the United States from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a massive deal hotly supported by Big Ag that would link the United States with 11 nations on both sides of the Pacific Ocean. And he vowed to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with Mexico and Canada, two of the biggest foreign buyers of our farmed goods.

He has also initiated a fight with Mexico over his beloved border wall—one that threatened to bloom into a full trade war on Thursday afternoon when White House spokesman Sean Spicer dangled the idea of collecting funds to pay for the barrier by imposing a 20 percent tax on all imports. Spicer’s statements were widely misreported: He never mentioned a tax specifically targeting Mexico, and he quickly walked back the idea anyway.

But if we did get sucked into a US-Mexico trade war, the consequences would be massive on both sides of the border. The United States imports nearly a third of the fruit and vegetables we consume, and Mexico accounts for 44 percent of that foreign-grown cornucopia, much more than any other country. It’s by far our biggest supplier of avocados, sending us more than 90 percent of the Hass varietals we consume, and it also delivers loads of tomatoes and peppers—meaning that in the event of a trade war, your guacamole could become very dear, indeed.

For Mexico, the stakes are even higher. As Greg Grandin, a professor of history at New York University, recently noted, NAFTA “destroyed the Mexican farming industry, transforming what is left of it into the production of specialty crops to meet the all-season US demand for strawberries, broccoli, and tomatoes.” Mexico now relies heavily on imports of US wheat, corn, and soybeans. A major disruption in supply could trigger price spikes in these commodities, leading higher prices for staples like tortillas and meat in a country already being roiled by protests over rising gas prices.

Amid the tumult, US agricultural players are freaking out, and for good reason. The countries that Trump most directly targeted in his trade tirades during the campaign, Mexico and China, are two of the three biggest export markets for farmed products. The third biggest market is Canada—the country that joins the United States and Mexico in NAFTA. According to Joseph Glauber, who served as chief economist at the US Department of Agriculture under most of Obama’s presidency, US agriculture exports to China, Mexico, and Canada averaged $63 billion annually between 2013 and 2015—accounting for 44 percent of total US exports.

For soybeans and pork, two of the most valuable US products, the reliance is particularly stark. The United States is the world’s largest soybean producer, and our farms export nearly half of the crop. The biggest recipients are China and Mexico, which together account for nearly 70 percent of US soybean exports, buying a total of about $16.6 billion worth of the product. They also make up two of the top three destinations for US pork.

In an apparent attempt to ease agribiz concerns about China, Trump back in December appointed Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad, who has been promoting his states’ soybeans, corn, and pork to China for decades, as ambassador to that country. But Mexico and the TPP countries—which include Canada and major US pork and beef buyers Japan and South Korea—remain in his cross-hairs.

The American Farm Bureau Federation, which promotes the interests of corporate agribusiness, expressed dismay over Trump’s rejection of the TPP, mourning it as a “positive agreement that would add $4.4 billion annually to the struggling agriculture economy” and requesting that Trump commit to “ensuring we do not lose the ground gained—whether in the Asia-Pacific, North America, Europe or other parts of the world.” Around 130 companies and trade groups, representing virtually the entire US ag industry, signed a letter to Trump on January 23, informing the new president that “NAFTA has been a windfall for US farmers, ranchers, and food processors,” and that food and agriculture exports to Canada and Mexico have more than quadrupled since the deal’s signing in 1994.

Of course, these groups cannot claim to have been surprised by Trump’s trade moves—he made his stance on the issue crystal clear during his campaign. His rural proxies emphasized Trump’s anti-regulatory zeal and his vow to end the inheritance tax, a big deal to the American Farm Bureau but not so consequential to most farmers (the USDA estimates it affects less than 1 percent of farms). On trade, they delivered a trust-us message.

In July, when I spoke to Charles Herbster, the multi-level marketing and cattle magnate who chaired Trump’s Agricultural and Rural Advisory Committee, he gave me the campaign’s spiel. Before vowing Trump would end over-regulation and the reduce the inheritance tax, Herbster tried to square the circle on trade:

Herbster told me that he’s been getting calls from farmers “concerned about issues of trade.” Herbster said he reassures them that Trump “is not against trade in any way”—it’s “just that he wants trade to be fair,” and that means renegotiating trade deals. Herbster acknowledged that “trade for agriculture in the Midwest has probably been pretty good for the past few years,” but that it “hasn’t been good for small manufacturers in middle America and the coasts.” Trump, he suggested, would make trade great again for everyone.

Another prominent Trump rural proxy during the campaign, Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller, took a similar line, declaring in August that Trump’s trade stance could actually benefit US farmers because “above all, Trump wants to be known as the president that cuts the good deals…He’s a deal maker, that’s his whole mantra.”

In place of big, multi-national pacts like NAFTA and TPP, Trump has vowed to make multiple bi-lateral trade deals with individuals countries. “Believe me, we’re going to have a lot of trade deals,” Trump told a gathering of Republican legislators Thursday, Reuters reports. “If that particular country doesn’t treat us fairly, we send them a 30-day termination, notice of termination.”

Ben Lilliston of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy says Trump may simply not understand that negotiating trade deals is a long and difficult process. “They want the bi-lateral deals, because it allows them to bully other countries more easily,” he said. “But they seem to have a very limited understanding of the complications of negotiating deals—it’s an extremely time-consuming process.”

Of course, the big agribusiness interests don’t just prize trade deals because they expand markets for pork and (soy)beans. Deals like NAFTA and the TPP, Lilliston added, also “allow agribusinesses to set up wherever they want.” For example, US-based pork behemoth Smithfield—now, ironically, owned by a Chinese conglomerate—didn’t just use NAFTA as a lever to expand pork exports to Mexico; it dramatically expanded its hog-rearing operations in Mexico in the wake of the deal’s onset in 1994, sometimes over the protests of people who live near the hog operations.

US agriculture policy encourages farms to produce as much as possible, even in times of low prices. And since domestic demand rises only at the rate of population growth, these farmers rely on foreign markets to maintain profit growth, points out the former USDA economist Glauber. “Those facts explain why US agricultural interests have been such strong supporters of free trade agreements in the past,” he wrote.

Trump managed to win big in the corn and soybean counties of the Midwest, in areas largely reliant on exports. But if he repeals their beloved trade deals without replacing them, these well-heeled supporters might ultimately give up on Trump.

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This Industry Just Found Out What It’s Like to Do Business in Trump’s America

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Here Are Our Top 20 Imports From Mexico

by IleneHinds Posted on January 27, 2017

Mother Jones

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How much would a 20 percent tariff on Mexican imports cost us? I think it’s pointless to delve very deeply into this until President Trump and congressional Republicans produce a serious plan of some kind. Relying on random tweets and leaks from GOP gatherings will just drive us all crazy, as we try to analyze every dumb idea that gets run up the flagpole. Hell, even Paul Krugman says he’s a little confused about some of this stuff, and his Nobel Prize was for international trade.

However, there is one bit of raw data that you might as well get familiar with, since it’s not going to change. Here are our top 20 imports from Mexico:

I’ve highlighted a few of the categories that get the most attention: cars, televisions, crude oil, and produce. Generally speaking, if we tax these things at X percent, their price in the US is going to increase X percent. It won’t be quite that much, since trade will adjust based on the taxes, and in the long run the dollar will rise. Probably. And this all assumes there’s no retaliation from Mexico, which there probably would be.

Still, in the short and medium term, a 20 percent tax will increase the price of Mexican goods by 20 percent. That means a Ford Focus will cost 20 percent more, flat-screen televisions will cost 20 percent more, and avocados will cost 20 percent more. The problem, of course, is that Ford can’t increase the price of a Focus by 20 percent. Nobody would buy them. So they’ll just have to keep prices low and take it in the shorts.

Bottom line: in some cases, prices will go up, which will be bad for US consumers. In other cases, importers who are stuck with Mexican factories will have to accept lower profits, which is bad for US companies. In yet other cases, imports will just cease and plants will be shut down, which will be bad for Mexico.

So who will this be good for? That’s a very good question. In the case of cars and TVs, probably Japan and South Korea. In the case of produce, maybe Chile. In the case of crude oil, maybe Iran.

Of course, if we decide to put a tax on all imports from everywhere—not just Mexico—then consumer prices of just about everything will go up with no release valve. This would violate every trade treaty we’re part of, which means that the entire world would probably retaliate. In the end, prices would go up and American factories would either keep production unchanged or even cut back some. This would be pretty disastrous for the working class folks who voted for Trump.

But that’s what everyone is talking about.

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Here Are Our Top 20 Imports From Mexico

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There’s a Good Reason Democrats Aren’t Opposing Every Trump Nominee Unanimously

by KeiraHolton Posted on January 27, 2017

Mother Jones

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Why aren’t Democrats voting against President Trump’s cabinet nominees en masse? Is it because they’re just a bunch soft-headed Beltway lifers who don’t understand that the base is pissed and wants them to fight fight fight?

Nope. I’m sure they all get that. But there are two reasons not to do this. The first is simple: the tradition that presidents should be able to choose their own cabinet officers really is important. It’s important on its own merits, and it’s also important politically. We simply can’t get to the point where opposition parties routinely vote against every appointee for everything. That would be disastrous anytime different parties control the Senate and the White House.

But maybe this is still too wishy-washy for you. So here’s another reason: if Democrats vote against everyone sight unseen, then Republicans will vote for everyone sight unseen. However, if Democrats demonstrate that they’re considering each candidate on the merits, they have at least a fighting chance of defeating one or two of Trump’s nominees. Betsy DeVos, for example, has shown that she’s flatly ignorant of an astounding amount of basic education policy. It might be possible to persuade two or three Republicans to oppose her on these grounds—but only if the entire confirmation process isn’t a pure partisan battle.

So that’s that. There’s a principled reason for not opposing everyone unanimously, but there’s also a pragmatic reason. It won’t make a huge difference, but it might keep one or two of Trump’s worst qualified nominees out of the cabinet.

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There’s a Good Reason Democrats Aren’t Opposing Every Trump Nominee Unanimously

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Here Are the Top Five Takeaways From Yesterday’s Trump Interview

by MurrayStJulian3 Posted on January 26, 2017

Mother Jones

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ABC’s David Muir has gotten some flak for his performance interviewing President Trump yesterday, but I’m not sure it’s deserved. Maybe he could have done better, but if the guy won’t answer a question, he won’t answer a question. Most of the time, Trump barely let Muir get in a word edgewise. Every time half a question came out, Trump would barrel over it and deliver a rambling, unrelated screed. If Muir had asked him what 2+2 equaled, Trump would have blathered for five minutes about our terrible schools and the Chinese are killing us and nobody knows numbers anymore and we have to get rid of Common Core and blah blah blah. Muir tried four or five times to get a straight answer about Trump’s idiotic claim that 3-5 million noncitizens voted, and Trump just flatly wouldn’t engage.

Still, there were a few interesting tidbits. I count four altogether. First, what’s this business of sending in the feds to deal with Chicago’s crime problem?

DAVID MUIR: You will send in the feds? What do you mean by that?

PRESIDENT TRUMP: It’s carnage….It’s horrible carnage….Now if they want help, I would love to help them. I will send in what we have to send in. Maybe they’re not gonna have to be so politically correct. Maybe they’re being overly political correct. Maybe there’s something going on.

Chart above adapted from CNN chart. Next up: Does Trump endorse torture?

DAVID MUIR: The last president, President Obama, said the U.S. does not torture. Will you say that?

PRESIDENT TRUMP: I will say this, I will rely on Pompeo and Mattis and my group. And if they don’t wanna do, that’s fine. If they do wanna do, then I will work for that end….And I’m gonna rely on those two people and others. And if they don’t wanna do it, it’s 100 percent okay with me. Do I think it works? Absolutely.

How about the oil in Iraq? Are we going to go back in and take it?

DAVID MUIR: You brought up Iraq and something you said that could affect American troops in recent days. You said, “We should’ve kept the oil but okay maybe we’ll have another chance.” What did you mean by that?

PRESIDENT TRUMP: Well, we should’ve kept the oil when we got out….

DAVID MUIR: You’ve heard the critics who say that would break all international law, taking the oil.

PRESIDENT TRUMP: Wait, wait, can you believe that? Who are the critics who say that? Fools. I don’t call them critics. I call them fools….

DAVID MUIR: What got my attention, Mr. President, was when you said, “Maybe we’ll have another chance.”

PRESIDENT TRUMP: Well, don’t let it get your attention too much because we’ll see what happens. I mean, we’re gonna see what happens.

Finally, will Trump guarantee that folks currently covered by Obamacare will remain covered under his new plan?

DAVID MUIR: You’ve seen the estimate that 18 million Americans could lose their health insurance if Obamacare is repealed and there is no replacement. Can you assure those Americans watching this right now that they will not lose their health insurance or end up with anything less?

PRESIDENT TRUMP: …. Here’s what I can assure you, we are going to have a better plan, much better health care, much better service treatment, a plan where you can have access to the doctor that you want and the plan that you want. We’re gonna have a much better health care plan at much less money.

And remember Obamacare is ready to explode. And you interviewed me a couple of years ago. I said ’17 — right now, this year, “’17 is going to be a disaster.” I’m very good at this stuff….And why not? Obama’s a smart guy. So let it all come due because that’s what’s happening…..

DAVID MUIR: So, no one who has this health insurance through Obamacare will lose it or end up with anything less?

PRESIDENT TRUMP: You know, when you say no one I think no one. Ideally, in the real world, you’re talking about millions of people. Will no one. And then, you know, knowing ABC, you’ll have this one person on television saying how they were hurt. Okay. We want no one. We want the answer to be no one.

So there you have it:

Two weeks ago, the Justice Department released a “blistering” report about the Chicago Police Department that said “excessive force was rampant, rarely challenged and chiefly aimed at African-Americans and Latinos.” But Trump thinks maybe they’re being too soft and they need someone to come in and toughen them up.
Torture is a war crime, but Trump is explicitly fine with it if any of his guys recommend it.
He still wants to take Iraq’s oil, and refuses to rule out the possibility of going back in and doing it. Trump seems to still not realize that the oil is all in the ground and he can’t just “take it,” nor that taking it would also be a war crime.
He thinks President Obama deliberately designed Obamacare to implode in 2017 when he would no longer be in office.
His health care plan will cover everyone who currently has coverage under Obamacare. No one will end up with something worse. “We want the answer to be no one.”

I would have posted this last night, but I just couldn’t stand any more Trump. It took me all morning to work up the willingness to tackle it.

And we’re only partly through the first week. There are 208 to go.

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Here Are the Top Five Takeaways From Yesterday’s Trump Interview

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The Long History of "Nazi Punching"

by MaureenPaten444 Posted on January 26, 2017

Mother Jones

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By now many have seen the video of an unidentified man punching white nationalist Richard Spencer in the face during inauguration weekend. Much in the way that the new president’s vicious campaign rhetoric gave voice to the deeper resentments of some of his supporters, the assault on Spencer seems to have offered a cathartic and even comedic outlet for those on the left who were angered by thoughts of Trumpians goose-stepping through the streets of DC as Trump entered the White House. Since the video emerged, social media users have set the footage to Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA” and the Hamilton soundtrack, and comedian Tim Heidecker even wrote his own tune to celebrate the bashing. Former Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau tweeted, “I don’t care how many songs you set Richard Spencer being punched to, I’ll laugh at every one.” Journalists for the New York Times and other major outlets were soon mulling over the question at hand: “Is it OK to punch a Nazi?” A website, isitokaytopunchanazi.com, answered with a gleeful loop of the attack, with one neon-yellow word superimposed atop it: “Yes.”

Yet, this was more than just a morbid social-media sideshow: The attack on Spencer is part of a perennial conflict that may again be escalating. For decades, far-right extremists have faced the militant wrath of “antifas” (short for anti-fascists). With Trump’s campaign having summoned all sorts of white supremacists and other trolls from under their bridges, the old war—which I first got a front-row glimpse into a decade ago—appears ready to re-ignite.

This beef goes back to before World War II, when in Europe, a nascent authoritarian movement inspired by Hitler, Mussolini, and Francisco Franco squared off against a popular front coalition of liberals and radicals. At the Battle of Cable Street, in October 1936, Oswald Mosley brought 2,000 members of his British Union of Fascists to march through London’s Jewish East End neighborhood and 100,000 anti-fascists showed up to oppose them. In the resulting melee, Jews, Irishmen, Communists, anarchists, and socialists beat Mosley’s men with sticks, rocks, and sawed-off chair-legs. Local women dumped their chamber pots out of windows onto the heads of Mosley’s men.

Similar conflicts played out several decades later in America. In 1979, in Greensboro, North Carolina, the American Communist Party organized a rally called “Kill the Klan Day.” TV crews filmed as a nine-car caravan of Klansmen and neo-Nazis suddenly showed up and shot at marchers, murdering five participants, though no one was ever convicted of the crime. (In 2014, one self-proclaimed participant, Frazier Glenn Miller, went on a shooting spree at a Jewish cultural center in Kansas, murdering three people. The 74-year-old had just been diagnosed with lung cancer; he said that he “wanted to make damned sure I killed some Jews or attacked the Jews before I died.”)

In 1982, a street gang in Minneapolis named the Baldies began committing what they described as “righteous violence”—a term apocryphally attributed to Henry David Thoreau to describe John Brown’s attack at Harpers Ferry—against neo-Nazis who had started to appear in the city. The Baldies and their opponents both adopted the fashion of British punks—bomber jackets, bald heads, boots and braces—and kicked the Nazis, quite literally, out of town. On one occasion they even collaborated with now Congressman Keith Ellison, then a law student at the University of Minnesota, to lead a protest. “I remember he and the rest of the Black Law Student Association were friendly with us,” a founder of the Baldies told the Minneapolis City Pages. “I think they were just intrigued because we were so young and because we were anti-racist skinheads, which was weird to them.”

The battles in the Twin Cities were followed by a wider spread of neo-Nazi violence. In 1988, three members of a gang called White Aryan Resistance beat a 28-year-old Ethiopian student named Mulugata Serew to death in Portland, Oregon. In 1998, skinheads murdered Daniel Shearsty and Spit Newburn, a pair of anti-racists and best friends from Las Vegas—one black, one a white Marine—in the Nevada desert. The next year, a member of the racist cult World Church of the Creator went on a shooting spree in Indiana, gunning down nine Orthodox Jews, an African-American man, and a Korean graduate student before killing himself.

Anti-fascist groups like Anti-Racist Action, Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice, and the Love and Rage Anarchist Federation fought back. Their members advocated “direct action” against white supremacists, eschewing legislative efforts in favor of physically preventing Nazis from organizing, distributing literature, and speaking in public. To their supporters, these groups merged the moralism of America’s abolitionist tradition with the nihilism of punk rock, and boiled the culture wars down to their most primal element: vicious brawls over racism, sexism, and homophobia. The logic of their direct action was that, if a white-supremacist leader inspired someone to commit a hate crime, police couldn’t intervene until after a violent action had taken place. Anti-fascists wouldn’t wait. “Racism is an idea,” one anonymous ARA member said in the 2000 documentary Invisible Revolution, but “fascism is an idea mixed with action. It took fascism to establish Jim Crow and before that, slavery….Anti-Semitism has been around a long time but it took fascism to make the Holocaust….When you cross that threshold, you negate your rights to a calm, collective conversation.”

My own introduction to what anti-fascism looked like took place in South Philadelphia in 2004, where I attended a house party arranged around a half-keg of High Life in the kitchen. At the center of the gathered crew of mohawked kids was a man named Joe, whose skinny crimson suspenders strained over a swell of jiggling belly. A leader of ARA’s Philadelphia chapter, Joe regaled us with a story about a stranger in a pub who’d once called him a faggot. “So I grabbed this motherfucker by the collar,” he said, “and I dragged him outside.” In the parking lot, Joe explained, he beat the man unconscious. The tale was horrific. But it was also surprising—because Joe was gay, it turned out, as were many of his Philly ARA comrades. He wasn’t insulted by being called a faggot; he was insulted that someone would think there was anything wrong with being one.

“How does it feel!” Joe thundered, when he’d gotten to the climax of his yarn, in which he knocked his antagonist down and kicked him in the head repeatedly. Everyone laughed as Joe pantomimed his victory over the man by stomping the floor of the kitchen with his steel-toe combat boots: “How does it feel to get your head kicked in by a faggot?”

With the dawn of the Trump era, the Joes of the country may be stirring, and Spencer and his fans seem to sense it. On Tuesday, Spencer’s supporters offered a $3,000 bounty to anyone who could identify the alt-right leader’s assailant, and Spencer called for the formation of alt-right vigilante squads to prevent future attacks. “The ANTIFA thug who violently assaulted Spencer hid his face behind a mask,” an anonymous commenter said, “but some think they caught a glimpse of his face. There’s not much to go on—but let’s identify the ANTIFA criminal who punched Richard Spencer.”

Meanwhile, the same day that Spencer was assaulted, a 25-year-old anti-fascist was shot in the stomach during an inauguration protest at the University of Washington, allegedly by an alt-right sympathizer. New groups adopting an anti-fascist outlook such as Redneck Revolt, John Brown Militia, and the Bastards Motorcycle Club appear poised to revive the direct-action tactics of the 1980s and ’90s in order to confront white supremacists emboldened by Trump. Anti-Racist Action’s 20 or so chapters around the country have also promised to join the fray. The day after the inauguration, ARA’s branch in Louisville, Kentucky, posted on their website:

For decades, white supremacists were the face of the enemy and only a minute few dared show their true colors in public. This made them easy to dismiss, easy to ignore…However, recent events have proven that the fascist ideology has not only survived but thrived…Now, their labors of hatred have been rewarded with a sympathetic President-Elect and a federal Congress that is, at best, indifferent to their evil.

A warning to those who wish to destroy what we hold dear; We will resist you in the streets, in the poll booths and in the townhouses. Whether it’s in the bars, the concert halls, the conference centers or even City Hall, we will not allow a platform for your dangerous and divisive ideas. We will not allow history to repeat itself. We will shut you down everywhere you go. We will block your marches. We will interrupt your speeches. We will protest your legislation. We will be the thorn in your side. The glass in your bread. The pain in your ass.

Trump’s presidency is already promising to turn back the clock on American progress in multiple ways, with women’s rights, racial justice, and environmental protections under siege. The return of the war between fascists and anti-fascists is another expression of our current political atavism. This time, given a uniquely pugilistic president of the United States, the battle may rage hotter than ever.

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The Long History of "Nazi Punching"

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