Category Archives: The Atlantic

How America Treats Working Moms Like Shit

by AmandaFabinyi1 Posted on May 12, 2017

Mother Jones

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Mothers have always worked in this country, whether out of desire or necessity. But America’s relationship with these employed moms has been fraught from the start. In 1873, a Harvard medical professor claimed that higher education would make young women infertile. During the 1950s, writers, psychiatrists, and psychologists argued that career women had “penis envy,” while John Bowlby’s “attachment theory” was widely misconstrued to mean that moms spending time apart from their kids would cause permanent psychological damage.

Where the emotional appeals haven’t worked, opponents have outright or effectively blocked moms from clocking in by cutting day care programs, firing them for breastfeeding, and refusing them family leave. To this day, the United States remains the only industrialized nation that doesn’t mandate maternity leave.

As many have pointed out, all moms are working moms, regardless of whether they are paid for their work. But as sociologist Arlie Hochschild put it in her book The Second Shift, mothers juggling housework with a day job enjoy a “double burden.” In time for Mother’s Day, here’s a short history of some of America’s most underappreciated employees.

1800s
Women are legally barred from jobs such as lawyering and working underground based on the notion of “separate spheres“—a women’s should be at home with her children.
1850
The popular magazine Godey’s Lady Book touts piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity as the traits of “true womanhood,” and notes that women “step out of their own path when they attempt to encroach on the proper masculine pursuits.”
1851
Abolitionist Sojourner Truth points out that Godey’s definition excludes black women, who are often obliged to work outside the home to feed their children. “Ain’t I a woman?” she asks.
1869
A shorthanded Treasury Department hires married women including moms to fill positions vacated by Union soldiers. At war’s end, some widows are allowed to keep their jobs—at half the pay men get.
1873
Harvard Medical School professor Edward Clarke argues that higher education makes women infertile.
Turn of the 20th Century postcard

1888
Josephine Jewell Dodge establishes an early nursery school in a New York City slum that is later featured at Chicago’s World Fair. She goes on to start the country’s first national day care organization. Her critics propose an alternative strategy—”mothers’ pensions“—to keep women at home.
1930s
The Depression forces white middle-class moms to look for jobs—the number of married women in the workforce jumps 50 percent—while women of color solicit day labor in so-called slave markets. But “no one should get the idea that Uncle Sam is going to rock the baby to sleep,” the White House declares.
1943
World War II shortages of male workers inspire the first federally funded day care program. But the armistice marks a return to traditional gender attitudes: The day care initiative lapses and career-driven women are described by popular writers as “lost,” “man-hating” or “suffering from penis envy.”

1950s
Employers phase out the “marriage bar“—the legal practice of firing (or not hiring) women who get married. It will be nearly three decades before federal law forbids the boss from firing women for being pregnant.
1951
Psychoanalyst John Bowlby’s “attachment theory” posits that separating a mother from her child causes long-term behavioral difficulties—short separations are fine, he says, but his theory is twisted to make the case that mothers shouldn’t work.
1952
Lucille Ball’s real-life pregnancy is written into an episode of the sitcom I Love Lucy, but the actors are not allowed to use the word “pregnant” on air—too vulgar, says CBS.

1963
Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique gives voice to “the problem that has no name”—the frustrations and disappointments of housewives. Friedan had conceived of her idea as a magazine piece, but no magazine would take it.
Betty Friedan AP Photo/Anthony Camerano

1969
Under disability laws, five states allow female workers paid maternity leave, while others specifically exclude pregnancy as a temporary disability. A federal family-leave law remains decades away.
1970
“I have no objection of a pediatric or psychiatric nature about women going to work,” writes child-development guru Dr. Benjamin Spock: “What I say is that the children are going to have to be reared, and you ought to have women growing up feeling this is important, womanly work.”
Dr. Spock Associated Press

1971
Congress votes to establish federally funded child care centers nationwide, but President Richard Nixon vetoes the bill, saying it works against “the family-centered approach.”
1972
The Equal Rights Amendment, which outlaws sex discrimination, is attacked by conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly on the grounds that a women’s place is in the home. (The bill flops.) Betty Freidan dubs Schlafly “Aunt Tom.”
1978
An ad for Enjoli perfume croons, “I can put the wash on the line. Feed the kids. Get dressed. Pass out the kisses and get to work by five of nine. ‘Cuz I’m a wooooman!” Congress passes the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, making it illegal to fire a woman for being pregnant—employers must offer her medical benefits equivalent to what other workers get.

1979
Working Mother magazine targets America’s 16 million working moms: “We would like to share in your problems, your concerns for your family—and in your pride.” (It’s still around.)
Working Mother magazine

1989
In The Second Shift, sociologist Arlie Hochschild describes the “double burden” of mothers juggling housework with a day job. Also Child magazine coins the phrase “mommy wars” to describe tensions between working and stay-at-home mothers.
1992
Vice President Dan Quayle attacks TV show Murphy Brown for “mocking the importance of fathers” after the eponymous character, a working journalist, decides to raise her baby alone.

1992
Asked by reporters about allegations that her husband directed business to her law firm while governor of Arkansas, Hillary Clinton responds, “I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas, but what I decided to do was to fulfill my profession.” Homemakers are furious.
John Sykes/Liason

1993
The Family Medical Leave Act guarantees maternity leave—but it’s unpaid, and more than half of working women are excluded thanks to exceptions for small businesses and part-timers
1994
Asked how he feels about then-wife Marla Maples (top) working, Donald Trump tells ABC, “I have days where I think it’s great. And then I have days where, if I come home—and I don’t want to sound too much like a chauvinist—but when I come home and dinner’s not ready, I go through the roof.”
1996
Amid backlash against mythical “welfare queens,” President Bill Clinton overhauls the system, forcing single mothers to get a job within two years or lose their federal benefits.
1997
Future Indiana Gov. Mike Pence argues in an op-ed that “day care kids get the short end of the emotional stick” and that children with two working parents suffer “stunted emotional growth.” Also the Breastfeeding Promotion Act, a bill to end discrimination against nursing moms and make companies give women a place they can pump breast milk, dies in committee.
1999

The proportion of moms staying at home rather than working hits a low point of 23 percent. (By 2012, it’s up to 29 percent.)

2003
The New York Times Magazine describes the “opt-out revolution”—highly educated women scaling back their careers to stay home with their kids.
2008
The VP nomination of Sarah Palin, a mother of five, renews debate over work-life balance. “You can juggle a BlackBerry and a breast pump in a lot of jobs, but not in the vice presidency,” one Obama supporter tells the New York Times.
2009
Modern Family premieres on ABC—none of its fictional moms have jobs. Also a Texas woman is fired for asking her boss to let her pump breast milk at work. A (male) federal judge rules the firing is permissible because “lactation is not pregnancy, childbirth, or a related medical condition” protected by law.

2010
The Affordable Care Act mandates work breaks and a private space for new moms to pump breast milk.
April 2012
Mitt Romney defends his homemaker wife: “I happen to believe that all moms are working moms.” Yet earlier, talking about the welfare-work requirements Massachusetts enacted while he was governor, Romney said that even moms with two-year-olds “need to go to work…I want the individuals to have the dignity of work.'”
July 2012
Anne Marie Slaughter argues in The Atlantic that women cannot, in fact, “have it all”—kids and a fulfilling career. The problem, she writes, isn’t an “ambition gap,” but rather that America’s workplace culture still doesn’t value families.
Sept. 2012
“At the end of the day,” Michelle Obama tells the Democratic National Convention crowd, “My most important title is still ‘mom-in-chief.'”

2013
In her best-selling book, Facebook bigwig Sheryl Sandberg exhorts women to “lean in” at work. Cultural critic bell hooks eviscerates the book as “faux feminism…brought to us by a corporate executive who does not recognize the needs of pregnant women until it’s happening to her.”
2014
Apple and Facebook offer to freeze employees’ eggs in what critics call a cynical bid to delay childbearing. Actress Gwyneth Paltrow, meanwhile, claims she has it harder than office moms who “can come home in the evening.” Retorts a New York Post columnist, “Thank God I don’t make millions filming one movie per year.”
2016
America remains the only industrialized nation that doesn’t mandate paid maternity leave—only 14 percent of working moms can get it through their employers. In a September interview, Ivanka Trump brags to Cosmopolitan about her dad’s maternity-leave plan, calling him “a great advocate for women in the workforce.” But it turns out many Trump Hotels, including Mar-a-Lago, don’t offer paid maternity leave.
Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump at the Republican National Convention Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images

2017
President Trump proposes a child care plan and asks Congress to “help ensure new parents have paid family leave.” But a Tax Policy Center analysis concludes that 70 percent of the plan’s benefits would go to families making $100,000 or more. “The devil,” the ACLU notes, “is in the details“—the plan applies only to married birth mothers, making it “as inadequate as it is discriminatory.”

Excerpt from – 

How America Treats Working Moms Like Shit

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This Is The Horrific Violence Trump Is Forcing Central American Refugees To Return To

by BYUSamira6 Posted on May 5, 2017

Mother Jones

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While President Donald Trump has squawked about “bad hombres” invading America, the reality is that many migrants seeking to settle in the United States are not importing violence but fleeing it. As detailed in a new report from Kids In Need of Defense (KIND), an nonprofit organization focused on protecting children who enter the US immigration system, many Central American migrants, especially children, who head north are trying to escape extreme sexual and gender-based violence.

Tens of thousands of unaccompanied child migrants reach the United States’ southern border every year. In 2014, their numbers peaked at more than 68,500. Last year, Customs and Border Patrol apprehended nearly 60,000 unaccompanied kids, the vast majority of them from Central America. The reasons these children are trying to enter the United States are grim. The Northern Triangle of Central America, which includes El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala, has some of the highest homicide rates in the world. In particular, girls, young women, and gay youth in the region face a barrage of sexual exploitation and violence, according to the KIND report.

In recent years, gangs have increased their control over the region, as well as their savagery. According to KIND, sexual violence is one of their main tactics to control territory and communities. Gang members may choose girls to serve as “girlfriends” against their will and with no way out. “These girls, many of them between the ages of 12 and 16, are forced into situations of sexual and domestic servitude by gang members. Girls are trapped into these relationships, and any attempt to leave is considered an offense against the gang and punished with violence or even death,” said Rachel Dotson, KIND’s gender and migration initiatives director, in a press conference on Thursday.

In other instances, according to KIND’s findings, gangs abduct girls to be raped and tortured. “Sometimes girls are held for days, or weeks. When the gang is finished with the girl, she may be killed, or she may be allowed to go, but under the threat that if she reports to the violence, she or members of her family will be killed,” says Dotson. The gangs also force teenaged girls into sex trafficking schemes.

It’s not just this kind of violence that drives people to flee, it’s also the Central American governments’ lack of response. Dotson says that “representatives of government agencies in all three countries acknowledge there is little their governments can do to protect them.” In some areas, as many as 95 percent of crimes go unpunished. Police and other authorities are often complicit in gang activities. Witness protection programs lack the capacity to protect victims. Some shelters for crime victims explicitly ban victims of gang-related violence because they can’t guarantee their safety, says Dotson. Kids in these circumstances have few choices. Fleeing for the United States is one of them.

But once these children arrive at the US border, another series of challenges begin. As Mother Jones reported earlier this week, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officials have allegedly been turning back asylum seekers at alarming rates—a trend that ballooned following Trump’s election:

According to multiple human rights lawyers and observers, CBP officials at border crossings have denied entry to refugees on a variety of pretexts. Some asylum seekers have been told they need paperwork from the Mexican immigration agency or that they’ll have to come back later because officials don’t have time to process them. Others have been told that the United States is no longer accepting people from their country or that it’s only admitting refugees from countries where Christians are being persecuted.

Lisa Frydman, the director of regional policy and initiatives at KIND, says she has been told that these “turnbacks” have affected some children as well as women fleeing sexual and gender-based violence. Even if the migrants are not turned away, she says, the process of entering the United States is harrowing. Because the federal government does not provide legal representation for asylum seekers, more than 50 percent of the unaccompanied minors who make it into the United States do not have attorneys—making it extremely difficult for them to explain that they are seeking asylum to escape the violence directed at them. “These are challenging cases, highly dependent on the evidence and the facts and being able to present a claim according to the legal standard, which really requires counsel,” says Frydman. To apply for asylum, migrants must show that they have a “credible fear” of persecution or violence if they return to their home countries.

All too often, the reasons people migrate to the United States are misunderstood. At an event at the Atlantic Council on Thursday, Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly implied that most migrants seeking asylum lie in order to be admitted to the United States. “The vast majority of people who come up here…the overwhelming number, say exactly the same words because they are schooled by the traffickers to say certain words, to give certain scenarios, which, generally speaking, will get you to remain in the United States, in the system, because of a credible fear claim,” he said. Olga Byrne, a senior associate at Human Rights First, responded in a statement, “There is no evidence supporting the claim that any significant proportion of asylum seekers presents false claims or otherwise attempts to defraud the system.”

“Very clearly,” argues Frydman, “violence is a huge driver of why these kids and other Central Americans are coming, and there continues to be a failure to understand that the Central American situation is a refugee situation.”

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This Is The Horrific Violence Trump Is Forcing Central American Refugees To Return To

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Voting for Obamacare Cost Him His Job. Now It Might Be His Ticket Back.

by BerndMcclain Posted on May 5, 2017

Mother Jones

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At the People’s Climate March in Washington, there were old ladies dressed as beekeepers, vegetarians in full-body carrot suits, and a clean-energy marching band in matching green hard hats, but Tom Perriello was the only person I saw wearing a tie. It was probably a bad idea. Saturday was one of those steamy afternoons in DC, more August than April, that leaves you with the sensation of being inside the mouth of a dog—a good day to make the case for catastrophic global warming, but a bad one to walk outside in a pressed blue shirt and dress shoes. The 42-year-old former congressman, who is seeking the Democratic nomination for governor of Virginia, was running a few minutes late after a morning event in the suburbs and was undeterred. Clutching a bottle of water and an apple his sister had handed him, he wanted to explain to me what people had gotten wrong when he ran for reelection to Congress in 2010.

Republicans looking to take him down spent a lot of time and money talking about climate change. Perriello, a first-term Democrat in a rural, red, New Jersey-sized patch of “Southside” Virginia, had cast a key vote for Waxman-Markey, the House’s cap-and-trade bill that would go on to die in the Senate. Ads by the National Republican Congressional Committee, which supported his challenger Robert Hurt to the tune of $1.1 million, dubbed it an “energy tax.” The US Chamber of Commerce piled on too. When Perriello eventually lost by 4 points, the NRCC claimed his climate advocacy, along with his vote for the Affordable Care Act, was a big reason why.

But unlike a lot of other Democrats who were swept out to sea in that 2010 wave, Perriello had run on, not from, his support for the Obama agenda. “I think we convert more people by being bolder on climate instead of soft on climate,” he said as we moved toward the sound of drumming and tambourines along the parade route. “People thought that was a bad vote for me, but we didn’t just vote for it; we went out and made the case to farmers and small-business owners—literally got down to the level of cow manure and capturing methane off of cow manure for farmers to be able to power their own farms.” He cited an election-eve poll that showed voters trusted him by 24 points on energy issues.

Democrats have been winning big races in the Old Dominion for more than a decade, and they currently hold every statewide elected position, from the two US Senate seats to the state attorney general, but it has never been easy. Gov. Terry McAuliffe, an ur-Clinton loyalist and former Democratic National Committee chair, will be term-limited this fall, and the Democratic nominee will likely face well-funded Republican Ed Gillespie, a Trump-backing former lobbyist and Republican National Committee chair, who narrowly lost a US Senate bid in 2014. The race, an expensive fight in the shadow of the Capitol, will be the most serious test yet of the Democratic Party’s resiliency in the age of Trump. But somewhat unexpectedly, the primary has also become an early referendum on where the Democratic Party is heading.

Perriello’s opponent, Lt. Governor Ralph Northam, was also elected to a red-leaning seat in 2007, held onto it, and moved up the ladder in 2013. Northam, a 57-year-old former Army doctor with a genteel Southern cadence, looked like the de facto nominee last year, but Perriello announced his candidacy in January—amid a period of postelection soul-searching—and has made a race of it. He has pulled together a coalition that includes Bernie Sanders supporters and Obama loyalists, who appreciated his tough votes. Polling has been limited and all over the place; the only sure thing is that with a little more than a month to go before the June election, a large chunk of Virginia’s Democrats are still undecided.

Comparisons to Sanders don’t quite hold water, but in a few key ways Perriello’s message tracks closely with that of the Vermont senator. Perriello is pushing for a $15 minimum wage (which Northam also supports) and free community college, and he’s campaigning hard in rural areas of the state, such as the southwestern coal country and farm belt of Southside Virginia (his old district) that have booted out Democrats in recent years and swung hard toward Trump. And like Sanders, he’s going all-in on fracking, promising to block two natural gas pipelines from being constructed, if elected, and rejecting donations from Dominion Power, which has proposed the pipeline.

Perriello believes that conservatives, and many Democrats, have long talked about environmental regulations in a way that elides the real impediments to economic growth in those areas. “People know I’m a climate hawk, but it’s also worth knowing the two biggest killers of coal jobs have been automation and natural gas,” he said. He described spending time in Virginia’s struggling coal country trying to engage voters by pointing to new economic drivers. He insists the state needs “to get beyond looking at just distributed energy—though that can be a part of it. We need to actually be looking at how to relocalize some percent of food production, both because it’s more sustainable but also creates greater economic resiliency in communities that feel a real loss of sovereignty.”

As an example of what he means by “relocalizing,” Perriello points to a favorite example of his: the beer industry. “A decade ago, two companies controlled 96 percent of the beer market,” he said. Now, because of the growth of microbreweries, that figure is down to 84 percent. “We’re still talking about an industry that’s overwhelmingly dominated by two companies, but just that 10 percent delta of relocalizing beer production has had massive implications for jobs and economic renewal on main streets like Winchester and rural counties like Nelson County,” he said, referring to Shenandoah Valley communities that have embraced the “brew ridge” economy.

“So,” he continued, “we’re not talking about that going back to being 80 or 90 percent of the economy—but even if it’s a 10 percent plus-up, there are huge implications for jobs and sustainability.”

Relocalizing? Distributed energy? Delta? Perriello can sound like either an economic populist who speaks like a think-tanker, or the other way around. His ability to move between those two identities has been a key factor in his rise. A Yale-educated native of Ivy, Virginia, just outside Charlottesville, Perriello worked as a war crimes prosecutor in West Africa after college before returning at the end of the Bush administration to run against six-term incumbent Virgil Goode, an archconservative Republican and an occasional embarrassment who had once raised a ruckus about the first Muslim member of Congress, Rep. Keith Ellison, being sworn in on a Koran. After his stint on the Hill was up, Perriello took a post as CEO of the Center for American Progress Action Fund, the DC-based progressive think thank, only to return to Africa a few years later for a series of State Department postings.

Outside the Canadian embassy, a leader of a local Indivisible chapter, in a pink “Resist” hat and clutching half a dozen signs that say “Protect the Sacred,” approaches Perriello to tell him he has her group’s full support. As he speaks with another voter, a sign from a passing marcher, with a long quote from Ansel Adams, blows away onto the ground and Perriello stops to pick it up. He asks his young staffers if he should do a Facebook Live from the march, and one of them whips out a smartphone and starts filming. A few minutes later, he recognizes a sixtysomething man in crocs and a bucket hat wearing a blue T-shirt that says “no pipeline,” and they talk shop for a few minutes about the fracking fight. The man’s friend tells Perriello that some of the land that will be seized for pipeline construction through eminent domain has been in the same family since Emancipation. Perriello nods, concerned.

Northam, who has already been elected statewide and enjoys the backing of the entire state Democratic establishment, has campaigned hard on gun control and reproductive rights, two issues where Perriello holds different positions now than when he entered Congress. Perriello received donations (and an A rating) from the National Rifle Association during his single term, and he supported the failed Stupak amendment to the Affordable Care Act, which would have prohibited the law from subsidizing insurance plans that cover abortion. He now condemns the NRA as an organization “for gunmakers and survivalists,” and has said he regretted the Stupak vote.

Democrats have sparred in recent weeks over the role of abortion within the party’s coalition, after Sanders endorsed Omaha mayoral candidate Heath Mello, a former backer of a bill requiring doctors performing abortions to first offer women ultrasounds. When I ask Perriello if it’s possible to be progressive and pro-life, he chooses his words very carefully. “We’re running a campaign here that is focused on advancing reproductive justice, where we’re not just looking at the right to choose, but the right to affordable and dignified access to that choice,” he says. “I believe that we can’t separate issues of economic fairness and justice from issues of reproductive access. So I believe that those are fights that can and should be integrated, and that’s certainly what we’re gonna do here in Virginia.” Abortion, in other words, is an economic populist issue.

On combating climate change and protecting the environment, though, there is only so much the next governor of Virginia can do with Trump in the White House. Perriello would be able to stop those pipelines, of course, and he can push to lower the amount of money utilities are able to spend on state elections. But he has no delusions about the impact of the federal government on climate, and no inhibitions about turning his race in Virginia into a national one. “One of the things we’re seeing this year is the potential for a wave election that could set the trend for a wave election next year,” he says.

He’s banking on it; immediately following the passage of the Obamacare repeal in the House of Representatives on Thursday, Perriello put out a new ad, pegged to the vote, in which he stands in front of an ambulance being crushed in a junkyard:

First he has to win his primary. That evening, a few hours after the march, Perriello and Northam met up for their first debate of the campaign, at an elementary school in Fairfax sandwiched between NRA headquarters and H Mart, the Asian grocery superstore. The event was co-sponsored by EMERGE USA, an organization that aims to boost the political clout of Muslim, South Asian, and Arab-Americans. Both candidates mostly kept their powder dry, save for a brief dust-up over gun control when Northam brought up the NRA backing. Trump was a recurring villain, but Gillespie was hardly mentioned; when voters are mad at Washington, you don’t mess with a good thing.

Outside, evenly matched groups of young volunteers formed a gauntlet along the approach to the venue and exchanged rudimentary chants— “I say Ralph, you say Northam!”; “Go Tom Go!” A few supporters of the Atlantic pipeline gripped posters calling Perriello a “job killer” for his environmentalist objections—just like the old times—but no one paid them much attention. A few feet away, behind the scrum of shouting youths, a supporter clutched a sign that said “Perriello ♥’s Obamacare.” In a time when everything seems upside-down, it was a simple image of how Tom Perriello landed on his feet.

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Voting for Obamacare Cost Him His Job. Now It Might Be His Ticket Back.

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Democrats are proposing a bill to keep farm laborers from being deported.

by BetsyFredrickson Posted on May 4, 2017

Politico reports that senators from California, Vermont, Colorado, and Hawaii came out with legislation to give undocumented agricultural laborers a “blue card” — a sort of talisman to ward off deportation.

To qualify, immigrants would need to have worked at least 100 days on farms in each of the previous two years. They would have the opportunity to convert their blue cards to some form of legal residency later on.

This would come as welcome relief to workers who produce labor-intensive products like milk, fruit, and vegetables. On the other hand, it’s an example of government trying to keep farm labor semi-legal and cheap. Because most farmworkers live in a legal gray zone, they have little bargaining power and few options, which keeps wages from rising.

It’s a tough deal: We’d be asking immigrants to keep our food prices down by taking hard, low-paying jobs, and in exchange they’d get an anti-deportation card.

On yet another hand — we need at least three hands to juggle this one! — that kind of tradeoff is inevitable. For now, Congress is unlikely pass any immigrant protections unless the farm lobby can pull in Republican votes.

Excerpt from – 

Democrats are proposing a bill to keep farm laborers from being deported.

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, Green Light, LAI, ONA, OXO, Ringer, The Atlantic, Ultima, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Democrats are proposing a bill to keep farm laborers from being deported.

The newly revived Keystone XL’s future is in the hands of a red state.

by ValerieRix Posted on May 4, 2017

Politico reports that senators from California, Vermont, Colorado, and Hawaii came out with legislation to give undocumented agricultural laborers a “blue card” — a sort of talisman to ward off deportation.

To qualify, immigrants would need to have worked at least 100 days on farms in each of the previous two years. They would have the opportunity to convert their blue cards to some form of legal residency later on.

This would come as welcome relief to workers who produce labor-intensive products like milk, fruit, and vegetables. On the other hand, it’s an example of government trying to keep farm labor semi-legal and cheap. Because most farmworkers live in a legal gray zone, they have little bargaining power and few options, which keeps wages from rising.

It’s a tough deal: We’d be asking immigrants to keep our food prices down by taking hard, low-paying jobs, and in exchange they’d get an anti-deportation card.

On yet another hand — we need at least three hands to juggle this one! — that kind of tradeoff is inevitable. For now, Congress is unlikely pass any immigrant protections unless the farm lobby can pull in Republican votes.

Source: 

The newly revived Keystone XL’s future is in the hands of a red state.

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Alaska Natives are fighting Trump’s call to “drill, baby, drill.”

by HelaineMcGowen4 Posted on May 3, 2017

In 2012, Katherine Miller was frustrated that Americans weren’t really talking about issues of sustainable food and nutrition. She realized that chefs were in a position to restart those discussions. Restaurants, after all, are home to intimate and weighty discussions, all of it centered around food.

Miller decided to use her experience coaching community advocates to show chefs how to start conversations and discuss important issues with patrons and politicians alike. She founded the Chef Action Network to connect chefs with politicians and local organizations and, along with food education and advocacy group James Beard Foundation, organized a series of policy boot camps for chefs to sharpen their conversation skills.

After training ’em up, Miller puts chefs — prominent local business owners in their own right — in touch with representatives who will listen to their voices on issues like antibiotic overuse and catch limits. She also helps chefs get involved at the local level. In January, JBF partnered with NRDC and Nashville Mayor Megan Barry on the Food Saver Challenge, an initiative that aims to help Music City reduce waste.

Miller is hopeful that chefs can dish out common ground. “In a time when Americans have stopped talking to each other, chefs and restaurateurs are setting the table for all of us to have difficult conversations.”

Meet all the fixers on this year’s Grist 50.

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Alaska Natives are fighting Trump’s call to “drill, baby, drill.”

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Trump’s status on the Paris Agreement? It’s complicated.

by e0knk4m Posted on May 3, 2017

In 2012, Katherine Miller was frustrated that Americans weren’t really talking about issues of sustainable food and nutrition. She realized that chefs were in a position to restart those discussions. Restaurants, after all, are home to intimate and weighty discussions, all of it centered around food.

Miller decided to use her experience coaching community advocates to show chefs how to start conversations and discuss important issues with patrons and politicians alike. She founded the Chef Action Network to connect chefs with politicians and local organizations and, along with food education and advocacy group James Beard Foundation, organized a series of policy boot camps for chefs to sharpen their conversation skills.

After training ’em up, Miller puts chefs — prominent local business owners in their own right — in touch with representatives who will listen to their voices on issues like antibiotic overuse and catch limits. She also helps chefs get involved at the local level. In January, JBF partnered with NRDC and Nashville Mayor Megan Barry on the Food Saver Challenge, an initiative that aims to help Music City reduce waste.

Miller is hopeful that chefs can dish out common ground. “In a time when Americans have stopped talking to each other, chefs and restaurateurs are setting the table for all of us to have difficult conversations.”

Meet all the fixers on this year’s Grist 50.

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Trump’s status on the Paris Agreement? It’s complicated.

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Justice Sotomayor Slams "Disturbing Trend" of Supreme Court Siding With the Police

by CTMDelluphj Posted on April 29, 2017

Mother Jones

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The Supreme Court has a “disturbing trend” of siding with officers over their alleged victims in cases involving the use of force by police. That’s according to a stinging dissent issued on Monday by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, after the full court voted to let stand the dismissal of a lawsuit against a Houston cop who shot a man in the back during a traffic stop. The court, Sotomayor wrote, has reliably reversed lower-court rulings that favored the plaintiff in such cases, “but we rarely intervene where courts wrongly afford officers the benefit” of the doubt. Justice Ruth Bader-Ginsburg joined Sotomayor’s dissent.

One night in October 2010, Ricardo Salazar-Limon and his friends were driving on a highway outside of Houston when Houston Police Officer Chris Thompson pulled him over. After running the driver’s license and registration and finding nothing amiss, Thomson asked Salazar-Limon to step out of his truck—apparently to conduct a Breathalyzer test. Thompson then tried to handcuff Salazar-Limon, but the driver resisted and began walking back to his truck with his back to Thompson. The officer then drew his gun and ordered him to stop. Salazar-Limon says Thompson shot him within seconds of that order. Thompson claims he fired only after Salazar-Limon reached for his waistband—as if for a weapon—and turned toward him. No weapon was found.

Salazar-Limon sustained crippling injuries. In 2011, he sued Thompson and the Houston police for violating his civil rights. But a federal judge dismissed the suit, ruling that Thompson had qualified immunity because he’d shot Salazar-Limon in the course of his lawful duties. Salazar-Limon never explicitly denied reaching for his waistband during his deposition, nor, the judge wrote, did he offer evidence that he hadn’t—so the only conclusion a reasonable jury could reach was that he had. Thompson thus could have felt threatened and shot him because of it. A federal appeals court affirmed the ruling.

Salazar-Limon appealed to the Supreme Court, which on Monday decided not to hear the case. That was the wrong move, argued Sotomayor. A dismissal should only be granted, she wrote, when the facts of an incident are not in dispute. Thompson claimed the shooting was provoked. Salazar-Limon said it was not. The lower-court judge gave unfair privilege to the officer’s account, Sotomayor said. It was a jury’s job—not a district court judge’s—to determine whose story was more plausible. A juror, she wrote, could easily ask why Salazar-Limon would have reached for his waistband if he didn’t have a weapon. (In a footnote, she cited “the increasing frequency of incidents in which unarmed men allegedly reach for empty waistbands when facing law enforcement officers.”)

Writing for the majority, Justice Samuel Alito said the court rarely reviews cases “where the thrust of the claim is that a lower court simply erred in applying a settled rule of law to the facts of a particular case”—as opposed to cases in which the court is asked to interpret the law itself. But Sotomayor cited five recent cases in which the court intervened after a lower court ordered an offer to stand trial based on the facts of the case. Improperly dismissing lawsuits against officers who may have acted unlawfully “imposes no less harm” than trying officers who haven’t broken the law, she wrote.

The high court’s decision could encourage federal judges to dismiss civil lawsuits against police officers, says Joanna Schwartz, a professor at the University of California-Los Angeles who studies litigation against police. The ruling could also discourage attorneys from bringing such lawsuits, further limiting the options for redress against police abuses—as prosecutors rarely bring criminal cases and the Department of Justice under Attorney General Jeff Sessions may have little interest in doing so. “Lawyers are not making very much money off these cases. They bring these cases because they believe in them,” Schwartz told me. “As it becomes increasingly more difficult to win anything, it’s going to be even harder for lawyers to make the decision to represent these plaintiffs.”

Sotomayor’s dissent on Monday was her second recent one related to police tactics. Last summer, she cited author James Baldwin and The Atlantic writer Ta-Nehisi Coates while slamming a Supreme Court ruling involving what she deemed an illegal search and seizure: “The Court today holds that the discovery of a warrant for an unpaid parking ticket will forgive a police officer’s violation of your Fourth Amendment rights,” she wrote. “This case allows the police to stop you on the street, demand your identification, and check it for outstanding traffic warrants—even if you are doing nothing wrong.”

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Justice Sotomayor Slams "Disturbing Trend" of Supreme Court Siding With the Police

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You’ve Probably Forgotten Half the Terrible Things Donald Trump Has Already Done to Our Planet

by TravisMorgan58 Posted on April 28, 2017

Mother Jones

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It’s been an eventful 100 days.

Since taking office, Donald Trump has done his best to fulfill his campaign promise to roll back environmental regulations and liberate business from what he insists are job-killing, growth-impeding, unnecessary constraints. During a Republican primary debate in Michigan, he articulated his vision for the Environmental Protection Agency this way: “Department of Environmental Protection. We are going to get rid of it in almost every form. We’re going to have little tidbits left, but we’re going to take a tremendous amount out.”

So now at the 100-day mark, if not mission accomplished, he has certainly gone a long way towards fulfilling that dream.

Since 2009, Climate Desk, a collaboration among 14 news organizations—Mother Jones, CityLab, Wired, Slate, Reveal, The Atlantic, the Guardian, Grist, HuffPost, Fusion, Medium, the New Republic, Newsweek and High Country News—has tried to fill a void in climate coverage and explore climate change in all its complexity. And while the previous seven years have certainly had their fill of complexity, the Trump administration, with its the potential to unravel hard-won climate agreements and undo a generation or environmental protections, poses even greater challenges for journalism. Or, to borrow a line from Trump, this is more work than our previous life.

To mark the first 100 days of the Trump era, Climate Desk partners have put together a series of stories examining what’s changed so far. In New Republic, Emily Atkin writes that Trump has already “done lasting damage to the planet” by issuing executive orders, initiating regulatory rollbacks, and approving oil pipelines. This article by Jonathan Thompson of High Country News looks at Secretary of Energy Rick Perry’s efforts to protect the coal industry as it faces increased competition from natural gas, wind, and solar power. In a memo earlier this month, Perry warned that “regulatory burdens” were endangering the nation’s electricity supply. “Judging by Perry’s memo, and by much of the Trump administration’s rhetoric and actions during the first 100 days, they yearn for a time when such memos were pounded out on manual typewriters,” writes Thompson.

Karen Hao in Mother Jones gives us a historical perspective on the EPA, returning to a very different 100-day mark: the first 100 days of the agency’s existence. In a look at what the Trump administration has done to the Office of Environmental Justice, created during the George H.W. Bush administration, Nathalie Baptiste explores what has happened to a program which defined its mission as reducing the disproportionate impacts environmental problems have on minority, low-income, and indigenous people. And Rebecca Leber examines how Trump’s assault on environmental regulations could be considered one of the greatest successes of his administration—at least according to his standards.

But before exploring some of these stories, take a look at a brief but revealing timeline of some of the highlights of the assault on the environment during the first 100 days of the Trump administration:

Jan. 20: Within moments of Trump’s inauguration, nearly all references to climate change disappear from the White House official website. While there’s nothing unusual about a new administration changing the website, the new language is telling. “President Trump is committed to eliminating harmful and unnecessary policies such as the Climate Action Plan and the Waters of the US rule,” reads the new site’s only reference to climate change. “Lifting these restrictions will greatly help American workers, increasing wages by more than $30 billion over the next 7 years.”

Jan. 23: The EPA receives a gag order on external communication, including press releases, blog posts, social media and content on the agency website. A former Obama administration EPA official describes the action as “extreme and very troubling.”

Jan. 24: Within days of becoming president, Trump signs an Executive Order that reversing environmentalists’ hard-won efforts to block the Keystone and Dakota Access pipelines. On the same day, Trump meets with three Detroit auto industry executives and promises big regulatory rollbacks.

Jan. 25: The Trump administration reportedly mandates that all EPA studies and data be reviewed by political staffers before being released to the public. These restrictions far exceed the practices of past administrations, according to former EPA staffers.

Feb. 7: The House Science Committee, led by climate denier Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), holds a hearing titled “Making EPA Great Again.” Smith attacks the agency, accusing it of pursuing a political agenda and using questionable science to burden Americans with regulation.

Feb. 17: Scott Pruitt, Trump’s controversial EPA pick, is confirmed by the Senate. In his former career as attorney general of Oklahoma, Pruitt sued the EPA 14 times.

Feb. 28: Trump signs another executive order to dismantle the Waters of the US rule, a controversial Obama-era policy intended to protect waterways and wetlands from pollution.

Mar. 9: In a television appearance, Pruitt dismisses the basic scientific understanding that carbon dioxide emissions are the primary cause of climate change. He then questions the EPA’s authority to regulate carbon emissions. His comments are condemned by scientists, environmental activists, and Obama EPA administrator Gina McCarthy. That same day, the head of EPA’s Office on Environmental Justice, Mustafa Ali, resigns from his post after a 24-year career, saying he had “not heard of anything that was being proposed that was beneficial to the communities we serve.” He adds, “That is something that I could not be a part of.”

Mar. 16: Trump proposes slashing the EPA’s budget by 31 percent, as well as cutting spending on climate change programs across the State Department, NOAA, NASA, and the Interior Department. “We’re not spending money on that anymore,” says White House Budget Director Mick Mulvaney during a press briefing.

Mar. 27: In his most significant environmental order yet, Trump begins begins the process of gutting Obama’s landmark Clean Power Plan and other Obama-era climate policies.

Apr. 26: Trump signs another executive order, this time in an attempt revoke national monuments created by Obama and Clinton. It’s uncertain whether this is even legal.

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You’ve Probably Forgotten Half the Terrible Things Donald Trump Has Already Done to Our Planet

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Britain just went a whole day without burning any coal for electricity.

by ClaireRosensten Posted on April 24, 2017

Ten years ago, Mark Magaña was a D.C. lobbyist, when the Bipartisan Policy Center hired him to rally Latino support for an ill-fated bill to limit corporate carbon emissions. As Magaña soon found, there was no network to tap. Even within green groups in Washington, most Latino environmentalists didn’t know each other.

“The more I got into it, the more I saw the individuals in D.C. were very isolated,” Magaña says. “If I went to a green reception, maybe I’d be the only Latino in the room. Maybe there’d be one other, but I wouldn’t know them.”

In response, Magaña founded GreenLatinos, a national network of Latino environmental advocates that connects grassroots efforts with power and money in Washington. So far, the group has convinced the Environmental Protection Agency to close several contaminating landfills in Puerto Rico and brought attention to the Standing Rock pipeline protests in the Spanish-language media.

Diversity is the future of the environmental movement, Magaña says. “Now it’s investment time, investing in the communities,” he says. “They will be the environmentalists of the future.”

Meet all the fixers on this year’s Grist 50.

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Britain just went a whole day without burning any coal for electricity.

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