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I Met the White Nationalist Who "Falcon Punched" a 95-Pound Female Protester

by WHRJacquie Posted on May 9, 2017

Mother Jones

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Punching a 95-pound woman in the face might be the best thing that ever happened to Nathan Damigo. The 30-year-old Marine veteran and leader of the white nationalist group Identity Evropa was until recently an obscure ex-con and member of a marginal hate group, but in the past three weeks he’s suddenly became an icon to the alt-right for being the man behind the fist that clocked anti-fascist protester Emily Rose Marshall at a rally of far-right groups on April 15 in Berkeley, California. 4Chan users created memes celebrating him for his “falcon punch.” The neo-nazi site Daily Stormer hailed him as a “true hero.” Berkeley police, meanwhile, have declined to state whether they are pursuing charges against him.

Twelve days after that encounter, at another far-right gathering—billed as a “fuck antifa” rally—admirers approach Damigo, who is dressed in a white hoodie, to shake his hand and pat him on the back. “You’re sort of famous now,” says Faith Gold from the anti-semitic Canadian website Rebel Media.

A video of Nathan Damigo (top) and Emily Rose Marshall (below) during the street fighting in Berkeley on April 15 went viral. Stephen Lam/Reuters via ZUMA Press

“I’ve just been really humbled,” Damigo tells Gold. “A lot of people have shown support and come up to me today and said thank you for fighting for our ability to come here and speak.”

The rally, held in MLK Civic Center Park, includes speakers Brittany Pettibone, a writer for AltRight.com who promotes the conspiracy theory of “white genocide,” and Vice cofounder Gavin McInnes, head of the Proud Boys, a “Western Chauvinist” street brawling fraternity. Large white men in motorcycle helmets, carrying sticks and bats, guard the stage. There are a surprising number of people of color in red MAGA hats including “Latina for Trump” Irma Hinajosa. Anti-fascist counter-protesters like Marshall are, for the most part, nowhere to be seen.

When I approach Damigo and ask him about the response he’s received to the video of the assault, he says it’s been “great.” Recruitment for Identity Evropa has “gone through the roof” since Trump’s inauguration, he adds, growing from just 12 people last year to more than 450 members across dozens of campuses. Cal State Stanislaus, where Damigo is a social sciences major, launched an “immediate investigation” after the video was posted online. Damigo says he thinks the investigation is “funny.”

After the punching video went viral, the alt-right unleashed a doxing campaign against Marshall and her family, publishing their home addresses and phone numbers online. Marshall received rape threats and other abusive messages and images of pornography work she’d done were turned into memes and posted to her grandmother’s Facebook page. Damigo tells me these actions were justified. “I think we’re engaged in cultural warfare right now,” he says. Anti-fascists, he claims, doxed him and his family last year. “This is part of that culture war.”

Damigo’s assault and the adulation that followed may indeed be new battles in a long culture war, but his story also shows how a young man from California has slowly been radicalized—in the military, in prison, and on the internet—and in turn how he’s helping “racialize,” or make racially conscious, a new generation of young white conservatives.

Damigo tells me he has returned to Berkeley because he supports free speech, which he’d like to exercise in order to promote Identity Evropa’s message that white people should take pride in their race and resist being “ethnically cleansed.”

As we talk, he forces a smile, but his quivering lip betrays an underlying frustration. He repeats catchwords like “radical diversity,” “radical inclusion,” and “multiracialism” throughout our interview. He speaks like someone who has practiced his talking points—a skill he teaches other white nationalists—but he hasn’t quite learned how to integrate them into a back and forth with a reporter.

I ask Damigo whether the free speech he is advocating for in Berkeley applies to everyone and not just white people, especially given the fact that he promotes the creation of an ethnically pure, white “ethnostate.” He pauses. His lip quivers. “We have a right to exist,” he says. “We have a right to an identity.”

When I press him and ask what measures he would go to in order to create that ethnostate, he admits that violence might be needed. “Politics,” he says, “is essentially the use of force and power.”

Damigo is a product of the rapidly growing right-wing ideology known loosely as “identitarianism,” and his current 15-minutes of fame has, in turn, made him one of its newly anointed popularizers. Born in Lewiston, Maine, to parents he describes as “fundamentalist Baptists,” his family later moved to San Jose, California, where Damigo attended a “small, private Christian school.” White people make up about half of San Jose’s population but for Damigo, it felt like “everybody was kind of a minority,” as he once told Countercurrents TV, a white nationalist YouTube channel. Many of his friends were Filipino and Latino and he noticed that they “had a very tight-knit group thing going on. I would go and I would hang out and there was always something that was kinda off, that wasn’t really fitting.”

Damigo’s parents imparted on him their “hawkish, neocon views,” and in 2004, at age 18, Damigo joined the Marine Corps and completed two tours in Iraq’s Al-Anbar province. “For the first time in my life, I was around a lot of white people,” he said. “I noticed that they seemed to share a lot of my views.” His friends of color back home were never mean to him, but he felt an ease with his new white comrades that felt much more “natural.” With his friends of color “it seemed like on every single issue politically we disagreed. No matter how hard I tried to convince them of the logic of the views I was espousing, it just didn’t seem to sink in and I couldn’t understand why.”

Damigo lost several friends in combat and when he returned home, “There were a lot of demons I was facing,” he said. “I felt betrayed by the government.” He found it hard to reintegrate and began drinking heavily. About a month after returning from his second tour, he went on a binge and held up an Arab taxi driver at gun point, robbing him of $43. He was convicted of armed robbery and spent a year in county jail followed by four years in prison.

Damigo was featured in Wartorn 1861-2010, a 2010 HBO documentary about PTSD coproduced by Sopranos star James Gandolfini. The film follows Damigo as he awaits sentencing. When Damigo’s brother asks him if PTSD made him do it, he replies, “I know it was PTSD.” His mother says that at the time of the crime, “he was drunk, he was confused, he was probably suicidal. And when he came up on this guy, all of a sudden he went into combat mode. He was back in Iraq in a heartbeat.” After Damigo was sentenced to six years in prison, his mother told the film crew, “They took him when he was 18 and put him through a paper shredder and then sent him back to us. We get to try to put all the pieces back together. Sometimes it’s like Humpty Dumpty: they don’t go back together.”

Prison, Damigo told Countercurrents TV, ended up “perhaps being the best thing that ever happened to me.” While locked up, he became “racialized.” Because California was under a federal court order to depopulate its prisons, Damigo was sent to a private facility in Oklahoma run by the Corrections Corporation of America. In prison, he told me, “everybody kind of breaks down on race. It’s constantly present.” He took to a white man who seemed to have a deep interest in politics, and who recommended Damigo read My Awakening by former KKK leader David Duke. This in turn led him to more serious sociological works like Thomas Sowell’s Intellectuals and Society and esoteric white nationalist texts like Guillaume Faye’s Why We Fight: Manifesto of the European Resistance. “From there,” Damigo said, “I think the rest is history.”

Damigo’s activism started after he was released in 2014. He became enamored with the French nativist movement Bloc Identitaire, whose so-called identitarian ideology aims to extend the insights of identity politics to white people in order to preserve and promote “white” culture. Identitarianism was a far-right, anti-immigration movement, but it was influenced in part by socialist ideas. It opposed “imperialism, whether it be American or Islamic.” But most of all Damigo was impressed by the movement’s “professionalism” in advocating for the “interests” of white Europeans. “They have mastered this branding, this aesthetic. They’ve really done an amazing job with it.”

Around the same time, Damigo came across YouTube videos by a man named Angelo Gage, another white nationalist Iraq veteran who has struggled with severe PTSD. Damigo commented on Gage’s videos and the two struck up a friendship online. Damigo eventually assisted Gage in founding the National Youth Front (NYF), a youth-oriented offshoot of the white nationalist American Freedom Party. The NYF’s main tactic was to wage provocative, media-courting campaigns against college instructors. “A lot of what we were going after were…professors…teaching these cultural Marxist, anti-white theories like white privilege theory and critical race theory, who were publicly making anti-white statements on social media.” They posted flyers on campuses with professors’ pictures, branded with the term “anti-white.” At Arizona State University NYF members pressured administrators to discontinue a class called “U.S. Race Theory and the Problem of Whiteness.” Damigo seems to see no contradiction between his claim to defend free speech and his efforts to silence a professor. “I’m pretty big on freedom of speech obviously…but right now in the school system what they have is really just indoctrination…We had an issue with that.”

When another organization named Youthfront threatened to sue NYF for using its name, NYF fell apart. Damigo saw it as an opportunity. He had wanted NYF to be more overtly “pro-white.” At the same time, a broader, loosely knit movement was forming called the alt-right, which mostly existed on the internet. Damigo thought it was “the next natural step to take this decentralized internet-based movement into the real world. We’re trying to create a fraternity and brotherhood for people who have awakened and who see the world in a different light. We want to get the normies’ attention.”

Identity Evropa, formed in 2016, is an exclusive organization with a stringent interview process for membership. “We want people who represent us with their presence,” Damigo said. The organization tries to challenge stereotypes about white nationalism, which is part of its seduction. There are no skinheads or white hoods or swastikas. Its members wear suits and focus on debate and rhetorical strategy. Its main focus over the past year has been branding. Members hang posters and put stickers around campuses and busy downtown areas, trying to build name recognition and “bring attention to the concept of becoming racialized.”

The biggest obstacle to getting that attention, according to Damigo, is restrictions imposed by online platforms. Google began cracking down on alt-right YouTube accounts after companies threatened to pull advertisements. White nationalists, in turn, have migrated en masse to Twitter, where they are relatively unrestricted. Damigo says when he joined Twitter a couple years ago, there were “perhaps only 20 pro-white accounts and I just watched it blossom over the last couple years.”

“We are exponentially growing right now,” Damigo said. “Next semester, Identity Evropa is going to have much more of a face than we’ve had over the last semester. We’re going to be going to schools, setting up tables. Our members are going to be out there talking to students.”

At the rally in Berkeley, an argument has erupted. A black woman is yelling at a group of white men on the right-wing side. “You’re racist!” she shouts.

“She’s pulling the black card,” someone mutters.

“You’re racist!” she repeats.

“Fuck Donald Trump!” a Latino man standing next to her shouts.

Damigo is off standing at a distance by himself, aloof. One of the white men goes and finds a black woman with a Trump shirt and brings her back to argue.

I later ask Damigo what he thinks about the fact that there are people of color at the rally on his side. “I’m fine with it,” he says. “It’s not the same movement, but this is a big tent coalition.” He says he is okay making strategic alliances with everyone on the far right, even if they aren’t white, united by shared issues like pressuring Trump to build a border wall or end the amnesty program for illegal immigrants. But none of this, he makes clear, amounts to a belief in racial equality. “No one’s really equal to anyone else in a biological sense,” he says.

“We have a right to preserve our heritage,” he adds. “And part of that requires having a nation and having a country where we can preserve ourselves.” He recognizes that a whites-only ethnostate is a “utopian idea”—or a dystopian one, to everyone else—that will take many steps to achieve. For now, he’s content to focus on “racializing” white people and stopping immigration. “It’s not a human right to live in a white country,” he tells me, “or live next to white people.”

Two white women in Trump t-shirts stand by politely as we talk. When Damigo looks over, one mouths, “I support you.” She holds her phone forward, asking for a picture. Damigo excuses himself from me. The woman thanks him for punching Emily Rose Marshall. They take a selfie together. Damigo smiles wide.

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I Met the White Nationalist Who "Falcon Punched" a 95-Pound Female Protester

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Trump’s Lawyers Want the Courts to Ignore His Muslim Ban Comments

by WillaAbercrombi Posted on May 8, 2017

Mother Jones

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Donald Trump’s statements about banning Muslims during the presidential campaign are now at the heart of the court battle over his travel ban.

On Monday, the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals held oral arguments on the president’s executive order banning people from six Muslim-majority nations from entering the United States for 90 days. In reviewing the decision of a federal district judge in Maryland, who blocked the ban from going into effect, the judges of the 4th Circuit focused almost exclusively on the question of whether Trump’s campaign pledge to ban Muslims should be taken into consideration when weighing the constitutionality of the travel ban.

In December 2015, then-candidate Trump called for “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.” Trump repeated and stuck by his policy throughout the campaign. His original statement remained on his campaign’s website until sometime Monday, when it disappeared around the time a reporter asked about its continued presence online during the daily White House press briefing.

After his election, Trump swiftly signed an executive order banning individuals from seven Muslim-majority countries entering the country for 90 days. Federal courts blocked the order, and the administration withdrew it and released a second, modified travel ban. This second order applied to six countries—Iraq was taken off the list—and included exceptions for permanent legal residents and current visa-holders. Still, a federal judge in Maryland blocked part of it and another federal judge in Hawaii placed a nationwide injunction on the whole order.

In considering the Maryland judge’s decision, the 4th Circuit zeroed in on the issue of Trump’s statements about banning Muslims. During the first hour of the hearing, Trump’s acting solicitor general, Jeffrey Wall, repeatedly argued that the Maryland judge had relied too heavily on Trump’s campaign statements. He described the ban as merely a handful of statements by the candidate, rather than a central piece of Trump’s campaign, and said the Maryland judge had mistakenly conducted a “psychoanalysis” of the president based on these campaign comments.

Opponents of the ban argue that Trump’s campaign statements are key to understanding the true purpose of the order. Arguing against the travel ban, American Civil Liberties Union attorney Omar Jadwat struggled when the judges pressed him to explain his opposition to the travel ban based just on the text—without taking Trump’s campaign statements into consideration. Some of the judges repeatedly queried Jadwat on whether the ban would still be constitutional if Trump’s comments were not part of the calculation. Jadwat said it would be because it violates the First Amendment by targeting people of a specific religion. In order to fulfill its stated purpose on national security, he argued, it would have applied to a different set of countries than those targeted by the order. “If this order were legitimate and actually doing what it said it was doing, it would do something different,” he said.

But without Trump’s campaign statements targeting Muslims, at least some of the judges did not appear to buy his argument. That’s why he continued to emphasize the thinking behind the travel ban. “The question is, what is the purpose of this policy?” Jadwat asked. He noted that when Trump signed the order, he read aloud its title referring to “foreign terrorist entry” and then added, “We all know what that means.” Jadwat further pointed to the fact that 2015 press release still on Trump’s campaign website—not realizing it had been taken down just hours earlier.

Perhaps the most compelling argument against the ban on Monday came not from the ACLU’s lawyer but from Sally Yates, the former acting attorney general whom Trump fired in January when she refused to have Justice Department lawyers defend the first travel ban in court. Questioned about that decision during a hearing on Capitol Hill on Monday, Yates explained why she believed the ban was unconstitutional—and why the president’s campaign remarks were a key ingredient in that calculation.

“I believed that any argument that we would have to make in its defense would not be grounded in the truth,” she explained, “because to make an argument in its defense we would have to argue that the executive order had nothing to do with religion, that it was not done with an intent to discriminate against Muslims.” But Yates could not ignore the role of religion, she explained, because of what Trump had said about Muslims. “Particularly where we were talking about a fundamental issue of religious freedom—not the interpretation of some arcane statute, but religious freedom—it was appropriate for us to look at the intent behind the president’s actions,” she said. “And the intent is laid out in his statements.”

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Trump’s Lawyers Want the Courts to Ignore His Muslim Ban Comments

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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.

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

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Look at These Republicans Celebrating a Bill That Will Gut Health Care for Millions

by KerstinAbrahams Posted on May 4, 2017

Mother Jones

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President Donald Trump stood alongside House Republicans in the Rose Garden Thursday to applaud the narrow passage of legislation to repeal and replace Obamacare. The bill, also known as the American Health Care Act, aims to effectively gut health care coverage for millions, cut Medicaid funding by 25 percent, and allow states to deny coverage for a slew of pre-existing conditions.

“As much as we’ve come up with a really incredible health care plan, this has brought the Republican party together,” Trump said. “We’re going to get this finished.”

While there were a handful of female lawmakers present, many on social media pointed to the overwhelming presence of white men on hand to celebrate a bill that seeks to eliminate federal funding for Planned Parenthood and make pregnancy significantly more expensive:

The setting also appeared somewhat premature, considering the Rose Garden has been historically reserved to mark bill signings. (The American Health Care Act is still subject to a Senate vote.) Still, Trump and Republicans on hand struck a triumphant note.

“Thanks to the leadership of President Donald Trump, welcome to the beginning of the end of Obamacare,” Vice President Mike Pence said, prompting loud applause.

Earlier Thursday, cases of beer were reportedly spotted entering the Capitol, as it became clear Republicans had secured enough votes to ensure the bill’s passage. Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), fresh out of foot surgery, also returned to Congress to cast his vote. Many on social media derided his appearance:

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Look at These Republicans Celebrating a Bill That Will Gut Health Care for Millions

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Another Anti-Immigrant Hardliner Scores a Key Administration Appointment

by HermelindaWCAQ Posted on May 3, 2017

Mother Jones

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After several months of speculation, the Department of Homeland Security announced Tuesday that Julie Kirchner, the former executive director of the hardline anti-immigrant group Federation for American Immigration Reform, will take a top spot at US Citizenship and Immigration Services. Kirchner’s appointment as ombudsman at USCIS—which processes visa and naturalization petitions, as well as asylum and refugee applications—is yet another move signaling that the Trump administration won’t be relaxing its crackdown on immigrants anytime soon.

In August 2015, Kirchner left FAIR, which the Southern Poverty Law Center has classified as a “hate group,” to work as an immigration adviser on the Trump campaign. She later served “a temporary political appointment” at Customs and Border Protection shortly after the election. Since then, the White House has rolled out its “Muslim ban,” requested bids for the border wall with Mexico, and clamped down on immigration of all kinds.

According to the DHS press release, as ombudsman Kirchner will be responsible for “improving the quality of citizenship and immigration services” and “making recommendations to improve the administration of immigration benefits.” The release states that “the Ombudsman is an impartial and confidential resource that is independent of USCIS.” As I reported in February when rumors circulated that Kirchner would be appointed as chief of staff of Customs and Border Protection (CBP), she has a long history of promoting an anti-immigrant agenda:

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.)

Kirchner is one of several anti-immigrant hardliners to join the administration since the election. John Feere, formerly of the Center for Immigration Studies, now works for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Stephen Miller, who worked to defeat immigration reform as a Senate staffer to current Attorney General Jeff Sessions, is now a White House senior adviser. And former Breitbart reporter Julia Hahn—whom Weekly Standard editor-at-large William Kristol called “Bannon’s Bannon”—is now a special assistant to the president.

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Another Anti-Immigrant Hardliner Scores a Key Administration Appointment

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Puerto Rico Files for Bankruptcy the Day After Trump Admin Brags About Blocking Funds

by JettaBlummkqc Posted on May 3, 2017

Mother Jones

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After a day of sometimes violent demonstrations in San Juan protesting austerity measures and government handling of the debt crisis, Puerto Rico governor Ricardo Rosselló, announced Wednesday morning that he would move the island’s crushing debts into the bankruptcy-like process created under federal legislation to deal with the crisis. Unlike public entities and cities in the states, Puerto Rico, essentially a colony of the US, is prohibited from filing for bankruptcy under federal law. This legislation created a different option that allows a federal court to restructure more than $70 billion—the largest such restructuring in the history of the US municipal bond market.

The announcement comes after a flurry of lawsuits filed against the island’s government by creditors Tuesday morning, the first to land after local officials’ proposal for partial repayment of the debt was rejected by lenders last weekend. Under legislation passed last summer, known as the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act (PROMESA), the island had until May 1 to negotiate a plan to address the debts while also providing basic services for the island’s 3.5 million residents. The deal from the local government last Friday offered as much as 77 cents on the dollar to some lenders while offering 58 cents on the dollar to others, according to Bloomberg, but the lenders called the deal unworkable. Hedge funds such as Aurelius Capital Management and Monarch Alternative Captial, and Ambac Financial Group, Inc., an insurer that owned Puerto Rican bonds, had been prevented from filing suit until May 1 under PROMESA.

The suits came a day after thousands took the streets in a national strike throughout Puerto Rico protesting cuts proposed by the board that was created under PROMESA, which increased water rates, while cutting funds to schools, public-sector jobs and pensions, health care spending, and the island’s university system totaling roughly $450 million over three years. After a day of largely peaceful protests, police used tear gas and pepper spray to disperse some protesters, according to local reports, and at least 17 people were arrested. Students and other protesters have demanded an independent audit of the debt, among other things, as the island grapples with the issue.

“As time goes by and austerity measures start to strike on more and more people, people are going to stand up and respond to what is the government violence against the people who are left in very difficult conditions,” Mariana Nogales Molinelli, an attorney in Puerto Rico and former candidate for the island’s non-voting representative to the US Congress, tells Mother Jones.

Nogales Molinelli says that the cuts by both the government and the control board to public sector workers and collective bargaining rights have made a lot of people angry—and not just university students. On April 18, the Puerto Rican Senate approved a bill that eliminated the publicly-funded audit commission responsible for insuring the debts were issued lawfully and were not in violation of island’s constitution. Some of the protesters at the capital were retired police, according to Joel Cintrón Arbasetti, a journalist with the Center for Investigative Reporting in Puerto Rico. Nogales thinks more police will join the protests.

“My guess is that part of the police force will be joining the people because they are going to be affected also,” Nogales Molinelli says. “Their kids’ schools will be closed, and they will not have enough medical insurance. The situation could explode because of all the austerity measures and they are going to have to work under much more pressure and in conditions that are going to be very difficult for them.”

Nogales says there have also been reports of some violent responses by police towards protesters and those perceived to be organizing protests. During a protest at the capital, she saw a police officer take a protester’s sign and hit her over the head with it. The Puerto Rico Police Department is currently under a consent decree with the US Department of Justice in an effort to become more professional and accountable after years of documented corruption and violence against the population.

Back on the mainland, Puerto Rico has been a political football for Trump and Congress during negotiations for a federal spending bill, with the president implying that Puerto Ricans, who have been US citizens for 100 years, were not.

When the budget deal was announced Monday morning, Democrats managed to get “an emergency injection of $295 million” to help shore up the island’s Medicaid program through the end of the year, according to Reuters. On Tuesday, Office of Budget and Management Director Mick Mulvaney bragged during a White House Press briefing that Republicans and the president had actually prevented any money from going to Puerto Rico, and that the $295 million had come from funds not previously allocated.

“You had the Democrats crying out that they got $295 million for Puerto Rico,” Mulvaney told reporters, “Did not cost the taxpayer a penny. They wanted new money, they wanted a bailout. We wouldn’t give it to them.”

It’s unclear how the restructuring will proceed as the provision in PROMESA has never been used, but the New York Times reports that Chief Justice John Roberts of the US Supreme Court will now appoint a bankruptcy judge to handle the case.

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Puerto Rico Files for Bankruptcy the Day After Trump Admin Brags About Blocking Funds

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More Americans Are Spending Life in Prison Than Ever Before

by DarbyWillason Posted on May 3, 2017

Mother Jones

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One out of every nine prisoners in the United States is currently serving a life sentence—a record high—even as the overall prison population has fallen. That’s according to a depressing new report by the Sentencing Project, an advocacy group that’s been tracking life sentences since 2004. Almost 162,000 people are now serving life behind bars, up from 132,000 about a decade ago and 34,000 in 1984.

To put that in perspective, for every 100,000 people in America, 50 have been locked up for life. That’s roughly the total incarceration rate—including inmates whose sentences are just a few months—in Scandinavian countries like Denmark, Sweden, and Finland. And it doesn’t even account for the tens of thousands of Americans handed sentences of 50 years or more, which are considered “de facto life sentences,” says Ashley Nellis, a senior research analyst at the Sentencing Project who co-authored the report.

What’s driving the uptick? It’s not a rise in violent crime or murder—both have dropped substantially since the mid-1990s. Nor is it an increase in the number of criminals behind bars: A majority of states saw declining overall prison populations from 2010 to 2015.

The Sentencing Project

The Sentencing Project

In part, the continuing rise in lifers is a legacy of three-strikes laws and mandatory minimum sentencing. It may also be related to the shift away from capital punishment. In some states that no longer allow executions, elected officials like governors and prosecutors have championed life-without-parole sentences—which account for the biggest increase in life sentences nationally—as a way to appear tougher on crime. “Going forward, we will have a system that allows us to put these people away for life, in living conditions none of us would want to experience,” Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy, a Democrat, said in 2012 when his state abolished the death penalty. But these lengthy punishments probably aren’t keeping the public safer. “The impulse to engage in crime, including violent crime, is highly correlated with age,” the Sentencing Project notes. “Most criminal offending declines substantially beginning in the mid-20s and has tapered off substantially by one’s late 30s.”

The biggest losers of all this? Minorities. Of all the lifers and de facto lifers in the country, almost half are African American. What’s more, 12,000 of the total are locked up for crimes they committed as kids, though some are eligible for release thanks to recent court decisions. (In 2010, the Supreme Court ruled that life-without-parole sentences are unconstitutional for juveniles who didn’t commit homicide. In 2012, the justices went further, saying that mandatory life-without-parole sentences for kids, including those who committed homicide, are also unconstitutional. Nineteen states and DC now ban any kind of life-without-parole sentence for juveniles.)

Finally, it’s important to remember that many of the prisoners serving these long sentences never actually hurt anyone: Two-thirds of lifers or de facto lifers in the federal system committed nonviolent crimes—and one-third of them are serving time for drug crimes. With Attorney General Jeff Sessions at the helm of the Justice Department alongside his team of tough-on-crime advisers, there’s a good chance that won’t be changing anytime soon.

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More Americans Are Spending Life in Prison Than Ever Before

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Historian on Donald Trump’s Civil War Comments: "God Help Us"

by AugustiXxj Posted on May 1, 2017

Mother Jones

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President Donald Trump said in an interview on SiriusXM’s “Main Street Meets the Beltway” show Monday that if Andrew Jackson had been president in 1860, the Civil War would have been averted. “Had Andrew Jackson been a little later, you wouldn’t have had the Civil War,” he stated, and he asked, “Why could that one not have been worked out?”

I asked David Blight, a Yale University historian whose work has focused on slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction, what he thought of Trump’s remarks. Here’s his response:

“Worked out?” God!…

Well, I just read these postings? So he really said this about Jackson and the Civil War? All I can say to you is that from day one I have believed that Donald Trump’s greatest threat to our society and to our democracy is not necessarily his authoritarianism, but his essential ignorance—of history, of policy, of political process, of the Constitution. Saying that if Jackson had been around we might not have had the Civil War is like saying that one strong, aggressive leader can shape, prevent, move history however he wishes. This is simply 5th grade understanding of history or worse. And this comes from the President of the United States! Under normal circumstances if a real estate tycoon weighed in on the nature of American history from such ignorance and twisted understanding we would simply ignore or laugh at him. But since this man lives in the historic White House and wields the constitutional powers of the presidency and the commander in chief we have to pay attention. Trump’s “learning” of American history must have stopped even before the 5th grade. I wish I could say this is funny and not deeply disturbing. My profession should petition the President to take a one or two month leave of absence, VP Pence steps in for that interim, and Trump goes on a retreat in one of his resorts for forced re-education. It could be a new tradition called the presidential education leave. Or perhaps in New Deal tradition, an “ignorance relief” period. This alone might gain the United States again some confidence and respect around the world.

Hope this helps. God help us.

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Historian on Donald Trump’s Civil War Comments: "God Help Us"

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Trump Brought the War on Women Mainstream in His First 100 Days

by CameronByrne88 Posted on April 29, 2017

Mother Jones

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When a video of Donald Trump boasting about grabbing women “by the pussy” leaked a month before the 2016 presidential election and his party seemed on the cusp of rejecting him, onlookers wondered whether his apparent admission of sexual assault might have finally crossed a line with voters. But conservatives who were reassured by his promises to roll back reproductive rights turned a blind eye to the sexual-assault claims.

With those concerns about his electability far behind him, as president Trump has made good on his assurances. He may have discussed child care and other so-called family-friendly policies, but in the first 100 days of the Trump administration, the country has seen an unprecedented rollback of many hard-won reproductive rights. Trump has pushed to defund Planned Parenthood, appointed a Supreme Court justice who he promised would vote to overturn Roe v. Wade, and cut off US aide for family-planning services globally. States have also ridden the Trump wave: 1,053 measures—both restrictive and proactive—have been introduced in state legislatures in 2017 alone.

Women have not been passive in the face of these setbacks. They came out in droves to protest Trump’s inauguration during the Women’s March the day after his inauguration. Eleven-thousand women have told Emily’s List, an organization that gets pro-choice women elected to office, that they want to run for something next year, compared with 900 last year. And women already in positions of power have taken Trump to task on his Cabinet nominees, his travel ban, and his environmental policies.

But if his first 100 days as president are any indication, the three-plus years ahead will be grueling for women in the United States and abroad. Here’s what’s happened so far.

Planned Parenthood

In the weeks following Trump’s January 2017 inauguration, his daughter Ivanka took the unexpected step of reaching out to Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards to request a meeting. On the campaign trail, her father had promised to “defund” the women’s health care provider by prohibiting low-income patients from using their Medicaid coverage for care at Planned Parenthood clinics because the group also performs abortions.

Richards sought to explain to Ivanka Trump that Medicaid reimbursements to Planned Parenthood don’t fund abortions, but instead go to other forms of reproductive health care—cancer screenings, pap smears, contraception, and more—because of the Hyde Amendment, which has prohibited the use of federal funds for almost all abortions for more than 40 years.

But in the months following the meeting, the Trump administration and the GOP-controlled Congress launched an offensive against Planned Parenthood. Bills proposing to prohibit the use of Medicaid by patients at Planned Parenthood were introduced in both the House and the Senate and are still awaiting a vote. A week after Trump’s inauguration, audio was leaked of a closed-door meeting where Republicans voiced concerns about the political repercussions of defunding a women’s health organization that’s popular even among Trump voters. A month later, Trump tried to cut an informal deal with Planned Parenthood: keep your funding, maybe even increase it, if you stop providing abortions. The women’s health organization rejected the idea. Soon after, the Trump administration’s Obamacare repeal bill was introduced, including a provision to defund Planned Parenthood. That bill failed, but the revised version of the repeal bill, introduced by Republicans this week, contains the same provision and is still awaiting a vote.

Another administration effort to kneecap Planned Parenthood’s funding, however, was more successful. A bill allowing states to withhold Title X family-planning funds from health care providers that offer abortion, like Planned Parenthood, passed both chambers of Congress in February and March. Title X grants help fund nonabortion services such as contraception for low-income women, and more than one-third of the 4 million patients who use Title X each year receive care at Planned Parenthood.

Vice President Mike Pence was essential to that bill’s passage. After two GOP senators voted against the bill, Republicans were forced to whisk in the vice president to cast a tie-breaking Senate vote to advance the legislation. In April, Trump signed the bill into law in a private ceremony, an uncharacteristically publicity-shy moment for a president who has seemed to relish in the public spectacle of his other signings.

State restrictions

Trump’s election greatly emboldened anti-abortion state legislatures to propose measures that restrict women’s access to the medical procedure. His win came months after the Supreme Court ruled last June on the biggest abortion rights case since Planned Parenthood v. Casey. Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt reaffirmed a woman’s constitutional right to an abortion, a ruling that made restricting access through TRAP laws—or Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers—a violation of a woman’s constitutional right to an abortion.

It was hailed as a massive win for reproductive rights advocates, but Trump’s victory and Republican-dominated statehouses reinvigorated both abortion opponents and abortion rights advocates who collectively have proposed 1,053 state-level provisions regarding women’s reproductive health in 2017. Thus far, 18 abortion restrictions have been enacted at the state level, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive rights think tank. Twenty-two states have potential legislation on deck to ban abortion in most cases outright—four of these are bans known as “trigger laws,” meaning they would automatically become state law should Roe v. Wade be overturned in the Supreme Court. And despite the Supreme Court ruling just last year, 30 states have introduced TRAP legislation in the hopes that a new justice would tip the scales should another challenge to the constitutionality of those laws arise.

Also trending in anti-abortion state legislatures this year are fetal burial laws, which require tissue extracted from the uterus after an abortion to be buried rather than disposed of as medical waste, creating additional costs and burdens for providers; religious liberty protections for crisis pregnancy centers—in Oklahoma; counseling that relies on anti-scientific information to persuade women that medication abortion can be reversed—in Indiana; personhood bills that endow a fetus or an embryo as a person with full rights under the Constitution—in Iowa and North Carolina; and waiting periods between the initial medical evaluation and the actual abortion procedure—in Colorado. Ohio and Kentucky passed laws banning abortions after 20 weeks, and Pennsylvania and Montana are considering similar bills, as are others.

Weakening Roe v. Wade

Years before running for president, Trump said that, despite his personal dislike of abortion, he was “pro-choice in every respect” and that abortion “is a personal decision that should be left to women and their doctors.” But in recent years, the reality TV star turned politician has said he no longer supports abortion access. During his presidential campaign, Trump’s stance remained anti-abortion with the then-candidate saying that the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that women had a constitutional right to an abortion under the 14th Amendment, “will happen, automatically,” should he be elected and have the chance to appoint justices to the nation’s highest court. In the months after his election, anti-abortion advocates have argued that he will make good on that promise.

But overturning Roe will be a complicated task and is likely one of the hardest goals for Trump to actually achieve. The Supreme Court recently affirmed women’s constitutional right to abortion without undue burden in its Whole Women’s Health v. Hellerstedt decision last June, and it will likely take years before another challenge makes its way to the Supreme Court. For the court to decide to completely overturn Roe, it would need to reject more than four decades of settled precedent.

Still, there are ways that Trump can begin laying the groundwork for overturning the landmark ruling. He has consistently promised to place “pro-life justices on the US Supreme Court,” and while some anti-abortion advocates argued that his pool of potential picks weren’t sufficiently conservative, there is still plenty for them to like about Trump’s first Supreme Court appointment, Neil Gorsuch. Since being appointed to the circuit court by George W. Bush in 2006, Gorsuch has taken conservative stances on reproductive issues—recently he wrote the dissenting opinion in a ruling that blocked Utah from defunding Planned Parenthood.

During his time on the appellate court, Gorsuch ruled in favor of Hobby Lobby’s effort to fight against the Obamacare rule requiring companies to include contraception coverage in their health insurance plans. While Gorsuch is likely to be a strong voice in favor of pro-life advocates, as a successor to Antonin Scalia, he will not drastically shift the balance of the court. But if Anthony Kennedy, a frequent swing vote, or a more liberal justice like Ruth Bader Ginsburg vacates their seat in the next few years, Trump would have an opportunity to move the Supreme Court in a decidedly anti-Roe direction.

States also play a large role in determining what will happen. While the Supreme Court’s newest member adjusts to being on the bench, conservative-led legislatures have remained undaunted in their efforts to get another abortion rights case before the courts. Abortion restrictions, particularly the emergence of bans before fetal viability, have become some of the biggest sources of a potential court challenge. As Elizabeth Nash, senior state issues manager at the Guttmacher Institute, said in a recent interview with Mother Jones, some states “are thinking about being the state that overturns Roe v. Wade, and the way to do that is to adopt something like a 6-week abortion ban or a 20-week abortion ban and then send that up through the courts.”

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Trump Brought the War on Women Mainstream in His First 100 Days

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Texas Is About to Crack Down on Undocumented Immigrants

by CedricSolander Posted on April 27, 2017

Mother Jones

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Texas is about to become the second state to outlaw sanctuary cities, jurisdictions that refuse to fully comply with federal enforcement of immigration laws. On Thursday, lawmakers in the Texas House of Representatives gave approval to legislation that would make it a misdemeanor crime for local law enforcement to not cooperate with federal immigration authorities, with penalties of up to $25,500 in fines for local governments and jail time for individual law enforcement officials who maintain sanctuary cities. The legislation would also allow local police officers to inquire about someone’s immigration status during routine encounters such as traffic stops. A slightly different version of the bill already passed in the state senate, and Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, who has made passing legislation banning sanctuary cities a top priority this legislative session, will likely sign the final measure.

Texas became one of the battlegrounds in the national debate over sanctuary cities when Travis County Sheriff Sally Hernandez, after taking office earlier this year, instituted a new policy for her department to not fully cooperate with federal immigration authorities. Gov. Abbott cut off funding in retaliation and even threatened to oust the sheriff. In a parallel effort, the Trump administration is also trying to cut off federal funding to jurisdictions that refuse to fully cooperate with federal immigration officials.

Thursday’s vote followed an initial 16-hour overnight hearing on the House floor. State Rep. Mary González, a Democrat who was once an undocumented immigrant herself, told her colleagues that she was a victim of sexual assault, and that the proposal would actually make Texas less safe by discouraging immigrants from talking to the police when a crime has been committed. “We aren’t exaggerating when we say the people empowered by this piece of the amendment will be criminals,” Gonzalez said. “We aren’t exaggerating when we say the people who will feel the biggest effects of this are the most vulnerable—the women and children who are victims of rape, sexual assault, human trafficking.”

González also beseeched other lawmakers to limit questioning about immigration status to those who were under arrest. “If you ever had any friendship with me, this is the vote that measures that friendship,” González pleaded during the hearing.

According to the Texas Observer, hundreds protested in the Capitol rotunda, where their chants opposing the legislation could be heard during the marathon debate. The protest didn’t dissuade Republican Rep. Matt Schaefer, who added language to the bill that would allow police to check someone’s immigration status during routine “detainments” like traffic stops. “This was about making sure that our law enforcement officers can continue to do what they have a duty to do, which is to make sure that we’re safe,” he said. “That means using every reasonable tool available under the law to inquire about criminal activity.”

State Rep. Ana Hernandez, a Democrat who was also undocumented as a child, fought back tears as she described her fears growing up. “I knew I wasn’t a U.S. citizen, and I feared the reactions from my classmates if they knew I wasn’t a citizen,” Hernandez said. “I see myself in many of those students now that share the same fear of being deported, or having their parents deported.”

Sanctuary city legislation is expected to head to the governor’s desk soon, but local leaders and civil rights advocates opposing the bill say the fight is only getting started, and they plan to file lawsuits challenging the legality of the measure. “The legislature is attempting to blackmail cities into violating our own resident’s constitutional rights,” Austin City Council member Greg Casar said on a press call. “I believe we have no responsibility to follow an unconstitutional law, and we should not be complying with a law that is so discriminatory and dangerous in its mandate.”

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Texas Is About to Crack Down on Undocumented Immigrants

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