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Trump Declares War on EPA Mileage Standards

by CierraSummerfiel Posted on March 15, 2017

Mother Jones

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California has made a lot of noise about being the front line of resistance to President Trump, but mostly it’s just blather. This week, however, it’s finally getting very real:

President Trump will direct the Environmental Protection Agency on Wednesday to shelve aggressive vehicle fuel economy targets that are a pillar of climate action and anti-pollution efforts in California and nationwide, according to a senior administration official.

…Targeting them puts the White House on a path of direct and costly confrontation with California….Under the Clean Air Act, the state has the authority to impose emissions standards stronger than those set by the federal government, and a dozen other states have embraced the California rules, as the act allows. About 40% of the vehicles sold in America are subject to the rules California sets. Automakers have said repeatedly that it is untenable to manufacture separate fleets of vehicles to meet different standards.

The state had refrained from charting its own course on mileage goals as part of a compromise with auto companies and the EPA early in the Obama administration. That agreement will start to unravel Wednesday with Trump’s action, which will direct the EPA to re-open the rule-making for the mileage standards. If, as environmental and auto lobbyists anticipate, the administration ultimately decides to weaken the rules, California will almost certainly move to invoke its federal waiver.

There are other disputes on the horizon between California and the Trump administration, but this is the first big one. From the very beginning, California has had an exemption under the Clean Air Act to set its own standards, and these standards have often led the nation. The state is pretty jealous of this prerogative, and it will fight to prevent any change to the law that weakens it. However, unless the Trump administration succeeds in doing that, it’s likely that California will adopt the current EPA standards and car companies will follow along even if Trump trashes the federal rules. It’s either that or build two separate fleets of cars, one for California and its fellow green states, and one for everyone else.

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Trump Declares War on EPA Mileage Standards

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Trump’s Plan to Make America Great Again Using Cheap Foreign Labor

by CrystleAshton Posted on March 14, 2017

Mother Jones

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At Porterville Citrus, an orange harvesting and packing operation in California’s Tulare Valley, CEO Jim Phillips has been growing increasingly nervous over the past five years. He’s found it harder and harder to marshal enough local workers to pick his oranges on time—up to 20 percent of the fruit has been left to rot on the trees. This year he decided not to take any chances. He hired a contractor to supply his company with 120 Mexican guestworkers under the H-2A farmworker visa program. “It is a little bit more expensive,” he says, “but the quality and reliability is worth something to us. We know we can get the product harvested.”

Only about 4 percent of America’s 2.5 million farmworkers in 2015 came in on temporary visas—most of the rest were undocumented—but these numbers are poised to skyrocket if President Donald Trump carries out his promises to build a border wall and deport millions of undocumented immigrants. Trump has signaled that he wants to cut red tape in the H-2A program, but farmworkers’ advocates fear a loosening of the rules could make guestworkers even more vulnerable to potential labor abuses than they already are. “The H-2 programs are inherently problematic,” says Bruce Goldstein, president of a nonprofit called Farmworker Justice, because the workers “tend not to want to challenge unfair or illegal conduct—and there are a lot of violations.”

Despite campaigning on the unsettled claim that immigrants depress wages and compete with American citizens for jobs, Trump has embraced the use of temporary foreign workers. He has used low-wage guestworkers himself at Mar-a-Lago, and his son Eric petitioned the Labor Department in recent months to import 29 H-2A workers to tend his Virginia winery. Trump’s transition teams for the departments of Labor and Agriculture are stacked with members of trade groups and right-wing think tanks who support guestworker programs.

A draft executive order leaked to the press last month called for “efficient processing” of H-2A visas. The order “does suggest an interest in modernizing the H-2A program, which we would welcome,” says Jason Resnick, a vice-president of Western Growers, whose CEO serves on Trump’s agricultural advisory board. “We think the administration is well aware of the importance of the H-2A program to agriculture, so we are optimistic that there will be proposals forthcoming to make the program more efficient and streamlined and less costly and burdensome.”

The number of H-2A visas has roughly doubled since 2011 as it stands, driven by what farmers say are chronic labor shortages. The children of aging farmhands gravitate toward higher-paying work, and stricter border enforcement and an improving Mexican economy means fewer immigrant workers are available. Some farmers have turned to mechanization to hold down labor costs, but harvesting California’s fresh fruits and vegetables often requires a human touch. Western Growers says the crews of its farmer members are 20 percent understaffed.

Before hiring guestworkers, farmers have to show that they can’t find enough Americans to do the work at the “adverse effect wage,” which is basically the average wage in a given state for a given type of farm work. “US workers are not applying to take those H-2A jobs,” says Western Growers’ Resnick. “The ones that do generally don’t last a week, let alone the whole season.”

Some labor advocates say the shortages are a product of inferior wages. They point to Christopher Ranch, a 4,000-acre farm in Gilroy, California, which at the end of last year was short 50 workers it needed to peel and package garlic. In January, the company announced that it would raise its farmhand wage from $11 to $13 an hour—an 18 percent increase—and boost it to $15 in 2018. Soon it had a waitlist of 150 people. “I knew the pay raise would help,” ranch VP Ken Christopher told the Los Angeles Times, “but I had no idea it would solve our labor problem.”

But farmers insist they can’t pay wages high enough to attract non-immigrants. Labor economists tend to agree: “I don’t think we will ever get US workers in the field, period,” says P.L. Martin, a professor emeritus of agriculture and resource economics at UC-Davis. In America, he says, labor makes up about 40 percent of the cost of producing fresh fruits and vegetables, and that puts the farmers at a disadvantage to foreign rivals paying lower wages. But in less-competitive sectors—fresh-picked strawberries, fresh lettuce, etc—farmers could afford to pay more, according to a 2010 USDA report Martin co-authored.

In any case, H-2A workers are typically viewed as a last resort by American farmers, who must pay the cost of transporting and housing them. They cannot easily adjust an H-2A workforce according to a farm’s day-to-day needs—and they can’t employ any guestworker for more than three years at a time. There is one advantage, though: “We really can control the quality of the harvesting even better than we can with our local farm labor contractors,” says Phillips of Porterville Citrus. “Nobody is being overbearing, but if the workers are not productive, they can be sent back. So their incentive is to do a good job.”

Which is okay so long as the boss is fair. But the imbalance of power can also enable horrific abuses. A 2015 investigation by BuzzFeed found that thousands of H-2 visa holders had been badly exploited: deprived of fair pay, imprisoned, starved, beaten, raped, and threatened with deportation if they complained. And guestworkers seldom report labor abuses. When they do, advocates say, they lack the resources to fight for restitution. Former Rep. Charles Rangel once attacked the H-2 program as “the closest thing I’ve ever seen to slavery.”

The United States last experimented with large-scale use of guestworkers during WWII, when Mexican braceros labored on American farms. Approximately 200,000 braceros entered the United States each year between 1948 and 1964, according to historian Mae M. Ngai. On paper, the program offered legal protections for workers, just as the H-2A program does today, but abuses were common—a study by the Pan American Union noted that “workers who complain are regarded as agitators and shipped back to Mexico.”

Any plan to bring in more guestworkers will likely face resistance from left-leaning labor groups and right-wing nativists alike. Breitbart News has written critically about the use of H-2As, as well as H-2B visas for non-agricultural workers. As a senator, Attorney General Jeff Sessions voted against a bill to loosen restrictions on the H-2A program.

Yet guestworkers do have a certain appeal on the right. “You are probably going to see more reliance on it, which is better than just allowing employers to hire people who come across the border illegally,” says Ira Mehlman, media director for a group called Federation for American Immigration Reform. “It eliminates some of the exploitation that comes just with the widespread hiring of illegal aliens.”

Worker advocates were less sanguine. Employers control the guestworkers’ visas, making it very difficult for the workers to switch jobs. And while undocumented immigrants tend to migrate to places where they have friends and family, guestworkers often live in remote areas without support networks. “It should be that they are significantly better protected” than undocumented immigrants “and have access to better jobs, and that’s what the migrants come in expecting,” says Cathleen Caron, the founder of a farmworker advocacy group called Justice in Motion. But “in the end, everybody gets exploited equally.”

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Trump’s Plan to Make America Great Again Using Cheap Foreign Labor

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Trump Plans to Slash the Most Effective Social Program in History

by KristopHunt Posted on March 3, 2017

Mother Jones

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Reuters tells us what to expect from President Trump’s budget:

Under the proposal, which was sent to the EPA this week, grants to states for lead cleanup would be cut 30 percent to $9.8 million, according to the source, who read the document to Reuters.

What an idiot. This is hardly the biggest issue in his budget, and I’ll grant that the current allocation for lead cleanup is so pitiful that a 30 percent cut hardly matters. On principle, though, it’s obvious that Mick Mulvaney’s crew just saw a line item in their spreadsheet and slashed it without knowing anything about it. Nice work, folks. You get a gold star.

By coincidence, the Washington Post ran a piece yesterday that’s all about lead—though the reporter didn’t realize it:

In dozens of one-on-one meetings every week, a lawyer retained by the city of Philadelphia summons parents whose children have just been jailed, pulls out his calculator and hands them more bad news: a bill for their kids’ incarceration….He is one agent of a deeply entrenched social policy that took root across the country in the 1970s and ’80s. The guiding principle was simple: States, counties and cities believed that parents were shedding responsibility for their delinquent children and expecting the government to pick up the tab.

.…”It was a very different time, when too many parents frequently wanted to essentially ‘dump’ their adolescent children on juvenile courts when they found them unruly, ungovernable, uncontrollable,” Linda O’Neal, executive director of the Tennessee Commission on Children and Youth, said of the era decades ago when the laws were implemented.

Regardless of what you think about this policy, there’s a reason it “took root” in the ’70s and ’80s: Kids of that era spent their early childhoods surrounded by lead fumes from automobiles, so they contracted lead poisoning in massive numbers. By the time they were teenagers they really were “unruly, ungovernable, uncontrollable,” and parents didn’t know what to do.

As it turns out, there was nothing they could do. The damage was done. But nobody knew that, so we put in place pointless laws based on the premise that if only they worked harder, parents could keep their kids under control. In reality, the only policy that ended up working came from Trump’s hated Environmental Protection Agency, which banned leaded gasoline and put an end to our national epidemic of lead poisoning.

But the old laws are still around, even though they don’t work, while the EPA’s lead cleanup program is being slashed, even though it does work. Welcome to America.

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Trump Plans to Slash the Most Effective Social Program in History

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I Have Thoughts About the Oscars

by DanteVidahi Posted on February 27, 2017

Mother Jones

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The Oscars! They are tonight! I went to them once and my dad lost to Nicolas Cage and then took us to McDonald’s and I had 20 McNuggets and many hot mustard sauces. (But like dad already had an Oscar so like it was totes political; Dad totally should have won).

Anyway! I’m going to watch the Oscars and put some thoughts about them in this here post. The kids, they used to call this live blogging, but Twitter sort is a running live blog and it kind of killed that whole thing, so instead of doing proper live blog time stamp stuff I’m just going to continually update this article and we’ll see where it goes! Maybe tomorrow morning this will just be a Reuters post I copy and pasted in.

Buckle up, friends! This baby is about to get cooking. (Don’t cook your baby. Unless it’s not a human baby and you are referring to a Boar’s Cut piece of meat as ‘baby’)

• This Jimmy Kimmel monologue is either a) not great and totally forgettable, or b) i have not been paying enough attention because I was making that art of me in the grass with Julie Andrews and the Oscar statue.

• The first Oscar is Best Supporting Actor and it goes to Mahershala Ali from Moonlight! He’s apparently the first Muslim actor to ever win an Oscar, which is nuts. That’s insane. That it took this long for Hollywood to give a performer of the second largest religion in the world its highest recognition is insane.

• Suicide Squad, an unwatchable film, just won some technical Oscar. Think about that. Suicide Squad is an Academy Award winning film and Donald Trump is president. God is dead.

• You know what was really great this year but wasn’t nominated for an Oscar because it is actually not a movie at all and thus not eligible? The Amazon Original television show Mozart In The Jungle! It’s better than like 90% of this crap. Do you like it? They’re so cute together, the weird conductor and the weird oboist! I hope they fall in love. I mean they are in love but I hope they admit it to themselves, get together, and stay together. Relationships are hard, but when when you put in the effort they can be really rewarding. Anyway, it’s not a film so it wasn’t eligible tonight.

• OJ: Made In America won best documentary! I haven’t seen all the other nominees but I have seen that and it was great. It was a great companion piece to the similarly great The People Vs OJ Simpson. My colleague Edwin Rios actually wrote a great thing about how OJ: Made In America is great.

• Mel Gibson is nominated for Best Director tonight. A story:

• LOL at this prophetic Trump tweet

• Viola Davis won! And she gave a really sweet speech.

• The film The Salesman from Iran just won best Best Foreign-Language Film. The film’s director Asghar Farhadi announced a few weeks ago that he was going to boycott the ceremony because of Donald Trump’s stupid fucking Muslim ban. A statement was read in his absence.

• The dude from Mozart in the Jungle just appeared at the Oscars to present some animation award! Is he reading this post? If you are reading this, star of Mozart In The Jungle, please know that I am a big fan and would love to hangout sometime. Do you go to SoulCycle? I love SoulCycle. Let’s go to SoulCycle!

• The guy from Mozart In The Jungle came back to present some second animation award but first gave a really eloquent little speech about how Trump’s wall is dumb and evil. Sir, sir, sir, I love you. I want to be your best friend. I should probably learn your name.

• I’m tired. I have to be up early tomorrow to interview someone :(. I might just stop watching this. But I also might not stop. You know what they say, “life isn’t a song you’re playing, it’s a song you’re writing.” No one knows what the next brick on your path is even though you’re the one who lays the bricks, you dig? I dig. And I might keep updating this…or i might not.

• I personally don’t really care for Seth Rogen’s films but he seems nice?

• Michael J Fox just said he wanted to point out how much “we all owe to editors.” Indeed. This rambling ramble could probably use one.

• Some British dude won some Oscar. Finally, the British have arrived.

• Oh the British dude who won was the editor of Abortion, I mean Arrival. Arrival was about abortion.

• Hahaha the We Bought A Zoo thing was great.

• The cat who directed La La Land just won Best Director. It could have gone to the dude who did Moonlight. I don’t know who should have won and believe “should have” is a question for the poets, but I really liked La La Land and I say that as a person who went to theater camp and, i don’t mean to brag, had their first sexual relations backstage at a musical.

• Emma Stone won Best Actress! I don’t personally care if she was better than whoever, but she seems like such a sweet person. I really think that she at least appears to be maybe the most lovable Hollywood celebrity. I hope and believe that she probably is. Anyway, my main point is: congrats for this actress who seems objectively wonderful.

•HOLY SHIT HOLY SHIT HOLY SHIT Warren Beatty just gave Best Picture to La La Land but then they came out to say he fucked it up and it was actually Moonlight!!

This was just so nuts

A post shared by Ben Dreyfuss (@bendreyfuss) on Feb 26, 2017 at 9:34pm PST

• i’m going to bed, but the real winner tonight was Marisa Tomei.

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I Have Thoughts About the Oscars

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Donald Trump May Be on Your Television, But Here’s What America Really Looks Like

by coolmathgamesgU Posted on February 25, 2017

Mother Jones

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Photojournalist Peter van Agtmael considers his third book, Buzzing at the Sill, the latest chapter of what he calls “one greater book”—a sweeping exploration of the September 11th attacks and the impact of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq on soldiers and their families. His project began with his 2009 book, 2nd Tour, Hope I Don’t Die, and continued with Disco Night Sept. 11, which appeared in 2014. In Buzzing at the Sill, published by Kehrer Verlag, he shifts his attention to unexplored corners the United States, after he realized “how little I know about my country.”

The Magnum photographer first went to Iraq in 2006 when he was 24, and he covered the conflicts there and in Afghanistan for several years before returning to the States. With 72 images pulled from his journalism assignments and others he shot while traveling throughout the country, Buzzing at the Sill examines the reverberations of 9/11 through glimpses of daily American life that often have the intimate feel of a snapshot. The photos in Buzzing at the Sill depict vulnerable, grieving, celebrating, and sometimes threatening Americans, collectively offering a cohesive and sharp reading of the country, with a powerful undercurrent of alienation. “In America, we somehow feel immune,” he writes in Buzzing at the Sill, “but in any country at war, the first thing they’ll tell you is that they didn’t think it could happen there.”

I talked with van Agtmael about making this book and what it might say about the political climate in the United States today.

Kentucky Derby aftermath. (Louisville, KY. 2015)

Mother Jones: Can you tell me about the title, Buzzing at the Sill?
Peter van Agtmael: Buzzing at the Sill is from a Theodore Roethke poem called “In a Dark Time.” I’d heard a small part of it in a play, a sort of sci-fi play about morality in a virtual reality universe. Nothing to do with the book precisely, but it was a great play. I read the poem afterwards because I was intrigued and had one of those strange senses: “This poem is kind of important to me. I don’t know why, but I’m going to just keep it in the back of my mind.” I just kept coming back to it. As I started putting the book together and writing the stories for it, this idea of buzzing as a word kept popping up in my brain.

I started the book with the story of a vulture that flapped up to this window sill outside of a burn ward at a military hospital in Texas. I guess it could smell the rotting flesh through the walls and was just trying to desperately and aggressively get in through that window, I don’t know, to try and feast on the flesh. It was really a troubling moment. But apparently it happens all the time, because the soldiers in recovery and the nurses were totally accustomed to the presence of those vultures.

When I started thinking of the decisions that led me down the road first—which was part of Disco Night Sept. 11 and then the buzzing being— I somehow couldn’t ignore the urge to do things that kind of defy logic. And I liked the poem, I liked the ring of it. I was sitting with David Allan Harvey one day when he pointed out how appropriate the title was for the things I was talking about.

MJ: In what way do you see that Buzzing at the Sill continues the narrative you built with Disco Night?

PVA: I went out to cover the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan fundamentally because I was interested in war as a notion and in experiencing it. I was interested in history and how societies form. I was interested in the recent history of what had provoked these wars. So when I finally got out there, I was really seeing the wars through the American perspective, much more than through being embedded with American soldiers and Marines. I realized in that process how little I knew about my own country. I had grown up in the suburbs and, after college, I moved out of the country, so I didn’t really know the place well. When I started following soldiers and their families back home, it provoked a lot of the questions about who we are as a nation, questions I realized couldn’t be explored through the more limited framework of looking at the military at war and at home. So that inspired these trips in which I began to explore America in more general terms. I really started this work in 2009. I got the bulk of it done as I was easing out of Disco Night. I started them as almost concurrent projects.

A woman attending the annual Iowa GOP Ronald Reagan dinner, where Sarah Palin gave the keynote speech. (Des Moines, Iowa, 2010)

The Fourth of July. (Brooklyn, New York, 2010)

The KKK had boasted that dozens from their Klan chapter would attend the rally and cross burning, but there were only a few people when we showed up, including a British TV crew and a freelance photographer. (Maryland, 2015)

Outside Lyniece Nelson’s house. Nelson’s 19-year-old daughter, Shelly Hilliard (known as “Treasure”), was strangled, dismembered, and set on fire in 2011. Treasure was a transgender teen born Henry Hilliard Jr. The family is with Treasure’s urn. (Detroit, Michigan, 2012)

MJ: What was your thinking as you approached putting together this body of work? The photos feel like they’re pieced together from assignments or from different stories.

PVA: At first it wasn’t meant to be a book, although I’m always thinking about that in the back of my mind. It started off as a series of exploratory road trips that I was doing with Christian Hansen, who I dedicated the book to. Then I started getting some assignments to go shoot in America because I think editors liked the pictures I was taking. What I was doing for those assignments wasn’t always directly tied to what I was doing for myself, but it gave me the space to photograph. I started getting assignments that dealt with my own interests and made some pictures in that direction. A lot of it was just photographed through general exploration. It was sometimes provoked by assignments, then I’d go back on my own dime if I really clicked with a place. And sometimes it was just hanging out with my family or friends.

MJ: How did you approach the editing? How were you going to tie the pictures together?

PVA: I’m a constant editor. Every few months or so I make a ton of 4×6 prints. I put them on a magnetic board and I live with them for a while to see what bubbles to the surface. A lot of this was part of Disco Night originally, and I suddenly started realizing, “If I keep working on this because I’m not done and I put all that in Disco Night, how can this be one book? Is it going to be too long and bloated and crazy?” Then I started thinking, “Okay, I have so many other questions about America, when do I stop?” I started thinking about each book being a chapter in one bigger book and that gave me the space to cut it off at a certain point. I needed to have some kind of thematic focus to the work.

I was taking all these prints and I brought them to the Magnum meetings, trying the old Josef Koudelka trick: Give them to photographers, who are getting bored during the talks about the economics of the agency, to look through with a pen. They’ll separate them in two piles—what they like and what they don’t like—and put their initials on the back. I started to find the core pictures that people seem to relate to. I’d ask myself why? And did I relate to them? Sometimes I did and sometimes I didn’t. But it gave me an idea of how other people were seeing the work. From there, I kept shooting but started making drafts of the work, essentially spending a few days a month sequencing and editing, hanging things up on the board, showing them to trusted confidantes from in and outside the photo world. It started to take its shape naturally over time until I kind of ran out of ideas. At that point I was like, “Okay, I guess it’s a book.”

After dinner at Lyniece Nelson’s house. One of Nelson’s children was murdered, one committed suicide shortly after his 16th birthday. Her house burned down not long after the death of her son, destroying the urns of both her deceased children. (Detroit, Michigan, 2012)

Hunting rabbits with BB guns. (The outskirts of New Orleans, Louisiana, 2009)

Iraqi refugees in a low-income housing community in Portland. The area is home to several thousand Iraqi refugees. (Portland, Oregon, 2015)

MJ: When you’re out on these road trips, do you still see reverberations from 9/11 in the country?

PVA: Constantly. You find them in them most unexpected places, like graffiti on a wall. Sometimes it’s a faded picture; sometimes it’s a newspaper tacked to a wall. Sometimes it’s weird paraphernalia related to it, home constructed paraphernalia. It resonates through society and continues to resonate today. The travel ban that was imposed by the administration is a very direct reverberation of 9/11. Even though most people were disconnected from it, the moment amplified a fairly massive and somewhat irrational fear that exists in the populace at large. And I think a lot of the work I’ve done and a lot of the work I’m going to do in the future still ties to 9/11 and the fallout from it.

MJ: In the text you’ve written for both Disco Night September 11 and Buzzing at the Sill, you are introspective about covering war. Do you still cover conflict?

PVA: I am still covering conflict to some degree. I was back in Iraq last year for the next book I’m working on. I’ve covered quite a bit of the Israel and Palestine conflict in the last five years for another book I’m working on. But I’m not doing it with the kind of intensity I was before and I’m not seeking out the front line and the kind danger that comes with being at the edge of the war the way I used to. It just kind of ran its course for me. For a long time I could justify doing it to myself, no matter how irrational it was. It was important to me and my work. And I just don’t feel it in the same way any more. When it comes up and it’s important to me, I’ll do it, but more out of sense of duty than desire—which used to be a big part of it.

MJ: When we started talking, you mentioned that Buzzing at the Sill reflects the times, the current situation in America. Can you explain what you meant?

PVA: It deals with the margins of America, a lot of parts unseen. Well, parts that are seen and familiar to a lot of the populace, but unseen when it comes to the parameters of what mainstream news and popular culture and Hollywood reflects. That kind of unease, that melancholy, is of course partly my interpretation, but partly, I think, it’s something that’s really there as well. It resonates with this moment and the sort of alienation from the power structure a lot of people feel, as well as a certain amount of desperation, in the hope of disrupting the power structure so they can live better lives. I think in those ways, it’s intimately connected to today.

The youngest children tending the horses. (Pine Ridge, South Dakota, 2011)

A “second line parade” is a local African American tradition where brass bands–known as the first line-march in the streets and are joined by members of the public, the “second liners.” (New Orleans, Louisiana, 2012)

All photos by Peter van Agtmael/Magnum Photos, from his book Buzzing at the Sill.

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Donald Trump May Be on Your Television, But Here’s What America Really Looks Like

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Trump Just Made Life Harder for Transgender Students

by ChaunceSchurr Posted on February 23, 2017

Mother Jones

On Wednesday, Donald Trump’s administration rescinded Obama era guidance directing schools to treat transgender students according to their gender identity.

While the most talked about part of Obama’s rules allowed students to use the bathroom that aligned best with their identity, the guidance also explained teachers should use students’ chosen name and pronoun and recommended steps to limit access to and amend transgender students’ school records. The move, which comes in a joint letter from the departments of justice and education, rescinds all such protections.

“This is the administration saying very clearly to anti-trans bullies…’These students are not worthy of protection….and we are not going to enforce the law,'” says Mara Keisling, the head of the National Center for Transgender Equality.

The letter claims rescinding the standing rules “does not leave students without protections from discrimination, bullying, or harassment,” and emphasizes that schools are responsible for ensuring all students “are able to learn and thrive in a safe environment.” But unlike Obama’s directive, which specified that a hostile environment could, for example, be established by failing to recognize students gender identity, the Trump administration’s letter gives no such guidance. That nod to bullying and harassment was reportedly added at the urging of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, who, according to the New York Times, expressed discomfort at rescinding the guidance. When asked Wednesday about infighting between DeVos and Attorney General Sessions, who pushed strongly to rescind the guidance and who has long history of opposing LGBTQ rights, the administration maintained DeVos supports the move “100 percent.”

Without federal policies, transgender students’ rights will be inconsistent state to state and even between school districts and individual schools. In a statement released shortly after the letter, DeVos argued this “is an issue best solved at the state and local level…Schools, communities, and families can find—and in many cases have found—solutions that protect all students.”

“No child in America should have their rights subject to their zip code,” said Eliza Byard Executive Director of GLSEN, a nonprofit organization dedicated to making schools safe for LGBTQ students.

The Obama administration developed the guidance after the Education Department received questions from educators, administrators, parents, and students about how Title IX, a law which bans sex discrimination in educational programs and schools receiving federal assistance, protects transgender students. Bathroom access proved to be controversial, but it was seen as a key step towards compliance with the law by department officials.

“Students in kindergarten, elementary school classes are made to line up by boys and girls to go to the bathroom,” said Catherine Lhamon, a former assistant secretary for civil rights at the Department of Education who helped develop the guidance. “Transgender students had to face a choice everyday about which line to get in and answering questions from their peers about why they’re in one line versus another, and that causes harm and humiliation to a student to have to explain.”

Private bathrooms can also invite questions from other students, be far from classes, or require an adult to unlock them, which can make students late for class.

“There were physical consequences to students of having to go through extra barriers just to be able to relieve themselves at school,” she says. “There were psychological consequences to students from having to explain who they are inside everyday to other students rather than just being able to be who they are.”

The Trump administration’s decision to roll back the protections comes just weeks before the Supreme Court is set to hear its first transgender rights case. Virginia high schooler Gavin Grimm sued his school board after it adopted a policy barring him from the men’s bathroom. At the center of the case: the question of whether Title IX protections apply to transgender students.

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Trump Just Made Life Harder for Transgender Students

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The Private Prison Industry Is Licking Its Chops Over Trump’s Deportation Plans

by robertalash4 Posted on February 21, 2017

Mother Jones

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Immigration agents sparked panic across the country last week, when a series of high-profile operations made it clear that a new era of crackdowns on undocumented immigrants had begun. Coming on the heels of a couple of major executive orders on immigration, the arrests and deportations were a very public reminder of President Donald Trump’s promise to deport upwards of 2 million immigrants upon taking office.

But given that America’s detention system for immigrants has been running at full capacity for some time now, where is the president going to put all of these people before deporting them?

In new jails, for starters. In the same executive order that called for the construction of a southern border wall, Trump instructed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to build out its sprawling network of immigration detention centers. Starting “immediately,” his order said, ICE should construct new facilities, lease space for immigrants alongside inmates in existing local jails, and sign new contracts—likely with private prison companies. The scale of that expansion became clearer on February 5, when the Los Angeles Times reported on a memo handed down in late January from White House immigration experts to top Homeland Security officials. The document called for raising the number of immigrants ICE incarcerates daily, nationwide, to 80,000 people.

Last year, ICE detained more than 352,000 people. The number of detainees held each day, typically between 31,000 and 34,000, reached a historic high of about 41,000 people in the fall, as Customs and Border Protection apprehended more people on the southwest border while seeing a simultaneous rise in asylum seekers. But doubling the daily capacity to 80,000 “would require ICE to sprint to add more capacity than the agency has ever added in its entire history,” says Carl Takei, staff attorney for the ACLU’s National Prison Project. It would also take an extra $2 billion in government funding per year, detention experts interviewed by Mother Jones estimated. And, Takei warned, “we don’t know if 80,000 is where he’ll stop.”

Yet even if ICE does not adopt an 80,000-person detention quota, other changes laid out in Trump’s executive orders suggest that vastly more people will be detained in the coming months and years. For example, Trump ordered ICE to prioritize deporting not only immigrants who been convicted or charged with crimes, but also those who had “committed acts that constitute a chargeable offense”—a category that could include entering the country illegally and driving without a license. Trump also ordered Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly, who oversees ICE, to take “all appropriate actions” to detain undocumented immigrants while their cases are pending.

Beyond that, ICE could stop granting parole to asylum seekers, explains Margo Schlanger, a former Obama administration official who served as Homeland Security’s top authority on civil rights. With ICE taking enforcement action against more categories of immigration offenders and releasing fewer of them, Schlanger says, “we could get to a very large sum of people in detention very quickly.”

It’s not difficult to guess who profits. In an earnings call last week, the private prison giant CoreCivic (formerly known as the Corrections Corporation of America, or CCA) announced that it saw the ICE detention expansion as a business opportunity. “When coupled with the above average rate of crossings along the southwest border, these executive orders appear likely to significantly increase the need for safe, humane, and appropriate detention bed capacity that we have available,” CoreCivic President and CEO Damon Hininger said.

As of November, a whopping 65 percent of ICE detainees were held in facilities run by private prison companies, which typically earn a fee per detainee per night and whose business model depends upon minimizing costs to return profits to their shareholders. Since Trump’s election, private prison stocks have soared, and two new, for-profit detention centers are opening in Georgia and Texas.

Another private prison company, Management & Training Corp., is reportedly seeking a contract with ICE to reopen the Willacy County Correctional Institution, a troubled detention camp that held up to 2,000 ICE detainees in Kevlar tents between 2006 and 2011. “Historically, ICE has relied heavily on the private prison industry every time the detention system has expanded,” Takei says. “There’s little doubt in my mind that they will continue to rely on the private prison industry in what’s going to be the biggest expansion of the agency in history.”

The first new detention center contracts will likely take the form of arrangements between ICE and local governments to reopen empty prison facilities as detention centers or rent beds in existing local jails, Takei says. The arrangements, known intergovernmental service agreements, allow ICE to cut deals with local governments and private prison companies while avoiding a lengthy public bidding process. Occasionally, the local government agrees to hold ICE detainees alongside inmates in their publicly run jail—an arrangement a Department of Homeland Security subcommittee recently called “the most problematic” option for holding detainees. But most of the time, local governments simply act as middlemen in deals between ICE and private prison companies.

The opaque nature of the process allows all parties to avoid public outcry before the deals are signed, explains Silky Shah, co-director of the Detention Watch Network, an immigrant rights advocacy group. So far, immigration advocates haven’t gotten wind of many new contracts being negotiated or signed since Trump’s inauguration. “But that doesn’t mean contracting activity is not taking place,” Takei says. “I suspect there are closed-door meetings taking place across the country right now.”

Expanding detention quickly could have a high human cost. Schlanger is worried that conditions inside detention facilities could deteriorate without proper oversight from the Department of Homeland Security. “There are a lot of bad things that happen if the number of beds is ramped up fast, without appropriate controls, monitoring, supervision, and care,” she says, pointing to the potential overuse of solitary confinement, inadequate safety measures, poor nutrition, and insufficient medical care. “That means detainees could die.” Asylum seekers, she warns, will have a harder time fighting their immigration cases from inside detention centers, where it’s difficult to access lawyers and gather evidence. More could be coerced into voluntary deportation: “You’re vulnerable to the government saying to you, ‘Look, we’ll let you out from detention, but you have to give up your immigration case.'”

We don’t have to look far in the past to see the danger of rushing to open new detention facilities. Last year, as several thousand Haitian immigrants arrived on the southern border, fleeing natural disasters and poverty, the Department of Homeland Security began seeking contracts for new detention facilities to accommodate the surge. In their scramble to secure space for the new arrivals, ICE officials reportedly considered ignoring quality standards for the facilities—”scraping the bottom looking for beds,” as one official told the Wall Street Journal.

The bottom of the barrel, in this case, included a prison in Cibola County, New Mexico, owned by CoreCivic. Last summer, after an investigation by The Nation revealed a pattern of severe, longtime medical neglect in the 1,100-bed facility—which had gone months without a doctor—the US Bureau of Prisons decided to pull its inmates out and cancel its contract with CoreCivic. Yet less than a month after the last federal prisoner was transferred out, ICE was already negotiating an agreement with the county and CoreCivic to detain immigrants in the newly vacant facility. Four hundred immigrants are currently detained there. Takei notes that ICE contracted with the same company, for the same prison: “There weren’t any substantive changes.”

Shah expects to see familiar problems like poor medical care worsen as new deals for detention facilities are finalized. “One of the concerns we hear most often is that when people complain about ailments, officers will come back and just say, ‘Well, drink more water, or take an Advil and you’ll be fine,'” she says. “It’s a really harsh system already. If you’re going to expand at this level, it’s just going to become that much harsher.”

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The Private Prison Industry Is Licking Its Chops Over Trump’s Deportation Plans

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NBC News: Putin Still Trying to Figure Out Trump’s Brain

by DeidreBarreto Posted on February 20, 2017

Mother Jones

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Bill Neely of NBC News reports on Vladimir Putin’s efforts to understand the psyche of America’s reality-show president:

A dossier on Donald Trump’s psychological makeup is being prepared for Russian President Vladimir Putin. Among its preliminary conclusions is that the new American leader is a risk-taker who can be naïve, according to a senior Kremlin adviser.

….Former Deputy Foreign Minister Andrei Fedorov told NBC News…”Very serious preparatory work is going on in the Kremlin, including a paper — seven pages — describing a psychological portrait of Trump, especially based on this last two to three months, and the last weeks.”

….Putin’s government is growing increasingly concerned about Trump’s battles in Washington, according to Fedorov and former lawmaker Sergei Markov, who remains well-connected at the Kremlin. Fedorov added that Trump’s “constant battle with the mass media” was “worrying us.” The U.S. president “is dancing on thin ice,” he said. “It’s a risky game.”

A former prime minister under Putin said the Kremlin is taking no pleasure at Trump’s struggles. “Absolutely not — not laughing,” Mikhail Kasyanov said. “The situation is very serious and the whole of Putin’s team, they are nervous.” Many in the Kremlin believe hardliners in America — in Congress and the military — want to sabotage the president and his plans for better ties with Russia.

From Putin’s point of view, there’s good news and bad news. The good news is that Trump can’t control himself. Putin could literally publish his dossier on his Facebook page and it wouldn’t matter. Just as he did in the debates, when Hillary Clinton baited him in the most obvious ways, Trump will respond to provocations the way he always responds.

That’s also the bad news, of course: Trump can’t control himself. He lives in a delusionary world where everything is going great and the White House is a finely tuned machine. This divorce from reality is likely to become ever more cavernous as time goes on, and there’s no telling how long it will be until this produces a disaster of some kind. Eventually it’s going to become clear that trying to run the US government the same way he ran his business—Trump acting as the showman/marketing genius, while professional managers keep the gears turning—isn’t producing any results here in consensus reality. And then the whole delusionary edifice will come tumbling down.

But when? Next week? Next year? Whenever the economy turns down? There’s no telling. Putin better keep that dossier constantly updated.

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NBC News: Putin Still Trying to Figure Out Trump’s Brain

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Cleaning Up After Trump

by KayleeHuntingto Posted on February 20, 2017

Mother Jones

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From the Wall Street Journal:

Jim Mattis, on his first trip to Iraq as defense secretary, said he plans to assess the fight against Islamic State in the country and that the U.S. isn’t there to take its oil. “I think all of us here in this room, all of us in America, have paid for our gas and oil all along and I’m sure that we will continue to do so in the future,” he told reporters in Abu Dhabi the day before leaving for Iraq. “We are not in Iraq to seize anybody’s oil.”

So far, Mattis and VP Mike Pence have been fanning out across the world to assure our allies that President Trump thinks NATO is great; that America’s support for Europe is “unwavering”; that Trump will be tough on Russia; and that we’re not going to take Iraq’s oil. In other words, basically the opposite of everything Trump himself has said over the past year.

This is becoming the signature of the Trump administration. At home, Trump says something stupid, and Sean Spicer and Kellyanne Conway gamely go out to clean up the mess and claim that Trump didn’t really mean what he said. Abroad, Mattis and Pence and Rex Tillerson play the same role. They’re like the guys who follow the elephants at a parade.

I’ll bet they didn’t think this was how they’d be spending their time as some of the most powerful people in the world.

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Cleaning Up After Trump

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“Jane Roe” Has Died. Abortion Rights Might Not Be Far Behind.

by StormyMoseley Posted on February 19, 2017

Mother Jones

Norma McCorvey, the “Jane Roe” plaintiff in the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court case that legalized abortion in the United States, died Saturday at at an assisted-living facility in Katy, Texas. She was 69.

McCorvey was a complicated symbol for the political fight over abortion rights. Following the high court’s 1973 decision, she became the face of the pro-choice movement. At the time, she represented the struggles faced by ordinary women confronted with unwanted pregnancies. Abortion was illegal in Texas in almost all cases when she learned she was pregnant in 1969. Poor and with a ninth grade education, she didn’t have the means to seek abortion across state lines. The legal battle dragged on for three years; by the time she won, she had long since carried the pregnancy to term. She gave the baby up for adoption.

But in 1995, McCorvey reversed her stance on abortion after discussing the Bible with Pastor Flip Benham, the director of Operation Rescue, an aggressive pro-life group that had moved in next door to the women’s health clinic where McCorvey worked. She soon quit her job at the clinic and was baptized by Benham. She became a spokeswoman for the anti-abortion movement, penning a book about her ideological transformation and traveling the country giving speeches to religious groups.

Like McCorvey’s own views on abortion, popular opinion about a woman’s right to choose has been the subject of much conflict and debate since the landmark 1973 case. And while a strong majority of Americans still agrees with the Roe decision, dismantling the right to an abortion is now an explicit objective for both the new administration and the Republican-led congress.

In the month since President Donald Trump’s inauguration, GOP lawmakers have put forward measures aimed at pulling federal family planning funds from Planned Parenthood and repealing the Affordable Care Act, including its requirement that insurance plans cover contraceptives. They have also introduced bills that would make abortion illegal after 20 weeks of pregnancy and would ban the standard abortion method used by doctors in the second trimester.

A Supreme Court majority that would be open to overturning Roe is becoming increasingly likely, as well. This is something Trump promised repeatedly during the campaign as part of his largely successful effort to win over skeptical evangelical voters. As a candidate, he made four promises to the anti-abortion community: He pledged to nominate anti-abortion justices; defund Planned Parenthood; sign the 20-week abortion ban; and permanently enshrine into law the Hyde Amendment—a 40-year old budget rider that Congress has repeatedly used to bar federal tax dollars from funding most abortions. Assuming that Judge Neil Gorsuch is confirmed this spring, it may only take the departure of one pro-abortion-rights justice to tip the balance on the court against Roe.

During the campaign, the formerly pro-choice Trump brought on Mike Pence to shore up his anti-abortion bonafides. As governor of Indiana, Pence signed some of the country’s strictest abortion restrictions into law, including a measure requiring burial or cremation of aborted fetus remains and a ban on abortions due to fetal anomaly. In a September 2016 speech, Pence told an evangelical conference in Washington, DC, “I want to live to see the day that we put the sanctity of life back at the center of American law, and we send Roe v. Wade to the ash heap of history, where it belongs.”

Last month, Pence became the highest-ranking government official to ever address the annual March for Life in person. “Life is winning again in America,” Pence said at the anti-abortion gathering, pointing to the “historic election of a president who stands for a stronger America, a more prosperous America, and a president who, I proudly say, stands for the right to life.”

Roe has been seen by many as an imperfect decision. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, one of the foremost legal warriors for gender equality, has criticized the decision for changing too much, too quickly. After founding the ACLU’s women’s rights project in the 1970s, Ginsburg focused on fighting sex discrimination with an incremental strategy. She brought several cases to the Supreme Court, building up a body of court victories that together established a sweeping legal and moral understanding of sex discrimination as something that is both illegal and wrong. Roe, she said at a conference in 2014, “established a target” for abortion opponents because it ditched this incremental approach, instead imposing a drastic change on states across the country. She suggested that if the high court had moved a little more slowly, today the idea of reproductive choice wouldn’t be so controversial. “A movement against access to abortion for women grew up, flourished, around a single target,” Ginsburg said.

After her victory as Roe’s main plaintiff, McCorvey joined the movement that sprung up to oppose Roe. Her death comes at a time when that movement, with help from the Trump White House, could achieve many of its long-held goals.

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“Jane Roe” Has Died. Abortion Rights Might Not Be Far Behind.

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