Tag Archives: mexico

Here’s the Transcript of Trump’s Meeting With the President of Mexico

by robinjsk7726156 Posted on September 1, 2016

Mother Jones

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I can’t reveal my sources, but I have gotten hold of a transcript of Donald Trump’s meeting today with Enrique Peña Nieto. Here it is:

EPN: Mr. Trump, Mexico will never pay for a border wall. The idea is insulting and demeaning to the Mexican people and we resent it. You must stop telling the American people this ridiculous fantasy.

DJT: That’s a nice tie you’re wearing. Is it silk? I’ve always loved silk. Melania does too, and she always makes sure that all our sheets are 100 percent silk. Even Barron’s. You can’t start too young when it comes to quality, you know. When I get to the White House, I’m going to change out all the sheets in the guest rooms. You should come for a visit. It’ll be great. They probably have cotton sheets now because Obama doesn’t know quality the way I do. I mean, the guy is obviously in way over his head, don’t you agree? He just doesn’t understand how to negotiate with a head of state. But you and I are going to get along. We’ll be friends. I just know it. Many of my best friends are Hispanic, you know. It’s something people don’t give me credit for. But that’s the press for you. Is it the same here? How does the press treat you? When you do something great, like inviting me for this meeting, do they give you any credit or do they just publish the most horrible lies about you? When I’m president that’s going to stop. They shouldn’t be able to publish lies and get away with it. They said I wanted to use nuclear weapons on Syria! I mean nuclear, that’s where….

2,385 words omitted

So I told him that was impossible, and he said “Not for you, Trump-san!” The Japanese are great kidders. But he was right. We got it done on time and under budget. It was….

Aide: Sir, the press is waiting. We need to make our way out to the portico.

DJT: And I’ve got a plane to catch. It’s been great talking with you, Enrique. I can call you Enrique, can’t I?

So you see, both sides have told the truth about this meeting. Peña Nieto did tell Trump that Mexico wouldn’t pay for the wall, and Trump didn’t discuss it with him.

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Here’s the Transcript of Trump’s Meeting With the President of Mexico

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Conservatives Crippled Obama’s Plan to Help Undocumented Families. This Could Save It.

by AlishaFergusson Posted on August 26, 2016

Mother Jones

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When a district judge single-handedly blocked President Barack Obama’s executive actions on immigration last year, the situation looked bleak for millions of immigrants across the country who faced deportation. Now, a new lawsuit seeks to challenge that judge’s decision.

Obama’s immigration actions, announced in November 2014, would have shielded up to 5 million undocumented immigrants from deportation, including parents of US citizens and green card holders, and granted them temporary work authorization. The orders also would have expanded a similar program for young undocumented immigrants who came to the United States as children.

But last year, after 26 states challenged the executive actions in court, a district judge in Texas issued an injunction blocking their implementation across the country. The case made it all the way to the Supreme Court, whose justices remained deadlocked and failed to issue a ruling, which meant Obama’s immigration programs remained blocked and families could not use them to apply for relief from deportation.

In the new lawsuit, filed Thursday in a federal court in New York, lawyers from three immigrant rights groups argue that the Texas judge lacked the authority to suspend Obama’s new programs nationwide, including in states that were not party to the Texas lawsuit because they did not want to suspend the programs. “There’s no reason the injunction from Texas should block progress in New York and similar states,” Javier H. Valdes, co-executive director of Make the Road New York, said in a statement announcing the lawsuit.

The suit was filed on behalf of Martín Batalla Vidal, an undocumented 25-year-old medical student in New York who came to the United States illegally from Mexico when he was seven years old. In February 2015, Batalla Vidal received three years of work authorization under a program, called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, that had been expanded by Obama’s executive actions. But because the Texas judge issued the injunction, Batalla Vidal’s work authorization was reduced to two years—the maximum period allowed by the DACA before Obama expanded it. The lawsuit argues that the injunction should not apply to residents in New York, a state that was never a party to the Texas lawsuit and that falls outside the jurisdiction of the district court in Texas. If the New York judge agrees, it could affect not only immigrants like Batalla Vidal who are applying to the DACA program, but also undocumented parents who are applying for relief under a different program.

“It’s hard to know at this early juncture what this lawsuit will achieve,” said Melissa Crow, legal director at American Immigration Council, a pro-immigration nonprofit in Washington, DC. “But the nationwide scope of the injunction…is way beyond the court’s jurisdiction.”

Batalla Vidal’s lawyers say the injunction has affected the academic and professional goals of thousands of immigrants across the country. “When I first filed for DACA, I was excited to get a three-year work permit and move forward with my life,” said Batalla Vidal. “That was taken away by one judge in Texas…I’m filing this lawsuit for myself and the thousands of others like me who have been wronged by this judge’s decision.”

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Conservatives Crippled Obama’s Plan to Help Undocumented Families. This Could Save It.

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Venezuela Is Descending Into Chaos. Now This Issue Is on America’s Doorstep.

by Adan Baird Posted on August 14, 2016

Mother Jones

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Earlier this year, Venezuelan journalist and political scientist Francisco Toro described his home country as “the world’s most visibly failing state.” And now, amid a worsening economic crisis, a crackdown on political opposition, and increasing violent crime, more and more of his countrymen are seeking haven in the United States.

Over the past year, the United States has experienced a surge in asylum applications from Venezuela, according to new data from the Pew Research Center. So far in fiscal 2016, applications from Venezuela soared past 10,000, an increase of 168 percent compared with the fiscal year 2015.

Venezuela’s economic collapse has been making headlines for more than a year. Oil prices plummeted, and price controls led to shortages of basic staples like food and medicine. A recent study from Simón Bolívar University found that 9 out of 10 Venezuelans can no longer afford to buy enough food. Now, people wait in line for hours for essentials like rice and cooking oil, sometimes even fending off armed thieves. As food riots became a daily occurrence, President Nicolás Maduro—who succeeded Hugo Chávez after his death in 2013—put the army in charge of rationing. Food is now transported by armed guards, and police protect against looters. The International Monetary Fund has estimated that Venezuela’s inflation rate will reach 480 percent this year, and more than 1,600 percent next year. Unemployment is around 17 percent and is expected to grow to a quarter over the next three years.

On top of all that, Maduro has been cracking down on his political opponents. In December, the opposition coalition won a major victory, securing a majority of seats in parliament for the first time since Chávez came to power in 1999. After that, Maduro intensified his crackdown. The Venezuelan Penal Forum, which tracks human rights abuses, counted 96 political prisoners in June, compared with just 11 when Maduro became president. Meanwhile, election officials signaled earlier this week that a long-promised recall election to oust Maduro would have to wait until 2017.

This combination of food and medicine shortages, political instability, and increasing violent crime is driving Venezuelans out of the country, according to Julio Henriquez, director of the Boston-based nonprofit Refugee Freedom Program, which currently focuses on helping Venezuelan asylum seekers. “There was a lot of hope that the new parliament would make a big difference in the human rights conditions,” he says, “but human rights conditions have worsened.”

So far, Henriquez says, most of the Venezuelan asylum seekers he’s encountered have been middle-class people who’ve come to the United States via a student or tourist visa and then applied for asylum after their arrival. It’s quite a contrast to the Central American families showing up at the US-Mexico border, a situation which advocates have warned for years amounts to a refugee crisis.

Faye Hipsman, an analyst with the Migration Policy Institute, says some Venezuelan asylum applicants may be taking advantage of excessive backlogs in the application process—delays that allow applicants to stay in the United States for years pending the outcome of their claim. And while many are likely fleeing poverty, hunger, and general violence, Hipsman says, it’s often not enough to qualify for asylum, which requires applicants to prove that they risk persecution based on their race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or social group.

“A share of these people have legitimate asylum claims,” she says. “But there’s a lot of concern that for legitimate reasons, people don’t want to go back to Venezuela because it’s dangerous there—and the circumstances are really bad.”

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Venezuela Is Descending Into Chaos. Now This Issue Is on America’s Doorstep.

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12 of the Biggest Threats Facing Our Oceans

by ChristeCarder Posted on July 1, 2016

As we spend our summer days enjoying beach days and fresh seafood, please considerthe biggest threats facing the health and future of this most important of ecosystems.

1. Ignorance

We know less about the oceans than we do about the moon. And yet, the oceans are far more essential to our survival.Less than 0.05 percent of the ocean floor has been mapped to a level of detail useful for detecting items such as airplane wreckage or the spires of undersea volcanic vents, reports Scientific American.

2. Indifference

Maybe it’s because they’re so big. Maybe it’s because they’re so deep. Or maybe it’s because things sink out of sight. Whatever the reason, people generally seem to worry less about the health of the oceans than almost any other ecosystem on Earth. Here are six reasons why you should be more concerned about ocean conservation.

3. Climate Change

The oceans are vast heat sinks that, despite their size, are highly susceptible to climate change. A “mere” 1 degree Celsius increase in ocean temperatures hascaused marine life to die, set off superstorms and hurricanes, and changed weather patterns around the globe. Climate change is among the most serious threats the ocean faces because it will take so long to reverse the impact it is having on the oceans. Even if today we stopped emitting the carbon dioxide, methane and other “greenhouse gases” that cause climate change, it would be decades before the ocean would benefit, because they are so large and in constant flux.

4. Trash and Toxic Runoff

Untreated sewage, garbage, fertilizers, pesticides and industrial chemicals are common on land, and sadly, they eventually find their way into the ocean, as well. Sometimes they’re deliberately dumped. Sometimes, they “run off” because they’re not contained properly when they’re disposed. TheGulf of Mexico suffers daily from the chemicals routinely carried into it by the Mississippi, says Ocean.org, especially the nitrogen and phosphorous doused on agricultural operations. Rivers carry these chemicals steadily to the oceans, creating “dead zones” in many gulfs, bays and estuaries all over the world.

5. Oil and Gas Development

Speaking of dead zones, when an oil spill happens, thousands of square miles of undersea life can be affected for decades.When the Deepwater Horizon oil rig blew up, it was called the”worst environmental disaster the U.S. has faced,” by White House energy adviser Carol Browner.The spill was by far the largest in U.S. history, almost 20 times greater than the Exxon Valdez oil spill. Though disasters of that magnitude don’t occur regularly, smaller oil spills plus the oil that finds its way to the sea from improper disposal on land, still take a serious toll killing marine animals, polluting waters and reducing the productivity of fisheries.

7. Air Pollution

Just as air pollution causes smog in our cities and sends acid rain falling on our forests, it threatens the oceans, too.Ateam of climate scientists and coral ecologists from the United Kingdom, Australia and Panama discovered that pollution from fine particles in the air, like those emitted by coal-burning power plants as well as volcanoes, can shade corals from sunlight, which is needed for the coral to grow. Acid rain falling on coastal areas makes them more acidic, threatening the ability ofsea urchins, corals and certain types of planktons to create the hard outer exoskeletons they need to survive. And if these animals don’t survive, the entire oceanic food chain could be affected.

8. Plastic

From plastic microbeads to plastic bags, the amount of plastic filling up the oceans has reached epidemic proportions. Each year, 8 million tons of plastic are added to our seas,equivalent to one municipal garbage truck pulling up to the beach and dumping its contents every minute, reports Fortune magazine. Areport by the Ocean Conservancy, in partnership with the McKinsey Center for Business and Environment, warns that by 2025, the ocean could contain one ton of plastic for every three tons of finfish.

9. Unsustainable Fishing

Ninety percent of the world’s fisheries are already fully exploited or overfished, while billions of unwanted fish and other animals die needlessly each year when they are trapped as the “by catch” of other fishing operations.

“Unsustainable fishing is the largest threat to ocean life and habitats … not to mention the livelihoods and food security of over a billion people,” says World Wildlife Fund. Greenpeace concurs. “Weve already removed at least two-thirds of the large fish in the ocean, and one in three fish populations have collapsed since 1950. Put simply, there are too many boats chasing too few fish.”

10. Lack of Protection

Though they cover over 70 percent of our planets surface, only a tiny fraction of the oceans has been protected: just 3.4 percent, reports Oceana. Even worse, “the vast majority of the worlds few marine parks and reserves are protected in name only. Without more and better managed Marine Protected Areas, the future of the oceans rich biodiversityand the local economies it supportsremains uncertain.”

11. Tourism and Development, Leading to Habitat Destruction

All over the world, our coastlines have become burgeoning sites for housing, vacationing communities, commercial development, and factories and refineries. Coastal wetlands are filled in, waste gets dumped into the seas, and habitat for fish, birds and other marine life gets destroyed.

12. Shipping

More freight is moved via ocean cargo vessels than any other method; more oil is carried on tankers than through pipelines. Unsurprisingly,oil spills, ship groundings, anchor damage and the dumping of trash, ballast water and oily waste are threateningmarine habitats around the world.

What Can You Do? Startwith these helpful articles from Care2.

5 Human Habits Harmful to Ocean Health
There’s a Better Way to Protect Our Ocean Ecosystems

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are solely those of the author and may not reflect those of Care2, Inc., its employees or advertisers.

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12 of the Biggest Threats Facing Our Oceans

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North America pledges to deliver 50 percent zero-carbon energy in less than a decade

by AveryGrafton Posted on June 28, 2016

U.S. President Barack Obama (R) and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau hold a joint press conference in the Rose Garden of the White House. Kevin Lamarque/Reuters

North America pledges to deliver 50 percent zero-carbon energy in less than a decade

By on Jun 28, 2016Share

Climate change will be front and center at the North American Leaders’ Summit this week in Ottawa, the annual meeting between the prime minister of Canada and the presidents of Mexico and the U.S.

In addition to President Obama’s address on climate change, the leaders of the three nations will announce that Mexico will be joining an agreement between the United States and Canada to regulate methane leaks. They will also pledge to generate half of the continent’s electricity from clean energy sources by 2025. The target, up from 37 percent today, will require increasing include wind, solar, hydropower, nuclear energy, and carbon capture technology, according to the New York Times.

Environmentalists, however, are mixed on both nuclear energy and carbon capture technology, which doesn’t exist in any scalable way right now. There are only eight carbon-capture projects currently operating in the world, including a handful in the U.S and one massively expensive “clean coal” plant in Canada.

Still, the announcement coming Wednesday isn’t nothing. “This agreement means the United States will dramatically increase the amount of clean, renewable energy we get from sources like wind and solar within the next decade,” said Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune.

Here’s hoping.

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The Paradox of Immigration: Opposition Is Strongest Precisely Where There Are the Fewest Immigrants

by ReneIBVDadaqo Posted on June 25, 2016

Mother Jones

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James Fallows is in western Kansas around Dodge City, where many of the cities are majority Latino and full of immigrants from Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Cuba, and more recently Somalia and Sudan. Here’s what he says:

I can’t let this day end without noting the black-versus-white, night-versus-day contrast between the way immigration, especially from Mexico and other parts of Latin America, is discussed in this part of the country where it is actually happening, versus its role in this moment’s national political discussion.

….Every single person we have spoken with — Anglo and Latino and other, old and young, native-born and immigrant, and so on down the list — every one of them has said: We need each other! There is work in this community that we all need to do. We can choose to embrace the world, or we can fade and die. And we choose to embrace it.

I don’t have actual data on this, but my sense from both the US and Britain is that the most fervent opposition to immigration—legal or otherwise—comes precisely from the regions where it’s had the least impact. Here in the US, for example, immigration from Latin America has been heaviest in the southern sun belt states of California, Texas, Arizona, and a few others. And yet Donald Trump’s “build a wall” narrative played well in places like New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts, all of which have relatively small Latino populations. Similarly, Brexit did best in the small towns and rural areas of England, the places that have the fewest immigrants and that depend the most on EU trade.

That’s not to say that opposition to immigration is absent in places like London or San Diego. It’s not. But these places mostly seem to have adapted to it and figured out that it’s not really all that bad. It’s everywhere else, where immigration is mostly a fear, that anti-immigrant sentiment has the strongest purchase. And that’s why peddling fear is so effective.

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The Paradox of Immigration: Opposition Is Strongest Precisely Where There Are the Fewest Immigrants

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Houston flooding is a perfect storm of climate change and bad urban planning

by KourtneyLeane Posted on May 31, 2016

Houston flooding is a perfect storm of climate change and bad urban planning

By on May 31, 2016 3:54 pmShare

Flooding in Texas killed six over Memorial Day weekend, bringing the death toll from the state’s unprecedented floods this year to at least 14. The area surrounding Houston has been hit especially hard: On Sunday, about 2,600 inmates were evacuated from two southeastern Texas prisons endangered by high water, and evacuation orders were issued Monday for homes along the Brazos River.

Deluges like this aren’t exactly new to the area — downpours at this time last year brought a death toll of at least 30 — but as the climate warms, so does risk of flooding. In the past 30 years, reports the AP, the frequency of extreme downpours in the area has doubled.

“One likely cause,” Texas’ state climatologist John Nielsen-Gammon tells Grist, “is the increase in ocean temperatures from the Gulf of Mexico and tropical Atlantic. That determines how much moisture is in the atmosphere.” As temperatures increase, so does rainfall.

But it’s not just the rainfall that is endangering Houston’s citizens — it’s also ecologically irresponsible development.

Houston is the only major American city without formal zoning laws. As a result, developers have been free to pave over huge swaths of valuable wetlands that absorb runoff. Between 1996 and 2011, the amount of the Houston region covered in pavement increased by 25 percent, according to Samuel Brody, professor of urban planning at Texas A&M.

“Houston’s unique in that it’s a low-lying area barely above sea level,” Brody told Marketplace. “It’s originally made up of bayous and soils that don’t drain too well, and it’s a city that’s afflicted by flooding from both the sea, saltwater flooding, and rainfall-based flooding. The problem is not the environmental conditions, the problem is pavement.”

Beyond lives lost, there are financial costs to these disasters as well. Since 1998, FEMA has paid over $3 billion (adjusted for inflation) for flood losses in the area, according to the AP. And as floods worsen and paved areas expand, that’s a cost that promises to get worse.

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Houston flooding is a perfect storm of climate change and bad urban planning

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China just said what the U.S. never has: Eat less meat

by korystell193663 Posted on May 25, 2016

China just said what the U.S. never has: Eat less meat

By on May 25, 2016Share

Nobody in the United States paid much attention when the Chinese government released new dietary guidelines earlier this month. But hidden within them is a provision that could slash carbon emissions from livestock, according to the group Climate Nexus citing a forthcoming report from WildAid.

China is saying something simple and straightforward, something that the U.S. government has never been able to bring itself to say: Eat less meat.

If 1.3 billion Chinese people follow the guidelines and eat just 200 grams of meat and eggs a day — instead of increasing their meat consumption as expected — it would prevent a lot of greenhouse gas from entering the atmosphere. And when we say “a lot” we mean on the order of 1.5 percent of global emissions. That’s like zeroing out Mexico’s carbon emissions every year.

The Chinese dietary guidelines don’t say anything about greenhouse gasses, only about health. The government issued them as part of a campaign against obesity. Even so, in a statement responding to the news, food and climate expert Jonathan Foley underlined the importance of dietary changes.

“Reducing our meat consumption — especially red meat — even a little bit can have profound impacts on the future of the planet,” Foley said.

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China just said what the U.S. never has: Eat less meat

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Elizabeth Warren Invokes Taylor Swift, "One of the Great Philosophers of Our Time," to Slam Donald Trump

by NellBower602441 Posted on May 16, 2016

Mother Jones

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Sen. Elizabeth Warren used her commencement speech at Bridgewater State University on Saturday to speak about the importance of fighting for one’s beliefs, no matter the challenges ahead. But before her message resorted to the same tired clichés of most commencement speeches, Warren proceeded to frame her advice in terms that the millennials in the audience would be sure to understand.

“To put it differently, as one of the great philosophers of our time has said—haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate,” Warren said, invoking the lyrics of Taylor Swift. “Knowing who you are helps you ‘shake it off.'”

While Warren didn’t specifically name the presumptive GOP presidential nominee to the graduates of the Massachusetts college on Saturday, her use of Swift’s famous lyric comes as the Massachusetts senator ramp ups her attacks against Donald Trump on social media. She was not the only one. Speaking at Rutgers University the following day, President Barack Obama also indirectly took aim at Trump’s campaign, warning students about the dangers of ignorance and building a border wall at the US-Mexico border.

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Elizabeth Warren Invokes Taylor Swift, "One of the Great Philosophers of Our Time," to Slam Donald Trump

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Even with the Arctic out, offshore drilling isn’t slowing down

by choneqjxs Posted on May 11, 2016

Even with the Arctic out, offshore drilling isn’t slowing down

By on May 11, 2016Share

The oil industry just lost its chance at finding a fossil fuel goldmine in the U.S. Arctic. On Tuesday, Royal Dutch Shell formally gave up on its decade-long attempt of striking oil in the Arctic’s icy waters, relinquishing all but one of its oil and gas leases off of Alaska’s northwest coast. Last fall, the company abandoned its drilling plans in the Chukchi Sea for the “foreseeable” future, and President Barack Obama’s canceled new oil and gas leases there, too.

But that doesn’t mean offshore drilling is slowing down.

The Gulf of Mexico, long an epicenter of offshore drilling, is still wide open — and its oil and gas production is growing. There are currently more than 5,000 offshore active oil and natural gas leases in the Gulf of Mexico, according to the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM). More than two-thirds of these leases are for deep water drilling.

The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) is hammering out the final details for its five-year leasing plan, which will determine offshore areas that are fair game for oil exploration from 2017 to 2022. Right now, BOEM has proposed 10 new lease sales in the Gulf. The 45-million-acre area, said to contain the eighth-largest carbon reserve on Earth, will remain open to drilling unless the Obama administration changes its gameplan.

“The Gulf drilling is not going to cease unless another catastrophic disaster happens,” said Tyler Priest, a University of Iowa environmental historian who studies oil and energy, referring to the 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill that dumped 4.2 million barrels of oil into the Gulf. According to the Energy Information Administration, the Gulf supplies 17 percent of the country’s total crude oil.

So why is the oil business thriving in the Gulf while it’s largely faltered in the Arctic?

The reasons for the Gulf’s successes, according to Priest, can be attributed to the wealth of infrastructure already in place, the extensive network of pipelines and coastal refineries, and the seemingly endless stream of new oil reserve discoveries.

“It’s a totally different region from the Arctic, which is a long way away from infrastructure,” he told Grist, adding that companies can’t drill year-round in the Arctic. “But the Gulf just keeps on giving.”

Offshore oil has dominated for nearly 80 years. In 1938, Pure Oil and Superior Oil Company, now part of ExxonMobil, propped up the first oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico — a freestanding wooden deck — about a mile off the shore of Creole, La.

Offshore oil enterprises in the Gulf are relatively protected from oil prices fluctuating than other energy sources, Priest explained, because the infrastructure needed to support them is already so well-developed. So while oil prices are cheap and taking a toll on oil prospects nationwide, oil and gas production in the Gulf is expected to hit a record 1.82 million barrels per day in 2016 and 2017.

But there is one other variable that could put a stopper on the oil streaming out of the Gulf. Protesters have been attending offshore drilling auctions lately, demanding BOEM to cancel its leases. The idea that a group of activists could cut off one of the most lucrative, longest-running oil rigs in the United States may be a long shot — but it’s not like it hasn’t happened before.

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