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This Salvadoran Woman Served 4 Years for Having a Miscarriage

by AishaMcLean5884 Posted on July 12, 2016

Mother Jones

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Maria Teresa Rivera didn’t realize she was pregnant in 2011 when she went into early labor. The 28-year-old factory worker in El Salvador, who already had one son, started bleeding heavily late one night, so her family called an ambulance to drive her to the hospital. The next day, Rivera was taken to jail.

Her crime? Having a miscarriage.

Rivera is one of a number of women in El Salvador incarcerated not for abortion, which is illegal, but as a result of miscarriages. An abortion rights group in the area has identified 17 people convicted of homicide, with sentences upward of 40 years, after facing obstetric emergencies such as miscarriage or stillbirth.

After serving four of her 40-year prison sentence for aggravated homicide, Rivera’s conviction was overturned by a judge and she walked free this spring. But the prosecution appealed her release, and this week a three-judge panel will decide whether to hold a new hearing or throw out the charges for good.

Only six countries in the world, including El Salvador, ban abortion in all cases, even when the pregnancy is the result of rape or threatens the life of the mother. Nicaragua, Chile, the Dominican Republic, the Vatican city-state, and Malta are the only other places with similar prohibitions. In January, El Salvador’s deputy health minister told women to avoid getting pregnant for two years because of worries over the effects of Zika virus.

“A woman who procures herself an abortion is running a very high risk,” Carmen Barroso, the former regional director of the International Planned Parenthood Federation in the Western Hemisphere, told Mother Jones. “She’ll run the risk to her life because she’ll have to have an unsafe abortion because they are so limited in availability. It is tragic.”

The ban in El Salvador got international attention in 2013, when the country’s highest court rejected the abortion request of a young woman, known only as Beatriz, with a potentially life-threatening pregnancy, ruling the “rights of the mother cannot be privileged over those” of the fetus. The fetus suffered from anencephaly, a severe congenital disorder where the fetus’ brain and skull stop growing, giving it little chance of surviving outside the womb. The woman survived after getting a controversial caesarian section.

Despite the ban, more than 19,000 illegal abortions were reported in El Salvador between 2005 and 2008, according to the Ministry of Health’s Information, Monitoring, and Evaluation Unit, an estimate that advocates say is low. Nearly a third of abortions performed were on adolescents, who make up a large percent of the region’s unplanned pregnancies. According to the World Health Organization, 9 percent of maternal deaths in Central America are the result of illegal abortions.

As a result of the criminalization, women in El Salvador frequently face legal scrutiny for abortion-related crimes. According to research done by a Salvadoran advocacy group, between 2000 and 2011 about 130 women were criminally prosecuted for ending their pregnancies. That number doesn’t include cases where the allegations were dropped or cases involving minors, whose records are sealed. Almost 50 women were convicted of either illegal abortion or different degrees of homicide, which carries a sentence of up to 50 years.

Then there are the cases of the 17 women who are part of “Las 17,” as they’re known, who are all, like Rivera, young, impoverished, and accused of losing their pregnancies on purpose. Guadalupe Vasquez, a housekeeper, was only 17 years old when she became pregnant from rape. She decided to keep the baby but lost it during labor. After her employer sent her to the hospital, she was reported to the police and eventually sentenced to 30 years behind bars.

Many of the women, including Rivera, were reported to the police by medical staff at the hospital. In some cases, neighbors or friends called law enforcement.

“I felt the need to go to the bathroom, I pushed, and it was the baby that came out into the latrine,” Rivera said in a video from prison. She passed out from loss of blood and was in the hospital when she woke up. “Then they took me to this place,” she said.

Rivera was convicted “despite the complete lack of evidence of any wrongdoing,” according to an analysis of Las 17 cases by a Salvadoran lawyer and a Harvard sociologist. The analysis also concluded that Salvadoran courts systematically discriminated against the women by aggressively pursuing “the mother’s prosecution instead of pursuing the truth.”

“In stark contrast to the courts’ findings, our analysis concludes that the legal and medical facts in the majority of these cases correspond with medical emergency—not with homicide,” they wrote.

Rivera successfully appealed her conviction and has spent the last two months walking free.

“What worries me is leaving my son alone again,” Rivera, who grew up in orphanages, told Rewire after being released in May. “I was forced to abandon him for four and a half years, and he suffered greatly during that time.”

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This Salvadoran Woman Served 4 Years for Having a Miscarriage

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"No Flag to March Behind": The Amazing Story of Rio’s All-Refugee Olympic Team

by RemonaAllen924 Posted on May 30, 2016

Mother Jones

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Six nights a week, Popole Misenga travels by bus from a favela in the northern reaches of Rio de Janeiro to a private college on the city’s west side. The trip takes roughly two hours, and once he arrives—often beat from a day’s work loading trucks—he makes his way past the classrooms to the school’s small outdoor gym, where he slips on a heavy white judo robe, steps barefoot onto blue vinyl mats, and grapples with his workout partners until exhaustion sets in.

These days, Misenga is an Olympic-caliber athlete without a country. But before he was that, he was a member of the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s national team, which came to Brazil back in August 2013 to compete in the judo world championships. Misenga had survived the DRC’s devastating civil war only to suffer under its abusive coaches, who he says would punish him and his teammates for losing practice matches by denying them food for days and even locking them in a closet. (The secretary-general of the DRC’s judo federation claims this never happened.)

When the team arrived in Rio that year, things took on a new level of crazy. The head coach promptly disappeared, Misenga says, taking with him the athletes’ passports, food vouchers, and uniforms. Misenga had to borrow a competitor’s robe for his first match, which he lost in three minutes. When the coach finally returned after a three-day bender, Misenga decided he was done with his country: He would stay in Brazil as a refugee. Wandering around Rio, he began stopping every dark-skinned passerby to ask, in French, “Do you know where the Africans live?”

Misenga’s decision kicked off a chain of events that would lead the 24-year-old judoka to the cusp of competing in this summer’s Olympics as part of an inaugural all-refugee team consisting of athletes from around the world. Last October, with the Syrian migrant crisis sweeping Europe, International Olympic Committee (IOC) President Thomas Bach announced that, for the first time, refugee athletes “having no flag to march behind, having no national anthem to be played,” could compete in Rio 2016. The Olympic flag would be their banner.

Video by Fabio Erdos

All told, there are 43 athletes out of an estimated 20 million refugees worldwide who have been selected as potential members of Team Refugee Olympic Athletes. The IOC will announce the full team this week at its executive-board meeting; besides Misenga, the committee has publicly identified just two other contenders: taekwondo master Raheleh Asemani, an Iranian living in Belgium, and Syrian swimmer Yusra Mardini, who lives in Germany and whose backstory is the stuff of one of those Bob Costas-narrated profiles. Last August, Mardini and her sister left Turkey on a packed boat with 18 other Syrian refugees. After the engine failed, the sisters jumped into the water and helped kick the craft three-plus hours to the Greek island of Lesbos. (Yolande Mabika, another Congolese judoka who stayed in Brazil, also hopes to make the refugee team.)

Misenga grew up during a particularly bloody time in the eastern DRC, the site of a conflict that’s been described as Africa’s world war. A rebel attack forced him to flee his home on foot as a young child, leaving his family behind. (He hasn’t seen them since.) He ended up in the capital, Kinshasa, sleeping on the street with other children before finding an orphanage. It was there, at age nine, that he was introduced to judo. The sport instantly drew him in. “People who like judo are calm,” he told me, “with respect for other people.”

We chatted in the university’s courtyard, steps away from where he trains under the guidance of 73-year-old Geraldo Bernardes, who’s been to four Olympics as coach of Brazil’s national team. The day I visited, Misenga was late to practice, and his worried coach made some calls to make sure he showed up. By the time Misenga arrived, at dusk, the training session was all but over. Bernardes lectured Misenga about not wasting his opportunity before quickly switching gears to discuss his Olympic weight class. (They decided on 198 pounds; Misenga’s stocky frame was most of the way there.)

Bernardes met Misenga through a nonprofit he’d started with Olympic medalist Flávio Canto to provide an outlet for inner-city kids. He’d seen the young judoka through a difficult transition: Early on, Misenga fought like his life depended on it, sometimes yanking his partners onto the concrete slab surrounding the mat. No wonder, Bernardes added, given the “subhuman” conditions Misenga faced back home.

While he has adapted to his training in Brazil, Misenga still struggles away from the mats—especially when it comes to money. Instituto Reação, Bernardes’ nonprofit, helps Misenga with some basics. He’s occasionally found work loading boxes onto trucks for about $11 a day, but Misenga and his Brazilian wife have four mouths to feed—a one-year-old son, plus her three kids from a previous relationship. It embarrasses him that she’s the breadwinner: “A big guy like me should be able to pay for the house.”

It doesn’t help that his friends in Brás de Pina—a favela home to Angolans, Moroccans, and some Congolese—say things like, “Do you really think they’ll let you compete? Give up this dream and get a real job.” But Misenga is holding out hope. Maybe the games will lead to a sponsorship, or at least income steady enough to pay for some new sneakers—he’s been running in a pair scavenged from the trash.

After an hour of talking, it was getting late, and Misenga’s broad shoulders were starting to slump. We walked out through the university’s gate and said our goodbyes at a nearby intersection. Misenga crossed the street and headed up a hill, off to find the first of his two buses home. He still had a long way to go.

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"No Flag to March Behind": The Amazing Story of Rio’s All-Refugee Olympic Team

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Dangerous Work for “Crap Money”—The Dark Side of Recycling

by VenusBergeron47 Posted on April 12, 2016

Mother Jones

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Darkness had enveloped the Newell Recycling yard by the time Erik Hilario climbed into a front-end loader on a cold evening in January 2011. Hilario, a 19-year-old undocumented immigrant from Mexico, earned $8 an hour at the industrial park in East Point, Georgia, working amid jagged piles of scrap metal eventually bound for the smelter.

On this day, Hilario was driving a loader in a paved section of the nine-acre yard known as the defueler or car-processing area. Here, according to witness testimony, gasoline was drained from junked cars through a crude process employing a 30-foot crane and an 11-foot-tall structure topped with a spike known as The Puncher. A claw attached to the crane would pick up cars and smash them, gas tank first, onto the spike, spilling gasoline into a trough. The crane then would swing the cars onto a pile, dripping gas along the way.

As Hilario used the loader to slowly push metal scraps, a spark ignited the gasoline on the ground. An intense fire suddenly engulfed him. “Help me!” he screamed, his coworkers later testified.

When the fire was finally extinguished, Hilario’s severely burned body was found 10 feet from the charred loader. A doctor reviewing Hilario’s autopsy later determined that he was probably conscious for as long as five minutes before he died.

Recycling may be good for the environment, but working conditions in the industry can be woeful. The recycling economy encompasses a wide range of businesses, from tiny drop-off centers in strip malls to sprawling scrap yards and cavernous sorting plants. The industry also includes collection services, composting plants, and e-waste and oil recovery centers. Some of the jobs at these facilities are among the most dangerous in America. Others offer meager pay, and wage violations are widespread. Experts say much of the work is carried out by immigrants or temporary workers who are poorly trained and unaware of their rights.

“These are not good jobs,” says Jackie Cornejo, former director of Don’t Waste LA, a campaign to improve working conditions for waste and recycling workers Los Angeles. “People only hear about the feel-good aspects of recycling and zero waste, and rarely do they hear about the other side.”

The last comprehensive analysis of the American recycling industry, commissioned in 2001 by the National Recycling Coalition, estimated that it employed more than 1 million people. Private scrap yards alone generated more than an estimated $80 billion in revenue in 2015. The nation’s largest trash haulers, Waste Management and Republic Services, are also the largest recycling firms. In 2014, recycling generated a combined $1.7 billion in revenue for the two corporations, or about 7.5 percent of total sales.

But many of the companies that do this work are small and may lack the knowledge and resources to establish effective safety procedures. Recycling workers, by virtue of their immigration status or status as temps, often hesitate to speak up when they see hazards on the job or are victimized by the outright illegal behavior of their supervisors.

One of the largest sectors in recycling, scrap yards, has long had high fatality and injury rates. In 2014 its fatality rate was 20.8 deaths per 100,000 full-time workers, more than 9 times higher than manufacturing workers overall. The same year, garbage and recycling collectors had the fifth-highest fatality rate among the dozens of occupations analyzed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. No one tracks how many workers die across all recycling sectors. But at scrap yards and sorting facilities, at least 313 recycling workers were killed on the job from 2003 to 2014, according to the BLS.

A FairWarning analysis of Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) records found that inspections conducted from 2005 to 2014 resulted in scrap yards and sorting facilities receiving about 80 percent more citations per inspection than the average inspected worksite did.

Christopher Webb with his daughter in May 2012, two months before he was killed at a recycling plant in North Carolina. Allison Hildebrand

Recycling is dirty, labor-intensive work. It involves heavy machinery, including conveyor belts, shredders, and grinders that can pose a serious risk of injury or death, especially if they’re not properly serviced or lack basic safety features. Unlike many industrial processes, recycling cannot be completely systematized because it deals with an ever-changing flow of materials in all manner of shapes and sizes. Workers may have to personally handle most of the scrap passing through recycling facilities, potentially exposing them to sharp objects, toxics, carcinogens, or explosives.

“I did not realize the danger,” recalls Alice Pulliam of Reidsville, North Carolina, whose 32-year-old son, Christopher Webb, was killed at the Southern Investments plastic recycling plant in July 2012. It purchased loads of milk jugs, detergent bottles, and other recyclable plastics and ground them into bits for re-sale to businesses that would further process the material.

One day, just a couple of months after joining the 13-employee company, Webb was feeding giant bales of compacted bottles and jugs into an auger with 14 spinning blades. More than a foot long and sharpened to a point, these blades broke up the bales before they were ground into finer pieces. Following the plant’s standard procedure, Webb used a forklift to place the roughly three-foot high bales on an elevated platform next to the mouth of the auger, according to a report by the North Carolina Department of Labor’s Division of Occupational Safety and Health. While the blades spun below him, Webb climbed onto the bales to cut the wires holding them together. Then he used the forklift to push the bales into the auger.

Webb was on top of a bale when he fell into the spinning blades below, crushing his head. A subsequent investigation by the state department of labor found that plant employees weren’t instructed to shut down the auger while climbing on the bales, and that the machine did not have the proper guarding to prevent the blades from hitting workers.

The state cited Southern Investments with 35 safety violations, including 16 “willful violations,” and fined the company the unusually high sum of $441,000. The plant’s owner, Donald Southern, said he could not pay and agreed to close Southern Investments and not manage another plastic recycling business in North Carolina. He declined to comment for this story.

Generally, the hazards at scrap yards and sorting facilities are typical of any major industrial operation Safety measures to make these workplaces less dangerous are well known and widely implemented in other industries. “This is not rocket science,” says Susan Eppes, a Houston-based safety consultant to the recycling industry.

Although OSHA says that 5 of its 10 regions have special enforcement programs covering sectors of the recycling industry, safety advocates say that isn’t enough. “Systematically, across the country, they haven’t given the industry the attention it’s due,” says Eric Frumin, the health and safety director for Change to Win, a partnership of four national unions. Advocates are lobbying the agency to create a national program aimed at sorting plants, where metal, paper, and plastic are separated. The Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries, a trade association, recently announced that it is partnering with OSHA to try to reduce injury and fatality rates.

Yet basic safety procedures are often ignored in recycling plants, experts say. Consider the case of Robert Santos, a 46-year-old line supervisor at a Republic Services plant in North Las Vegas, where he helped dump mounds of recyclables onto a conveyor belt. Using radios, workers would direct front-end loaders to push paper from a holding bay onto the belt, which rolled towards a baler. State safety inspectors later learned that it was common for employees to stand on the moving belt to pull material from the holding bay, or to sweep up material along its sides.

“he was dead working for crap money”
The recycling industry tends to attract the desperate and the downtrodden. “It’s a low end of the economy,” says Eric Frumin of Change to Win. “We’ve shipped all the factory jobs to China, so what is the modern-day equivalent of dirty, dangerous factory jobs? Warehouses and recycling plants.”

Take the case of 51-year-old David Lightfritz, who was killed in a 2011 accident at Marietta Industrial Enterprises in Ohio when he tried unjamming a large machine used to separate glass from paper and plastics. Lightfritz got into the recycling business after his previous employer learned he was a registered sex offender. “He didn’t have anything else,” says his older brother, Willard Lightfritz. “He wasn’t out of prison long and he was dead working for crap money”—around $7 an hour.

Recycling drop-off centers have become a priority target of wage theft investigations in California by the Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division. Ruben Rosalez, the division’s western regional administrator, says these small businesses are among the “worst that we have to deal with,” and are as exploitative as sweatshops or the agricultural industry.

Wage and Hour investigators in Los Angeles have found that these businesses were often paying their employees as little as $55 or $65 a day, regardless of the hours they worked. Some employers were found to not even keep payroll records, and some failed to provide bathrooms for workers.

On the morning of June 8, 2012, work at the sorting facility was delayed two hours because a mass of paper had clogged the holding bay. Once the jam was cleared, Santos stood on the conveyor belt, yanking paper from the bay, when two to three tons of paper suddenly collapsed on top of him. A coworker would later remember him shouting “Stop the belt! Stop the belt!” before he was enveloped in a pile of paper eight feet high.

After the paper was lifted off of him, Santos was found to have minimal brain activity. He was taken off life support six days later and died. The Nevada Occupational Safety and Health Administration fined Republic Services $5,390 for the incident. Asked to justify such a small fine for a fatal accident, Nevada OSHA’s chief administrative officer said it was in line with agency policy, and that investigators did not find “clear indifference to employee safety and health.” Republic Services did not respond to requests for comment.

After his fatal accident, Erik Hilario’s family moved quickly to file a wrongful death lawsuit. Newell Recycling of Atlanta and the Hilario family declined to comment for this story.

Last September, a jury in Fulton County, Georgia, awarded $29.2 million to the Hilario family. Newell and the family subsequently settled out of court. But the pain of a life cut short lingers Hilario’s family, who were described by their lawyer as still reeling from Erik’s death five years later. “He wanted to be somebody,” Erik’s older brother, Efrain, recalled in his tearful testimony during the trial. “He had many dreams.”

Bridget Huber contributed to this report. The Courtroom View Network provided access to its archive of video trial testimony.

FairWarning, which reported this story, is a nonprofit news organization that focuses on public health, safety, and environmental issues. A longer version of the story appears at fairwarning.org.

Continued – 

Dangerous Work for “Crap Money”—The Dark Side of Recycling

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The Election in Arizona Was a Mess

by Trinidad36A Posted on March 24, 2016

Mother Jones

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Faith Decker, a 19-year-old sophomore at Arizona State University, got off work a little early Tuesday night so she could vote in her first-ever primary. She arrived at a church in southeast Phoenix just before 7 p.m. to find “the line wrapped completely around the corner, 300 to 400 people.” After waiting in that line for more than three hours, she finally reached the check-in desk. She was told that she couldn’t vote—not because the polls had closed three hours before, but because she was registered in a different county.

Decker says that while waiting in line, she saw several people get frustrated and leave before they cast their ballots, and that the election workers seemed confused, taking a long time to process voters once they got to the table.

“It’s just kind of all a giant disappointment to everyone who usually comes out and votes in person,” she said. And as a first-time voter she was shocked “to see that it was so unorganized, or disorderly.”

Decker’s long wait and disappointing outcome was shared by many voters in Maricopa County, Arizona, the state’s biggest county, with 2 million registered voters, who live in Phoenix, Scottsdale, Mesa, Glendale, and other larger communities. Images of people waiting hours under the hot sun and into the night filled Twitter timelines and cable TV broadcasts. The last person to cast a ballot didn’t do so until after midnight, according to the Arizona Republic, nearly five hours after the Democratic race had already been called for Hillary Clinton, and a few hours after Donald Trump was declared as the Republican winner.

Election officials said that the long lines were due, in part, to a large number of unaffiliated or independent voters trying to vote. Only those registered with one of the recognized parties were allowed to cast ballots. The state’s Republican governor, Doug Ducey, issued a statement Wednesday morning calling the situation “unacceptable” and called for allowing independents to be able to vote in presidential primaries.

But Arizona has a long history of problems at the ballot box. Until 2013, the Grand Canyon State was one of 16 states required to clear all changes to voting law and procedures with the US Department of Justice, under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, because of its history of discriminatory and racist election practices. The two-part formula used to determine which jurisdictions would fall under the Department of Justice’s review process was created nearly fifty years before in 1965 and attempted to insure that the voting age population actually was able to vote. The first criteria was if a jurisdiction had a “test or device” that restricted the opportunity to register to vote on Nov. 1, 1964. The state would also be scrutinized if less than half of voting-age people in a jurisdiction were registered to vote, or if less than half of the voting-age population actually did vote in the presidential election of November 1964.

The formula was ruled unconstitutional in the 2013 US Supreme Court decision Shelby County v. Holder, in which an Alabama County argued that jurisdictions covered by Section 5 “must either go hat in hand to Justice Department officialdom to seek approval, or embark on expensive litigation in a remote judicial venue.” With the court’s ruling, Arizona (and the other states and jurisdictions previously covered by so-called “pre-clearance”) could make changes to voting laws and procedures without federal oversight. But in a state that took six years to adopt a Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday, is the home of the controversial Maricopa County Sheriff, and Donald Trump supporter, Joe Arpaio, and where SB 1070 required police to determine a person’s immigration status when there was “reasonable suspicion” that they were in the country illegally, the difficulties in voting raised some concerns about darker motivations.

Maricopa County Recorder Helen Purcell, the woman in charge of administering the county’s elections, said in an interview with a local news reporter Tuesday night that “the voters, for getting in line” were at least partly to blame for the long lines:

On Wednesday she told the county board of supervisors that she would “do it differently” if she could do it again, and that she “takes the blame” for what went wrong. She also blamed independent and unaffiliated voters who tried to vote for slowing down the process. Maricopa County Supervisor Steve Gallardo said, “I just don’t buy that,” according to the Arizona Republic.

Purcell couldn’t be reached for comment.

One reason for the long lines is the fact that the county went from 200 polling locations in 2012 to just 60 in 2016. As Republic reporter Caitlin McGlade noted Tuesday night, Maricopa County’s 60 polling locations worked out to about one for every 20,833 eligible voters, compared to one polling station serving 2,500 voters in other Arizona counties.

State Sen. Martín Quezada, (D-Phoenix), offered his own explanation for the lack of polling locations in his area on Wednesday:

Tammy Patrick, the county’s former federal elections compliance officer, is now a senior advisor of the Democracy Project at the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington DC, where she consults with jurisdictions around the country about voting administration best practices. She said that the comparison between 200 polling stations in 2012 and 60 in 2016 is misleading because the 200 polling stations in 2012 were “precinct-specific”, while the 60 this year were so-called “voting centers,” where voters could cast ballots anywhere in the county. Jurisdictions in 33 states are moving to or already use a vote-center model, she says, which are attempts by local election officials to help voters who appear at incorrect precinct voting locations.

“This alleviates all of that,” she says. “People could go anywhere, but it also meant they had to have much larger facilities. So they had fewer number of options on where they could get a facility large enough to be a vote center that would allow them in.”

Patrick’s job from late 2004 through the end of the Voting Rights Act coverage in 2013 was to make sure Maricopa County voting decisions complied with federal laws. She said her former county election colleagues “were all very disappointed when the Voting Rights Act enforcement went away because it kind of protected them from the crazy legislature down the street.”

The question remains why county level officials limited the number of vote-centers to just 60, but Patrick suggests it might have to do with finding locations around the county that could accommodate large groups of people and would likely have occurred under the old Voting Rights Act requirements, despite suggestions to the contrary. She admitted, though, that there’s a context for concerns about discrimination.

“It’s a heightened environment, without a doubt,” she says. “Anything that doesn’t go absolutely perfectly is going to be viewed as some sort of a tactic. Now when it comes to things like legislation, that’s quite possible that there are legislative acts that are done down the street that maybe have that sort of intent, but that’s certainly not the case at the local level.”

The Arizona Republic called the entire situation an “outrage” in an editorial Wednesday, and added that the decision to switch to a vote-center model was a “cost-cutting measure” that was “badly bungled” by county election officials who “did not account for such things as high turnout or parking.”

Whoever’s to blame, the net result was the same: thousands of people stood in line for hours, some of whom gave up and ended up not voting. Erika Andiola, the national press secretary for Latino outreach for the Sanders campaign, said she heard from her volunteers about people leaving lines and waiting hours and hours to vote.

“I’m pretty sure that other campaigns were concerned,” Andiola says. “It’s not just about Bernie Sanders, but it’s really about Arizona. How can you have such a big number of people who are trying to participate in our elections that are treated this way? We want to encourage voting, we don’t want to discourage voting. That’s definitely not something we should be doing in any state.”

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The Election in Arizona Was a Mess

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Are Immigration Agents Defying the President?

by CharoletteCambe Posted on January 21, 2016

Mother Jones

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As you all know, the Supreme Court has agreed to rule on the legality of President Obama’s 2014 immigration program—Deferred Action for Parental Accountability, or DAPA. Like DACA, the “mini-DREAM” rule that Obama established in 2012, DAPA codifies the president’s ability to direct prosecutorial resources by explicitly telling immigration agents to do what they’ve mostly been doing anyway: ignore undocumented immigrants who have clean records and have been in the US for a long time. The key word here is “mostly.” Nearly all immigrants who fit the DAPA criteria are left untouched, but immigration agents continue to randomly deport some of them. Over at the New Republic, Spencer Amdur makes an interesting argument that this is at the core of the legal case:

As the administration tries to rationalize its immigration policy, the biggest challenge has actually come from within….In 2011, the head of ICE, John Morton, issued a memorandum directing agents not to focus their limited resources on immigrants with clean records, long-time residence, and families in the United States….Morton issued several of these “priorities” memos, and line-level agents almost universally ignored them, continuing to deport immigrants with deep roots here and no convictions.

….Later in 2011, the administration instructed immigration prosecutors to close cases of people who were not priorities for deportation; little changed. In 2012, the administration asked agents to stop sending detention requests to local police for immigrants without criminal records. Still nothing.

….This pattern of defiance is not mentioned in any of the briefs or court decisions in United States v. Texas. But it was an essential antecedent for DAPA, which effectively forces immigration agents to follow the previous policies….This is the elephant in the courtroom. The lawsuit is not just about the balance of power between the president and Congress, as the briefs suggest. It’s about democratic control of the police. Do our elected officials have the right to control the enforcement bureaucracy?

The fact that this isn’t mentioned in any of the briefs suggests it’s not taken seriously by anyone. Should it be?

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Are Immigration Agents Defying the President?

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Here’s Why the Ted Cruz Birther Story Isn’t Going Away

by KathleneT54 Posted on January 15, 2016

Mother Jones

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During the memorable clash between Donald Trump and Ted Cruz at last night’s Republican presidential debate, the real estate mogul explained why he has persistently raised questions about his Canadian-born rival’s eligibility to serve as president.

“If for some reason…he beats the rest of the field, I already know the Democrats are going to be bringing a suit,” Trump said. “You have a big lawsuit over your head while you’re running. And if you become the nominee, who the hell knows if you can even serve in office?”

As it turns out, Trump’s concerns over a lawsuit weren’t unwarranted. In fact, one was filed that same day by Houston lawyer Newton Boris Schwartz Sr. The suit asks a federal judge to define the “(1) status (2) qualifications and (3) eligibility or ineligibility of defendant for election to the office of the President and vice President of the United States.” In the poorly written, 28-page complaint, Schwartz noted that this question is “now ripe for decision,” and then invoked the so-called birther arguments used against President Barack Obama (see the full complaint below):

If all that was and is required for Defendant’s eligibility for the election to the office of the President and Vice President of the United States is that one of his biological parents be a U.S. citizen at the time of his birth in Canada outside the 50 United States…then why have the “birthers” or “doubters” and questioners of the place of birth of the 44th President of the United States, Barack Hussein Obama have persisted to this date and prior to his 2008 elections in 2008 and 2012? When undisputedly: (1) he was born in the U.S. state of Hawaii after its admission on August 21, 1959 and is documented by his birth records…”

It’s unclear what will come of this complaint, but this isn’t the only birther action that Cruz is contending with. Also on Thursday, the Arizona Republic reported that Rep. Kelly Townsend, a Republican state legislator from the Phoenix suburb of Mesa, is “circulating a measure at the Arizona legislature that would call a U.S. constitutional convention to outline what it means to be a natural-born citizen.” The paper notes that Townsend hopes to get her Legislature on board before reaching out to other states, since, after all, “it will take 34 states to convene such a meeting, something that hasn’t happened since 1787.”

This legislative effort—like the lawsuit—appears quixotic. But Trump has ensured this question of his natural-born citizenship status will dog him. As seen in last night’s debate, Trump’s questioning of Cruz’s eligibility has marked a turning point in relations between the two candidates, who have previously refrained from attacking each other throughout the campaign. But, as Trump told CNN’s Dana Bash after Thursday’s debate, “I guess the bromance is over.”

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Here’s Why the Ted Cruz Birther Story Isn’t Going Away

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I Hated All the Star Wars Movies, Except This One. Here’s Why.

by SharylDellinger Posted on December 18, 2015

Mother Jones

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Star Wars: The Force Awakens just hit theaters. We asked Mother Jones’ own Ben Dreyfuss—a known Star Wars critic—and Edwin Rios—a self-proclaimed fanboy—to share their thoughts after seeing the highly anticipated picture. This discussion has been edited for clarity.

Edwin Rios: BEN!

Ben Dreyfuss: Eddie! OK, Star Wars is here! I just walked out of a 10 a.m. showing. You saw it this morning?

ER: I’ve been up since 4 a.m. Somehow, I’m alive after a 5:15 a.m. showing.

BD: 5:15 a.m. is commitment. That is true love. So let’s start this this way, then: You are a Star Wars fan, correct?

ER: Yeah, back when I was a child, my pops had the original VHS box set. I may or may not have watched it on loop.

BD: OK, so you are saying you love the original Star Wars films because they remind you of playing catch with your dad? There are daddy issues here. Which is fine!

ER: Hmm, I hadn’t thought of that.

BD: OK, so let me just start by saying that I am not a Star Wars fan. I guess when they first came out in the ’70s and early ’80s, the graphics were kickass and new and “wow!” but for people our age they’re not that impressive.

ER: Totally understand that. The first film actually came out in 1977. I would imagine it was pretty revolutionary for its time—the graphics, the camera work, the idea that these randos are traveling through space on an intergalactic adventure.

BD: But let’s talk about this new one. And SPOILER ALERT: We will spoil it all.

ER: Yeah, c’mon, it’s the 21st century, and we’re on the Internet. Spoilers are everywhere. By the way, did you hear Daniel Craig apparently made a cameo?

BD: WHAT?

ER: Yeah! Apparently he was in that scene with Rey, when she asked the Stormtrooper oh so nicely to loosen her restraints.

BD: That was a great scene. OK, general thoughts: I really enjoyed it. I thought it was far and away the best of the series.

ER: See, I’m not sure about “best of the series.” I thoroughly enjoyed every moment, from the iconic John Williams opener to the TIE fighter battle at the end. It harkened to the original trilogy most of the time. But—

BD: Well, I mean we could call this entire fucking film an homage to the original. SO many elements are reproduced. They even joke about it when Harrison Ford is looking at a model of the Death Star and the SUPER DEATH STAR and he says, “I get it. It’s big.”

ER: I mean, it’s a fan’s wet dream.

BD: There is this fight in films like this about whether they should be written for fans or for general audiences. I think you see a lot of ones that go awry are because they’re trying too hard to accommodate the diehards, à la Watchmen, but this one had seemed to also have enough broad appeal to stand on its own.

ER: Totally agree. Can we talk about this cast? That’s what did it for me. It’s just a young and diverse collection of heroes and villains. Badass female lead, badass black and Latino duo.

BD: The leads, whose names I don’t know, but the guy and the girl, they were both pretty fucking amazing.

ER: For sure. This was John Boyega’s (Finn) and Daisy Ridley’s (Rey) launch party. Oh, and Adam freaking Driver killed it as a petulant Darth Vader wannabe.

BD: Totally. And I found, to my surprise, that they really were more interesting than the original actors who admittedly had less to do in this film. But I was sort of bored by their requisite presence and wanted to get back to the Star Wars: The New Class.

ER: A cast of nobodies embodying the allure of an iconic series. It looks all too familiar. Also, can’t forget Oscar Isaac. He was severely underutilized.

BD: Let’s talk a bit about the plot.

ER: How did you feel about the First Order’s weird Nazi overtones?

BD: Oh man! They laid that on thick! That scene with them literally heiling the SS guy?

ER: I literally whispered, “damn, that’s so Nazi,” under my breath when that scene came on.

BD: In one of the first scenes, the Stormtroopers go to the shitty sand planet and are executing people, and the hero, Finn, watches his friend die and there’s the blood on his mask—and he like grows as a person. I mean, from the standpoint of his military career he really did not have a stellar first mission. But I thought the actual emotional moment was some pretty beautiful storytelling that you don’t often see in this genre.

ER: Yeah, it’s something you barely thought about in the original movies. What would happen if a Stormtrooper just said, “Forget this, I’m outta here”? And what if some random scavenger on a desert planet ran into that same Stormtrooper? It’s an alternative perspective on the typical storyline.

BD: How did you feel about the old crew’s presence? Carrie Fisher wasn’t really given much to do.

ER: Neither was R2-D2.

BD: WAIT. R2 D-2. Now I have a question. I totally didn’t understand what the fuck that was about. He had a map but went dark when Luke flew away and then just decided to repower on right at the last second after X many years?

ER: Actually, let’s get back to that, because I have thoughts on that. In a word: It was so fucking implausible. Like WTF R2, NOW YOU WANT TO WAKE UP?

BD: HAHAHAH. It made NO SENSE. They didn’t even try and justify it in dialogued.

ER: Yeah, BB8, who is so adorable, was just like, “Oh shit, you’re awake!” And C3PO is like, “Oh, hi.” Basically.

BD: Is BB8 the ball?

ER: Yeah.

BD: The ball was great. The ball is a fucking star.

ER: Ball So Hard.

BD: Why does the ball talk in clicks and beeps? Like I know R2-D2 does too but it seems very difficult for many of the humans to deal with. Like some know how to speak beep and squeak but other don’t. Why don’t they program the robots to talk in English like Mr. Gold C3PO?

ER: Good question.

BD: THE BALL CAN CLEARLY UNDERSTAND ENGLISH. WHY CAN’T HE SPEAK IT? This is actually my biggest complaint about this movie. I took the time to tweet about it from the theater.

ER: I mean, the droid is still a robot. And it has the capacity to understand, which made it hilarious when Finn was trying to get BB to side with him.

BD: Yeah that was a cute scene. There were a lot of really cute scenes.

ER: Here’s my problem with the plot: It lacked context.

BD: How so?

ER: So let me get this straight: The First Order and the Resistance are fighting. The First Order is basically like the Empire, but not like the Empire. The Resistance is like the Republic, but not actually the Republic. The First Order is controlled by the Dark Side, while the Resistance is trying to establish peace?

BD: Yeah, without any Force. Like they have no Jedi since Luke ran off to play Survivor on some island.

ER: Beautiful shot, by the way. Mark Hamill in his best acting performance since The Kingsman. I just saw that movie recently and was like “OMG Mark Hamill’s head explodes!”

BD: He has spent the last like 20 years doing voiceover work. I think he was in a bunch like animated Batman series.

ER: For sure. He’s kept busy. But back to the plot: Luke has disappeared, and everyone is trying to find him.

BD: You’ve just reminded me of another plot flaw. What sets this movie off aside from the personal revelation that being a Stormtrooper is bad? Like the Super Death Star Ray that the Empire or First Order whatever the hell they’re called is already online. They use it to kill like 10,000,000,000 people midway through and then are going to use it to kill the rest of them. But they didn’t just turn it on. They could have done that months or years or whenever ago.

ER: Right. Also, not a smart move to absorb the sun’s energy to power the weapon. It really screwed the First Order at the end of the day.

BD: I’m no scientist but when suns collapse they like create dark holes I think which are bad. Wait, I have another question. Let’s just acknowledge this right here: Adam Driver or whatever his character’s name is kills Harrison Ford in a pretty obvious moment of like “shake my hand, pa, let’s have a game of catch” and then stabs him in the heart. Then some other shit happens and the girl discovers she has the Force and gets Luke’s lightsaber and then suddenly has all this Force power and does some Force shit and she kills Adam Driver in the woods.

ER: So, two things: I still want to know Rey’s backstory. Whose child is she? And why was she abandoned in the desert? And with whom? But yeah, back to Han Solo’s horrific death scene: It genuinely felt like that moment in Empire Strikes Back, I think, when Luke finds out Vader is his pops and has a WTF moment. Only this time, Kylo Ren seems to have a moment of “maybe I can be good” and then says, “no way” and kills his dad.

BD: So my other question was, how does the girl become so good at sword fighting? I get she has the Force in her because she just has the Force in her, but Adam Driver has been training to kill people with his crucifix lightsaber for years. She just got her first lightsaber and is suddenly winning fucking gold medals in fencing at the Olympics.

ER: If you can fight with a staff in the desert, you can use a lightsaber. Although it also raises the question: How was Finn using the lightsaber so well? He worked in sanitation!

BD: That’s a great point.

ER: He was a janitor, basically. And yet he wielded a lightsaber and went pound for pound against Kylo Ren. Also, let’s appreciate just how much of a child Kylo Ren acted like when things went wrong for him. And how he Force-choked that one general.

BD: Literally having a tantrum and destroying his battleship room with his lightsaber.

ER: He’s got anger and daddy issues.

BD: Final thoughts: I really liked it. I think the reason it is better than the original movies (which are overrated) and the prequels (which are garbage but also somewhat underrated because everyone hates them so much) is largely because J.J. Abrams is a better and more technically inventive filmmaker than George Lucas. (also, for the record, I called this months ago)

ER: But Ben, the originals are not overrated, and The Force Awakens exemplifies why. The things that made the Star Wars series great—its pace, its wit, its storytelling—are what made this movie all the more memorable.

BD: NO WHAT MADE IT GREAT WAS THE CAST AND J.J. ABRAMS.

ER: For the Star Wars fan, this was a wet dream come true. For the typical moviegoer, it was straight-up a good holiday action film.

BD: “Wet dream” is a thing I bet most Star Wars fans know well since they’re all adolescent boys with acne. (Sorry, no offense. I was once one too.)

ER: J.J. Abrams, you done good.

BD: And with that, let’s publish this motherfucker.

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I Hated All the Star Wars Movies, Except This One. Here’s Why.

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Climate Change Deniers Try to Derail the Paris Talks

by Myrna Posted on December 8, 2015

The GOP is making its presence felt at the conference. Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP LE BOURGET, France—Monday began what’s supposed to be the final week of the climate talks, the one where top-level negotiators hammer out an accord to stop the deadly march of global warming. To troll this momentous event, the climate change deniers at the Heartland Institute came all the way from Chicago to stage a “counter-conference” at a central Paris venue called, seriously, the Hotel California. I don’t know much about what happened on that dark desert highway, in part because journalists with the climate advocacy site DeSmogBlog were kicked out before the session began. Heartland’s Jim Lakely told me DeSmogBlog engaged in “overt advocacy.” Kyla Mandel, one of the two bloggers booted, responded that he’s probably referring to them having told other journalists that Heartland has received funding from ExxonMobil. (Lakely didn’t elaborate.) A few reporters briefly noted the “counter-conference” and moved on, which is the attention it deserved. While there are intense arguments about how to address climate change, there is no real debate among scientists about the core facts: Human contributions to the greenhouse effect are making the Earth hotter, which is bad for life. We can already see it happening, and pretty much the only people still clinging to denial live in well-off, English-speaking countries, primarily the United States. Which is probably why the denial event drew such a paltry crowd—organizers say a multiple of 20—compared to the thousands at anti-carbon emissions protests in the city and tens of thousands at the 196-party United Nations conference here. And yet, at the real conference on Monday, it became clear that there are important reasons not to ignore that small, well-funded American faction entirely. For all the worldwide agreement on global warming, this week’s negotiators are hashing out the thorny issues of what should be done, by whom and when. Big fights include who will pay for existing and future damage and how to make sure that countries live up to all the promises they’ve made and will make this week. Read the rest at The New Republic. Read article here:  Climate Change Deniers Try to Derail the Paris Talks ; ; ;

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Climate Change Deniers Try to Derail the Paris Talks

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Big Recessions Are Good For Right-Wing Politics

by MarylouKelsall Posted on December 2, 2015

Mother Jones

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I guess today is David Dayen day. Over at the New Republic, he points me to an interesting new historical study of systemic banking crises. Here’s what happens when the financial system implodes:

Both before and after WWII, the authors find the same dynamic: the voting share of far-right parties increases by about a third and national legislatures become more fractured and dysfunctional. This doesn’t happen after normal recessions. Only after major recessions caused by a banking crisis.

Why? The authors are unsure. One possible explanation, they say, is that financial crises “may have social repercussions that are not observable after non-financial recessions. For example, it is possible that the disputes between creditors and debtors are uglier or that inequality rises more strongly….Financial crises typically involve bailouts for the financial sector and these are highly unpopular, which may result in greater political dissatisfaction.” Or maybe this: “After a crisis, voters seem to be particularly attracted to the political rhetoric of the extreme right, which often attributes blame to minorities or foreigners.”

Since we’re guessing here, I’ll add my two cents. People are, in general, more generous when times are good. Policywise, they’re more likely to approve of safety net programs that help the poor, which are generally associated with the left. But when times turn bad, people get scared and mean—and the longer the bad times last, the meaner they get. When people have lost their jobs, or had their hours cut, or seen the value of their home crash, they’re just not as sympathetic to helping out the poor. They’re looking out for their own families instead.

Politically, the result of this is pretty obvious. Liberal parties think that bad times are precisely when the poor need the most help, so they propose more social spending. Right-wing parties, by contrast, oppose increased spending.

In public, this usually isn’t framed as support or opposition to doling out money to the poor. Liberals talk about stimulus and countercyclical spending. Conservatives talk about massive budget deficits and skyrocketing government outlays. But it doesn’t really matter. What people hear is that liberals want to spend more on the poor and conservatives don’t. When people are feeling vulnerable and mean, the conservative message resonates with them.

From a practical policy standpoint, this makes little sense. Liberals are right that recessions are the best time to spend more on safety-net programs, both because the poor need the help and because it acts as useful stimulus. But human nature doesn’t work that way, and conservatives have the better read on that.

So what’s the answer? Dayen suggests that banks and bank bailouts are central to this dynamic, so we need to take a meat axe to the political power of the financial sector. I’m all for that. But my guess is that this isn’t really key. I think people just get scared when times are bad, and hate the idea of their tax dollars going to other people. This means the answer is to assuage both their financial anxiety and their perception that their money is being spent on the poor. So how about something that dramatically makes this point? Say, a one-year income tax holiday for everyone making less than $70,000 coupled with explicit promises to increase the deficit and help the poor. The tax holiday could be extended year by year as necessary, or phased out gradually.

Why something like this? Because it puts more money in everyone’s pocket and reduces their angst over money matters. It also makes it crystal clear that their money isn’t being spent on the poor. They aren’t paying any taxes, after all. Under those circumstances, helping out the poor would probably strike most people as a lovely idea.

Obviously conservatives would still oppose this, and the tax holiday wouldn’t last forever. Still, it’s worth a thought. You need something dramatic to cut through people’s fears, and this might do it.

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Big Recessions Are Good For Right-Wing Politics

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We Can Stop Pretending Any of the 2016 Republicans Believe in Science

by UlrikeSteffen Posted on November 11, 2015

Mother Jones

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This story originally appeared in The New Republic, and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Rand Paul was having a decent night in the fourth Republican debate Tuesday, until he fielded a question about climate change. With his answer, he disappointed those who thought he might deliver reality-based comments.

Paul, like the rest of the GOP candidates, wants to repeal President Barack Obama’s legacy-making Clean Power Plan reining in carbon emissions from the power sector. On Tuesday, Paul firmly aligned himself with the science-denier camp. “While I do think man may have a role in our climate, I think nature also has a role,” Paul said. “The planet is 4.5 billion years old. We’ve been through geologic age after geologic age. We’ve had times when the temperature’s been warmer. We’ve had times when the temperature’s been colder. We’ve had times when carbon in the atmosphere has been higher. So I think we need to look before we leap.”

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We Can Stop Pretending Any of the 2016 Republicans Believe in Science

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