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Senators Press Feds to Stop Locking Up Central American Families Who Have Fled for Their Lives

by LorenD35vd Posted on October 7, 2016

Mother Jones

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Roughly 30 Central American women and their children who are applying for asylum in the United States are being held outside Philadelphia in a federal immigration detention center called the Berks County Residential Center. Many have been there for more than a year, and in August, 22 mothers went on hunger strike to protest their prolonged detention. Now, a group of 17 Democratic senators, including former presidential candidate Bernie Sanders and current vice presidential candidate Tim Kaine, have called on Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson to release the families and end the practice of family detention.

“Many of these mothers have asylum claims based on rape, severe domestic violence, and murder threats,” the senators wrote in a letter released on Tuesday. “It is unconscionable to keep these children locked up and goes against our most fundamental values.” The children at Berks, who make up about half the population of detainees, range in age from 2 to 16 years old. Many have been held for months and, in some cases, more than a year. The senators said family detention is “wrong” and “should be ended immediately,” pointing to research showing that prolonged confinement is harmful to children’s physical and mental health.

The Berks Center is one of three family detention centers in the country. The other two, located in Texas, were opened by the Obama administration in 2014 in response to the surge in unaccompanied minors crossing the border. Around that time, the centers came under scrutiny for poor medical care, lack of access to legal council, and alleged sexual abuse. (Earlier this year, one former guard at Berks was sentenced to prison for sexually assaulting a teenage detainee.)

Last summer, the administration announced a series of reforms to reduce the length of confinement. Shortly afterward, a district court in California ordered the government to release migrant children within three to five days of their initial confinement, or within 20 days under extreme circumstances. The administration says it has taken steps to come into compliance with that court decision. Secretary Johnson has said his agency is detaining families for an average of 20 days or less, but advocates say the experience of the Berks mothers tells another story.

The 17 senators urged Johnson to review their cases and release them unless they are a serious flight risk or threat to public safety. Hillary Clinton has taken a similar position as her running mate and called for an end to family detention.

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Senators Press Feds to Stop Locking Up Central American Families Who Have Fled for Their Lives

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The Pentagon Is Reversing Its Long-Standing Policy on Sex Reassignment Surgery

by AngelinMurdoch Posted on September 30, 2016

Mother Jones

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Starting next week, the Pentagon will pay for gender reassignment surgery for eligible soldiers, a change that comes after the military lifted its long-standing ban on transgender service members earlier this summer.

Soldiers will be eligible for the surgery if they have a medical condition related to their gender identity, such as gender dysphoria, that has hindered their ability to serve, a Defense Department spokesman told USA Today. The military will also cover hormone therapy for eligible soldiers.

“The Secretary of Defense has made clear that service members with a diagnosis from a military medical provider indicating that gender transition is medically necessary will be provided medical care and treatment for the diagnosed medical condition,” Air Force Major Ben Sakrisson, a Pentagon spokesman, told Stars and Stripes.

Out of a total force of about 1.3 million active-duty service members, an estimated 1,320 to 6,630 are transgender, according to a recent study by RAND Corp., which analyzed the health care needs of trans soldiers at the request of Defense Secretary Ash Carter. But “only a small portion of service members would likely seek gender transition-related medical treatments that would affect their deployability or health care costs,” RAND concluded. It estimated that 25 to 130 active-duty soldiers would have gender reassignment surgery annually, while 30 to 140 soldiers would begin hormone treatment every year. That would translate to an additional annual cost of between $2.4 million and $8.4 million, or a 0.13 percent increase in current spending.

Critics of the new policy worry that too many soldiers will be unqualified for deployment for long periods of time because of gender reassignment surgery. But RAND estimated that only 10 to 130 active-duty service members would have reduced deployability every year, and it described this amount as “negligible” compared with the 50,000 active-duty soldiers in the Army who are nondeployable.

For decades, the military had discharged soldiers who received medical treatment for a gender transition. But in June, the Defense Department announced it would allow openly transgender people to serve, and that soldiers would be allowed to transition genders during their service. “We can’t allow barriers unrelated to a person’s qualifications to prevent us from recruiting and retaining those who can best accomplish the mission,” Carter said. But at the time of the announcement, it wasn’t clear whether the Pentagon would agree to pay for gender reassignment surgery as a medically necessary procedure, or if it would instead treat the surgery as an elective, cosmetic procedure.

In September, the Army agreed to provide gender reassignment surgery to Chelsea Manning, a transgender soldier serving a 35-year prison sentence for leaking classified documents. Days later, the Defense Department announced it would begin covering the surgeries for eligible active-duty soldiers, too, starting in October.

“I am unendingly relieved that the military is finally doing the right thing,” Manning said of the Army’s decision, which came after she attempted to commit suicide and went on a hunger strike. “I applaud them for that. This is all that I wanted—for them to let me be me.”

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The Pentagon Is Reversing Its Long-Standing Policy on Sex Reassignment Surgery

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Democrats Are Freaking Out. But They’ve Been Here Before.

by StaciWFOgmzdrj Posted on September 26, 2016

Mother Jones

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The polls are tightening and the freak-out is beginning. With hours to go before the first presidential debate, FiveThirtyEight‘s polls-plus forecast gives former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton just a 53.4 percent chance of winning the election. It’s the closest the race has been since the elections site unveiled its model in June. The “bedwetting cometh,” tweeted New York Times political reporter Jonathan Martin.

But Democrats have been here before. In 2012, President Barack Obama held a modest but consistent lead over Republican nominee Mitt Romney heading into the first debate, only to uncharacteristically collapse. Within a few days, the lead had evaporated—according to FiveThirtyEight, Obama’s chances went from 86.1 percent to 61.1 percent, the steepest drop of the campaign—and his supporters started to lose it. No one captured this liberal angst better then Andrew Sullivan, then of the Daily Beast, who had championed Obama in 2008 and joyfully called him “the first gay president” in a Newsweek cover story.

Following Obama’s first debate with Romney, Sullivan was inconsolable:

Maybe if Romney can turn this whole campaign around in 90 minutes, Obama can now do the same. But I doubt it. A sitting president does not recover from being obliterated on substance, style and likability in the first debate and get much of a chance to come back. He has, at a critical moment, deeply depressed his base and his supporters and independents are flocking to Romney in droves.

I’ve never seen a candidate self-destruct for no external reason this late in a campaign before. Gore was better in his first debate—and he threw a solid lead into the trash that night. Even Bush was better in 2004 than Obama last week. Even Reagan’s meandering mess in 1984 was better—and he had approaching Alzheimer’s to blame.

I’m trying to see a silver lining. But when a president self-immolates on live TV, and his opponent shines with lies and smiles, and a record number of people watch, it’s hard to see how a president and his party recover. I’m not giving up. If the lies and propaganda of the last four years work even after Obama had managed to fight back solidly against them to get a clear and solid lead in critical states, then reality-based government is over in this country again. We’re back to Bush-Cheney, but more extreme. We have to find a way to avoid that. Much, much more than Obama’s vanity is at stake.

A week later, after the vice presidential debate had passed, Sullivan was even further gone. “Obama threw it all back in his supporters’ faces, reacting to their enthusiasm and record donations with a performance so execrable, so lazy, so feckless, and so vain it was almost a dare not to vote for him,” he wrote. And then Obama rebounded at the next two debates and won 332 electoral votes.

The race heading into the first debate tonight is closer than it was heading into the first presidential debate in 2012. If the election were held today, there’s a virtually even chance that Donald Trump would win. But Clinton backers anxiously hitting refresh on FiveThirtyEight and consulting their astrologers would do well to reread Sullivan’s lament. It’s fine to panic, but a 7-point polling swing is nothing a few good debates can’t reverse.

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Democrats Are Freaking Out. But They’ve Been Here Before.

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This Is How We Know Congress Isn’t Really Serious About Election Fraud

by Vince4171216 Posted on September 13, 2016

Mother Jones

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The debate over possible Russian meddling in US elections was a major theme in a US House hearing Tuesday on protecting the 2016 elections from cyberattacks and machine-voting attacks. Even though election preparations have been underway for months around the country and early voting in many states begins soon, committee chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas) said the hearing was to review the security of the election system.

“This discussion is timely as many concerns have been raised in recent months about the vulnerabilities of electronic voting machines, voting over the internet, and online voter registration,” Smith said.

Concerns about the security of the US voting system have been heightened after the recent hacking of the Democratic National Committee, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and some high-profile Democratic politicians. The DNC, along with several US government officials and security research firms, have fingered Russian intelligence as responsible for the hacks of Democratic targets. Add to that the recent revelation that state election databases in Arizona and Illinois had been hacked, although the degree of success in each attack, and the ultimate purpose, remains unclear. Even though the Russian government has denied being involved, Democrats within Congress have called on the Obama administration to publicly accuse Russia of trying to interfere with US elections.

None of the witnesses—Dr. Charles Romine of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, Louisiana Secretary of State Tom Schedler, David Becker of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, and Dr. Dan Wallach of the Baker Institute for Public Policy at Rice University—suggested Russians were attempting to hack election infrastructure, only that they, too, had received this information specific to the DNC and the DCCC from press accounts.

“The nature of the threat is that they don’t want you to see them there,” said Wallach. “So we can’t assume that if we haven’t seen them that they’re absent. What we do know is that we’ve established motive. The attack on the DNC’s email server is motive—it shows that they did it for explicit partisan purposes.”

Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) said the Russians’ goal might not necessarily be to manipulate vote counts or tamper with voter registration databases, but to create chaos in the system and undermine confidence. “The focus of this hearing is on the voting systems, but really the question is about the election,” she said. “It’s pretty clear that the Russians have attacked, have engaged, in a cyberattack on the DNC and the DCCC.”

For Rep. Dana Rohrbacher (R-Calif.), Russian involvement in trying to hack or access actual election systems around the country lacked any evidence. “We have seen article after article after article about how Russia is compromising the integrity of our election system, and Mr. Chairman, the panelists are just saying that is false,” Rohrbacher said. “We want our country to be safe, but we also don’t want to just continually vilify Russia and turning them into the bad guys. If we’re going to have integrity of our system, I think we have to look at home for real threats to the integrity of our voting system.”

Lofgren disagreed. “To downplay the role that the Russians have had in this is a huge mistake, when you take a look at what they did to the DNC and the DCCC,” Lofgren said, urging members to avoid making the discussion about hacking partisan. “If you attack one of the major parties, somehow that’s okay if it could be to your advantage,” she said. “I like to think if the Russians had attacked the Republican National Committee, Democrats would be as outraged as Republicans. It’s an attack on America. It’s not an attack on a party.”

The hearing came the same day that Guccifer 2.0, the hacker or hackers who have publicly taken credit for the hack of the DNC, issued a rambling statement about information security at a London cybersecurity conference where he was supposed to appear (he didn’t), according to Motherboard. Guccifer did release roughly 600 megabytes of documents containing information about DNC fundraising efforts and other Democratic planning documents at the conference, according to Politico.*

Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that the documents released today by the hacker Guccifer 2.0 came from a Democratic contracting firm. We regret the error.

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This Is How We Know Congress Isn’t Really Serious About Election Fraud

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Will Hillary Clinton’s Education Policy Break From Obama’s in a Huge Way?

by LatonyaRaymond Posted on September 9, 2016

Mother Jones

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Before Hillary Clinton gave her speech at the Democratic National Convention in July, organizers fired up the crowd with a video extolling President Barack Obama’s key policies: health care reform that extended coverage to an estimated 20 million more people; the $62 billion bailout of General Motors and Chrysler that saved about 1.5 million jobs; the killing of Osama bin Laden.

But one major issue was conspicuously missing from the highlight reel of Obama’s achievements: education.

This glaring omission is just one of many signs that Clinton is distancing herself from Obama’s education policies. On her campaign website, Clinton’s K-12 page avoids any discussion of testing, accountability, or expansion of charters—the main focuses of Obama’s administration. Perhaps most telling, Clinton’s choices of advisers signal her attempt to move Obama’s test-driven K-12 agenda toward the center.

Clinton’s K-12 working policy group, according to a Democrat close to the campaign, comprises a mix of teachers’ union leaders, proponents of test-driven reforms, and advocates for increased investments in underfunded schools.

The previously unreleased list includes:

Chris Edley Jr. the president of the Opportunity Institute, a California-based think tank that works mostly on early-childhood and college access initiatives
Lily Eskelsen García, the president of the National Education Association, the nation’s biggest teachers’ union
Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, the second-biggest teachers’ union
Carmel Martin, the executive vice president for policy at the Center for American Progress and onetime adviser to former Education Secretary Arne Duncan
Catherine Brown, the former vice president of policy at Teach for America and current vice president of education policy at the Center for American Progress
Richard Riley, the secretary of education under Bill Clinton who’s known for his views that don’t neatly fit into the pro-reform or pro-teachers’ union wings of the Democratic Party. Riley supported testing and accountability but also pushed with equal fervor for smaller classes and more funding for schools.

The inclusion of teachers’ union leaders—who were not advising Obama’s campaigns and are among some of the most powerful opponents of his education policies—marks an especially sharp break from his administration. By contrast, many of Obama’s advisers—and later staffers at the Department of Education—viewed teachers’ unions as obstacles to school improvement and had close ties to the Gates Foundation, which championed many federal policies that encouraged both numbers-driven teacher evaluations and charter schools.

But while Clinton’s K-12 advisers may suggest a more teacher-friendly approach to policy, they don’t exactly indicate that, if elected, she would push for the end of test scores in policy decisions. The Center for American Progress, a progressive DC-based think tank closely aligned with Clinton, has been generally supportive of Obama’s test-based education policies; meanwhile, as education secretary, Riley helped lay the foundation for the modern standards and accountability movement.

Still, Clinton’s teacher-friendly speeches and lack of emphasis on test-based accountability are making many of the reform groups that had influence in the Obama administration nervous. “There’s a lot of anxiety about the transition from this president to the next administration,” said Shavar Jeffries, the president of a think tank affiliated with Democrats for Education Reform, a powerful pro-testing group, during a recent education forum.

“Obama had positioned himself as a reformer who was unapologetically for charter schooling, teacher evaluations, the notion of common standards,” said Rick Hess, a veteran education policy expert with the conservative American Enterprise Institute. “With Clinton, you see an agenda that leans much more toward teacher unions than the Democrats for Education Reform.”

We’re Losing Tens of Thousands of Black Teachers. Here’s Why That’s Bad for Everyone.

Most of Clinton’s shift has to do with two of Obama’s relatively small but widely unpopular federal programs: Race to the Top and School Improvement Grants. These initiatives offered about $9 billion in grants that were tied to prescriptive policies like evaluating teachers based in part on student test scores and to dramatic school “turnarounds,” which included closings and mass firings of teachers. Even though these grants contributed just a tiny fraction to state education budgets (for example, Race to the Top accounted for 0.63 percent in New York in 2011), they had an outsize impact on schools: The numbers of standardized tests and curricula that mimicked multiple-choice questions exploded, especially in schools serving low-income black and Latino students. And as districts fired staff or closed schools with low scores, thousands of educators, especially black teachers, lost their jobs or left teaching all together.

In the last three years, opposition to these policies has gained a lot of steam. Last year, for example, 1 in 5 students in New York opted out of standardized tests, forcing policymakers to remove test scores from teacher evaluations. In August, Black Lives Matter organizers called for a moratorium on both public school closures based on test scores and the expansion of charters to replace them. Many of these opponents argue that test-based reforms haven’t been working: While racial achievement gaps have narrowed slightly since 2001, they remain stubbornly large and shrank far more dramatically before No Child Left Behind (NCLB), when policies focused on equalizing funding and school integration, rather than on test scores.

Perhaps because of how divisive school reform has become among Democrats, Clinton’s education campaign so far has poured most of its energy into its early-childhood initiative—an education issue that has more allies in Congress than any other and has been one of Clinton’s signature issues for decades. There is also a growing pile of evidence that investments in early childhood for poor kids may have bigger returns than a focus on raising test scores. Obama already pushed for expansion of pre-K education, and Clinton wants to make preschool universal for four-year-olds and double the number of children enrolled in Early Head Start, which includes home visits by a social worker or nurse during pregnancy and parent coaching in the child’s first three years. Paul Tough, the author of Helping Children Succeed, found that the United States spends only 6 percent of all public early-childhood dollars on interventions targeting the child’s first two years, even though that’s when kids’ brains are most malleable for positive development. (The rest goes to kids ages three to six.)

When it comes to reform ideas after preschool, Clinton’s campaign page contains relatively few policy details. It does call for investing in K-12 teachers and schools through a “national campaign to elevate and modernize the teaching profession,” rebuilding crumbling public school buildings, and increasing funding for teaching computer science. The boldest and most detailed section discusses the need to disrupt the “school-to-prison pipeline”; Clinton promises to send $2 billion to states to reduce suspensions and expulsions that disproportionately affect black students and “implement social and emotional support interventions.”

Clinton has made clear in speeches that she supports testing, but she has said she wants to have “better and fewer tests”—a position that mirrors comments from both Obama and Duncan over the past two years. Meanwhile, on accountability—which measures to use to evaluate schools and teachers, and what to do when they are not meeting the mark—Clinton’s campaign pages and speeches haven’t offered much detail. But that’s in large part because the new Every Student Succeeds Act, which replaced No Child Left Behind last year, moves these decisions largely to states, and the specifics of its implementation are still being hashed out in Congress.

Many nations with higher-performing students, like Finland, Singapore, and Australia, already use fewer and broader tests for accountability. In these countries, standardized tests are used in combination with real student work, graded by trained teachers, to measure the performance of schools, as NPR’s lead education blogger, Anya Kamenetz, documents in her book The Test. Stanford professor Linda Darling-Hammond—who was considered for the secretary of education job after Obama was first elected, and could again be a top contender if Clinton is elected—has been calling for a similar accountability system in the United States. A 2014 testing-reform plan co-authored by Darling-Hammond recommends fewer multiple-choice tests and increased capacity at the local and state level to develop yearly “performance assessments”—student work that reflects what professionals actually do in the real world, like essays, group work, individual presentations, and science projects.

But that’s just one piece of the larger puzzle, according to José Luis Vilson, a veteran math teacher in New York City and the author of This Is Not a Test: A New Narrative on Race, Class, and the Future of Education. Vilson hopes to see increased investments in professional development and coaching of teachers, far beyond the three to five hours a week that’s typical in American public schools. Teachers in Finland, Singapore, and South Korea spend 15 to 25 hours each week working to improve their craft.

Today, the push to create fewer and better tests and improve teacher training faces the biggest obstacles in the schools that need them the most: those with large numbers of low-income students. In the past 10 years, the per-student funding gap between rich and poor schools has grown by 44 percent. The Title I program, a federal initiative created to equalize these disparities, is broken: A 2016 investigation by USA Today found that 20 percent of Title I money ends up funding affluent school districts. Meanwhile, a majority of US public school students come from low-income families, and about 10 percent of them live in deep poverty—in families that earn less than $11,000 a year.

Clinton has expressed support for more federal funding for poor students and those with special needs in her speeches. In a radio interview this year, Clinton said, “The federal government has an opportunity—and I would argue an obligation—to help equalize spending” on schools.

Jonathan Stith, who as national coordinator of the Alliance for Educational Justice worked closely on the development of the Black Lives Matter policy agenda, said he is encouraged to hear a call for higher investments in struggling schools. But he’s disappointed that Clinton’s K-12 agenda lacks detail and doesn’t include any discussion of systemic racism in education. “The agenda’s vague language can be seized by states to continue to do these same school ‘turnaround’ and push-out policies that have contributed in part to the rise of the Movement for Black Lives,” Stith said.

Ultimately, Stith and others agreed that Clinton’s biggest choices are still in front of her. Whether issues of race, better tests, and access to high-quality education will be addressed with meaningful policy will depend a great deal on the types of advisers and staffers she’d select as president, said Samuel Abrams, professor of education at the Columbia Teachers College and author of Education and the Commercial Mindset. Abrams, who taught in public schools for 18 years, argued that most advisers, staffers, and policymakers in the Education Department must have a proven record of success with the hardest-to-reach kids. “I failed so many times as a teacher,” he said. “Until you understand the complexities of why and how that failure happens, you won’t make good policy in education.”

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Will Hillary Clinton’s Education Policy Break From Obama’s in a Huge Way?

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The US Just Met Its Goal of Admitting 10,000 Syrian Refugees

by EloisaBastow Posted on August 29, 2016

Mother Jones

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It’s been one year since President Barack Obama announced that the United States would take in 10,000 Syrian refugees by this September. After much criticism from Republican politicians and a slow start, the administration picked up the pace of resettlement and met its goal a month ahead of schedule. Today, the United States is resettling its 10,000th Syrian refugee.

In a statement, National Security Advisor Susan Rice welcomed the newcomers. “On behalf of the President and his Administration, I extend the warmest of welcomes to each and every one of our Syrian arrivals,” Rice said.

The newest group of Syrian refugees are arriving in California and Virginia from Jordan. Among them is Nadim Fawzi Jouriyeh, a 49-year old former construction worker from Homs. He, his wife Rajaa, and their four children are being resettled in San Diego. Jouriyeh told the Associated Press that in anticipation of his journey, he feels “fear of the unknown and our new lives, but great joy for our children’s lives and future.”

Most of the 10,000 Syrian refugees who have been granted asylum in the United States look a lot like the Jouriyeh family. According to the State Department, approximately 80 percent are women and children. Roughly 60 percent are under the age of 18. The vast majority of male refugees are fathers, grandchildren, or older siblings. Only 0.5 percent are adult men unattached to families.

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In the last year, Syrian refugees have been placed in 39 different states, with California and Michigan hosting the largest numbers. More than half of have been resettled in eight states—California, Michigan, Arizona, Texas, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Florida, and New York.

Although the goal of admitting 10,000 Syrians in this fiscal year marked a six-fold increase over last year, the number of refugees resettled this year only accounts for about two percent of the total number of Syrian refugees the United Nations says are in need of resettlement. Presidential nominee Hillary Clinton has proposed a target of admitting 65,000. Donald Trump has ridiculed that proposal. In April, he told supporters in Rhode Island to “lock your doors” to stay safe from Syrian refugees. “We don’t know who these people are. We don’t know where they’re from,” he warned. In December 2015, Trump tweeted that a Syrian family who crossed the US-Mexico border were “ISIS maybe?”

Last month, the Department of Homeland Security told Mother Jones that the Syrian refugees it is currently vetting are subject to the same stringent security and medical requirements as other asylum-seekers. Those applying for refugee status must go through a 21-step vetting process that includes security screenings by the National Counterterrorism Center, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Department of Homeland Security, and the State Department.

White House spokesman Josh Earnest told reporters that Obama plans to increase the number of Syrian refugees admitted to the United States by “a few thousand more” next year. Secretary of State John Kerry is expected to put the administration’s proposal before Congress in the coming weeks. Any increase is likely face opposition from Republican lawmakers who have resisted the introduction of more Syrian refugees to the United States. “The president would like to see a ramping-up of these efforts but he’s realistic,” said Earnest.

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The US Just Met Its Goal of Admitting 10,000 Syrian Refugees

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The Feds Could Stop Hiring Private Prison Companies to Detain Immigrants

by StaceyDowling61 Posted on August 29, 2016

Mother Jones

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The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) will reexamine its use of private prison companies to hold immigration detainees, Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson announced today. The decision comes less than two weeks after the Justice Department announced that it would close out its contracts with private prison companies, a decision that affects approximately 22,600 prisoners in 13 federal prisons.

Last Friday, Johnson directed an advisory council to evaluate whether DHS should “move in the same direction” as the Justice Department. The council is expected to report back by November 30.

If Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the DHS division that controls migrant detention, were to end its contracts with for-profit prison companies, the decision could be more significant than the Justice Department’s announcement. While private prisons oversee about 12 percent of federal inmates, for-profit companies operate 46 ICE facilities and oversee a daily average of 24,567 people, or 73 percent of immigration detainees.

The Corrections Corporation of America and the GEO Group, the country’s two largest for-profit prison companies, together control 8 of the country’s 10 biggest immigration detention centers. Both corporations’ stock prices took a severe hit after the Justice Department’s decision on August 18, and both are now facing class-action lawsuits from investors. Johnson’s announcement sent their stocks falling once again, with CCA slipping 9.4 percent and GEO falling 6 percent after the announcement.

ICE’s immigration detention capacity has skyrocketed over the past two decades. Private prisons have played a key role in expanding ICE’s capacity to hold migrants. For-profit prison operators controlled 62 percent of immigration detention beds in 2014, up from 25 percent in 2005. The rewards for private operators of immigration detention centers can be huge: Last year, CCA made 14 percent of its total revenue from one 2,400-bed facility, the South Texas Family Residential Center, after it obtained a four-year, $1 billion contract from ICE.

Today, ICE is required by law to fill an average of 34,000 beds daily, a requirement instituted in 2010, when former Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.V.) added the private detention quota to the DHS budget. As of December 2015, around 400,000 migrants were detained by ICE annually.

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The Feds Could Stop Hiring Private Prison Companies to Detain Immigrants

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Why Has Only Hillary Clinton Turned Over All Her Emails?

by Arkady549e Posted on August 22, 2016

Mother Jones

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I have a dumb question. Hillary Clinton has been forced, via FOIA request, to release all of her work-related emails from her term as Secretary of State. Today we learned there may be more to come. By the time it’s all over, we’ll have something like 30-40,000 emails that have been made public.

So here’s my dumb question: why has this happened only to Hillary Clinton? If FOIA can be used to force the release of every email sent or received by a cabinet member, why haven’t FOIA requests been submitted for all of them? It would certainly be interesting and newsworthy to see all of Leon Panetta’s emails. Or all of Condi Rice’s. Or all of Henry Paulson’s.

So what’s the deal? Why has this happened only to Hillary Clinton?

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Why Has Only Hillary Clinton Turned Over All Her Emails?

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How a Wonky Trade Pact You’d Never Heard of Became a Huge Campaign Issue

by Allison05T Posted on August 18, 2016

Mother Jones

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Until very recently, grousing about the pitfalls of global trade was seen as akin to complaining about the weather. One could no more stop China from dumping cheap imports than outlaw El Niño. And besides, the deluge of foreign goods would in the long run lift all boats. Or so we were told—before Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump begged to differ.

In a year of seething resentment towards the political establishment, support for “free trade” is no longer a given within either party. Even Hillary Clinton, whose husband famously negotiated NAFTA, has come out against the Trans Pacific Partnership—a sweeping trade deal she helped set up as secretary of state.

Larry Cohen has a pretty good idea why that happened. As the president of the Communications Workers of America, and more recently a senior advisor to Bernie Sanders, he has probably done more than anyone to elevate the issue. I reached out to Cohen to ask how he managed to make trade a big deal again.

Mother Jones: How has global trade affected your union members?

Larry Cohen: Call center jobs are tradable—more tradable than the production of steel or auto parts. Tens of thousands of CWA jobs are now in South Asia with English speakers. But that’s not all. The United States is the biggest consumer of telecom products in the world and almost none of them are made here. Other countries that don’t have this kind of trade regime have held onto those jobs. So Germany with Siemens and France with Alcatel—the French government puts huge penalties on shutdowns. We don’t put any.

MJ: The Democratic Party has been divided on trade since the 1990s, when Bill Clinton pushed through NAFTA with Republican support. President Obama’s Trans Pacific Partnership agreement with 12 Pacific Rim countries was supposed to win over the liberal wing of the Democratic Party by better protecting workers and the environment. What happened?

LC: A year ago, President Obama said to me, “Larry, you must admit, the language is a lot better in here.” And I said, “Yeah, the language is a lot better, but the problem is with enforcement.”

MJ: Give me an example.

LC: I worked on a case in Honduras involving the murder of labor organizers and the collapse of bargaining rights. When there’s complaints, the International Labor Affairs Bureau does an investigation. It takes them at least two years. Then you get a report eventually, and then it goes to the US Trade Representative. This is the guy who is gung ho for all these deals in the first place. When he gets to it, he meets with his foreign counterpart. They had one meeting on Honduras. It can move, after years and years, to a loss of some trade preferences. TPP enumerates that a little bit more clearly. But that’s years and years, and by that point, you know?

MJ: The jobs are long gone?

LC: It’s not just the jobs. It was people being butchered! The bottom line is: Multinational corporations get reparations. We get reports.

MJ: In other words, companies get to sue to protect their interests but workers and environmental groups do not?

LC: Right. Companies get to sue under what’s known as “investor state dispute settlement.” Occidental Petroleum got $3 billion from Ecuador because, after the bilateral agreement with the US, Ecuador said, “No more coastal drilling.” That impacted Occidental’s profit. They got an award last year of $3 billion for their lost future profit. Ecuador doesn’t have $3 billion, so it’s in limbo, but probably they will let them drill. TransUnion is suing the US over Keystone: $15 billion. Vattenfall, which is a Swedish energy company, is suing Germany for $5 billion Euros because German Chancellor Angela Merkel, a conservative, said we’re going to shut down nuclear after Fukushima. These are examples. That has been the history of 25 years of so-called improvements in side agreements in trade.

MJ: And you don’t think TPP fixes those problems?

LC: Chapter after chapter was written by corporate lobbyists. Nothing was written by people like me. There was a little side panel on labor and the environment and they didn’t do a single thing we wanted.

MJ: Obama has framed the TPP as part of his “pivot to Asia,” arguing basically that this is really a diplomatic mission aimed at counteracting the influence of China.

LC: That’s what they wrap this in. But what it really is about is all the multinational corporations that are cheering this deal because they will reign supreme in all 12 countries. That is the core of our foreign policy. Just look at our embassies around the word. In Honduras they throw in one person on human rights. This person says, “I am totally overwhelmed. People are killed here, killed there—it’s a police state.” And then the Commerce Department has 15, 20 people in Honduras promoting US multinationals there, from Fruit of the Loom to you name it. It’s way off.

MJ: How did your meeting with Obama come about?

LC: It was May of 2015. I’d been criticizing TPP at the time and they said, “He’d like to talk to you.” What he told me was: “I am too far down the road to change.” He repeated it over and over.

MJ: So you got a sense that he kind of agreed with you?

LC: No, he never agreed with me. His point of view was that this was significantly better than any other trade agreement on the things that I cared about. He did most of the talking. The joke I made at the end was: I grew up as the only kid. There were five adults in my great grandmother’s rural house in North Philadelphia. These were big talkers. Once in a while, I got to talk, and they never listened to a thing I said. And I told the president, “I love you very much anyway.”

MJ: What did he say?

LC: He laughed. They all laughed.

MJ: So after that meeting you kept fighting against TPP—and you almost derailed it.

LC: Right, June 27. They needed 60 votes to pass fast-track authority for the deal. We lost in the Senate by one vote.

MJ: And that’s when you decided to do something different.

LC: In September I said, “I am not going to run again for CWA president. I feel like we are in a box. I want to go back to movement building.”

MJ: So you joined the Sanders campaign as a senior advisor.

LC: Yeah, I worked full time, unpaid.

MJ: On the trade issue?

LC: Yeah, that was my job.

MJ: What did you do, specifically?

LC: In Lansing, Michigan, we set up a trade forum with Bernie and the media and brought in a whole bunch of people who gave firsthand reports about what they had experienced.

We did a nonpartisan march through Indianapolis. Carrier, which is owned by United Technologies, announced a shutdown of their heating and furnaces plant—1,900 jobs moving to Monterrey, Mexico at $3 an hour. Bernie spoke at the march and it was 100 percent about trade.

On the South Side of Chicago, we did a big event in front of the Nabisco plant in the middle of winter with the workers there, mostly black. They had announced they are moving the Oreo cookie line, over 1,000 jobs out of that plant, to Mexico.

Bernie wrote op-eds on trade. He did a thing in Pittsburgh, We had a thing called “Labor for Bernie” that I helped organize, bringing in tens of thousands of active union members.

MJ: Can you point to any particular moment in the campaign when it became clear that the trade issue was really resonating with voters?

LC: Definitely Michigan.

MJ: Sanders’ primary victory there was a big upset.

LC: There were dramatic results there from what we believed was, in part, that work. I would give the credit to Bernie. He really thinks that the way the global economy is working is at the center of what’s wrong. We call it trade, but it really isn’t trade. It’s how we rig it.

MJ: As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton helped set up the negotiations for TPP, so it was surprising when she came out against it in October. Did you see that coming?

LC: Gradually. The pressure was enormous. I think she made a very careful calculation: If she had not come out against TPP, she would have lost to Bernie Sanders. She never could have provided enough cover to the national labor unions that endorsed her campaign without that flip.

MJ: Did you then start to see other prominent Democrats follow her lead?

LC: No. Tim Kaine would be the next prominent Democrat, and that was only when it was announced that he would be vice president.

MJ: Interesting. So what were you doing heading into the Democratic convention?

LC: Bernie put trade right at the top of his list. We had five people on the platform drafting committee out of 16. There was a meeting in St. Louis where the draft got finalized. The language had said that Democrats are “divided” on the TPP. The platform committee itself had I think 188 people, of which we had 72. They realized they had a problem. They took out “Democrats are divided” and instead they listed a bunch of standards that are actually pretty decent. The document concludes by saying: “Trade deals must meet this standard.” We had an amendment that said, “Therefore, we oppose the TPP.” It lost 106 to 74. So we got 2 votes from the Clinton appointees and our 72.

MJ: If Clinton really opposes the TPP, why would most of her platform committee reps oppose that language?

LC: The reason is, I think, that the White House said, “This is a total embarrassment to us. You are our secretary of state. We are not going to put up with that. We don’t want any opposition to the TPP in the platform.”

MJ: Why didn’t you take it to a floor vote?

LC: We could have, because you only need 25 percent of the platform committee to go to the floor, but Bernie’s view was that we would get the same thing. We would lose, and then it would look like the Democratic Party doesn’t oppose the TPP.

MJ: So you orchestrated a protest instead. People who watched the convention on TV may still remember all the anti-TPP signs. How did that come about?

LC: On Monday night we had the giant TPP forum with 800 delegates. That’s where we sort of revved up the signs and the stickers and the chants of “No TPP!” We actually practiced that in the room.

MJ: Whose idea was it to do that?

LC: Me and others who organized the forum. We knew we had to use it as a springboard. That is what a political convention is supposed to be. It’s not just about falling in line. In my opinion, Hillary Clinton is opposed to TPP, so we should be saying it publicly so we don’t give ground to Trump.

MJ: What is your take on how the trade backlash happened within the GOP?

LC: It’s voters. Hillary Clinton would say the same thing. “I listened to voters.” People get it. They look at the numbers about jobs or incomes or the trade deficit, and they see the results.

MJ: Trade might be the only thing Trump and Sanders agree on.

LC: At an ideological level, we don’t have the same views of fair trade at all. Our view would be that workers rights and the environment need to count as much as corporate profits, and Trump’s view would be just that it’s “a bad deal.”

MJ: Do you think you can build an effective bipartisan coalition on trade?

LC: With regular people we can do that. But it’s not like our part of the movement can unite with whatever that part is in the Republican Party. There’s some acknowledgement of each other. That’s about it. I just got off a call earlier making a plan for the next few months. We don’t have any of them to make a plan with.

MJ: Do you think TPP will be addressed in the lame duck session?

LC: Only once can TPP be sent to Congress by any president. If it is sent before the election, it’s really gonna get attacked. Anyone who is in a vulnerable district, that issue is gonna go way to the top. The White House could send it after the election but they are not even guaranteed the vote. So they are caught here. They can’t send it unless they think they have the best chance they possibly have to pass it. That’s why you have House Speaker Paul Ryan doubting it for lame duck.

MJ: So they might just wait until the next administration?

LC: Yeah, but we’re not going to give on that. We are going to mobilize constantly on it.

MJ: And beyond the TPP?

LC: The only thing that the president really controls is trade policy. Congress reacts, the president acts. I do think there is a ground swell for not bringing Wall Street people into the US Trade Representative’s office and taking it over. That has been going on either directly or indirectly for decades.

MJ: What should the overarching principles be?

LC: Balanced trade should be a major factor: The net effect on jobs. Consequences about manufacturing. What happens to different employment sectors in our country. But also, ending the investor state dispute settlement. There should be issues about the environment or workers rights or human rights that can trump national courts in the same way that investment rights do now.

MJ: This stuff is obviously important, yet when politicians talk about it, people’s eyes often glaze over. How do you keep voters engaged?

LC: Only by saying to people quite bluntly, “This is not about trade, it is fundamentally about the way in which large foreign corporations rig the global economy.” We need to have plain, simple language that regulates the global economy where we count just as much as the richest corporations in the world. That’s what people react to.

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How a Wonky Trade Pact You’d Never Heard of Became a Huge Campaign Issue

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Here’s What’s Happening in the Battle for Voting Rights

by AlfredoBML Posted on August 3, 2016

Mother Jones

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The courts have recently transformed the voting rights debate.

Last Friday, a panel of judges struck down a sweeping set of voting restrictions enacted by North Carolina Republicans in 2013 in the wake of the Supreme Court’s gutting of a key portion of the Voting Rights Act. Later that day, a federal district court killed a series of voting restrictions in Wisconsin, including rules that banned students from using expired student IDs, a residency requirement aimed at limiting college students’ right to vote, and some restrictions on early in-person voting. And in Kansas, a state district court judge ruled that the state’s two-tier system of voting—proof of citizenship required for state local elections but not federal elections—would disenfranchise too many citizens, and ordered the state to count the ballots at all levels.

The following Monday, a federal judge blocked a North Dakota voter ID law that he said posed an undue burden on the voting rights of Native Americans. And all these decisions come less than two weeks after the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals struck down a voter ID law in Texas, and a federal judge weakened that state’s voter ID law.

“It has been a string of victories for voting rights advocates, and we’ll have to see whether or not they stick, or they all stick, but it is an impressive string of victories for now,” said elections expert Richard Hasen, a professor of law and political science from the University of California Irvine.

The court battles have played out during a period when a number of restrictive voting laws have been passed across the country. Since 2010, 22 states have added new restrictions related to voting, according to the Brennan Center. After the court decisions relating to North Carolina and North Dakota, new restrictions will be in place in 15 states for the first time in a presidential election year.

As promising as these recent court victories have been for voting rights advocates, some states have already vowed to appeal the rulings. Other states continue to have restrictive laws that could jeopardize the ability of minority voters to cast ballots this November. Here is an overview of the voting rights landscape:

North Carolina: In 2013, a US Supreme Court decision, Shelby County v. Holder, cleared the way for states that previously had to have all voting-law and procedural changes reviewed by the US Department of Justice or a federal judge to enact any voting changes they wished. The next day, North Carolina Republicans passed one of the most sweeping pieces of legislation that restricted access to voting, eliminated same-day voter registration, reduced early voting, instituted a strict photo ID requirement, and ended a program that preregistered 16- and 17-year-olds to vote. That law was struck down July 29 in a scathing 83-page opinion that exposed the extent of the law’s racial bias. Judge Diana Gribbon Motz, writing for the majority on the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals, noted that the law’s provisions “targeted African Americans with almost surgical precision,” by using race data in the decision-making process.

“In holding that the legislature did not enact the challenged provisions with discriminatory intent, the district court seems to have missed the forest in carefully surveying the many trees,” Gribbon Motz wrote. “This failure of perspective led the court to ignore critical facts bearing on legislative intent, including the inextricable link between race and politics in North Carolina.”

State Republicans and Gov. Pat McCrory have said they will appeal the case to the US Supreme Court. “Photo IDs are required to purchase Sudafed, cash a check, board an airplane or enter a federal court room,” the governor said in a statement on Friday. “Yet three Democratic judges are undermining the integrity of our elections while also maligning our state. We will immediately appeal and also review other potential options.”

Ohio: On May 24, a federal district court ruled that a state law passed in 2014 that eliminated the state’s so-called “Golden Week”—a period of time during which voters could register and vote at the same time—violated the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution, and Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits “voting practices or procedures that discriminate on the basis of race, color, or membership in one of the language minority groups.” Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted, a Republican, has appealed the ruling, but for now the restoration of Golden Week will be in place for the November 2016 election.

The elimination of Golden Week was part of a broader election bill pushed by state Republicans and signed into law in 2014 by Republican Gov. John Kasich. It also included provisions that limited the number of early-voting sites in each county and the distribution of certain voting machines in each county. The judge let those provisions stand.

Husted is also dealing with a lawsuit over his plan to purge voters from the rolls if they haven’t voted in two consecutive federal elections. A district court judge sided with Husted on June 29, but the appeal (which is joined by the US Department of Justice) is ongoing.

Wisconsin: According to Hasen in his Election Law Blog, a federal district court “struck a host of Wisconsin voting rules” on Friday, blocking a law that required citizenship information to be included in dormitory forms as proof of residence, that created narrow requirements for valid ID, and that made it illegal to vote if you’d moved into the state 28 days before an election.

“The Wisconsin experience demonstrates that a preoccupation with mostly phantom election fraud leads to real incidents of disenfranchisement, which undermine rather than enhance confidence in elections, particularly in minority communities,” wrote US District Judge James Peterson. He bolstered his assertion that the rules were discriminatory by pointing to Milwaukee specifically. “I reach this conclusion because I am persuaded that this law was specifically targeted to curtail voting in Milwaukee without any other legitimate purpose,” he wrote, speaking of rules to limit early voting. “The Legislature’s immediate goal was to achieve a partisan objective, but the means of achieving that objective was to suppress the reliably Democratic vote of Milwaukee’s African Americans.”

The decision came less than two weeks after a separate federal judge ruled that voters can cast ballots in November without IDs if they submit affidavits at the polls saying they couldn’t easily get IDs. Wisconsin Attorney General Brad Schimel said he would appeal the court’s decision.

Texas: A majority of the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled July 20 that a Texas voter ID law passed in 2011 violated the Voting Rights Act and discriminated against African American and Hispanic voters. The law required many residents to show ID before their ballots would be counted. The ruling didn’t stop the law; it only forced a lower court to come up with a remedy that would do a better job of getting all eligible citizens proper ID. Experts estimate that several hundred thousand people in the state currently lack proper ID.

The law was originally passed in 2011 and signed into law by Republican Gov. Rick Perry, but under the Voting Rights Act at that time, the state had to have all changes to election law reviewed by the Department of Justice or a federal judge. Before the pre-clearance decision was made, Perry sued the federal government in hopes of speeding up the process. That case became moot in 2013 when the Supreme Court decision removed the mechanism for determining which states should seek federal review for voting law changes. At that point the Texas law came into effect, but it has faced legal challenges and has racked up at least $3.5 million in legal fees along the way. The July 20 ruling was the result of one of the most recent of those cases.

Now a federal judge in Texas is tasked with fixing the law and plans to hold a hearing August 17.

Virginia: On April 22, Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a Democrat, signed an executive order granting voting rights restoration for more than 200,000 felons in the state. State Republicans cried foul, claiming that McAuliffe, a longtime confidante of Bill and Hillary Clinton, was trying to throw a key swing state toward Clinton for the November election. Besides, they argued, McAuliffe only had the right to restore felon rights on an individual basis, and they threatened to sue. They followed through with that threat about a month later.

On July 22, the Virginia Supreme Court ruled 4-3 that the Republicans were right, and McAuliffe couldn’t give a blanket restoration, wiping out 11,000 voter registrations that had taken place under the governor’s executive order. McAuliffe said after the ruling that he would sign about 13,000 individual orders “expeditiously” and then “continue to sign orders until I have completed restoration for all 200,000 Virginians.”

In May, the US Supreme Court sided with state Democrats who had challenged the way state Republicans had redrawn congressional districts. The Democrats charged that Republicans redrew the districts in 2013 to pack African American voters into one district. A district court panel of judges agreed and redrew the districts. Three Virginia Republicans appealed the case to the Supreme Court, which left the lower court’s ruling in place, opening the door for a new black congressional hopeful from Virginia to run this fall.

Kansas: On Friday, a state judge temporarily blocked Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach’s attempt to disqualify 17,500 state voters who, under a 2013 state law, didn’t provide proof of citizenship when registering to vote. The voters are eligible to participate in federal elections, but the state law would have prevented their votes in local and state races from counting. The judge’s order temporarily blocked that rule and, if it’s still in place in November, could affect about 50,000 people. The judge’s ruling expires shortly after the November election.

Arizona: On March 22, Arizona held its presidential primary election and totally bungled it. Thousands of people waited for hours to cast ballots in the state’s largest county, Maricopa County. Local officials blamed the large number of unaffiliated voters trying to cast ballots as the main culprit, but critics charged that it most likely had to do with the county’s decision to reduce its number of polling places from 200 to just 60, which worked out to about one polling place for every 20,833 eligible voters. The state’s biggest paper called the situation an “outrage” and the Republican governor called it “unacceptable.”

The Democratic National Committee, along with the campaigns of Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, filed a lawsuit against the state of Arizona and Maricopa County on April 14. The suit is seeking to restore federal review of Arizona election procedures, something state and local officials had to deal with before the 2013 Supreme Court Shelby County v. Holder decision. Additionally, the suit seeks to block officials from not counting provisional ballots cast in the wrong precinct, and to halt a law that prevents people from turning in others’ absentee ballots. That case is working its way through federal court.

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Here’s What’s Happening in the Battle for Voting Rights

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