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Actually, Donald Trump’s Immigration Proposals Are Nothing New

by FatimaAbigail Posted on September 18, 2016

Mother Jones

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This story original appeared on the TomDispatch website.

Liberal Americans like to think of Donald Trump as an aberration and believe that his idea of building a great wall along the US-Mexico border to prevent immigrants from entering the country goes against American values. (After all, as Hillary Clinton says, “We are a nation of immigrants.”) In certain ways, in terms of the grim history of this country, they couldn’t be more wrong.

Donald Trump may differ from other contemporary politicians in so openly stating his antipathy to immigrants of a certain sort. (He’s actually urged the opening of the country to more European immigrants.) Democrats like Barack Obama and Bill and Hillary Clinton sound so much less hateful and so much more tolerant. But the policies Trump is advocating, including that well-publicized wall and mass deportations, are really nothing new. They are the very policies initiated by Bill Clinton in the 1990s and—from border militarization to mass deportations—enthusiastically promoted by Barack Obama. The president is, in fact, responsible for raising such deportations to levels previously unknown in American history.

And were you to take a long look back into that very history, you would find that Trump’s open appeal to white fears of a future nonwhite majority and his support of immigration policies aimed at racial whitening are really nothing new either. The policies he’s promoting are, in an eerie way, a logical continuation of centuries of policymaking that sought to create a country of white people.

The first step in that process was to deport the indigenous population starting in the 1600s. Later, deportation policies started to focus on Mexicans—seen by many whites as practically indistinguishable from Indians. Except, white settlers found, Mexicans were more willing to work as wage laborers. Since the middle of the 19th century, Mexicans have been treated as disposable workers. Europeans were invited to immigrate here permanently and become citizens. Mexicans were invited in to work—but not to become citizens.

The legal rationales have changed over time, but the system has been surprisingly durable. Prior to the 1960s, deportation was based openly on discrimination against Mexicans on the basis of their supposed race or nationality. It was only with the civil rights advances of the 1960s that such discrimination became untenable, and new immigration restrictions created a fresh legal rationale for treating Mexican workers as deportable. Having redefined them as “illegal” or “undocumented,” nativists could now clamor for deportation without seeming openly racist.

A closer look at American history makes the notion that “we are a nation of immigrants” instantly darker than its proponents imagine. As a start, what could the very idea of a “nation of immigrants” mean in a land that was already home to a large native population when European immigrants started to colonize it? From its first moments, American history has been a history of deportation. The initial deportees from the British colonies and the American nation were, of course, Native Americans, removed from their villages, farms, and hunting grounds through legalized and extralegal force everywhere that white immigrants wanted to settle.

The deportations that began in the 1600s continued at least until the end of the nineteenth century. In other words, to celebrate the country’s “immigrant” origins also means celebrating the settler colonialism and native displacement that made the United States that nation of immigrants—and this has important implications for immigrants today, many of whom are indigenous people from Mexico and Central America.

Conflicts between immigrants and natives were central to the colonial histories of North and South America, and to the American Revolution. In the Proclamation of 1763, the British attempted to mitigate such conflicts by banning colonist (that is, immigrant) encroachment on native lands west of the Appalachian Divide. The British Crown even restricted immigration itself in another fruitless attempt to balance native and settler interests. These prohibitions were among the major grievances that led to the American Revolution.

Among the list of “injuries and usurpations” carried out by the king that were denounced in the Declaration of Independence, there was the fact that he had “endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.” In addition, the declaration claimed, the king had “excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.”

Along with its commitment to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” that document couldn’t have been clearer that the new country would also be committed to a settler colonial project of populating the land with white immigrants and getting rid of the natives. Put another way, deportation was written into the American DNA from the get-go and, put in Election 2016 terms, the new country was, from the beginning, designed as an explicitly racist project to populate the land with white people. Perhaps this is what Donald Trump means by “Make America Great Again!”

Nor did this commitment to white supremacy through immigration change during the initial century of US history. The first Naturalization Act of 1790 encouraged white immigration by basing citizenship on race and offering it liberally to immigrants—defined as white Europeans—who were in this way made the privileged constituency of a new nation that had a slave system at its heart. (Although southern and eastern Europeans would face social prejudice in the United States, immigration and citizenship law always placed them in the “white” category.)

It was not until 1868, three years after the Civil War ended, that the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution created the right to citizenship by birth, making it possible for the first time for nonwhites to become citizens. But when Congress passed that amendment, it had in mind only some nonwhites: previously enslaved Africans and their descendants. Here’s the crucial line in which Congress made sure of that: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.” Since Native Americans were not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States, they were excluded.

The new racial boundaries were further clarified in 1870 when Congress amended the Naturalization Act by officially allowing, for the first time, some noncitizens of color to obtain citizenship: It extended naturalization rights to “aliens of African nativity and to persons of African descent.” On paper, this looked like a move away from white supremacy. In the context of the United States at that moment, however, it was something else. It ensured that Native Americans, already excluded from citizenship by birth, would also be barred from obtaining citizenship through naturalization. As for those theoretical “aliens of African nativity” who might be entering the country and seeking citizenship through naturalization, there were virtually none. In the aftermath of hundreds of years of enslavement and forced transport, it would be many decades before any African could imagine the United States as a land of opportunity or a place to make a better life.

And the new Naturalization Act just as explicitly excluded lots of people who were migrating to the United States in significant numbers in the 1870s. If you were European, you were still quite welcome to become a citizen. However, if you were, for example, Mexican or Chinese, you were still welcome to come and work but you weren’t an “immigrant,” since you couldn’t become a citizen. The United States continued to be a “nation of immigrants”—if only of a specific sort.

Citizenship by birth, however, opened a Pandora’s box. Anybody physically present in the country (except Native Americans) could obtain citizenship for his or her children by virtue of birth. Chinese adults might be prohibited from naturalizing, but their children would be both “racially ineligible to citizenship” and citizens by birth—a logical impossibility.

Once citizenship by birth was established, Congress moved to preserve the white racial character of the country by restricting the entry of nonwhites—first with the Page Act of 1875, prohibiting Chinese women from entering the country, and then with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. That ban was gradually expanded until, in 1917, the “Asiatic Barred Zone” was put in place. It would span significant parts of the globe, from Afghanistan to the islands of the Pacific and encompass about half of the world’s population. Its purpose was to ensure that, all “Asians” being “aliens ineligible to citizenship,” none of them would enter the United States, and so their racially ineligible children would never be born here and obtain citizenship by birth.

Students of immigration history generally learn about the 1921 and 1924 quotas that, for the first time, placed restrictions on European immigration. Indeed, for about four decades in the mid-20th century, the United States ranked Europeans by their “racial” desirability and offered differential quotas to reduce the numbers of those less desired (southern and eastern Europeans in particular) entering the country.

But while all these restrictions were being implemented, Congress did absolutely nothing to try to stop Mexican migration. Mexican labor was desperately needed for the railroads, mines, construction, and farming that followed in the wake of white settler colonialism and the displacement of Native Americans in the West. In fact, after Chinese immigration was banned, Mexican workers became even more necessary. And Mexicans had an advantage over the Chinese: They were easier to deport. Many, in fact, preferred to maintain their homes in Mexico and engage in short-term migration to seasonal, temporary jobs. So Mexicans were welcomed—as eminently deportable temporary workers.

In this way, a revolving door of recruitment and deportation came to define Mexican migration to the United States. At some points this system was formalized into bracero or “guest-worker” programs, as happened from 1917 to 1922, and again from 1942 to 1964. Nativists could sometimes mobilize anti-Mexican sentiment of a Trumpian sort to justify mass deportations—such as those in the 1930s and again in 1954—that would only reinforce the inherent and public tenuousness of the Mexican presence in the United States.

The formal bracero program was phased out after 1964, but the pattern of recruitment and deportation of Mexican workers has continued to this day. President Obama actually implemented quotas that have pushed the Department of Homeland Security to oversee hundreds of thousands of deportations yearly. Most of those deported are Mexican—not exactly surprisingly, since the legal apparatus was designed for just that purpose. The only thing that’s new is the stated rationale: Now they have been assigned a status—”undocumented”—that justifies their deportation.

Events in the 1960s, including the ending of the bracero program and the Hart-Celler Immigration Act of 1965, made changes that began to treat all countries, including Mexico, the same way. Instead of large numbers of guest-worker visas, Mexico would receive a small number of immigrant visas. But Mexico’s migrant history and its reality were completely different from those of other countries. Given how dependent both countries had become on Mexicans migrating north to work, the stream of workers heading north continued despite changes in the law. The only difference: Now the crossings were illegal.

The 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act legalized millions of unauthorized Mexicans already in the country and also began the trend toward the militarization and border control. Paradoxically, this only increased the undocumented population because those who made it across were increasingly afraid to leave for fear they wouldn’t make it back the next year.

Meanwhile, civil wars in Central America in the 1980s and 1990s, and subsequent neoliberal reforms and violence, as well as the impact of similar neoliberal reforms and the North American Free Trade Agreement on Mexico’s economy in those decades led to significant increases in immigration, authorized and unauthorized. The result was a significant increase in the US Latino population—as citizens, legal permanent residents, temporary legal residents, and unauthorized residents. But the longstanding national sentiment that Donald Trump is now mobilizing—the belief that somehow Mexicans are alien to the nature of the United States—continues, as does a sub rosa desire for a whiter America.

Something else of interest happened to Mexican and Central American migration during these years. As in the United States, indigenous people in these countries have tended to be the poorest, most marginalized, most exploited sectors of the population. As a result, the violence and the socio-economic changes of the 1980s and 1990s disproportionately afflicted them, which meant ever more indigenous people from those countries entering the migrant stream.

By 2010, 174,494 people chose “Mexican American Indian” as their tribal affiliation on the US census, making them the fourth largest group of Native Americans after the Navajo, the Cherokee, and the Choctaw. It’s not clear from the data how many of these were recent immigrants rather than long-term residents, and how many were undocumented. But as the website ThinkMexican commented, “It directly challenges Manifest Destiny, the white supremacist narrative used to justify Western expansion, and the genocide of Native Peoples. The message is clear: This land is still Native.” Another message is clear too: The United States is still deporting its native people.

Aviva Chomsky is professor of history and coordinator of Latin American studies at Salem State University in Massachusetts. Her most recent book is Undocumented: How Immigration Became Illegal.

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Actually, Donald Trump’s Immigration Proposals Are Nothing New

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Bombs and Backbiting: The Syrian Cease-fire Is Off to a Great Start

by HoseaO868858 Posted on September 12, 2016

Mother Jones

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On Saturday, just hours after Secretary of State John Kerry and his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov announced an imminent cease-fire in Syria, government planes bombed a crowded marketplace killing 61 and wounding 100 more. By weekend’s end, at least 90 people had died in regime airstrikes, including 28 children. Today, President Bashar al-Assad publicly vowed to “recover every inch of Syria from the terrorists” and decried those in the opposition who “were betting on promises from foreign powers, which will result in nothing.”

In other words, the long-awaited Syrian cease-fire appears to be off to a great start.

The agreement, which was announced early Saturday morning in Geneva, officially began at sundown today. It comes after 10 months of failed attempts to reach a political settlement to a conflict that’s killed nearly half a million people and spawned the largest refugee crisis since World War II. While some observers argue that the cease-fire is the best opportunity to bring a pause to the violence, the plan has been greeted mostly with skepticism.

If the truce endures for a week and humanitarian aid begins to flow into besieged areas, the United States and Russia say they will put aside their differences over the legitimacy of the Assad regime and work to target two jihadist groups, ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra, the former Al Qaeda-affiliate that recently rebranded as Jabhat Fateh al-Sham (JFS).

In theory, the cease-fire deal prohibits the Syrian Air Force from flying raids over opposition-held areas, except for those controlled by ISIS or JFS. Kerry called this “the bedrock of the agreement,” labeling the Syrian Air Force the “main driver of civilian casualties.” But as Michael Weiss of The Daily Beast writes, outside of excluding ISIS and JFS, the deal does not clearly define the ideologically mixed groups that make up the Syrian opposition forces.

As part of the agreement, more moderate rebel groups must distance themselves from JFS or risk being targeted. But Syria’s mainstream armed opposition forces, as Charles Lister, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, puts it, “are extensively ‘marbled’ or ‘coupled’ with JFS forces…This is not a reflection of ideological affinity as much as it is merely a military necessity.” Lister wrote on Saturday that “not a single one has suggested any willingness to withdraw from the frontlines on which JFS is present. To them, doing so means effectively ceding territory to the regime, as they have little faith in a long-term cessation of hostilities holding.”

Under the new deal, the Syrian government is only banned from striking areas agreed to by both Russia and the United States, and the Assad regime and Russia are permitted to strike JFS (the group formerly known as Nusra) without prior American consent if it’s in response to “imminent threats.” Weiss asks, “What is to stop Damascus and Moscow from suddenly finding ‘imminent threats’ everywhere against parties they insist are Nusra or Nusra-affiliated before Washington can concur?”

Bloomberg columnist Eli Lake points out that the Pentagon and the US intelligence community are deeply skeptical about sharing intelligence with the Russians on Syria. Even if the first week’s truce holds, he writes, “is it even desirable for US intelligence officers to be sharing the locations of US-backed rebels in Syria with a Russian Air Force that has been bombing them for nearly a year?”

On Sunday, rebel groups sent a letter to the United States agreeing to “cooperate positively” with the cease-fire. But they added that they have deep concerns “linked to our survival and continuation as a revolution.” Among their top concerns: The agreement neglects many besieged areas outside of Aleppo, lacks guarantees or sanctions against violations, and doesn’t ban Syrian jets from flying for up to nine days following the beginning of the cease-fire. It also called the exclusion of JFS, but not Iranian-backed Shiite militias, a double standard. One American-backed rebel faction has already called the deal a “trap.”

Perhaps to no one’s surprise, reports of alleged cease-fire violations emerged within one hour of its official start on Monday night, as the Assad regime launched artillery strikes on Al-Hara and dropped a barrel bomb on Aleppo.

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Bombs and Backbiting: The Syrian Cease-fire Is Off to a Great Start

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Accused of Tax Dodging, Apple Says It’s the World’s Largest Taxpayer

by MapleHogan4 Posted on September 2, 2016

Mother Jones

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In a landmark ruling handed down on Tuesday, the European Commission ordered Apple to pay $14.5 billion in back taxes to Ireland. The commission found that Ireland’s tax arrangement with Apple, set up in 1991, was a sweetheart deal that violated the European Union’s antitrust statutes and amounted to illegal state aid.

The ruling, while significant, is just a speeding ticket for the tech giant. Apple’s stock is valued at $570 billion, and it holds more than $230 billion in cash, more than 90 percent of which is kept offshore, beyond the reach of the IRS. The EU ruling implies that the company has been holding as much as $115 billion in profits tax-free in Ireland. That’s more than half of the profits Apple has stashed in its offshore subsidiaries, according to its latest financial filings.

Apple has a long and colorful history of tax minimization, having been deemed both a “pioneer” and a “poster child” of stashing corporate profits beyond the reach of tax collectors. In 2003, Apple paid an effective tax rate of just 1 percent on its profits from selling iPhones and iPads outside of the United States. By 2014, that effective tax rate was just 0.005 percent—or $50 in tax for every $1 million in profit.

Despite Ireland’s 12.5 percent corporate tax rate, Apple’s arrangement with the country allowed it to split its international profits between its Irish branch and a head office that existed only on paper. The company paid the already-low Irish rate on the profits it attributed to Ireland and allocated the rest to this phantom, stateless company, which is untaxable. According to CNN Money, Apple made 16 billion euros (roughly $22 billion) in international profits in 2011, attributing less than 50 million (just below $70 million) to its Irish branch. The rest was funneled through the tax-immune, employee-free “head office”. Via this arrangement, Apple has been able to shift up to two-thirds of its global profits to Irish-registered companies, paying an effective tax rate of one percent or less.

Nevertheless, Apple has roundly condemned the European Commission ruling, with CEO Tim Cook penning an open letter decrying it. Cook said that the “vast majority” of Apple’s profits are taxed in the United States, and claimed that Apple is the largest taxpayer in the United States, Ireland, and the world.

Verifying those claims isn’t easy. A 2014 report on corporate taxation by Citizens for Tax Justice omitted Apple due to the company’s “implausible geographic breakdowns of pretax profits.” In other words, it is very likely that profits Apple claimed in Ireland were actually earned in the United States, making it difficult to confirm Apple’s tax assertions. In particular, CTJ raised an eyebrow at Apple’s US tax rate. Apple claimed to have paid a 36.5 percent effective tax rate on its American profits from 2008 to 2012, even though the highest corporate tax rate is 35 percent. Using Apple’s 2015 filings, CTJ found that the company claimed its most recent tax rate was 46.7 percent. (Apple did not respond for a request comment.)

An Irish Times list of the country’s top taxpayers in 2016 gave the number one spot to the pharmaceutical group Medtronic, though Apple placed in the top ten. And as to Cook’s claim that the “vast majority” of Apple’s profits are taxed in the United States, Matthew Gardner, the executive director of the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, says that statement contradicts information in Apple’s own annual report.

Ireland may not be the only beneficiary of the European Commission ruling, which allows for other countries to partake of the penalty, including cash-strapped EU countries like Greece, as well as the United States. According Gardner, the decision provides a jumping-off point for the United States to recoup back taxes from Apple, which he estimates has avoided close to $70 billion in US taxes.

Yet the official US reaction to the ruling has been largely negative. The Treasury Department expressed disappointment, saying that the assessment was “unfair” and “contrary to well-established legal principles.” Last week, the department warned the European Commission against pursuing American companies for tax avoidance, on the grounds that clawback penalties could harm American efforts to collect taxes from domestic companies with international operations. Even though Apple’s $14.5 billion tax bill represents more than a third of Ireland’s total tax revenue and more than the entirety of Ireland’s annual health spending, Irish Finance Minister Michael Noonan has promised to appeal the ruling.

Google, Facebook, and Microsoft also hoard profits in Ireland, benefiting from its so-called “double Irish” tax structure, an arrangement which Ireland has promised to phase out by 2018. European competition regulators are currently investigating tax deals awarded to McDonald’s and Amazon by Luxembourg, as well as Anheuser-Busch InBev’s arrangement in Belgium. Tax deals given to Fiat/Chrysler (incorporated in Luxembourg) and Starbucks (incorporated in the Netherlands) were found illegal by the European Commission in October.

Even if the EU ruling stands, tax havens will not go away overnight. Fortune 500 companies have an estimated $2.4 trillion in offshore holdings, avoiding up $695 billion in US taxes. While President Obama has criticized corporate inversions, the process by which corporations move their headquarters offshore, Congress has been slow to act. The Treasury Department’s reaction indicates that that is unlikely to change.

Still, European regulators aren’t waiting around for American support. EU bodies are actively investigating possible anti-competitive behavior and tax avoidance by Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Netflix, with penalties expected to be announced sometime in the fall. Google is facing tax probes in Spain, Italy, and France, all of which claim the company should have declared more profits and paid more taxes. As James Wentworth, the vice president for Europe at the US-based Computer & Communications Industry Association, a tech lobbying group, tells the Wall Street Journal, “It’s an avalanche coming.”

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Accused of Tax Dodging, Apple Says It’s the World’s Largest Taxpayer

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Here’s More Evidence That Trump Did Not Oppose the Iraq War Before It Began

by ZacGiordano Posted on September 2, 2016

Mother Jones

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One of the many mysteries of the bizarre 2016 presidential campaign is how GOP nominee Donald Trump has seemingly gotten away with the big lie that he opposed the Iraq war. The celebrity mogul has repeatedly boasted that he had the foresight and judgment to be against George W. Bush’s 2003 invasion of Iraq. Yet there is nothing in the public record suggesting that Trump was anti-war before it began. The only known public statement from Trump on this subject shows the opposite: that he favored the military action. In September 2002, he appeared on Howard Stern’s show, and the shock-jock asked him if he supported invading Iraq, a move that the Bush-Cheney administration was obviously prepping for. “Yeah, I guess so,” Trump replied. Not very Churchillian, but it was definite.

Yet Trump has insisted—as he did during a speech in June—that he “was among the earliest to criticize the rush to war, and yes, even before the war ever started.” And during this campaign he has not always been called out when bragging that he opposed the war. During a joint 60 Minutes interview in July with his running mate Mike Pence, Trump asserted, “I was against the war in Iraq from the beginning,” and he added, “Frankly, I’m one of the few that was right on Iraq.” Interviewer Lesley Stahl did not challenge Trump on this point and instead focused on the fact that Pence had voted for the war while serving as a member of Congress.

Now there is more evidence that Trump was not a foe of the war before it was launched.

In a 2011 video interview with the Wall Street Journal, Trump was asked by the newspaper’s Kelly Evans about the ongoing US intervention in Libya. He indicated that he was no fan of this Obama move and that he was opposed to intervening in Libya on humanitarian grounds: “I’m only interested in Libya, if we take the oil. If we don’t take the oil, I have no interest in Libya.” Trump then turned toward the subject of Iraq: “I always heard that when we went into Iraq, we went in for the oil. I said, ‘Ah that sounds smart.'”

This suggests that Trump was not initially opposed to the invasion and, moreover, that he was fine with it, as long as the United States somehow ended up with control of Iraq’s oil. The remark is hardly the comment of someone who prior to the invasion considered the war a big mistake. It indicates that Trump came to see the war as wrong because his initial expectation—the United States would seize Iraq’s oil—was not met.

After making this comment, Trump had a difficult time answering Evans’ follow-up questions about his assertion that the United States could still take over Iraq’s oil supplies and make a profit. It was typical Trump: he just insisted that were he in charge he could do it. (At the time, Trump was considering entering the 2012 presidential race, a contest he eventually avoided.)

By the way, in this WSJ interview, Trump contradicted his own position on Libya. Weeks earlier, he had called on Obama to intervene in Libya—not to grab oil but to stop Libyan leader Muammar al-Qaddafi from slaughtering rebel forces and civilians. In a video blog, Trump had proclaimed, “I can’t believe what our country is doing, Qaddafi in Libya is killing thousands of people, nobody knows how bad it is, and we’re sitting around we have soldiers all over the Middle East, and we’re not bringing them in to stop this horrible carnage and that’s what it is. It’s a carnage.”

Policy consistency is not a Trump trait. He often appears to spout whatever he thinks is politically necessary at the moment. On the campaign trail, he has attacked President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton for withdrawing US troops from Iraq—actually, it was Bush’s decision, not theirs—even though that was what Trump himself called for at the time. And he keeps citing his opposition to the Iraq war as proof of his national security savvy. But this claim is more likely proof of a penchant to change positions and a willingness to say anything.

Watch Trump’s full Wall Street Journal interview below.

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Here’s More Evidence That Trump Did Not Oppose the Iraq War Before It Began

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This American Company Is Finally Getting Out of the Cluster Bomb Business

by KimberHoltzmann Posted on September 1, 2016

Mother Jones

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The CBU-105 Sensor Fuzed Weapon first saw combat in the early months of Operation Iraqi Freedom. On April 2, 2003, an Iraqi tank column was advancing toward a Marine unit in southwest Baghdad. The marines had no tank support, but a new weapon was on its way. A B-52 bomber dropped two CBU-105 cluster bombs aimed at the leading edge of the Iraqi armor. “The entire first third of the Iraqi tank column was decimated,” said Air Force Col. James Knox. “The Iraqis in the back of the tank column immediately stopped and surrendered to the Marines.”

It was the perfect unveiling for the CBU-105, which quickly became the United States’ go-to anti-armored vehicle munition. But in the past decade, cluster munitions have become known not for deadly accuracy but indiscriminate carnage and civilian casualties. And now, after sustained international pressure, the internationally-banned weapon will no longer be made in the United States—at least for now.

On Tuesday, Textron Manufacturing Systems announced that it is ceasing production of the controversial CBU-105, citing reduced orders, a volatile political environment, and international weapons treaties that negatively affect the “ownability” of its shares. “Historically, sensor-fuzed weapon sales have relied on foreign military and direct commercial international customers for which both executive branch and congressional approval is required,” Textron said in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. “The current political environment has made it difficult to obtain these approvals.”

The announcement comes three months after Textron’s CEO defended the weapon in a Providence Journal op-ed amid ongoing protests at the company’s Rhode Island headquarters. Around the same time, the Obama Administration blocked the transfer of cluster bombs to Saudi Arabia in a rare display of unease over the growing civilian death toll in the Saudi Arabia-led war against Shiite rebels in Yemen.

Cluster bombs, which are dropped from aircraft or launched from the ground, contain submunitions, or “bomblets,” that spread over a wide area before exploding. They’re intended to target military convoys or installations, but can kill or injure anyone who happens to be nearby. Bomblets that fail to detonate can become de facto landmines, laying in wait for anyone unfortunate enough to come across them. The CBU-105 cluster bomb contains 10 canisters, each of which disperses 4 explosive bomblets, called “skeets,” which can spread out over an area the size of a football field before detonating.

In 2008, the United States came up with a policy to end its use and export of all cluster munitions by 2018 except for those whose failure rates are less than one percent. In lab settings, the CBU-105 meets the criteria, blowing up 99 percent of the time they’re deployed. But many observers and activists question whether that’s been the case on the battlefield after documenting numerous cases of unexploded skeets.

Morgan Stritzinger, a Textron spokesperson, defended the CBU-105 in a statement to Mother Jones. “The Sensor Fuzed Weapon is a smart, reliable air-to-ground weapon that is in full compliance with the US Defense Department policy and current law,” she wrote.

According to the 2016 Cluster Munition Monitor, civilians made up 97 percent of cluster-bomb casualties in 2015. More than a third were children. Since the beginning of 2015, Syrian government forces have dropped 13 types of cluster munitions in at least 360 attacks, resulting in 248 deaths. And the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen has used cluster munitions in at least 19 attacks, killing more than 100. Casualties from cluster munition remnants have also been documented in six other countries.

Under the 2008 Convention on Cluster Munitions, more than 100 countries have banned the CBU-105. Yet major arms-supplying nations, including United States and Russia, have refused to sign the treaty. Former Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates stated that eliminating cluster munitions from US stockpiles “would put the lives of our soldiers and those of our coalition partners at risk.” The last known time the United States used cluster bombs was in 2009, when it sent a Tomahawk missile armed with cluster bombs at an alleged Al Qaeda training camp in Yemen. The attack killed 35 women and children and as many 14 militants.

“Textron has taken the right decision to discontinue its production of sensor fuzed weapons, which are prohibited by the 2008 Convention on Cluster Munitions,” Mary Wareham, the arms advocacy director at Human Rights Watch told Mother Jones in an e-mail. “This decision now clears the path for the administration and Congress to work together to permanently end US production, transfer, and use of all cluster munitions. Such steps would help bring the US into alignment with the international ban treaty and enable it to join.”

How likely that is remains to be seen. This week, states parties and advocates meet in Geneva for the Meeting of States Parties to the Convention on Cluster Munitions. But as former Navy explosive ordnance disposal officer turned public radio reporter John Ismay notes, the United States doesn’t have the best track record when it comes to arms treaties. “We haven’t signed the land mine treaty. We still have nuclear weapons. We still have napalm bombs in the inventory,” he says. “I have a feeling these are things we’ll hang on to.”

Plus, they’re still legal under US law. While Textron Systems is ending its cluster bomb program, the Pentagon could turn to a different manufacturer. Or Textron may be willing to license its technology to other defense contractors. On that point, the company did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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This American Company Is Finally Getting Out of the Cluster Bomb Business

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When it Comes to Helping the Poor, Block Grants Are an Epic Failure

by AdeleWight46509 Posted on August 30, 2016

Mother Jones

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I remain agnostic about the 1996 welfare reform act, simply because I haven’t studied it enough. But Ron Haskins, a former Republican congressional staff director, points out one very conspicuous failure:

Haskins said the reform has had important successes — improving day-care programs, helping local authorities collect child-support payments from absent fathers, establishing the value of work in American culture with an unequivocal statement by Congress and the president.

At the same time, Haskins said, the reform has done too little to help the worst off. Clinton’s reform gave states authority to use federal money to help parents train and find work, but many states used the money for other purposes, he said.

“This group of moms at the bottom needs help,” he said. “It’s disappointing to me that the states have not tried harder.”

I assume Haskins is sincere, but this is what happens when you leave social welfare programs up to the states, as Republicans have been hellbent on doing for decades. This usually takes the form of “block grants,” where federal programs are eliminated and money is instead given to states with only moderate strings attached.

Because of they way they’re funded, block grants are a handy way of ensuring that spending on the programs will never increase much: in the case of TANF, funding for the block grants was fixed forever at $16.5 billion. In inflation-adjusted terms, this means that funding has decreased from $21 billion to $16 billion since 1996. Even during the Great Recession, TANF funding only barely rose—for two or three years—to 1996 levels. This was despite the fact that the number of poor during the Great Recession far exceeded the number in 1996.

But that’s not all. Block granting also allows states more freedom to do what they want, and the plain truth is that there are a lot of states that don’t really want to do anything. So they do their best to game the system in every possible way, spending their block grant money on anything except helping the poor. As the CBPP chart on the right shows, only about 26 cents of every block grant dollar goes to cash assistance for the poor, and only half goes to core welfare programs at all.

This is especially ironic in the case of welfare reform, which was largely the result of experiments by states in the late 80s and early 90s. Some of those experiments had been pretty successful, which allowed the states to argue that they could handle welfare programs better than the sluggish federal bureaucracy. But once welfare reform was passed, the experiments ended. Instead, many states began pushing the envelope as hard as they could to redirect their block grant money away from poor people and into other programs. They argued—and continue to argue—that these programs help the poor more than actual welfare programs do, but in most cases this is obvious sophistry. They’re just plugging budget holes with welfare money and telling the poor to pound sand.

Of course, there are other ways states can show their contempt for the poor even more transparently. Obamacare allowed states to expand Medicaid for virtually no cost. It was a no-brainer. But lots of states didn’t want to help the poor, and when the Supreme Court gave them the opportunity to reject the free federal money, they did. This hurt their hospitals and hurt their economies, but no matter. Their hatred for spending money on the poor is so red hot that they pulled out of the expansion program anyway.

Whatever else you think about welfare reform, there’s one clear lesson we’ve learned: federal programs should remain federal programs. Lots of states actively hate spending money on the poor, and if you give them money they’ll do everything they can to avoid spending it on the people it’s designed to help.

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When it Comes to Helping the Poor, Block Grants Are an Epic Failure

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Basically, Donald Trump’s Border Wall Already Exists

by CandraVanderbilt Posted on August 27, 2016

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

At the federal courthouse, Ignacio Sarabia asks the magistrate judge, Jacqueline Rateau, if he may explain why he crossed the international boundary between the two countries without authorization. He has already pleaded guilty to the federal misdemeanor commonly known as “illegal entry” and is about to receive a prison sentence. On either side of him are eight men in the same predicament, all still sunburned, all in the same ripped, soiled clothes they were wearing when arrested in the Arizona desert by agents of the US Border Patrol.

Once again, the zero tolerance border enforcement program known as Operation Streamline has unfolded just as it always does here in Tucson, Arizona. So far today, close to 60 people have already approached the judge in groups of seven or eight, their heads bowed submissively, their bodies weighed down by shackles and chains around wrists, waists, and ankles. The judge hands out the requisite prison sentences in quick succession—180 days, 60 days, 90 days, 30 days.

On and on it goes, day in, day out. Like so many meals served in fast-food restaurants, 750,000 sentences of this sort have been handed down since Operation Streamline was launched in 2005. This mass prosecution of undocumented border crossers has become so much the norm that one report concluded it is now a “driving force in mass incarceration” in the United States. Yet it is but a single program among many overseen by the massive US border enforcement and incarceration regime that has developed during the last two decades—particularly in the post-9/11 era.

Sarabia takes a half-step forward. “My infant is four months old,” he tells the judge in Spanish. The baby was, he assures her, born with a heart condition and is a US citizen. They have no option but to operate. This is the reason, he says, that “I’m here before you.” He pauses.

“I want to be with my child, who is in the United States.”

It’s clear that Sarabia would like to gesture emphatically as he speaks, but that’s difficult, thanks to the shackles that constrain him. Rateau fills her coffee cup as she waits for his comments to be translated into English.

In April 2016, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, still in the heat of his primary campaign, stated once again that he would build a massive concrete border wall towering 30 (or, depending on the moment, 55) feet high along the 2,000 mile US-Mexican border. He would, he insisted, force Mexico to pay for the $8 billion to $10 billion barrier. Repeatedly throwing such red meat into the gaping jaws of nativism, he has over these past months also announced that he would create a major “deportation force,” repeatedly sworn that he would ban Muslims from entering the country (a position he regularly revises) and, most recently, that he would institute an “extreme vetting” process for foreign nationals arriving in the United States.

Back in June 2015, when Trump first rode a Trump Tower escalator into the presidential campaign, among his initial promises was the building of a “great” and “beautiful” wall on the border. (“And no one builds walls better than me, believe me. I will do it very inexpensively. I will have Mexico pay for that wall.”) As he pulled that promise out of a hat with a magician’s flair, the actual history of the border disappeared. From then on in Election 2016, there was just empty desert and Donald Trump.

Suddenly, there hadn’t been a bipartisan government effort over the last quarter-century to put in place an unprecedented array of walls, detection systems, and guards for that southern border. In those years, the number of Border Patrol agents had, in fact, quintupled from 4,000 to more than 21,000, while Customs and Border Protection became the largest federal law enforcement agency in the country with more than 60,000 agents. The annual budget for border and immigration enforcement ballooned from $1.5 billion to $19.5 billion, a more than twelvefold increase. By 2016, federal funding of border and immigration enforcement added up to $5 billion more than funding for all other federal law enforcement agencies combined.

Operation Streamline, a cornerstone program in the so-called Consequence Delivery System, part of a broader Border Patrol deterrence strategy for stopping undocumented immigration, is just one part of a vast enforcement-incarceration-deportation machine. The program is as no-nonsense as its name suggests. It’s not The Wall, but it embodies the logic of the wall: Either you crossed “illegally” or you didn’t. It doesn’t matter why, or whether you lost your job, or if you’ve had to skip meals to feed your kids. It doesn’t matter if your house was flooded or the drought dried up your fields. It doesn’t matter if you’re running for your life from drug cartel gunmen or the very army and police forces that are supposed to protect you.

This system was what Ignacio Sarabia faced a few months ago in a Tucson courtroom a mere seven blocks from where I live.

Before I tell you how the judge responded to his plea, it’s important to understand Sarabia’s journey, and that of so many thousands like him who end up in this federal courthouse day after day. As he pleads to be with his newborn son, his voice cracking with emotion, his story catches the already Trumpian style of border enforcement—both the pain and suffering it has caused, and the strategy and massive buildup behind it—in ways that the campaign rhetoric of both parties and the reporting on it doesn’t. As reporters chase their tails attempting to explain Trump’s wild and often unfounded claims and declarations, the on-the-ground border reality goes unreported. Indeed, one of the greatest “secrets” of the 2016 campaign (though it should be common knowledge) is that the border wall already exists. It has existed for years, and the fingerprints all over it aren’t Donald Trump’s but those of Bill and Hillary Clinton.

Twenty-one years before Trump’s wall-building promise (and seven years before the 9/11 attacks), the US Army Corps of Engineers began to replace the chain link fence that separated Nogales, Sonora (in Mexico) from Nogales, Arizona, with a wall built of rusty landing mats from the Vietnam and Persian Gulf wars. Although there had been various half-hearted attempts at building border walls throughout the 20th century, this was the first true effort to build a barrier of what might now be called Trumpian magnitude.

That rusty, towering wall snaked through the hills and canyons of northern Sonora and southern Arizona, forever deranging a world that, given cross-border familial and community ties, then considered itself one. At the time, who could have known that the strategy the first wall embodied would remain the model for today’s massive system of exclusion.

In 1994, the perceived threat wasn’t terrorism. In part, the call for more hardened, militarized borders came in response, among other things, to a never-ending drug war. It also came from US officials who anticipated the displacement of millions of Mexicans after the implementation of the new North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which, ironically, was aimed at eliminating barriers to trade and investment across North America.

The expectations of those officials proved well justified. The ensuing upheavals in Mexico, as analyst Marco Antonio Velázquez Navarrete explained to me, were like the aftermath of a war or natural disaster. Small farmers couldn’t compete against highly subsidized US agribusiness giants like Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland. Mexican small-business owners were bankrupted by the likes of Walmart, Sam’s Club, and other corporate powers. Mining by foreign companies extended across vast swaths of Mexico, causing territorial conflicts and poisoning the land. The unprecedented and desperate migration that followed came up against what might be considered the other side of the Clinton doctrine of open trade: walls, increased border agents, increased patrolling, and new surveillance technologies meant to cut off traditional crossing spots in urban areas like El Paso, San Diego, Brownsville, and Nogales.

“This administration has taken a strong stand to stiffen the protection of our borders,” President Bill Clinton said in 1996. “We are increasing border controls by 50 percent.”

Over the next 20 years, that border apparatus would expand immensely in terms of personnel, resources, and geographic reach, but the central strategy of the 1990s (“Prevention Through Deterrence“) remained the same. The ever-increasing border policing and militarization funneled desperate migrants into remote locations like the Arizona desert, where temperatures can soar to 120 degrees in the summer.

The first US border strategy memorandum in 1994 predicted the tragic future we now have: “Illegal entrants crossing through remote, uninhabited expanses of land and sea along the border can find themselves in mortal danger.”

Twenty years later, more than 6,000 remains have been found in the desert borderlands of the United States. Hundreds of families continue to search for disappeared loved ones. The Colibri Center for Human Rights has records for more than 2,500 missing people last seen crossing the US-Mexico border. In other words, that border has become a graveyard of bones and sadness.

Despite all the attention given to the wall and the border this election season, neither the Trump nor Clinton campaigns have mentioned “Prevention Through Deterrence,” nor the subsequent border deaths. Not once. The same goes for the establishment media that can’t stop talking about Trump’s wall. There has been little or no mention of what border groups have long called a “humanitarian crisis” of deaths that have increased fivefold over the last decade, thanks, in part, to a wall that already exists. (If the dead were Canadians or Europeans, attention would, of course, be paid.)

Although wall construction began during Bill Clinton’s administration, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) built most of the approximately 700 miles of fencing after the Secure Fence Act of 2006 was passed. Sen. Hillary Clinton voted in favor of that Republican-introduced bill, as did 26 other Democrats. “I voted numerous times when I was a senator to spend money to build a barrier to try to prevent illegal immigrants from coming in,” she commented at one 2015 campaign event, “and I do think you have to control your borders.”

The wall-building project was expected to be so environmentally destructive that then Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff waived 37 environmental and cultural laws in the name of national security. In this way, he allowed Border Patrol bulldozers to desecrate protected wilderness and sacred land. “Imagine a bulldozer parking in your family graveyard, turning up bones,” Chairman Ned Norris, Jr. of the Tohono O’odham Nation (a tribe whose original land was cut in half by the border) told Congress in 2008. “This is our reality.”

With a price tag of, on average, $4 million a mile, these walls, barriers, and fences have proved to be one of the costliest border infrastructure projects undertaken by the United States. For private border contractors, on the other hand, it’s the gift that just keeps on giving. In 2011, for example, the DHS granted Kellogg, Brown, and Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton (one of our “warrior corporations“), a $24 million upkeep contract.

In Tucson in early August, Republican vice presidential candidate Mike Pence looked out over a sea of red “Make America Great Again” caps and T-shirts and said, “We will secure our border. Donald Trump will build that wall.” Pence was met with roaring applause, even though his statement made no sense at all.

Should Trump actually win, how could he build something that already exists? For all practical purposes, the “Great Wall” that Trump talks about may, by January 2017, be as antiquated as the Great Wall of China given the new high-tech surveillance methods now coming on the market. These are being developed in a major way and on a regular basis by a booming border techno-surveillance industry.

The 21st-century border is no longer just about walls—it’s about biometrics and drones. It’s about a “layered approach to national security,” given that, as former Border Patrol chief Mike Fisher has put it, “the international boundary is no longer the first or last line of defense, but one of many.” Hillary Clinton’s promise of “comprehensive immigration reform”—to be introduced within her first 100 days in office—is a much more reliable guide to our grim immigration future than is Trump’s wall. If her bill follows the pattern of previous ones, as it surely will, an increasingly weaponized, privatized, high-tech, layered border regime, increasingly dangerous to future Ignacio Sarabias, will continue to be a priority of the federal government.

On the surface, there are important differences between the two candidates’ immigration platforms. Trump’s wildly xenophobic comments and declarations are well known, and Clinton claims that she will, among other things, fight for family unity for those forcibly separated by deportation and enact “humane” immigration enforcement. Yet deep down, their policies are far more similar than they might at first appear.

That April day, only one bit of information about Ignacio Sarabia’s border crossing to reunite with his wife and newborn child was available at the Tucson federal courthouse: He had entered the United States “near Nogales.” Most likely he circumvented the wall first started during the Clinton administration, as most immigrants do, by making his way through the potentially treacherous canyons that surround that border town.

If his experience was typical, he probably didn’t have enough water or food and suffered some physical woe like large, painful blisters on his feet. Certainly, he wasn’t atypical in trying to reunite with loved ones: More than 2.5 million people have been expelled from the country by the Obama administration, an average annual deportation rate of close to 400,000. This was, by the way, only possible thanks to laws signed by Bill Clinton in 1996 and meant to burnish his legacy. They vastly expanded the government’s deportation powers.

In 2013 alone, Immigration and Customs Enforcement carried out 72,000 deportations of parents who said their children were American-born. And many of them are likely to try to cross that dangerous southern border again to reunite with their families.

The enforcement landscape Sarabia faced has changed drastically since that first wall was built in 1994. The post-9/11 border is now both a war zone and a showcase for corporate surveillance. It represents, according to Border Patrol agent Felix Chavez, an “unprecedented deployment of resources,” any of which could have led to Sarabia’s capture. It could have been one of the hundreds of remote video or mobile surveillance systems, or one of the more than 12,000 implanted motion sensors that set off alarms in hidden operational control rooms where agents stare into large monitors.

It could have been the spy towers made by the Israeli company Elbit Systems that spotted him, or Predator B drones built by General Atomics, or VADER radar systems manufactured by the defense giant Northrup Grumman, which like so many similar technologies have been transported from the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq to the US-Mexico border.

If the comprehensive immigration reform Hillary Clinton pledges to introduce as president is based on the existing bipartisan Senate package, then this corporate-enforcement landscape will be significantly bolstered and reinforced. There will be 19,000 more Border Patrol agents roving around “border enforcement jurisdictions” that extend up to 100 miles inland. More F-150 trucks and all-terrain vehicles will rumble through and, at times, tear up the desert. There will be more Blackhawk helicopters, flying low, their propellers dusting groups of scattering migrants, many of them already lost in the vast, parched desert.

If such a package passes the next Congress, up to $46 billion could be slated to go into more of all of this, including funding for hundreds of miles of new walls. Corporate vendors are salivating at the thought of such a future and in a visible state of elation at homeland security trade shows across the globe.

The 2013 bill that passed in the Senate but failed in the House also included a process of legalization for the millions of undocumented people living in the United States. It maintained programs that will grant legal residence for children who came to the United States at a young age, along with their parents. Odds are that a comprehensive reform bill in a Clinton presidency would be similar.

Included in that bill was funding to bolster Operation Streamline. The Evo A. DeConcini Federal Courthouse in Tucson would have the capacity to prosecute triple the number of people it deals with at present.

After taking a sip from her coffee and listening to the translation of Ignacio Sarabia’s comments, the magistrate judge looks at him and says she’s sorry for his predicament.

Personally, I’m mesmerized by his story as I sit on a wooden bench at the back of the court. I have a child the same age as his son. I can’t imagine his predicament. Not once while he talks does it leave my mind that my child might even have the same birthday as his.

The judge then looks directly at Sarabia and tells him that he can’t just come here “illegally,” that he has to find a “legal way”—highly unlikely, given the criminal conviction that will now be on his record. “Your son, when he gets better, and his mother,” she says, “can visit you where you are in Mexico.”

“Otherwise,” the judge adds, he’ll be “visiting you in prison.” And that’s not exactly, she points out, an appealing scenario: seeing your father in a prison where he will be “locked away for a very long time.”

She then sentences the nine men standing side by side in front of her to prison stints ranging from 60 to 180 days for the crime of crossing an international border without proper documents. Sarabia receives 60 days.

Next, armed guards from G4S—the private contractor that once employed Omar Mateen (the Pulse nightclub killer) and has a lucrative quarter-billion-dollar border contract with Customs and Border Protection—will transport the shackled men to a Corrections Corporation of America private prison in Florence, Arizona. There, behind layers of coiled razor wire, Sarabia will have time to think about his sick child while the CCA collects $124 per day for incarcerating the father.

Donald Trump’s United States doesn’t await his presidency. It’s already laid out before us. And one place it’s happening every single day is in Tucson, only seven blocks from my house.

Todd Miller is the author of Border Patrol Nation: Dispatches From the Front Lines of Homeland Security. You can follow him on Twitter @memomiller.

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Basically, Donald Trump’s Border Wall Already Exists

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Hey Yahoo, Barack Obama Is Not the Founder of ISIS

by Parab3olum234 Posted on August 22, 2016

Mother Jones

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When Donald Trump declared that President Barack Obama was the “founder” of ISIS—and then stuck to that claim—most of the media dismissed this rhetoric as silly. No doubt, Trump, the onetime champion of birtherism, was trying once again to depict Obama as some foreign presence who is not truly American, but he was roundly slammed by journalists who described this move as yet another Trump misstep. Somehow, though, Yahoo did not get the memo.

If you go to the Yahoo search page and type in “Barack Obama,” one of the top results that appears is a truncated description sourced to Wikipedia that reads:

Barack Hussein Obama II (born August 4, 1961) is the 44th and current President of the United States. He is also the founder of ISIS. He is the first African American to hold the office…

Click on the link attached to this short bio, and you land on the Wikipedia page for Obama, where there is no mention of him and ISIS. It appears that at some point a Trumpish troll inserted the ISIS line into Obama’s Wikipedia page. The folks there must have excised it. But as of this afternoon, Yahoo (unlike other search engines) was still telling its users that the president created the terrorist outfit he has regularly bombed. Uh, #fail?

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Hey Yahoo, Barack Obama Is Not the Founder of ISIS

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The Biggest Threat to Women’s Health That No One Talks About

by SiobhanWheeler Posted on August 16, 2016

Mother Jones

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The lady doctors are disappearing, right when women need them the most.

According to the American College of Nurse-Midwives, nearly half of all counties in the United States don’t have a single OB-GYN. That’s a problem because, as Pew Charitable Trusts reports, the overall population is expected to boom by 18 percent between 2010 and 2030, and that means more women and babies who need health care. Maternal deaths are already high in the United States compared with other developed countries—there are 18.5 deaths for every 100,000 live births, compared with 8.2 in Canada and 6.1 in Japan and the United Kingdom.

And while the number of births increases, the number of practicing OB-GYNs is projected to decrease even more. The American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) estimates that the United States will face a shortage of OB-GYNs—6,000 to 8,800 fewer of them than necessary—by 2020. By 2050, that shortage will grow to 22,000.

Why? A few reasons. First, the number of medical students choosing to specialize in obstetrics and gynecology has remained relatively steady since 1980, but in the past couple of years, more than four out of five first-year OB-GYNs were women. That’s a change—like most medical specialties, the field used to be dominated by men. Thomas Gellhaus, president of ACOG, said female OB-GYNs tend to retire about a decade earlier than male OB-GYNs and tend to prefer part-time schedules.

Another factor: While OB-GYNs were once expected to be available around the clock, few doctors today will put up with such a demanding schedule. This change has given way to “laborists,” providers who work only in hospitals and focus strictly on labor and deliveries.

Finally, students going into obstetrics and gynecology today are choosing more lucrative subspecialties like gynecologic oncology and reproductive endocrinology and fertility, leaving a gap in routine gynecological care providers. Opting for a subspecialty over a general OB-GYN practice could mean up to a $100,000 annual difference in salary.

One potential solution: Let certified nurse-midwives pick up the slack. A California bill introduced by state Assemblywoman Autumn Burke would remove the requirement that nurse-midwives—registered nurses who have also completed an accredited nurse-widwifery program and passed an exam given by the American Midwifery Certification Board—practice under the supervision of doctors. Pew reports that the number of nurse-midwives in the United States has risen as states have relaxed restrictions—the profession has grown by 30 percent since 2012.

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The Biggest Threat to Women’s Health That No One Talks About

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Is Trump Even Aware of Where He’s Speaking?

by DedraBayldon5 Posted on August 15, 2016

Mother Jones

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Donald Trump will deliver a speech on Monday afternoon in Youngstown, Ohio, a quintessential Rust Belt city that has declined sharply from its manufacturing boom times. It’s the kind of place where Trump is perfectly positioned to make inroads among white working-class residents who have long voted Democratic but are drawn to Trump’s opposition to free-trade deals and his pitch for a return to better days.

But Trump doesn’t plan to talk about the economy in Youngstown. Instead, he will deliver a foreign policy address focused on ISIS.

In his speech, Trump will also propose an “ideological test” to administer to all immigrants entering the United States, according to the Associated Press. The “test for admission” would include questionnaires, a search of the immigrants’ social-media accounts, and interviews with friends and family to assess the immigrant’s views on religious liberty, gender equality, and LGBT rights.

The foreign policy focus is a strange one for Youngstown, where the dissolution of the domestic steel industry triggered economic depression and racial tensions—the very circumstances that have fueled Trump’s rise. But it wouldn’t be the first time Trump has delivered a message to one audience that is better suited to another.

At a rally in Loudoun County, Virginia, earlier this month, Trump rattled off a list of shuttered manufacturing plants—the exact topic that would most resonate in a place like Youngstown. But Loudoun County is not in the Rust Belt. It’s the richest county in the United States, thanks to lucrative defense contracts after September 11, 2001. All the factories Trump mentioned during this speech were far from the Washington, DC, exurbs of Loudoun County. One was in North Carolina.

Trump kept up the trend last week in southwestern Virginia coal country, where a speech to coal miners focused as much on the latest batch of Hillary Clinton’s emails as on the future of the state’s coal mines. Surrounded on stage by miners in hard hats, Trump couldn’t resist a reference to his winery in Charlottesville, Virginia, the college town 250 miles from where Trump was speaking in Abingdon. “I don’t know if you know my Charlottesville place, but it’s a fantastic place,” he said. “It’s now a winery, it’s one of the largest wineries on the East Coast.”

Trump has also insisted on campaigning in blue states he is highly unlikely to win. He gave a rambling talk in Fairfield, Connecticut, on Saturday evening. At the end of August, he plans to campaign in Oregon, another deep-blue state in an election where even some Republican strongholds are turning purple.

And then there was Trump’s puzzling decision to hold a rally in Portland, Maine, earlier this month. Because Maine allocates electoral votes by congressional district, Trump has a shot to win the state’s relatively conservative 2nd District. The only problem: He held his rally in the wrong district.

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Is Trump Even Aware of Where He’s Speaking?

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