Tag Archives: states

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

by coolmathgamesgU Posted on February 25, 2017

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

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

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

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

Kentucky Derby aftermath. (Louisville, KY. 2015)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Continue reading – 

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

Posted in Delk, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Donald Trump May Be on Your Television, But Here’s What America Really Looks Like

It’s Official: The Trump Administration Will Soon Solicit Bids for a New Border Wall

by PaulinaNesmith Posted on February 24, 2017

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

The Department of Homeland Security announced Friday that it will soon begin soliciting bids “for the design and build of several prototype wall structures in the vicinity of the United States border with Mexico.” Bidding begins March 6. The official posting says the administration will select the companies to potentially build the new structure sometime in April.

The solicitation appears to correspond to President Trump’s highly publicized pledge to build a new border wall along the US-Mexico border. “We’re going to build a wall, don’t worry about it,” Trump said at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Friday. “We’re building the wall. We’re building the wall. In fact, it’s going to start soon. Way ahead of schedule, way ahead of schedule.”

The official post soliciting bids for the border wall is available online here.

Taken from: 

It’s Official: The Trump Administration Will Soon Solicit Bids for a New Border Wall

Posted in alo, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on It’s Official: The Trump Administration Will Soon Solicit Bids for a New Border Wall

From Tech Workers to College Kids, Trump is Also Taking on Legal Immigrants

by EmilieSchuler Posted on February 20, 2017

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

President Donald Trump’s opposition to illegal immigration is well known. But since his inauguration, he has also attempted to overhaul legal immigration, most notably with his executive order barring travel and immigration from seven predominantly Muslim countries. Speculation about other ways the president could restrict legal immigration have been fueled by his statements as well as leaked draft memos. Additionally, there are concerns surrounding potential conflicts of interest between the president’s businesses and his immigration policy, since some of the Trump’s companies rely upon visas that he now controls.

Few people understand the United States’ notoriously labyrinthine immigration system. The confusion is understandable. The State Department lists 76 visa categories that fall under two umbrellas: non-immigrant visas, for those seeking to come to the country for a fixed period, and immigrant visas, for those seeking a path to citizenship.

Here are some of the visas issued by the US government and what we know about Trump’s plans for them:

EB-5: The “millionaire” or “investor” visa
EB-5 holders are required to make a minimum business investment of $1 million (or $500,000 in a “high unemployment” or rural area), creating at least 10 jobs. This visa is controversial: Some argue that it allows foreigners to buy citizenship. Others suggest that these visas are processed too quickly, potentially opening the door to money laundering and other security risks. Earlier this month, Sens. Diane Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) cosponsored a bill to end the program.

As Bloomberg reported, Trump’s son-in-law and senior advisor, Jared Kushner, owns an apartment complex that has taken $50 million in EB-5 funds, mostly from Chinese investors. Trump has not commented on this visa program.

H-1B: Highly Skilled worker visa
H-1Bs allow foreigners who work in a “specialty occupation,” such as technology, engineering, mathematics, or business, to work in the country for three years. (They may renew their visas an additional three years so long as they remain employed.) The worker must have an employment agreement with an American company. The number of H-1Bs is capped at 85,000.

Trump’s stance on H-1Bs has varied. He used harsh language about them on his website, but then in a campaign debate said, “I’m softening the position on his website because we have to have talented people in this country.” He then hardened his position again in a press release, stating that “I will end forever the use of the H-1B as a cheap labor program, and institute an absolute requirement to hire American workers first for every visa and immigration program. No exceptions.” In his inauguration speech, Trump said, “We will follow two simple rules; buy American and hire American.” This has raised questions about how a “hire American” requirement might impact American businesses that rely on skilled foreign employees, particularly Silicon Valley.

According to a draft executive order obtained by Bloomberg, Trump has plans to overhaul this visa program. The draft order sparked a wave of panic in India’s technology sector, whose workers are the top recipients of H-1Bs. According to executive order drafts leaked to Vox, one of the ways Trump could alter this visa would be to stop the spouses of H-1B holders from working in the United States and restricting these visas to companies that are “the best and the brightest,” which presumably means only largest and most successful American companies.

H-1B3: The “model visa”
This visa is a subset of the “highly skilled workers” visa. When the immigration system was reformed in the 1990s, the modeling industry expressed concern that while supermodels were covered by the O-1 visa (see below), non-supermodels were left out. The “model visa” was created.

First Lady Melania Trump originally worked in the United States on such a visa, and has cited it as proof that she immigrated legally and that others should follow her example. Trump’s modeling agency, Trump Model Management, has benefited from hiring foreign models using this visa. However, as Mother Jones reported last year, some of the company’s models say they came to the United States on tourist visas, which did not allow them to work legally. A Trump Organization executive did not deny the claims.

H2: Seasonal worker visa
H2s allow companies to temporarily hire agricultural workers or other workers without advanced degrees, such as waiters and housekeepers, provided that employers prove that they could not fill these position with citizens.

According to the Washington Post, Trump’s vineyard in Charlottesville, Virginia, recently applied for six H-2A visas. As BuzzFeed reported last week, the vineyard applied for nearly two dozen more earlier this month. Similarly, Trump’s Palm Beach Mar-a-Lago resort requested 78 H2B visas for foreign servers, housekeepers, and cooks. When asked about this at a debate last March, Trump said, “It’s very, very hard to get people. But other hotels do the exact same thing…There’s nothing wrong with it. We have no choice.” Perhaps that was a signal that he’ll leave this visa alone.

F-1: Student visas
These visas allow students to travel to the United States to study at high schools, universities, seminaries, and other educational institutions.

Many students with F visas have been affected by the travel ban. As Mother Jones has reported, many college students were stranded by the ban while returning from winter break. Four thousand Iranian students will be affected should the ban remain in place. Fortune estimates that US colleges could lose $700 million annually if these students’ tuition money dries up. Though Trump hasn’t spoken specifically about changes to student visas, during his campaign, he has called for ending the J-1 visa program for visiting scholars and professors.

O-1: The “artist” or “genius” visa
This visa allows “individuals with extraordinary ability or achievement” to come to the United States to work in their field of expertise. This visa covers everyone from athletes and musicians to famous authors and Nobel Prize-winning scientists. (Athletes who are entering for a specific competition may enter on a P-1 “athlete’s visa.”)

If Trump’s travel ban is upheld, celebrities from the seven specified countries could be affected. International disapproval of the ban could affect major events, such as Los Angeles’ bid for the 2024 Olympics, which will be decided in September. According to ESPN, international soccer officials’ disapproval of the president’s travel ban could affect the United States’s chances of hosting the World Cup in 2026.

This article: 

From Tech Workers to College Kids, Trump is Also Taking on Legal Immigrants

Posted in alo, Citizen, Everyone, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Smith's, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on From Tech Workers to College Kids, Trump is Also Taking on Legal Immigrants

Trump on Israel: Whatevs

by StellaPoe56 Posted on February 15, 2017

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

So does President Trump support a two-state solution in the Middle East, which has been US policy for decades? Or has he given up on that and now endorses a one-state solution? Here’s his answer:

So I’m looking at two-state and one-state, and I like the one that both parties like. Netanyahu laughs. I’m very happy with the one that both parties like. I can live with either one. I thought for a while the two-state looked like it may be the easier of the two, but honestly, if Bibi and the Palestinians — if Israel and the Palestinians are happy, I’m happy with the one they like the best.

Translation: I couldn’t care less. I’m not even sure what all this one-state and two-state stuff is about. I just want to make a deal.

I wouldn’t blame Trump if he ignored Israel entirely. It’s pretty obvious that no peace deal is anywhere on the horizon, and there’s nothing much the United States can do about it. But if he is going to talk about it, is it asking too much that he demonstrate even a minimal understanding of what the two sides disagree about?

Link:

Trump on Israel: Whatevs

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Trump on Israel: Whatevs

After Silent Treatment, Trump Caves In To Chinese

by MarshaBracewell Posted on February 10, 2017

Mother Jones

Behold the greatest negotiator our nation has ever seen:

President Donald J. Trump and President Xi Jinping of China had a lengthy telephone conversation on Thursday evening. The two leaders discussed numerous topics and President Trump agreed, at the request of President Xi, to honor our “one China” policy.

That’s a readout from the White House Thursday evening. Here’s the backstory:

December 2: Breaking tradition, Trump “risks China’s wrath” by speaking on the phone with the president of Taiwan.

December 12: Trump goes on Fox News Sunday to poke China further: “I fully understand the ‘one China’ policy, but I don’t know why we have to be bound by a ‘one China’ policy unless we make a deal with China having to do with other things, including trade.”

December through February: China gives Trump the silent treatment. “Stung by an earlier, and unorthodox, telephone call between Mr. Trump and the president of Taiwan, Mr. Xi had not spoken to the American leader since Nov. 14, the week after he was elected….Relations between Washington and Beijing had been frozen since December.”

February 8: Apparently uneasy over Xi shutting him out, Trump finally sends Xi a letter wishing him a happy Chinese New Year. The letter was hand delivered by Mike Flynn: “As a gesture of conciliation, Flynn and his deputy, K.T. McFarland, hand-delivered the letter to China’s ambassador to the United States, Cui Tiankai. Trump wrote that he wished ‘the Chinese people a happy Lantern Festival and prosperous Year of the Rooster.’ He also said he ‘looks forward to working with President Xi to develop a constructive relationship that benefits both the United States and China.'”

February 8: A Chinese surveillance plane “inadvertently” buzzes an American P-3C Orion in the vicinity of the disputed Scarborough Shoal in the South China Sea.

February 9: Trump caves in and agrees to honor the One China policy.

It’s worth noting that this was not just something that “came up” in the phone call. Xi would not have agreed to talk unless Trump explicitly promised beforehand that he would affirm the One China policy and do so publicly. Delivering that promise was probably the real point of Flynn’s meeting with the Chinese ambassador, and it’s why it was specifically mentioned in the readout. A single sentence in a late-night readout was the least humiliating way Trump’s aides could think of for publicly knuckling under to China. God knows, Trump would probably go to war before he’d be willing to personally back down in front of the TV cameras.

In any case, Trump really showed them, didn’t he? No matter what kind of spin the White House puts on this, China now knows that Trump’s threats and bluster are entirely hollow. That should do wonders for our negotiations with China on trade issues. And everyone else too.

POSTSCRIPT: Can anyone point me to any great deal that Trump has ever negotiated? I can think of plenty of disasters (Trump Air, the Plaza Hotel, his Atlantic City casinos, etc.), and I can think of plenty of ordinary deals he’s closed (all of his golf courses). But have there been any that were really spectacular? None come to mind, unless you count his ability to talk his bankers into sparing him personal bankruptcy after his businesses went bust in 1990. Or maybe the way he snookered all the poor schmoes who bought stock in his entertainment company when he took it public in 1995.

But how about a straightforward real estate deal where he negotiated a bargain price and made out like a bandit? Are there any?

Link:

After Silent Treatment, Trump Caves In To Chinese

Posted in Anker, Everyone, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Oster, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on After Silent Treatment, Trump Caves In To Chinese

Trump Loses Immigration Appeal

by AdellStephenson Posted on February 9, 2017

Mother Jones

President Trump lost his appeal today to keep his immigration ban in place:

A federal appeals court on Thursday refused to reinstate President Trump’s targeted travel ban, delivering the latest and most stinging judicial rebuke to his effort to make good on a campaign promise and tighten the standards for entry into the United States.

….The decision is likely to be quickly appealed to the United States Supreme Court. That court remains short-handed and could deadlock. A 4-to-4 tie in the Supreme Court would leave the appeals court’s ruling in place.

It’s worth pointing out that this isn’t a ruling on whether Trump’s immigration order is legal. It’s not even a ruling on whether it should be blocked pending the result of other lawsuits. It’s a ruling on an emergency stay of the temporary restraining order issued last week by a district court in Seattle. For now, the TRO remains in place unless the Supreme Court overturns the cicuit court and grants the emergency stay. Later we’ll get a full hearing on the TRO, and following that we’ll get trials on the various lawsuits challenging the legality of the immigration order.

UPDATE: This has been rewritten to more accurately explain what happened here.

Originally from:  

Trump Loses Immigration Appeal

Posted in FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Trump Loses Immigration Appeal

"Immoral," "Stupid," and "Counterproductive": National Security Experts Slam Trump’s "Muslim Ban"

by ZoilaSandes65 Posted on January 29, 2017

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Despite a decade of working to help America in Iraq, Hameed Khalid Darweesh was welcomed to the United States with handcuffs. Darweesh had received a special immigrant visa on January 20 for his work as a contractor, engineer, and interpreter for the Army’s 101st Airborne Division in Baghdad and Mosul. But when he arrived at New York City’s John F. Kennedy International Airport on Friday night, he was among the refugees detained upon arrival in the wake of President Donald Trump’s latest executive order.

On Friday afternoon, Trump banned refugees from Syria indefinitely, suspended all refugee resettlement to the United States for 120 days, denied entry to citizens of seven predominantly Muslim nations (Iran, Iraq, Sudan, Syria, Libya, Somalia, and Yemen), and reduced the number of refugees to be resettled this year by more than half. After nearly 19 hours of detention and a lawsuit filed on his behalf, Darweesh was released on Saturday. Countless others remain stuck in limbo.

While Trump’s executive order claims to be in the interest of “protecting the nation,” experts in national security and counterterrorism who spoke with Mother Jones argue that it poses potentially disastrous immediate and long-term security threats to the nation and US personnel overseas.

“Not only is it immoral and stupid, it’s also counterproductive,” says Patrick Skinner, a former CIA counterterrorism case officer who now works at the Soufan Group, a security consulting firm. “We’ve got military, intelligence, and diplomatic personnel on the ground right now in Syria, Libya, and Iraq who are working side by side with the people, embedded in combat, and training and advising. At no time in the US’s history have we depended more on local—and I mean local—partnerships for counterterrorism. We need people in Al Bab, Syria; we depend on people in a certain part of eastern Mosul, Iraq; in Cert, Libya. At the exact moment we need them most, we’re telling these people, ‘Get screwed.'”

Kirk W. Johnson, who spent a year on the reconstruction in Fallujah in Iraq with the US Agency for International Development (USAID), echoes Skinner’s fears: “This will have immediate national security implications, in that we are not going to be able to recruit people to help us right now, and people are not going to step forward to help us in any future wars if this is our stance.”

The US-led war on ISIS is but one front in a constellation of fights against extremist groups that could be hampered by Trump’s decision. “The US is officially banning people in these countries at the same time we’re trying to build up local support to fight ISIS,” Skinner says. “It takes a long time to build trust with these people. This is like the Abu Ghraib thing. You have to start over, say, ‘Okay, starting now, trust me.’ How many times can you get away with that?” It also sends a message that groups like the so-called Islamic State can exploit. Elizabeth Goitein, the codirector of the Brennan Center’s Liberty & National Security Program, says, “The message this projects is that America sees Muslims as a threat—not specific actors who are intent on committing terrorist acts. The message that America really is at war with Islam will be ISIS’s best friend.”

BuzzFeed reporters Mike Giglio and Munzer Al-Awad spoke with five current or former ISIS fighters who cited Trump’s divisiveness as a factor that will weaken America. They added that his rhetoric against Muslims will help them reinforce their narrative that America and the West are fighting not just terrorism, but Islam itself. “Trump will shorten the time it takes for us to achieve our goals,” said one.

Meanwhile, the very allies who have operated alongside US personnel in war zones for years—contractors and translators like Darweesh—are once again being abandoned. For the past decade, Johnson has been leading an effort to resettle Iraqi allies, many of whom, he says, face torture, kidnapping, and death after collaborating with American soldiers. It all started in 2006 when he heard from an Iraqi USAID colleague who’d been identified by a militia. The militia left a severed pig’s head on his door step, along with a message saying that it would be his head next. Despite his years of helping the United States, the US government offered no help, and he had to flee the country with his wife.

Johnson discovered that there was no mechanism in place to help US allies like his colleague, and he began a personal crusade to change that. Since then, through legislation and a special immigrant visa platform, Johnson’s efforts have helped thousands reach the United States, but the process is cumbersome, long, and often too late for the people who need it most. Johnson speaks of interpreters “who were having legs shot off, cut off, their wives raped, their children abducted.” Some of his colleagues were even killed. And though Johnson has been critical of the process for years, now he’s in the “awkward position” of defending it, because it was at least better than shutting those allies out as a matter of policy.

Skinner, Johnson, and Goitein all point out that the executive order reads as if whoever wrote it had no understanding of, or done any work with, US refugee admissions programs. Indeed, a senior Department of Homeland Security official reportedly told NBC News that career State Department and DHS officials had no input in the order, saying, “Nobody has any idea what is going on.” Johnson says, “It reads as though 9/11 happened yesterday, and that 9/11 was carried out by refugees, which it wasn’t, and it creates a series of policy prescriptions to solve a problem that doesn’t exist, as if the stringent measures that have been put in place over the past 15 years to screen refugees don’t exist.”

Johnson, exasperated at the thought of US allies being turned away by the very country they spent years helping, adds, “These people who are directly and immediately impacted by this have done more to help our country than just about every breathing American has—especially the president. Shame is not a strong enough word for today. This is a disgraceful moment.”

Originally posted here: 

"Immoral," "Stupid," and "Counterproductive": National Security Experts Slam Trump’s "Muslim Ban"

Posted in alo, Citizen, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on "Immoral," "Stupid," and "Counterproductive": National Security Experts Slam Trump’s "Muslim Ban"

Chaos Breaks Out in the Wake of Trump’s "Muslim Ban”

by MackN1969983798 Posted on January 28, 2017

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

The impacts of President Donald Trump’s sweeping order to temporarily block refugees from entering the United States and ban immigration from seven predominantly Muslim countries for 90 days were felt immediately around the world on Saturday. Multiple refugees were detained by customs officials across the country, as lawyers scrambled to file lawsuits against the Trump administration, and protesters planned demonstrations outside airports.

On Friday, Trump signed an executive order requiring immigration authorities to:

Suspend all refugee resettlement for 120 days and reduce the number of refugees resettled in the country to 50,000;
Immediately deny entry to the United States to anyone from Iran, Iraq, Sudan, Syria, Libya, Somalia, and Yemen for 90 days;
Ban Syrian refugees from resettling in the United States;
Prioritize refugee claims “on the basis of religious-based persecution, provided that the religion of the individual is a minority religion in the individual’s country of nationality.”

Confusion reigned as details began to emerge about just how many people might be covered by the executive order—potentially throwing hundreds of thousands of travelers into legal limbo. The State Department issued a statement on Saturday afternoon saying that citizens from the seven banned countries who hold dual nationality would also be blocked from entering the US, according to the Wall Street Journal. (The dual-citizenship restriction won’t apply to those holding US passports.) The ban could also affect some 500,000 people from those countries already in the United States on green cards or other temporary visas, according to ProPublica.

The executive order also opens the door for immigration procedures to become even more restrictive in the future. Read the full order here:

DV.load(“https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3434994-Donald-Trump-s-Anti-Refugee-Order.js”,
width: 630,
height: 500,
sidebar: false,
text: false,
container: “#DV-viewer-3434994-Donald-Trump-s-Anti-Refugee-Order”
);

Donald Trump’s Anti-Refugee Executive Order (PDF)

Donald Trump’s Anti-Refugee Executive Order (Text)

So far, 12 people have been detained at JFK airport in New York, according to CNN. The New York Times reports that passengers were turned away at airports in Dubai and Istanbul, and at least one family was ejected from a flight.

Iran issued a swift response to Trump’s ban, saying it would ban all US citizens from entering the country. “The US decision to restrict travel for Muslims to the US, even if for a temporary period of three months, is an obvious insult to the Islamic world and in particular to the great nation of Iran,” Iran’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement. “Despite the claims of combating terrorism and keeping American people safe, it will be recorded in history as a big gift to extremists and their supporters.” The ban would remain in place until the US lifted its restrictions on Iran, according to the statement.

Civil rights and refugee resettlement organizations are readying themselves for a fight against the order. On Friday evening, the Council for American-Islamic Relations announced it would file a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the executive order. “There is no evidence that refugees—the most thoroughly vetted of all people entering our nation—are a threat to national security,” CAIR national litigation director Lena Masri said in a press release.

The American Civil Liberties Union also filed suit Saturday morning on behalf of two Iraqi men who were already on their way to the United States and had been detained at New York’s JFK airport. One, Hameed Khalid Darweesh, who had worked as an interpreter during the Iraq War, was released Saturday afternoon.

Protests broke out in New York Wednesday evening in response to leaked versions of the ban. More protests were planned across the country for Saturday afternoon.

Update: 6:25pm ET January 28, 2017: New York Governor Andrew Cuomo put out the following statement indicating that he has directed the Port Authority (which controls JFK) to “explore all legal options to assist anyone detained at NY airports.”

This is a developing story. We will update the post as more details become available.

Source article – 

Chaos Breaks Out in the Wake of Trump’s "Muslim Ban”

Posted in Citizen, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, ProPublica, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Chaos Breaks Out in the Wake of Trump’s "Muslim Ban”

This Industry Just Found Out What It’s Like to Do Business in Trump’s America

by debbiemurch611 Posted on January 27, 2017

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

American farms overflow with certain foods: Our almond, corn, soybean, cotton, and wheat farms, and hog, chicken, and beef feedlots all churn out more than we can eat, wear, or burn in our cars as biofuel. That’s why industrial-scale US agriculture needs robust and growing export markets. During the campaign, Donald Trump courted support from these agribusiness interests, assembling a 60-plus-person advisory panel of farm-state politicians and industry flacks, and thundering from the stump against the “radical regulation” of farms.

But on the question of trade, Trump strayed far from his flock of agribiz supporters, lashing out against the very deals that Big Ag has been pushing for a generation and trash-talking China, a prized destination for our farm goods. In the first days of his presidency, Trump has already shown he meant business. He formally removed the United States from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a massive deal hotly supported by Big Ag that would link the United States with 11 nations on both sides of the Pacific Ocean. And he vowed to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with Mexico and Canada, two of the biggest foreign buyers of our farmed goods.

He has also initiated a fight with Mexico over his beloved border wall—one that threatened to bloom into a full trade war on Thursday afternoon when White House spokesman Sean Spicer dangled the idea of collecting funds to pay for the barrier by imposing a 20 percent tax on all imports. Spicer’s statements were widely misreported: He never mentioned a tax specifically targeting Mexico, and he quickly walked back the idea anyway.

But if we did get sucked into a US-Mexico trade war, the consequences would be massive on both sides of the border. The United States imports nearly a third of the fruit and vegetables we consume, and Mexico accounts for 44 percent of that foreign-grown cornucopia, much more than any other country. It’s by far our biggest supplier of avocados, sending us more than 90 percent of the Hass varietals we consume, and it also delivers loads of tomatoes and peppers—meaning that in the event of a trade war, your guacamole could become very dear, indeed.

For Mexico, the stakes are even higher. As Greg Grandin, a professor of history at New York University, recently noted, NAFTA “destroyed the Mexican farming industry, transforming what is left of it into the production of specialty crops to meet the all-season US demand for strawberries, broccoli, and tomatoes.” Mexico now relies heavily on imports of US wheat, corn, and soybeans. A major disruption in supply could trigger price spikes in these commodities, leading higher prices for staples like tortillas and meat in a country already being roiled by protests over rising gas prices.

Amid the tumult, US agricultural players are freaking out, and for good reason. The countries that Trump most directly targeted in his trade tirades during the campaign, Mexico and China, are two of the three biggest export markets for farmed products. The third biggest market is Canada—the country that joins the United States and Mexico in NAFTA. According to Joseph Glauber, who served as chief economist at the US Department of Agriculture under most of Obama’s presidency, US agriculture exports to China, Mexico, and Canada averaged $63 billion annually between 2013 and 2015—accounting for 44 percent of total US exports.

For soybeans and pork, two of the most valuable US products, the reliance is particularly stark. The United States is the world’s largest soybean producer, and our farms export nearly half of the crop. The biggest recipients are China and Mexico, which together account for nearly 70 percent of US soybean exports, buying a total of about $16.6 billion worth of the product. They also make up two of the top three destinations for US pork.

In an apparent attempt to ease agribiz concerns about China, Trump back in December appointed Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad, who has been promoting his states’ soybeans, corn, and pork to China for decades, as ambassador to that country. But Mexico and the TPP countries—which include Canada and major US pork and beef buyers Japan and South Korea—remain in his cross-hairs.

The American Farm Bureau Federation, which promotes the interests of corporate agribusiness, expressed dismay over Trump’s rejection of the TPP, mourning it as a “positive agreement that would add $4.4 billion annually to the struggling agriculture economy” and requesting that Trump commit to “ensuring we do not lose the ground gained—whether in the Asia-Pacific, North America, Europe or other parts of the world.” Around 130 companies and trade groups, representing virtually the entire US ag industry, signed a letter to Trump on January 23, informing the new president that “NAFTA has been a windfall for US farmers, ranchers, and food processors,” and that food and agriculture exports to Canada and Mexico have more than quadrupled since the deal’s signing in 1994.

Of course, these groups cannot claim to have been surprised by Trump’s trade moves—he made his stance on the issue crystal clear during his campaign. His rural proxies emphasized Trump’s anti-regulatory zeal and his vow to end the inheritance tax, a big deal to the American Farm Bureau but not so consequential to most farmers (the USDA estimates it affects less than 1 percent of farms). On trade, they delivered a trust-us message.

In July, when I spoke to Charles Herbster, the multi-level marketing and cattle magnate who chaired Trump’s Agricultural and Rural Advisory Committee, he gave me the campaign’s spiel. Before vowing Trump would end over-regulation and the reduce the inheritance tax, Herbster tried to square the circle on trade:

Herbster told me that he’s been getting calls from farmers “concerned about issues of trade.” Herbster said he reassures them that Trump “is not against trade in any way”—it’s “just that he wants trade to be fair,” and that means renegotiating trade deals. Herbster acknowledged that “trade for agriculture in the Midwest has probably been pretty good for the past few years,” but that it “hasn’t been good for small manufacturers in middle America and the coasts.” Trump, he suggested, would make trade great again for everyone.

Another prominent Trump rural proxy during the campaign, Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller, took a similar line, declaring in August that Trump’s trade stance could actually benefit US farmers because “above all, Trump wants to be known as the president that cuts the good deals…He’s a deal maker, that’s his whole mantra.”

In place of big, multi-national pacts like NAFTA and TPP, Trump has vowed to make multiple bi-lateral trade deals with individuals countries. “Believe me, we’re going to have a lot of trade deals,” Trump told a gathering of Republican legislators Thursday, Reuters reports. “If that particular country doesn’t treat us fairly, we send them a 30-day termination, notice of termination.”

Ben Lilliston of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy says Trump may simply not understand that negotiating trade deals is a long and difficult process. “They want the bi-lateral deals, because it allows them to bully other countries more easily,” he said. “But they seem to have a very limited understanding of the complications of negotiating deals—it’s an extremely time-consuming process.”

Of course, the big agribusiness interests don’t just prize trade deals because they expand markets for pork and (soy)beans. Deals like NAFTA and the TPP, Lilliston added, also “allow agribusinesses to set up wherever they want.” For example, US-based pork behemoth Smithfield—now, ironically, owned by a Chinese conglomerate—didn’t just use NAFTA as a lever to expand pork exports to Mexico; it dramatically expanded its hog-rearing operations in Mexico in the wake of the deal’s onset in 1994, sometimes over the protests of people who live near the hog operations.

US agriculture policy encourages farms to produce as much as possible, even in times of low prices. And since domestic demand rises only at the rate of population growth, these farmers rely on foreign markets to maintain profit growth, points out the former USDA economist Glauber. “Those facts explain why US agricultural interests have been such strong supporters of free trade agreements in the past,” he wrote.

Trump managed to win big in the corn and soybean counties of the Midwest, in areas largely reliant on exports. But if he repeals their beloved trade deals without replacing them, these well-heeled supporters might ultimately give up on Trump.

Source article – 

This Industry Just Found Out What It’s Like to Do Business in Trump’s America

Posted in Everyone, FF, food processor, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Ultima, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on This Industry Just Found Out What It’s Like to Do Business in Trump’s America

Donald Trump Backs Away From His Campaign Pledge to Resurrect Torture

by MichaelPn Posted on January 27, 2017

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Throughout his presidential campaign, Donald Trump repeatedly said that torture works, and that should he enter the White House he would utilize techniques such as waterboarding and “much worse” against ISIS fighters. But at a short press conference with UK Prime Minister Theresa May on Friday, Trump said that though he still thinks torture “works,” he will allow newly confirmed Secretary of Defense Gen. James Mattis to “override” him on this point.

Trump was questioned about his views on torture and other controversial matters by a BBC reporter, who asked, “Mr. President, you’ve said before that torture works, you’ve praised Russia, you’ve said you want to ban some Muslims from coming to America, you’ve suggested there should be punishment for abortion. For many people in Britain, those sound like alarming beliefs. What do you say to our viewers at home who are worried about some of your views and worried about you becoming the leader of the free world?”

In typical Trumpian fashion, the new president lashed out at the slightest bit of media criticism. “This was your choice of a question,” he said, clearly perturbed. “There goes that relationship,” he darkly joked.

Once he turned to the substance of the question, Trump said he would let Mattis make the decision about the sort of interrogation techniques used by the United States. Mattis has long been opposed to torture, fighting back against “enhanced interrogation” during George W. Bush’s presidency. He reaffirmed that view at his Senate confirmation hearing earlier this month, and the Pentagon once again reiterated its opposition to techniques such as waterboarding earlier this week. During Friday’s press conference, Trump noted that he doesn’t concur with Mattis’ views on torture. “Mattis has stated publicly that he does not necessarily believe in torture,” Trump said, “or waterboarding, or however you want to define it—’enhanced interrogation’ I guess would be words that a lot of people like to use. I don’t necessarily agree, but I would tell you that he will override, because I am giving him that power. He’s an expert, he’s highly respected.” Trump added, “I happen to feel that it does work—I’ve been open about that for a long period of time. But I am going with our leaders. And we’re going to win, with or without, but I do disagree.”

During the presidential campaign, Trump repeatedly vowed to resurrect interrogation techniques such as waterboarding. During a February debate in New Hampshire, Trump said, “I would bring back waterboarding. And I’d bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding.” He regularly complained that Barack Obama had weakened the United States’ ability to fight abroad by banning the use of torture. “Don’t tell me it doesn’t work—torture works,” he’s said.

Under the Geneva Conventions, torture is a war crime. Unlike the Bush administration—which at least cloaked its torture program under the Orwellian term of “enhanced interrogation” to duck international laws—Trump isn’t trying to obfuscate what he believes.

Even if the country isn’t about to revive its torture program, it is noteworthy that the president of the United States said, during his first press conference since taking office one week ago, that if he had his druthers he’d order the nation’s military forces to commit war crimes.

Continue reading: 

Donald Trump Backs Away From His Campaign Pledge to Resurrect Torture

Posted in Brita, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Donald Trump Backs Away From His Campaign Pledge to Resurrect Torture