Tag Archives: trump

Progressive Groups Are Basically Printing Money After the Health Care Vote

by Louise6qy Posted on May 5, 2017

Mother Jones

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Progressives got a hard lesson in math on Thursday when the Obamacare repeal bill narrowly passed the House with 217 votes despite uniform Democratic opposition. But while the bill’s effect will be far-reaching if it eventually becomes law, in the short term it has become an almost unprecedented fundraising magnet for left-leaning grassroots groups.

In the 24 hours since the House vote, Daily Kos, the 15-year-old Netroots stalwart that has experienced a renaissance in the Trump era, raised $800,000 from 17,200 readers. That money will be split evenly among 24 Democratic candidates. (Daily Kos is specifically targeting the 24 Republican congressmen who voted for the bill but represent districts where President Donald Trump received less than 50 percent of the vote.) The group’s political director, David Nir, says the group previously raised $400,000 in one day for Jon Ossoff, the Democratic candidate in the special election in Georgia’s 6th Congressional District, and the same amount for Elizabeth Warren over the course of a year. But he couldn’t recall a $1 million haul.

Swing Left, which grew out of the postelection “resistance,” has only been around for a few months and has a much shorter track record of big fundraising hauls. But it has raised $850,000 from more than 20,000 donations since the vote, for the purposes of boosting candidates challenging its target list of 35 Republicans who voted for the bill (there is some overlap between the two lists). Swing Left got a signal boost from Crooked Media, the podcast empire launched by a group of Obama White House veterans, which partnered with the group to raise money.

Notably, the money raised going to candidates Thursday and Friday won’t end up in the hands of a candidate for a long time. It’ll be held in escrow for the winners of Democratic contests in those House districts next spring and summer. Think of it as a small pot of gold at the end of the primary.

Update: Per a Swing Left spokesperson, the organization had raised $200,000 for those 35 districts since they launched the fundraising page April 13—so to put the haul in perspective, in one day the group raised more than four times what it had raised in the previous 20.

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Progressive Groups Are Basically Printing Money After the Health Care Vote

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Trump Budget Would Slash Funds for Office Fighting Opioid Epidemic

by mathiaskoonce Posted on May 5, 2017

Mother Jones

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The White House is calling for a 95 percent funding cut for the Office of National Drug Control Policy, the agency leading the charge against the country’s opioid epidemic, according to sources knowledgeable about the White House’s draft budget for the coming fiscal year. ONDCP is responsible for coordinating drug prevention programs across federal agencies and was slated to fund President Donald Trump’s much-lauded opioid commission.

The budget would slash ONDCP’s $380 million budget to $24 million. It would eliminate the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas program, which coordinates local, state, and national efforts to reduce drug trafficking and has a $250 million annual budget. It would also cut the Drug-Free Communities Support Program, which funds community-based youth substance abuse prevention programs. The budget calls both programs “duplicative of other Federal programs.” The budget is a “passback” draft: it was cleared by the White House budget office last week, but will still need to be approved by Congress.

On the campaign trail, Trump promised to “spend the money” to address the opioid epidemic, but his proposed budgets and policies thus far would drastically cut federal funding to tackle the issue. The Republican health care bill passed by the House of Representatives on Thursday would cause an estimated 3 million Americans to lose some or all of their addiction treatment coverage.

The president tapped New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie in March to lead an opioid commission, which reports to Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner. The commission’s purpose is to draft priorities and recommendations for future policies, but critics say that it wastes precious time, given that the surgeon general’s office in the Obama administration published a similar report last November. As one Democratic congressional staffer said last month, “How many more people will die of opioid overdose while they’re pretending to care?”

In an email to his staff, acting ONDCP director Richard Baum wrote:

I have been encouraged by the Administration’s commitment to addressing the opioid epidemic, and the President’s personal engagement on the issue, both during the campaign and since he was sworn into office. However, OMB’s proposed cuts are also at odds with the fact that the President has tasked us with supporting his Commission on Combatting Drug Addiction and the Opioid Crisis.

These drastic proposed cuts are frankly heartbreaking and, if carried out, would cause us to lose many good people who contribute greatly to ONDCP’s mission and core activities.

I don’t want to see this happen.

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Trump Budget Would Slash Funds for Office Fighting Opioid Epidemic

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Voting for Obamacare Cost Him His Job. Now It Might Be His Ticket Back.

by BerndMcclain Posted on May 5, 2017

Mother Jones

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At the People’s Climate March in Washington, there were old ladies dressed as beekeepers, vegetarians in full-body carrot suits, and a clean-energy marching band in matching green hard hats, but Tom Perriello was the only person I saw wearing a tie. It was probably a bad idea. Saturday was one of those steamy afternoons in DC, more August than April, that leaves you with the sensation of being inside the mouth of a dog—a good day to make the case for catastrophic global warming, but a bad one to walk outside in a pressed blue shirt and dress shoes. The 42-year-old former congressman, who is seeking the Democratic nomination for governor of Virginia, was running a few minutes late after a morning event in the suburbs and was undeterred. Clutching a bottle of water and an apple his sister had handed him, he wanted to explain to me what people had gotten wrong when he ran for reelection to Congress in 2010.

Republicans looking to take him down spent a lot of time and money talking about climate change. Perriello, a first-term Democrat in a rural, red, New Jersey-sized patch of “Southside” Virginia, had cast a key vote for Waxman-Markey, the House’s cap-and-trade bill that would go on to die in the Senate. Ads by the National Republican Congressional Committee, which supported his challenger Robert Hurt to the tune of $1.1 million, dubbed it an “energy tax.” The US Chamber of Commerce piled on too. When Perriello eventually lost by 4 points, the NRCC claimed his climate advocacy, along with his vote for the Affordable Care Act, was a big reason why.

But unlike a lot of other Democrats who were swept out to sea in that 2010 wave, Perriello had run on, not from, his support for the Obama agenda. “I think we convert more people by being bolder on climate instead of soft on climate,” he said as we moved toward the sound of drumming and tambourines along the parade route. “People thought that was a bad vote for me, but we didn’t just vote for it; we went out and made the case to farmers and small-business owners—literally got down to the level of cow manure and capturing methane off of cow manure for farmers to be able to power their own farms.” He cited an election-eve poll that showed voters trusted him by 24 points on energy issues.

Democrats have been winning big races in the Old Dominion for more than a decade, and they currently hold every statewide elected position, from the two US Senate seats to the state attorney general, but it has never been easy. Gov. Terry McAuliffe, an ur-Clinton loyalist and former Democratic National Committee chair, will be term-limited this fall, and the Democratic nominee will likely face well-funded Republican Ed Gillespie, a Trump-backing former lobbyist and Republican National Committee chair, who narrowly lost a US Senate bid in 2014. The race, an expensive fight in the shadow of the Capitol, will be the most serious test yet of the Democratic Party’s resiliency in the age of Trump. But somewhat unexpectedly, the primary has also become an early referendum on where the Democratic Party is heading.

Perriello’s opponent, Lt. Governor Ralph Northam, was also elected to a red-leaning seat in 2007, held onto it, and moved up the ladder in 2013. Northam, a 57-year-old former Army doctor with a genteel Southern cadence, looked like the de facto nominee last year, but Perriello announced his candidacy in January—amid a period of postelection soul-searching—and has made a race of it. He has pulled together a coalition that includes Bernie Sanders supporters and Obama loyalists, who appreciated his tough votes. Polling has been limited and all over the place; the only sure thing is that with a little more than a month to go before the June election, a large chunk of Virginia’s Democrats are still undecided.

Comparisons to Sanders don’t quite hold water, but in a few key ways Perriello’s message tracks closely with that of the Vermont senator. Perriello is pushing for a $15 minimum wage (which Northam also supports) and free community college, and he’s campaigning hard in rural areas of the state, such as the southwestern coal country and farm belt of Southside Virginia (his old district) that have booted out Democrats in recent years and swung hard toward Trump. And like Sanders, he’s going all-in on fracking, promising to block two natural gas pipelines from being constructed, if elected, and rejecting donations from Dominion Power, which has proposed the pipeline.

Perriello believes that conservatives, and many Democrats, have long talked about environmental regulations in a way that elides the real impediments to economic growth in those areas. “People know I’m a climate hawk, but it’s also worth knowing the two biggest killers of coal jobs have been automation and natural gas,” he said. He described spending time in Virginia’s struggling coal country trying to engage voters by pointing to new economic drivers. He insists the state needs “to get beyond looking at just distributed energy—though that can be a part of it. We need to actually be looking at how to relocalize some percent of food production, both because it’s more sustainable but also creates greater economic resiliency in communities that feel a real loss of sovereignty.”

As an example of what he means by “relocalizing,” Perriello points to a favorite example of his: the beer industry. “A decade ago, two companies controlled 96 percent of the beer market,” he said. Now, because of the growth of microbreweries, that figure is down to 84 percent. “We’re still talking about an industry that’s overwhelmingly dominated by two companies, but just that 10 percent delta of relocalizing beer production has had massive implications for jobs and economic renewal on main streets like Winchester and rural counties like Nelson County,” he said, referring to Shenandoah Valley communities that have embraced the “brew ridge” economy.

“So,” he continued, “we’re not talking about that going back to being 80 or 90 percent of the economy—but even if it’s a 10 percent plus-up, there are huge implications for jobs and sustainability.”

Relocalizing? Distributed energy? Delta? Perriello can sound like either an economic populist who speaks like a think-tanker, or the other way around. His ability to move between those two identities has been a key factor in his rise. A Yale-educated native of Ivy, Virginia, just outside Charlottesville, Perriello worked as a war crimes prosecutor in West Africa after college before returning at the end of the Bush administration to run against six-term incumbent Virgil Goode, an archconservative Republican and an occasional embarrassment who had once raised a ruckus about the first Muslim member of Congress, Rep. Keith Ellison, being sworn in on a Koran. After his stint on the Hill was up, Perriello took a post as CEO of the Center for American Progress Action Fund, the DC-based progressive think thank, only to return to Africa a few years later for a series of State Department postings.

Outside the Canadian embassy, a leader of a local Indivisible chapter, in a pink “Resist” hat and clutching half a dozen signs that say “Protect the Sacred,” approaches Perriello to tell him he has her group’s full support. As he speaks with another voter, a sign from a passing marcher, with a long quote from Ansel Adams, blows away onto the ground and Perriello stops to pick it up. He asks his young staffers if he should do a Facebook Live from the march, and one of them whips out a smartphone and starts filming. A few minutes later, he recognizes a sixtysomething man in crocs and a bucket hat wearing a blue T-shirt that says “no pipeline,” and they talk shop for a few minutes about the fracking fight. The man’s friend tells Perriello that some of the land that will be seized for pipeline construction through eminent domain has been in the same family since Emancipation. Perriello nods, concerned.

Northam, who has already been elected statewide and enjoys the backing of the entire state Democratic establishment, has campaigned hard on gun control and reproductive rights, two issues where Perriello holds different positions now than when he entered Congress. Perriello received donations (and an A rating) from the National Rifle Association during his single term, and he supported the failed Stupak amendment to the Affordable Care Act, which would have prohibited the law from subsidizing insurance plans that cover abortion. He now condemns the NRA as an organization “for gunmakers and survivalists,” and has said he regretted the Stupak vote.

Democrats have sparred in recent weeks over the role of abortion within the party’s coalition, after Sanders endorsed Omaha mayoral candidate Heath Mello, a former backer of a bill requiring doctors performing abortions to first offer women ultrasounds. When I ask Perriello if it’s possible to be progressive and pro-life, he chooses his words very carefully. “We’re running a campaign here that is focused on advancing reproductive justice, where we’re not just looking at the right to choose, but the right to affordable and dignified access to that choice,” he says. “I believe that we can’t separate issues of economic fairness and justice from issues of reproductive access. So I believe that those are fights that can and should be integrated, and that’s certainly what we’re gonna do here in Virginia.” Abortion, in other words, is an economic populist issue.

On combating climate change and protecting the environment, though, there is only so much the next governor of Virginia can do with Trump in the White House. Perriello would be able to stop those pipelines, of course, and he can push to lower the amount of money utilities are able to spend on state elections. But he has no delusions about the impact of the federal government on climate, and no inhibitions about turning his race in Virginia into a national one. “One of the things we’re seeing this year is the potential for a wave election that could set the trend for a wave election next year,” he says.

He’s banking on it; immediately following the passage of the Obamacare repeal in the House of Representatives on Thursday, Perriello put out a new ad, pegged to the vote, in which he stands in front of an ambulance being crushed in a junkyard:

First he has to win his primary. That evening, a few hours after the march, Perriello and Northam met up for their first debate of the campaign, at an elementary school in Fairfax sandwiched between NRA headquarters and H Mart, the Asian grocery superstore. The event was co-sponsored by EMERGE USA, an organization that aims to boost the political clout of Muslim, South Asian, and Arab-Americans. Both candidates mostly kept their powder dry, save for a brief dust-up over gun control when Northam brought up the NRA backing. Trump was a recurring villain, but Gillespie was hardly mentioned; when voters are mad at Washington, you don’t mess with a good thing.

Outside, evenly matched groups of young volunteers formed a gauntlet along the approach to the venue and exchanged rudimentary chants— “I say Ralph, you say Northam!”; “Go Tom Go!” A few supporters of the Atlantic pipeline gripped posters calling Perriello a “job killer” for his environmentalist objections—just like the old times—but no one paid them much attention. A few feet away, behind the scrum of shouting youths, a supporter clutched a sign that said “Perriello ♥’s Obamacare.” In a time when everything seems upside-down, it was a simple image of how Tom Perriello landed on his feet.

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Voting for Obamacare Cost Him His Job. Now It Might Be His Ticket Back.

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Trump Just Signed Another Executive Order. It’s an Attack on Women.

by CarmelBignold Posted on May 4, 2017

Mother Jones

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President Trump marked the National Day of Prayer Thursday by signing what’s being billed as an executive order on “religious liberty.” The much-anticipated order will not include explicit, sweeping provisions allowing individuals and organizations to discriminate against people who are LGBT or having sex outside of marriage, as many had feared after a draft of the order leaked in February. Instead, it gives protections to groups that want to limit access to contraception and sets the stage for more political dark money to pour in from religious groups previously prohibited from political speech.

Many religious conservatives argue the right to freely practice their religion enshrined in the constitution permits them to legally discriminate or be exempt from certain laws on the basis of their faith. The executive order codifies this philosophy by strengthening employers’ ability to limit women’s access to contraceptive and other preventative healthcare services promised in the Affordable Care Act from private health plans. The order asks three agencies to consider issuing amended rules to make this process easier for employers if they have a religious objection.

The order was met with a mixed response from some conservative groups. The Alliance Defending Freedom, a Christian nonprofit that advocates on various political issues, said it did not go far enough. “Though we appreciate the spirit of today’s gesture, vague instructions to federal agencies simply leaves them wiggle room to ignore that gesture, regardless of the spirit in which it was intended,” said General Counsel Michael Farris in a statement. “We strongly encourage the president…to ensure that all Americans…enjoy the freedom to peacefully live and work consistent with their convictions without fear of government punishment.”

The order also makes good Trump’s campaign promise to his religious base to “get rid of and totally destroy” the Johnson Amendment, which prohibits tax-exempt charitable organizations, including churches, from engaging in political activity. Only religious organizations and churches will be exempted from the law, meaning other nonprofits will still be prohibited from political speech. “This executive order directs the IRS, not to unfairly target churches or religious organizations for political speech,” Trump said. “No one should be censoring sermons or targeting pastors.”

A number of advocacy organizations point out that exempting powerful religious organizations from prohibitions on political speech will bring a lot more dark money into politics. “This policy would create a massive loophole for dark money, allowing unlimited sums of money to flow to religious nonprofit organizations for expressions of political views,” said Noah Bookbinder, the head of the left-leaning watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, in a statement.

Bookbinder has called charitable groups the “next frontier” in undisclosed political spending because without the Johnson amendment in the way, it’ll be easy to start spending lots of money right away. “You have these ready-made, very large organizations that could do a lot of political spending,” he told me back in February after Trump reaffirmed his commitment to dismantle the law at the National Prayer Breakfast. “You wouldn’t have the challenges of having to set up a new organization and raise a lot of money for it.” Plus, Bookbinder says, those contributions are tax deductible, meaning people will likely give more.

Trump’s executive order may not have the anti-LGBT provisions the leaked draft does, but it gives Jeff Sessions plenty of leeway to develop rules, if he so chooses.

“In order to guide all agencies in complying with relevant federal law, the Attorney General shall, as appropriate, issue guidance interpreting religious liberty protections in Federal law,” the order reads.

Responding to the order, executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality Mara Keisling said, “President Trump has simply asked others in his administration to do much of his dirty work.”

In anticipation of the executive order, many civil rights groups began preparing lawsuits, and at least one group still intends to file. “President Trump’s efforts to promote religious freedom are thinly-veiled efforts to unleash his conservative religious base into the political arena while also using religion to discriminate,” ACLU director Anthony Romero said in a statement. “It’s a dual dose of pandering to a base and denying reproductive care. We will see Trump in court, again.”

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Trump Just Signed Another Executive Order. It’s an Attack on Women.

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Here’s What It Costs Taxpayers to Fly Trump to Mar-a-Lago

by trasze2aja Posted on May 4, 2017

Mother Jones

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When Donald Trump travels to one of his properties for weekends of golf and well-done steak, he brings a massive entourage of aides, Secret Service agents, and all the trappings of the world’s most powerful job. And it’s all on the taxpayer’s tab.

It’s still not clear how much all of that costs, but we now know how much money it takes to operate the biggest presidential accessory involved with these trips: Every hour Trump flies on Air Force One costs taxpayers more than $142,000. For just two weekend trips to Mar-a-Lago that Trump took in March, taxpayers paid $1.2 million. Again, that’s just for the plane that ferried Trump. That doesn’t count the cost of fighter jet escorts, the planes carrying Trump’s limousines, or any of the on-the-ground costs.

The figures come from Judicial Watch, a conservative watchdog group that submitted Freedom of Information Act requests to the Department of the Air Force. Notably, Judicial Watch is the group that calculated the oft-quoted figure of $96 million as the tab for Obama’s family travel during his presidency. The group says it has also asked for figures for the cost of Secret Service protection and other expenses associated with Trump’s weekend trips, but those requests are still pending.

“We’re pleased the Air Force finally gave us some numbers for President Trump’s travel,” said Tom Fitton, president of the group, in a statement. Fitton vowed to go to court to get the other numbers. “Judicial Watch tracked some of the costs of President Obama’s unnecessary travel and we’re not closing up shop with a new administration.”

The figures do suggest that early estimates of the cost of Trump’s personal trips—as much as $3 million per weekend—might be in the right ballpark, but the exact amount remains difficult to tabulate. The FOIA responses Judicial Watch received detailed two separate trips, one of which included a stopover at an airport in Florida so Trump could hold an event with Secretary of Education Betsy Devos promoting a school voucher program. Each flight cost more than $600,000.

If Judicial Watch’s estimate of $96 million for Obama’s personal vacations is correct, it would mean that he averaged about $12 million a year on all travel. In other words, Trump is easily on pace to easily exceed his predecessors totals. Trump has spent seven of 13 weekends of his presidency at Mar-a-Lago, but the club is closing for the summer season. This weekend Trump makes his first trip to his New Jersey golf club, which will be a shorter flight, but will require moving Trump through the crowded New York City area. That could significantly increase his on-the-ground costs.

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Here’s What It Costs Taxpayers to Fly Trump to Mar-a-Lago

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Trump Advisor Accidentally Raises Middle-Class Taxes

by StanleyBryant Posted on May 3, 2017

Mother Jones

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Here is Gary Cohn—supposedly one of the “smart ones” in the Trump administration—explaining the president’s tax plan:

The median income in the United States today is … about $56,000. You take the $24,000 away from the $56,000, you’ve got taxable income of $32,000. At a 10% rate that’s $3,000 of tax. If you have one or two or three children and we give you $1,000 tax credit, you could end up with a—you know, very marginal, single-digit tax rate to no taxes whatsoever. That, to me, is a middle-income tax cut because you’re going to owe no taxes potentially.

“Potentially” is doing a lot of work here, as David Kamin explains:

Cohn forgot to mention the fact that our tax system, as it is currently written, provides what are called “personal exemptions” to families….The plan Trump presented on the campaign trail would eliminate these personal exemptions….So when you take into account the elimination of personal exemptions, families aren’t actually getting much tax relief after all. In fact, if that family has two or more kids, they’d actually face a tax increase under the Trump plan described by Cohn.

Here this is in chart form:

This should come as no surprise. The problem is that the average family pays most of its taxes at the state and local level, and via payroll taxes. Their federal income tax rate is already “very marginal, single-digit tax rate to no taxes whatsoever,” so it’s all but impossible to cut it. This is from the Tax Policy Center:

The bottom 40 percent pays no federal income tax at all and the average middle-class person pays 6.4 percent of their earnings in federal income taxes. If you focus solely on the federal income tax—as Republicans always do—you can’t help the middle class much. Even in theory, the only people who really benefit are high earners.

Of course, you can still do a little to help middle-class workers—but only if you’re careful. Cohn wasn’t careful, so he ended up increasing middle class taxes. It’s an easy mistake to make.

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Trump Advisor Accidentally Raises Middle-Class Taxes

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The National Urban League Just Released a Report that Shows Black America Has a Lot to Worry About Under Trump

by LinwoodSaltau Posted on May 2, 2017

Mother Jones

Black and Hispanic Americans continue to lag behind their white counterparts when it comes to equal access to employment, housing, education, and other areas. But a new report argues that with a new presidential administration unlikely to enforce longstanding civil rights laws, black America must also fight to protect the progress that they have already made.

That’s the main takeaway from the 2017 State of Black America report, released Tuesday by the National Urban League, a civil rights organization established in 1910 to focus on the economic empowerment of African Americans. The report, which has been released annually for more than four decades, evaluates how black life in America compares to that of whites on a number of issues, including housing, economics, education, social justice, and civic engagement.

For the past 13 years, the report has utilized a “National Equality Index,” a set of statistical measurements that provide a quantitative breakdown to assess exactly how the lives of blacks and Hispanics stack up when compared to whites in the United States. White America is given the baseline number of 100, which is intended to represent the full access to opportunity that whites have historically been afforded when compared to other racial groups. By giving each metric a score out of 100, the report is able to provide a specific assessment of the progress nonwhite groups have made in narrowing the gaps, and how much they continue to lag behind over time.

This year’s report tracks through the end of 2016, making it the last one to follow the progress of black America under President Barack Obama. Marc Morial, the President of the National Urban League, tells Mother Jones, that while looking at yearly changes in the measured variables make it difficult to grasp long-term shifts in the equality of nonwhite groups, this year provided an opportunity to assess the difference in the status of black Americans after eight years with the first African American president. “During the Obama era, the economy added 15 million new jobs, the Black unemployment rate dropped and the high school graduation rate for African Americans soared,” Morial notes in the report. “Now that progress, and much more, is threatened.”

The 2016 edition, which was entitled “Locked Out: Education, Jobs, and Justice,” emphasized that black America still had much farther to go, but this year’s report—”Protect our Progress”—argues that under the Trump administration many hard-won gains are in jeopardy. In an interview with Mother Jones before the report’s launch, Morial noted that the presidential election had played a large role in the shift in tone of the report, adding during the official launch on Tuesday, “It would be difficult to pinpoint any moment in recent history where so much of our economic and social progress stood at dire risk as it does today.”

“There are several actions taken by the new administration that raise great cause for concern,” Morial says. He points to the Justice Department as his most immediate concern, noting Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ efforts to undermine consent decrees with police departments and voting rights enforcement “are inconsistent with the idea of a Justice Department that should enforce civil rights law.” He also points to the Department of Education, and “what could be an anti-public schools agenda” should the agency make good on its promise to promote school choice.

The report notes there have been small, but important, developments over the past year. Overall, Black Americans are 72.3 percent equal to their white counterparts, slight progress from last year when they stood at 72.2 percent. Specific areas reveal a more complicated picture. Across individual metrics there were some slight increases for black America, with education moving to 78.2 percent from 77.4 percent last year, likely because of an increase in the number of students working with more experienced teachers and a decline in the number of high school dropouts across all racial groups. Health outcomes improved from 79.4 percent to 80 percent, which may be because of more equal Medicare expenditures among blacks and whites. Economics—a metric that takes employment rates, wages, and business ownership into account—increased slightly to 56.5 percent from 56.2 percent with continued improvements in the black unemployment rate.

Black Americans are more civically engaged than whites, scoring 100.6 percent in both years. Social justice declined, falling to 57.4 percent in 2017 from 60.9 percent last year. The National Urban League attributes much of the decline to the change in the way the Bureau of Justice Statistics—a main source of raw data for the social justice index’s calculation of racial disparities in traffic enforcement—reports racial disparities in traffic stops.

The report also tracks the equality of Hispanics compared to whites, finding that overall, Hispanic Americans are at 78.4 percent in 2017 compared to 77.9 percent in the previous year. Much of this increase was due to a jump in the health index, which can be attributed to a decrease in the maternal mortality rate and an increase in insurance coverage. Similar to black Americans, there were also increases in economics and education. These increases helped offset declines in civic engagement and social justice.

The National Urban League also tracks gaps in unemployment and income equality between racial groups living in major metropolitan areas, and found the Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario, California, metro area continues to have the smallest gap between the incomes of black and white residents. Minneapolis, Minnesota, has the largest. The unemployment rate between the races in the San Antonio-New Braunfels, Texas, metro area has the smallest disparity, while Milwaukee has the greatest. For Hispanics, the North Port-Sarasota-Bradenton, Florida, metro region is best for unemployment equality—Rochester, New York, is the worst. While Modesto, California has the smallest racial income gap, Springfield, Massachusetts, has the largest according to the report.

The State of Black America describes the problems but it also attempts to outline proposed policy solutions in the portion of the report entitled “Main Street Marshall Plan.” During Tuesday’s press conference, Morial called the plan—which supports several policy proposals including a $15 minimum wage, universal childhood education, summer jobs for youth, job training and workforce development, infrastructure, and affordable housing—a “forward-leaning investment,” suggesting that its rigorous research could provide politicians with some guidance as they plan for the future.

Critics have already slammed the Trump administration for being weak on civil rights, and the president notably declined an invitation to address the National Urban League’s annual conference during the election season. The National Urban League has not met with Trump recently, but members of the organization have met with Ivanka Trump and spoken to Jeff Sessions. In the past month several groups, particularly the Congressional Black Caucus, have held discussions with the administration and offered policy proposals for communities of color, only to then speak out when the administration moved against civil rights in some way.

Still Morial remains confident that even under these conditions, there is a chance for progress. “Obviously in this political environment, we are going to face headwinds,” he says. “However I think that this is just a question of politicians being able to get their act together.”

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The National Urban League Just Released a Report that Shows Black America Has a Lot to Worry About Under Trump

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A Lot of Republicans Are Abandoning the Latest Trumpcare Plan

by JacelynBrigham Posted on May 2, 2017

Mother Jones

Republican efforts to repeal Obamacare could once again be in trouble. According to whip counts from various news outlets, Republicans have already lost nearly enough support from their own members in the House of Representatives to tank the American Health Care Act, the GOP’s bill that would rip apart and replace the Affordable Care Act.

The latest blow for House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) came Tuesday, when Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.) said that he’d vote against the bill. Upton is a particularly notable defection, since he’s the former chairman of one of the committees that deals with health care, and he’s spent years trying to undo Obamacare. But the current GOP repeal effort goes too far for Upton, because it would essentially end Obamacare’s ban on discrimination against people with preexisting conditions. “I’m not at all comfortable with removing that protection,” Upton said in a radio interview.

Last week, Republicans thought they were headed toward a deal that could pass the House. The hardcore conservatives in the Freedom Caucus had finally relented and offered their support for the AHCA after an amendment was introduced that would allow states to opt out of two of the core consumer protections in Obamacare: essential health benefits, and the prohibition on insurance companies charging higher rates for people with preexisting conditions. In other words, in order to win over the far-right members of their caucus, Ryan and other House leaders accepted a proposal that would allow insurance companies to once again price-gouge people with any sort of medical history.

But by caving to the Freedom Caucus and agreeing to ditch one of the most popular aspects of Obamacare, Ryan has lost support from a number of mainline Republicans in his caucus—Republicans who were already waffling thanks to the initial bill’s $880 billion in cuts to Medicaid and policies that would allow insurance companies to charge older Americans higher rates.

Republicans can likely afford to lose just 22 votes and still pass their bill. (The exact number depends on how many members of Congress are present if the vote ever happens.) Per a tabulation by HuffPost‘s Matt Fuller, there are 20 Republicans who have publicly said they will vote “No,” with another eight leaning against the bill. And those are just the Republicans willing to share their plains with the press. It’s possible that others are hesitant to publicly defy GOP leadership but are also wary of voting to repeal protections for their many constituents who suffer from preexisting conditions.

Ryan’s strategy for convincing his colleagues to support the bill seems to be to lie about what it actually does. After Upton announced his plans to vote against the proposal Tuesday, Ryan tweeted that it was “VERIFIED” that the bill protects people with preexisting conditions, despite the bill explicitly doing the exact opposite. Ryan’s own website acknowledges that fact, noting that the GOP plan would let states wave the current ban on preexisting condition pricing differences:

President Donald Trump has helped muddy GOP negotiations in recent days with a string of contradictory messages about what sort of health care bill he’d like to sign. In interviews, Trump has said both that the bill already protects people with preexisting conditions (not true) and also that the bill would be altered to add in those protections.

Still, despite all this bad news, Republicans have good reason to want to rush their bill through this week. While the public vote tallies aren’t favorable to Republicans, leadership is applying pressure behind the scenes that could possibly flip enough votes. Ryan reportedly asked his caucus to “pray” for the bill on Tuesday.

Ryan doesn’t have a ton of time, though. Congress is scheduled to leave town Thursday for a one-week recess, and a week of angry town hall events back home isn’t likely to shore up wavering moderates who are hesitant to overturn the preexisting condition ban and slash Medicaid.

What’s more, the amendment to end the preexisting condition protections hasn’t been analyzed yet by the Congressional Budget Office. When the CBO ran the numbers on the initial GOP proposal, it projected that 24 million fewer people would have health coverage if the plan became law. That number would probably rise under the new proposal, and premiums for people with preexisting conditions would likely skyrocket. But the CBO hasn’t yet had time to score the new legislation, leaving Republicans a brief window in which they could pass the bill before the American public has a chance to hear what it will actually do.

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A Lot of Republicans Are Abandoning the Latest Trumpcare Plan

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Why Remembering Japanese-American Internment Really Matters This Year

by MargaretteFAOC Posted on May 1, 2017

Mother Jones

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Flowers were distributed prior to the interfaith service at the end of the ceremony. Matt Tinoco

As the long line of cars, trucks, and more than two dozen charter buses pulled into dusty, makeshift parking lots in the high desert below California’s snowcapped Eastern Sierra Nevada Mountains on Saturday morning, they were greeted by a National Park Service ranger. “Welcome to Manzanar,” she said. “It is very dry. Drink a lot of water.”

They’d descended on the remote Owens Valley, four hours north of Los Angeles, to commemorate the 75th anniversary of Executive Order 9066—President Franklin Roosevelt’s February 1942 decision to forcibly detain 120,000 Japanese Americans until the end of World War II. Manzanar War Relocation Center, as the facility was formally called, was one of 10 internment camps nationwide; at its peak, the 5,415-acre site held more than 10,000 people in army-style barracks behind barbed wire.

In the language of the Roosevelt’s order, these actions were taken to establish “every possible protection against espionage and against sabotage to national-defense.” Approximately two-thirds of those incarcerated without due process were fully enfranchised American citizens by birth. The remainder were lawful permanent residents.

President Donald Trump’s harsh rhetoric about Muslims, Mexicans, and other immigrants has reignited scrutiny of this dark period in American history. Internment even made headlines in November when Carl Higbie—the former spokesman of the pro-Trump Great America PAC—cited American treatment of Japanese residents in WWII as an example of appropriate action to protect national security.

Banners signifying the 10 camps erected by the US government Matt Tinoco

So perhaps it was no surprise that the 2,500 people who showed up as part of the 48th-annual Manzanar Pilgrimage on Saturday were a record for the event, according to the Park Service. The blowing dust, the whipping wind, and the beating sun all set an elemental tone for the day’s program—a not-so-subtle reminder how, as Manzanar Committee co-chair Bruce Embrey later would tell me, “there was a vicious, just despicable drive to make sure that these camps were sites of suffering. That the people here were going to be isolated psychologically and physically, far from civilian populations, in desolate areas intended to make people suffer.”

Though the camp was almost entirely disassembled after World War II—concrete slabs and the occasional piece of rusted metal are all that remain of the camp’s former living areas—the pilgrims visiting Manzanar walked past full-size reconstructions of the camp’s latrines, its mess halls, and its tar-paper barracks on their way to the day’s ceremony. Wooden Park Service signs marking the locations of long-disappeared structures—a recreation hall, an outdoor theatre, a pet cemetery, an elementary school—dotted the path.

Matt Tinoco

Several people in the crowd wore shirts from various California-based Muslim organizations. Among them was Syed Hussaini, an organizer with CAIR’s Los Angeles chapter. Hussaini explained that, for the past few years, CAIR-LA has participated in the Manzanar Pilgrimage in order to keep alive the memory of internment—it is only briefly mentioned, if at all, in most schools—in the Muslim community.

“We have to stand very vigilantly, and make sure that we are upholding the tenants of democracy. If good people don’t do anything, this is what could happen again,” said Hussaini, who came to Manzanar on one of the three buses CAIR-LA chartered this year.

“When the executive order was signed back in the ’40s, only the Quaker community openly voiced dissent,” said Hussaini, echoing a point made a few minutes earlier by one of the event’s speakers. “But we have seen an outpouring of support from many other faith communities and many other civil rights organizations coming out to say that Trump’s words are not in keeping with American values, and will not stand.”

Preserving the memory of internment is the guiding mission of those who organized Saturday’s pilgrimage, as well as those who work to maintain and expand the facilities at Manzanar National Historic Site. It wasn’t until the 1960s that the generation of Japanese Americans born after internment began pushing for recognition and reparations. The Manzanar Pilgrimage, for example, began in 1969, kicking off decades of work to establish Manzanar as an officially recognized National Historic Site, which finally happened in 1992.

Matt Tinoco

The theme for this year’s pilgrimage was “Never Again, to Anyone, Anywhere,” emblazoned in red text on black banners and T-shirts scattered throughout the event. That message, it seems, is resonating more than ever: In 2016, more than 105,000 people visited Manzanar, a record attendance year. A few employees noted that, since Trump’s election, there have been better, deeper conversations between Manzanar’s guests and those who work at the site.

A couple of hours after the ceremony concluded, several hundred people made their way to Lone Pine High School, about 10 miles south, for Manzanar at Dusk. In the school gymnasium, the Nikkei Student Unions at several LA-area colleges put on a three-hour program that spawn intergenerational conversations about their daytime experiences at the Manzanar Pilgrimage, and to spread the oral tradition of those who spent years confined in the camp.

After a spoken word performance that wove together FDR’s E.O. 9066 with Trump’s E.O. 13769, a.k.a. the travel ban, the 300 attendees broke into two-dozen randomly sorted small groups for an informal, hourlong conversation. Sprawled out on high school’s front lawn in the twilight shadows of the Sierra’s highest peaks, the small group I joined consisted of 10 people, the youngest in high school, the oldest in his 70s.

We listened to the grandson of a woman who lived at Manzanar relay one of her stories about the dust, and how she remembered seeing the outline of her sleeping body sketched out in her bedsheets when she got up each morning. We discussed why people remained quiet about their time in camps for years following their internment. And, by the end of our hour, we were sharing the history of our own personal names, comparing notes about whether our parents gave us a name from the old country or one considered more traditionally “American.”

“History is always relevant. But there are times when what’s happening in the world magnifies that relevancy,” said Alisa Lynch, the chief of interpretation at Manzanar National Historic Site, said to me after Manzanar at Dusk had concluded. “Our job is to share history, not to please whoever’s in office. We’re here to help people learn about the history, and if they want to make parallel connections, they’re free to. People see them. We don’t have to point them out.”

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Why Remembering Japanese-American Internment Really Matters This Year

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The Supreme Court Just Dealt a Huge Blow to Wells Fargo and Bank of America

by ChristianHilderb Posted on May 1, 2017

Mother Jones

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In a significant civil rights case, the Supreme Court today issued a blow to banking giants Bank of America and Wells Fargo. The court allowed the city of Miami to proceed with lawsuits it filed in 2013 against the banks for allegedly targeting minorities with predatory loans that contributed to the city’s ongoing foreclosure crisis, potentially exposing the banks to millions in damages. Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. provided the surprise swing vote in the 5-3 decision. (Newbie Justice Neil Gorsuch did not participate in this case.)

“In arriving at its decision, the Court today properly respected its own precedents, as well as Congress’ ratification of those precedents,” said Brianne Gorod, chief counsel for the liberal Constitutional Accountability Center, which filed an amicus brief on the side of the city. “Perhaps the most unexpected aspect was the vote of Chief Justice John Roberts,” she noted. “While he clearly remains a conservative Justice, today’s ruling is yet another reminder that he is a conservative who occasionally surprises.”

In its lawsuits, the city argued that between 2004 and 2012, Wells Fargo and Bank of America pushed risky and more expensive loans on minority customers, even when they were eligible for better terms, which led to extensive loan defaults and foreclosures that left the city with diminished tax revenues and huge bills for cleaning up the mess left behind in blighted neighborhoods. The court needed to determine whether Congress had intended the Fair Housing Act to allow municipalities, or only individuals, to sue in order to combat lending discrimination.

The banks counter that the law, which says “any aggrieved person” can sue for violations under the statute, couldn’t possibly have intended that a city would fall into the category of an “aggrieved person.” But the Supreme Court, which has famously found all sorts of personhood rights for corporate entities, has said before that under this particular statute, an aggrieved person can be a village, or a nonprofit, or a municipality. Consequently, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals sided with Miami, and the Supreme Court, relying on its earlier precedent, agreed, preserving the right of cities to sue under the FHA.

But the decision wasn’t a slam dunk for Miami. While the court ruled that the city had standing to bring the case, it also said the lower court used too liberal a standard to decide that the city could actually collect damages from the banks from the alleged harm of the discriminatory lending practices. The court sent the case back to the 11th Circuit to apply a much tougher standard for damages than the one the appellate court had approved.

That provision, which limits the scope of the decision, seems specifically tailored to win the vote of Roberts, who was the only conservative justice to side with the court’s liberals. His vote on this important civil rights case prompted University of California-Irvine law professor Rick Hasen to tweet that Roberts is “practicing” to be the court’s new swing vote in preparation for the retirement of 80-year-old Justice Anthony Kennedy, who plays that role now. The Trump administration has reportedly been working on Kennedy, whose children are friendly with Trump’s kids, to persuade him that it’s safe to retire on Trump’s watch. That would leave Roberts, a Reagan conservative, holding the court’s center, if only because after Kennedy’s departure, he would be the only remaining conservative who still occasionally finds common ground with the court’s liberal wing.

Even under the tougher standard Roberts signed off on, advocates are convinced that Miami will be able to prevail and prove that the financial damages the city suffered were a direct result of the banks’ lending practices, which are well documented and egregious. But Justice Clarence Thomas wasn’t so sure.

In a dissent, he argued that the city should not be allowed to sue under the FHA because it didn’t suffer from direct discrimination itself, and it’s not arguing that it even represents anyone who was discriminated against. But Thomas concurred with Breyer, Roberts, and the other liberals that the city needed to prove that the harm it suffered was specifically and directly related to the banks’ conduct under a stricter standard. Given that a number of factors could have caused the wreckage Miami experienced after the housing market collapsed in 2007, Thomas was not convinced the city has any chance of making that case. “The Court of Appeals will not need to look far to discern other, independent events that might well have caused the injuries Miami alleges in these cases,” he wrote.

Whether or not Thomas proves prescient, and regardless of how the case finally works out specifically for Miami, fair housing advocates and other civil rights groups are heartened that the court has at least preserved the option for cities to sue for the foreseeable future. “With this decision, the Supreme Court has acknowledged the crucial role of municipal governments in protecting residents’ rights,” said Dennis Parker, director of the ACLU’s racial justice program. “In housing and lending as in other areas, cities can and should serve as a bulwark against discrimination.”

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The Supreme Court Just Dealt a Huge Blow to Wells Fargo and Bank of America

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