Tag Archives: united

Basically, Donald Trump’s Border Wall Already Exists

by CandraVanderbilt Posted on August 27, 2016

Mother Jones

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

This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Link to article: 

Basically, Donald Trump’s Border Wall Already Exists

Posted in alo, Citizen, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, Smith's, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Basically, Donald Trump’s Border Wall Already Exists

In a Major Reversal, Labor Board Says Graduate Student Workers at Private Colleges Can Unionize

by AustinTLSM Posted on August 23, 2016

Mother Jones

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

Reversing a landmark ruling from the George W. Bush era, the National Labor Relations Board ruled today that graduate students who work as teaching and research assistants at private universities have the right to form labor unions.

“This is a historic moment,” said Julie Kushner, director of the northeast chapter of the United Auto Workers, which challenged the Bush-era NLRB ruling on behalf of graduate-student workers at Columbia University. “There are tens of thousands of workers at private universities across the United States that will reap the benefits of unionization.”

In 2004, the NLRB barred grad students at Brown University from engaging collective bargaining, contending that their status as students constrained their right to unionize. Yet in a 3-1 vote along partisan lines today, the Democratic-controlled NLRB reversed the prior board’s decision, arguing that graduate workers can be both students and workers at the same time. The students’ right to organize “is not foreclosed by the existence of some other, additional relationship,” the decision says.

Columbia grad students cheered the decision. “When I am working on my own research I clearly am a student,” said Paul Katz, a fourth-year PhD. student in Latin American history, “but when I am at the front of the room teaching 15 students about, say, the history of ancient Greece, there is no doubt in my mind that I am a worker, doing work that makes Columbia University great.”

Columbia University released a statement objecting with the ruling. “Columbia—along with many of our peer institutions—disagrees with this outcome because we believe the academic relationship students have with faculty members and departments as part of their studies is not the same as between employer and employee,” the statement said. “First and foremost, students serving as research or teaching assistants come to Columbia to gain knowledge and expertise, and we believe there are legitimate concerns about the impact of involving a non-academic third-party in this scholarly training.”

Columbia and other Ivy League universities have long argued that granting collective bargaining rights to graduate students could impinge on academic freedom by, for example, allowing unions to negotiate over whether tests should consist of multiple choice questions or essays. But the American Association of University Professors disagreed, telling the NLRB that giving unionization rights to grad workers would actually improve academic freedom by making it legally protected in labor contracts.

Today’s decision applies only to private universities. Grad students at public universities are already considered employees by many states. The United Auto Workers, for example, represents student workers at the University of Massachusetts, the University of Washington, the University of California, and California State University. It also represents grad workers New York University, which is private, but in 2002 voluntarily recognized a UAW union.

Columbia graduate students point to NYU as evidence that collective bargaining makes a difference. The NYU contract eliminated healthcare premiums and increased graduate student stipends from $12,500 to $22,000 a year—still a pittance, given the cost of living in New York and the amount of time many grad students spend teaching classes and grading papers.

The Columbia students also aim to push for a grievance procedure for sexual harassment and more certainty about pay and benefits. Similar unionization efforts are underway at Harvard and New York’s New School.

“I don’t think anybody expects unions to figure out what grade a student gets in a class,” says Eric Foner, a Columbia history professor who supports the union efforts, “but when it comes to stipends or healthcare or housing, it is clear that those are labor issues.”

View original post here:

In a Major Reversal, Labor Board Says Graduate Student Workers at Private Colleges Can Unionize

Posted in alo, FF, G & F, GE, Landmark, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on In a Major Reversal, Labor Board Says Graduate Student Workers at Private Colleges Can Unionize

Hey Yahoo, Barack Obama Is Not the Founder of ISIS

by Parab3olum234 Posted on August 22, 2016

Mother Jones

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

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

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

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

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

Original article:  

Hey Yahoo, Barack Obama Is Not the Founder of ISIS

Posted in FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Hey Yahoo, Barack Obama Is Not the Founder of ISIS

These Migrant Moms Are on Hunger Strike to Protest Being Locked Up Indefinitely

by NedHMTKiuufr Posted on August 19, 2016

Mother Jones

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

Nearly two dozen migrant women at a family detention center outside Philadelphia have been on hunger strike for more than a week to protest their extended confinement—and, more broadly, what they claim is the Obama administration’s mischaracterization of the detention of Central American families.

Earlier this month, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said that DHS has been detaining families for an average of no more than 20 days. This directly contradicted the experience of the hunger strikers, who say they have been held with their children in the Berks County Residential Center between six months and a year while awaiting their asylum claims to be appealed. So on August 8, 22 women began refusing all food and drinking only water, and two days later they sent a letter to Johnson asking to be released while they wait for their claims to be heard.

“All of us left our countries of origin fleeing violence, threats and corruption,” they wrote. “We are desperate and we have decided that we will get out alive or dead.”

Bridget Cambria, one of the attorneys representing the women, says most of them have lost between 6 and 10 pounds over the last 11 days. An Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokesman said the agency fully respects the hunger strikers’ right to express their opinions and said that health personnel are actively monitoring their well-being. The spokesman also said that ICE only recognizes 18 hunger strikers; previously, it acknowledged just four. (Last year, a wave of similar hunger strikes took hold at immigration detention centers across the country—including at one family detention center in Karnes City, Texas.)

The Berks County Residential Center is the smallest of three family detention centers in the United States. It currently houses 75 detainees, 34 of whom are adult women. The country’s other two (much larger) family detention centers are located in Texas. In 2014, when increasing volatility in Central America led to a surge in women and children fleeing for the US border, the Obama administration responded by increasing the federal government’s capacity to detain families.

However, those detention centers soon came under scrutiny for poor medical care, allegations of sexual abuse, lack of access to counsel, and unaffordable bonds that make it difficult, if not impossible, for families to obtain their release. Last summer, Johnson announced a series of family detention reforms meant to reduce the length of confinement, including setting bonds at a more realistic level. The following month, a district court in California ruled that the government must release migrant children within three to five days, or within 20 days under extreme circumstances. Otherwise, the court said, the administration would be in violation of an 18-year-old court settlement dictating the proper treatment of migrant children in detention.

Earlier this month, Johnson told reporters that the government is in compliance with those standards, having limited the average length of stay at family detention centers to 20 days or less. But advocates point to the prolonged detention of children in Berks as a clear violation. “It’s 100 percent violating the settlement,” Cambria said. “There is a right for the children to be released. I don’t even get it. I don’t…We should be caring for the best interests of the child.”

In their letter to Johnson, the hunger strikers stressed their concern for their children’s mental health. They said their sons and daughters have even expressed suicidal thoughts. Human Rights First, which has been making periodic visits to the Berks facility, issued a new report Friday documenting the poor state of mental health at the facility. For example, the report claims that one preteen girl wet the bed so frequently that she had to wear diapers at night. An independent psychological evaluation determined that she had symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder and that her bed-wetting, though it started well before her incarceration, was “exacerbated by her continued experience of heightened stress and hypervigilance while being detained.” The girl told her therapist that the thought of leaving her mother even briefly in the middle of the night filled her with so much fear that she often wouldn’t make the trip to the bathroom.

Numerous studies have shown that even short periods of detention can affect children’s mental and physical health. In a letter to Johnson in July 2015, the American Academy of Pediatrics warned that incarcerating Central American families could lead to “poorer health outcomes, higher rates of psychological distress, and suicidality.”

The ICE spokesman said he is prohibited from commenting on specific cases for privacy reasons but noted that the agency takes these allegations seriously and will review them. He also emphasized that comprehensive medical care, including from licensed mental-health providers, is available throughout a migrant’s detention, along with 24-hour emergency care.

Cambria and other immigrants’ rights advocates say that families seeking asylum shouldn’t be detained at all, let alone for months at a time. They would rather see women transferred out of detention into the care of their relatives in the United States or community-based programs while their asylum cases are processed.

“We’re not dealing with people who are violent. We’re not dealing with people who are a danger,” Cambria said. “They’re children and vulnerable women.”

Read More – 

These Migrant Moms Are on Hunger Strike to Protest Being Locked Up Indefinitely

Posted in alo, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on These Migrant Moms Are on Hunger Strike to Protest Being Locked Up Indefinitely

American Women Are Still Dying in Childbirth at Alarming Rates

by RUDKobyalnb Posted on August 19, 2016

Mother Jones

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

In dramatic contrast to the rest of the developed world, the rate of women dying because of complications with pregnancy or childbirth rose in the United States by 27 percent between 2000 and 2014. During the same time period, according to a study that will be published in the September issue of Obstetrics and Gynecology, 157 other countries reported a decrease in their maternal mortality rates.

Maternal mortality is defined as death while pregnant or within 42 days of being pregnant because of causes related to that pregnancy. The report covers 50 states and the District of Columbia, but researchers described the lack of comprehensive data surrounding maternal mortality as an “international embarrassment.” The lead researcher, editor-in-chief of Birth: Issues in Perinatal Care, with researchers from Boston University, and Stanford University, pointed to a lack of funding as reason for delays in compiling the data, but their conclusion was clear: “There is a need to redouble efforts to prevent maternal deaths and improve maternity care for the 4 million U.S. women giving birth each year.”

The nationwide rates are troubling, but Texas, whose maternal mortality rate doubled over two years, is the state with the sharpest increase. From 2006 to 2010, the maternal mortality rate stayed relatively steady in the state, at about 18 deaths per 100,000 live births. But in 2011, the rate there jumped to 33, and then to 35.8 in 2014. Texas has been at the center of a heated debate around women’s health that included a Supreme Court battle over restriction to abortion access in the state, and in 2013 the Legislature created a task force to study maternal mortality and morbidity. Its first report is set to be released in two weeks. While the state is separately analyzed in this report, the authors do not identify a specific reason for the increase, although they did speculate.

“There were some changes in the provision of women’s health services in Texas from 2011 to 2015, including the closing of several women’s health clinics,” the authors write. “Still, in the absence of war, natural disaster, or severe economic upheaval, the doubling of a mortality rate within a 2-year period in a state with almost 400,000 annual births seems unlikely. A future study will examine Texas data by race–ethnicity and detailed causes of death to better understand this unusual finding.”

The “changes in the provision of women’s health services” in Texas began in September 2011, when the state’s family planning budget was cut by two-thirds. Programs that provided prenatal care for low-income women were deeply affected, and the move also excluded clinics that provide abortion services from the funding. And in 2013, Texas passed HB 2, an anti-abortion omnibus bill that set off a domino effect of restrictions that drained half the state’s clinics of resources, ultimately shuttering them.

More recently, Texas awarded $1.6 million in funding for the Healthy Texas Women program to the Heidi Group, an anti-abortion organization. Only the Harris County Public Health Department received more money from the fund, but just barely—it was awarded $1.7 million.

Carrie Williams, a spokeswoman for the Texas Department of State Health Services, told the Dallas Morning News that the department considered the issue “a complex problem.”

“We’re aware of the numbers and want to see a decrease in this trend, and that’s why the task force is closely reviewing these cases and will make recommendations,” Williams said.

View original article:

American Women Are Still Dying in Childbirth at Alarming Rates

Posted in FF, G & F, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Ultima, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on American Women Are Still Dying in Childbirth at Alarming Rates

Understanding Louisiana’s big flood risks

by theacntnt1985-01 Posted on August 18, 2016

high water

Understanding Louisiana’s big flood risks

By on Aug 18, 2016Share

This story was originally published by Wired and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

There is a lot of water in southern Louisiana right now. The region’s been lashed with rain for the past week — the water has inundated freeways, surged past levees, and left about 40,000 homes water-logged husks of their former selves. The rain has stopped, for now. And when the water finally drains, people will return to their homes, pick up what’s left, and start rebuilding.

But the climate science prognosis doesn’t look good. This is the eighth time in about a year that 500-year rainfall has hammered the United States, and climate change will make extreme weather events like this more common. That means, among other things, millions of dollars worth of property damage. Fixing everything up and managing the growing threat of climate-related destruction hinges on flood insurance — which relies on ever-evolving, incomplete maps to determine risk. But new models will make it possible to better predict floodplains as it becomes increasingly dangerous to live on the coast.

The system isn’t perfect, but for people living in flood-prone regions like southern Louisiana, it’s the best line of defense, says Rafael Lemaitre, a FEMA spokesperson. If you’re covered, FEMA will pay out as much as $250,000 to repair your home.

But there are problems with how those policies get parceled out. “So much of it starts with what you define as a floodplain,” says Craig Colten, a geographer at Louisiana State University. FEMA creates flood risk maps that delineate areas of the region with a certain likelihood of being flooded every year. (An area that has a 1 percent probability of being flooded every year is called a 100-year floodplain.) Then, they base insurance premiums on where residents fall in those areas — the higher the risk, the higher the price.

Those maps, it turns out, are only updated every decade or so, when FEMA looks back on which places have flooded in the past. “It’s going to be a while before the recent flooding is factored into the maps,” Colten says. And the way water moves on the land is changing all the time: More developed areas with roads and parking lots lead to more runoff, for example. Climate change, too, is dramatically increasing the risk of flooding.

What coastal communities really need is predictive flood maps: projections of flood risk based on modeling. Right now, pretty much all flood insurance comes from FEMA, which, again, updates its maps infrequently and also allows residents to comment and push back on the boundaries, effectively letting them determine their own flood risk. Insurance companies, which might have the capital to invest in models that incorporate climate change, have largely stayed out of the business since the 1920s — partly because it’s too risky, partly because government-subsidized rates are too low for private companies to compete with.

But that may change soon, says Jeff Waters, a flood modeler at Risk Management Solutions, which models catastrophe risk for insurance companies. In recent years, he says, computers have finally been able to handle the computationally draining task of modeling something as dynamic as flooding across the U.S. Better modeling could lead to better estimates of risk in certain places, which would allow companies to price policies accordingly and residents to really understand how risky their locations are. And as FEMA enacts some much-needed reforms (like phasing out government subsidies, for one), it may become easier for insurance companies to offer up flood policies, too.

Another way to manage deepening risks, Colten says, is to widen the pool of people who buy into flood insurance. Currently, only the people living in 100-year floodplain areas are really expected to buy insurance — they’re the ones most at risk, after all. But if the insurance pool included people from 500-year floodplains, say, the risk would spread out more thinly. This scheme would’ve worked well for the flooding happening now, Colten says, since the water traveled far beyond the 100-year floodplain.

And FEMA is going with another, more direct way of managing the increasing risks of climate change: encouraging more severe weather-resistant infrastructure. Some of the funds FEMA provides for a disaster go toward rebuilding cities and houses to stricter code and in areas that aren’t quite so risky — say, at higher elevations or further away from the ocean. “Instead of constantly rebuilding for the next disaster, it’s much smarter to use federal dollars to build safer and build back,” says Lemaitre. As climate change risks climb and insurance costs rise to reflect reality, the shoreline of Louisiana will change, too: fewer buildings on the coast, and a lot more houses on stilts.

ShareElection Guide ★ 2016Making America Green AgainOur experts weigh in on the real issues at stake in this electionGet Grist in your inbox

More here:  

Understanding Louisiana’s big flood risks

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Safer, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Understanding Louisiana’s big flood risks

In 2006 Interview, Trump Demanded US Troops Leave Iraq—Even if Chaos and ISIS-Like Violence Occurred

by Rad7edzw Posted on August 16, 2016

Mother Jones

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

Last week, Donald Trump repeatedly asserted that President Barack Obama was the “founder” of ISIS and blasted Hillary Clinton as a “co-founder” of the terror group that has taken over large swaths of Iraq and Syria. But Obama was not in the White House and Clinton was not secretary of state when ISIS originated.

When a conservative radio host on Thursday asked if Trump meant that the Obama administration had “created the vacuum” in the region that allowed ISIS to grow, the GOP nominee stuck to his nonsensical statement: “No, I meant he’s the founder of ISIS.” Next, Trump claimed he was being sarcastic. Then at a campaign rally, he added, “But not that sarcastic.” It was a very Trumpian couple of days. And on Monday, with a speech on national security that Trump read off a teleprompter, he had a chance to declare what he really thought about Obama, Clinton, and ISIS. After repeating the lie that he had opposed the Iraq War before the invasion, Trump did not restate his “founder” claim, but he said that because of Obama and Clinton, “Iraq is in chaos, and ISIS is on the loose.” He added, “the Obama-Clinton foreign policy has unleashed ISIS.” He insisted that Obama’s withdrawal of US troops from Iraq (which actually was compelled by an agreement reached with the Iraqi government by President George W. Bush) “led directly to the rise of ISIS.”

Here’s the problem for Trump—if being wildly inconsistent and attacking an opponent for supposedly holding a position that Trump himself once advocated is a problem: 10 years ago, Trump called for a complete US withdrawal of troops from Iraq and indicated that he didn’t give a damn if this led to civil war and greater violence there. He even predicted that such a move would cause the rise of “vicious” forces in Iraq. But Trump believed this would not be the United States’ problem. That is, Trump was ardently in favor of the very actions that he now decries and for which he wrongfully blames Obama and Clinton.

In a 2006 CNBC interview, Trump was asked to critique Bush’s performance in the White House. Trump immediately brought up the Iraq War:

I would like to see our president get us out of the war in Iraq because the war is a total catastrophe. I would like to see President Bush get us out of Iraq, which is a total mess, a total catastrophe, and it’s not going to get any better. It’s only going to get worse. It’s a mess.

Trump was passionate and insistent. Bush had to get the hell out of Iraq right away:

What you have to do is get out of Iraq. You can do it nicely. You can do it slowly. You can do it radically.

Trump fancied the do-it-fast approach. And he noted that a US withdrawal should proceed, even though it would precipitate more violence in the region and the worst and most violent forces would benefit. It’s almost as if Trump foresaw the rise of ISIS—but didn’t believe that this mattered for the United States:

I would announce that we have been victorious in Iraq and all the troops are coming home and let those people have their civil war. And, by the way, no matter if we stay or if we leave, the most vicious person that you’ve ever seen in your—. Saddam Hussein is going to be like a nice guy compared to the one who’s taking over Iraq. Somebody will take over Iraq, whether we’re there or not, but probably when we leave, will take over Iraq. He will make Saddam Hussein…He will make Saddam Hussein look like a baby.

In his characteristic manner, Trump did not mince his words and he reiterated his solution:

I just said, announce victory, get them home…Let’s say, “Victory, Tremendous.” Have a big thing in the streets. Then get out real fast before you get shot. Let’s get home…Hey, hate us over there. Now how, how, do you—. The people that like us hate us. Those are the good ones. Then you have the double hate where they wanna just shoot us. But how do you solve that problem? You got to get out of Iraq.

Trump was clear at the time: The United States had to remove its troops, even if that would cause a civil war and a dramatic expansion of violence and terror in Iraq and the region. Now he denounces Obama and Clinton, who were not in charge of US foreign policy at that time, for supposedly implementing the policy he demanded. By Trump’s own standards—sarcastic or not—he is at least an honorary founder of ISIS.

Watch Trump take the exact position he now slams as “naive” and an example of “bad judgment”:

See original: 

In 2006 Interview, Trump Demanded US Troops Leave Iraq—Even if Chaos and ISIS-Like Violence Occurred

Posted in FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on In 2006 Interview, Trump Demanded US Troops Leave Iraq—Even if Chaos and ISIS-Like Violence Occurred

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

by SiobhanWheeler Posted on August 16, 2016

Mother Jones

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Original article – 

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

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The Biggest Threat to Women’s Health That No One Talks About

Is Trump Even Aware of Where He’s Speaking?

by DedraBayldon5 Posted on August 15, 2016

Mother Jones

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read more: 

Is Trump Even Aware of Where He’s Speaking?

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Is Trump Even Aware of Where He’s Speaking?

Donald Trump Has a Huge Conflict of Interest That No One’s Talking About

by TonjaBinder Posted on August 15, 2016

Mother Jones

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

If elected president, Donald Trump would bring with him to the White House unprecedented conflicts of interest, thanks to his sprawling holdings and various debts, including more than $100 million owed to a foreign bank. But his biggest conflict might be the $200 million hotel project Trump’s company is developing a couple of blocks from the White House in the Old Post Office Building, a historic property owned by the federal government and leased to the Trump Organization for 60 years. It seems likely, if not inevitable, that during a Trump presidency the federal government could find itself negotiating with the commander in chief—or his children—over matters relating to the new Trump International Hotel.

Completed in 1899, the Old Post Office is an iconic piece of real estate in a prime downtown DC location on Pennsylvania Avenue. Once the main post office for the District of Columbia, the building subsequently housed federal offices. By 2010, the property—which had escaped demolition in the 1970s due to an outcry by preservationists—was run-down and costing the government millions of dollars a year to operate and maintain. Congress pressured the General Services Administration, which manages the federal government’s facilities, to solicit bids to lease and revitalize the building. In 2012, Trump beat out competitors, including hotel chains Hilton and Hyatt, by offering an enticing deal—at least $3 million a year in rent and a share of the revenue, among other favorable terms—that some of his rivals thought was too good to be true and left little margin for profit. (Some bidders were also surprised that the government awarded this prize real estate to Trump, who at the time was actively stoking conspiracy theories that President Barack Obama was not a US citizen.)

Rival bidder BP-Metropolitan Investors, LLC, a consortium that included Hilton Hotels, angrily appealed the GSA’s decision to award the property to Trump, noting that the real estate mogul couldn’t possibly deliver on the terms of his proposal. At $200 million, his renovation was slated to cost $60 million more than BPM’s proposed overhaul, yet Trump was still pledging revenues to the government that surpassed those offered by his competition. “After a final contract award,” BPM warned in its complaint, “when the Trump revenues promised to GSA are found to be unachievable, the GSA and U.S. taxpayers will be left with an unrealistic economic model and another failed attempt to redevelop the Old Post Office. GSA and the U.S. taxpayers will have no choice but to ‘trade out’ the unrealistic ‘great deal’ it was promised for the far more pedestrian or even more disastrous outcome when it is taken back in default.”

BPM attached to its complaint more than 50 pages of exhibits detailing prior Trump bankruptcies, failed deals, and disgruntled business partners. But the GSA stuck with its decision.

Other critics have noted that, in order to turn a profit, Trump would have to charge exorbitant rates—and there’s no guarantee visitors would pay them in a city crowded with luxury hotels. Washington Post columnist Steven Pearlstein noted in 2012 that “none of the other experienced bidders came anywhere close to Trump’s numbers—and for good reason: They make no economic sense. Industry experts tell me that to justify that level of investment and that rent, Trump would have to fetch average room rates of at least…$750, which is far above the $500-plus average that even the city’s top hotel, the Four Seasons in Georgetown, commands.” At the time, Trump’s daughter Ivanka responded angrily to Pearlstein’s column, saying, “His numbers are pure speculation and, simply put, wrong.” She added, “We wanted to be extremely conservative in our projection and therefore showed achieving a rate less than that of the Four Seasons Georgetown.”

But now it appears that it was Ivanka Trump who was wrong. Pearlstein’s estimate, meanwhile, seems remarkably accurate. The hotel is slated to open on September 12 and is already accepting reservations. On October 18, a random weeknight this fall more than a month after opening, the Trump International’s cheapest room will run $775 a night. (The Trump Townhouse, a 6,300-square-foot two-bedroom suite, will cost $29,000 a night.) That same night, the least expensive room at the Four Seasons hotel in Georgetown, according to that hotel’s website, will be $735. (A one-night stay at the Ritz-Carlton will start at $685.) On some nights, the Trump International will be far and away the most expensive hotel in town, charging as much as three times more than other five-star hotels, such as the Mandarin Oriental. The question becomes whether or not Trump’s hotel can command those prices. If Trump can fill those rooms, the hotel may far exceed the expectations of critics who doubt it can be profitable at the price he paid. But if he can’t, it might spell trouble for the operation—and send Trump’s company back to the GSA seeking better terms that give the hotel a shot at profitability.

Going back to the bargaining table would not be an extraordinary move for a real estate developer—and especially not for Trump, who has frequently sought to change the terms of deals and has bragged of renegotiating debt. (He’s currently trying to renegotiate the presidential debate schedule.) And there are any number of reasons why the Trump Organization might need to haggle with the GSA that go beyond merely the bottom line, such as preserving certain architectural features. But Trump isn’t just a real estate developer. He’s potentially the boss of the very agency his company would be negotiating with. The GSA did not respond to a request for comment about how it would handle a conflict-of-interest issue if Trump becomes president.

Already the Trump Organization has sought to revise certain aspects of the Old Post Office deal. When his company submitted the plan, Trump said he had financial backing from Colony Capital, an investment firm run by his longtime friend Tom Barrack, a California billionaire who is currently serving as one of Trump’s economic policy advisers and helping finance a pro-Trump super-PAC. The Trump Organization later informed the GSA that Colony would not in fact be financing the project and that the organization would instead borrow $170 million from German banking giant Deutsche Bank.

Though historic preservation was an important aspect of the GSA’s decision-making process, the Trump Organization also informed the GSA in February 2013 that it would not be using the architect that it had identified in its proposal, a longtime champion of maintaining the building’s architectural and historical integrity. Since then, Trump’s company has regularly sparred with the government over preservation matters.

Jessica Tillipman, a law professor at George Washington University who specializes in government ethics, said the Old Post Office deal poses a massive conflict of interest for a President Trump. “You’d be kidding yourself if you don’t think the president of the United States has influence over this,” she says. “And he’s taken no affirmative steps to separate himself from this conflict of interest. I don’t know how this is not a bigger issue. It’s crazy.”

Presidents are not subject to the same ethics rules that govern other executive branch employees, but they often take steps, such as setting up blind trusts or handing over control of their assets, to avoid even an appearance of impropriety. But Trump has not been entirely clear on how he would disentangle himself from his complex corporate holdings if he became president. At one point, he suggested he would place his assets in a blind trust “or something.” But he also said this trust would be controlled by his children, who would continue to run his businesses. Blind trusts cannot be controlled by an individual’s family members. Trump’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment on how a conflict of interest with the Old Post Office, or any other property, would be handled.

“People have typically taken steps to silo these different aspects of their lives, because there should not be a doubt in the minds of the American public that the leader of the free world is not going to be putting certain interests over the public’s,” Tillipman says. “And when you haven’t taken affirmative steps, it leaves an open question.”

Originally posted here:

Donald Trump Has a Huge Conflict of Interest That No One’s Talking About

Posted in Bragg, Citizen, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, Landmark, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Donald Trump Has a Huge Conflict of Interest That No One’s Talking About