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Former Models for Donald Trump’s Agency Say They Violated Immigration Rules and Worked Illegally

by IsisKortig Posted on August 30, 2016

Mother Jones

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Republican nominee Donald Trump has placed immigration at the core of his presidential campaign. He has claimed that undocumented immigrants are “taking our jobs” and “taking our money,” pledged to deport them en masse, and vowed to build a wall on the Mexican border. At one point he demanded a ban on Muslims entering the country. Speaking to supporters in Iowa on Saturday, Trump said he would crack down on visitors to the United States who overstay their visas and declared that when any American citizen “loses their job to an illegal immigrant, the rights of that American citizen have been violated.” And he is scheduled to give a major address on immigration in Arizona on Wednesday night.

But the mogul’s New York modeling agency, Trump Model Management, has profited from using foreign models who came to the United States on tourist visas that did not permit them to work here, according to three former Trump models, all noncitizens, who shared their stories with Mother Jones. Financial and immigration records included in a recent lawsuit filed by a fourth former Trump model show that she, too, worked for Trump’s agency in the United States without a proper visa.

Foreigners who visit the United States as tourists are generally not permitted to engage in any sort of employment unless they obtain a special visa, a process that typically entails an employer applying for approval on behalf of a prospective employee. Employers risk fines and possible criminal charges for using undocumented labor.

Founded in 1999, Trump Model Management “has risen to the top of the fashion market,” boasts the Trump Organization’s website, and has a name “that symbolizes success.” According to a financial disclosure filed by his campaign in May, Donald Trump earned nearly $2 million from the company, in which he holds an 85 percent stake. Meanwhile, some former Trump models say they barely made any money working for the agency because of the high fees for rent and other expenses that were charged by the company.

Canadian-born Rachel Blais spent nearly three years working for Trump Model Management. After first signing with the agency in March 2004, she said, she performed a series of modeling gigs for Trump’s company in the United States without a work visa. At Mother Jones‘ request, Blais provided a detailed financial statement from Trump Model Management and a letter from an immigration lawyer who, in the fall of 2004, eventually secured a visa that would permit her to work legally in the United States. These records show a six-month gap between when she began working in the United States and when she was granted a work visa. During that time, Blais appeared on Trump’s hit reality TV show, The Apprentice, modeling outfits designed by his business protégés. As Blais walked the runway, Donald Trump looked on from the front row.

Former Trump model Rachel Blais appeared in a 2004 episode of Donald Trump’s hit NBC reality show, The Apprentice. Trump Model Management had yet to secure her work visa. NBC

Two other former Trump models—who requested anonymity to speak freely about their experiences, and who we are giving the pseudonyms Anna and Kate—said the agency never obtained work visas on their behalf, even as they performed modeling assignments in the United States. (They provided photographs from some of these jobs, and Mother Jones confirmed with the photographers or stylists that these shoots occurred in the United States.)

Each of the three former Trump models said she arrived in New York with dreams of making it big in one of the world’s most competitive fashion markets. But without work visas, they lived in constant fear of getting caught. “I was pretty on edge most of the time I was there,” Anna said of the three months in 2009 she spent in New York working for Trump’s agency.

“I was there illegally,” she said. “A sitting duck.”

I Spent 5 Years With Some of Trump’s Biggest Fans. Here’s What They Won’t Tell You.

According to three immigration lawyers consulted by Mother Jones, even unpaid employment is against the law for foreign nationals who do not have a work visa. “If the US company is benefiting from that person, that’s work,” explained Anastasia Tonello, global head of the US immigration team at Laura Devine Attorneys in New York. These rules for immigrants are in place to “protect them from being exploited,” she said. “That US company shouldn’t be making money off you.”

Two of the former Trump models said Trump’s agency encouraged them to deceive customs officials about why they were visiting the United States and told them to lie on customs forms about where they intended to live. Anna said she received a specific instruction from a Trump agency representative: “If they ask you any questions, you’re just here for meetings.”

Trump’s campaign spokeswoman, Hope Hicks, declined to answer questions about Trump Model Management’s use of foreign labor. “That has nothing to do with me or the campaign,” she said, adding that she had referred Mother Jones‘ queries to Trump’s modeling agency. Mother Jones also sent detailed questions to Trump Model Management. The company did not respond to multiple emails and phone calls requesting comment.

Fashion industry sources say that skirting immigration law in the manner that the three former Trump models described was once commonplace in the modeling world. In fact, Politico recently raised questions about the immigration status of Donald Trump’s current wife, Melania, during her days as a young model in New York in the 1990s. (In response to the Politico story, Melania Trump said she has “at all times been in compliance with the immigration laws of this country.”)

Kate, who worked for Trump Model Management in 2004, marveled at how her former boss has recently branded himself as an anti-illegal-immigration crusader on the campaign trail. “He doesn’t want to let anyone into the US anymore,” she said. “Meanwhile, behind everyone’s back, he’s bringing in all of these girls from all over the world and they’re working illegally.”

Now 31 years old and out of the modeling business, Blais once appeared in various publications, including Vogue, Elle, and Harpers Bazaar, and she posed wearing the designs of such fashion luminaries as Gianfranco Ferré, Dolce & Gabbana, and Jean Paul Gaultier. Her modeling career began when she was 16 and spanned numerous top-name agencies across four continents. She became a vocal advocate for models and appeared in a 2011 documentary, Girl Model, that explored the darker side of the industry. In a recent interview, she said her experience with Trump’s firm stood out: “Honestly, they are the most crooked agency I’ve ever worked for, and I’ve worked for quite a few.”

Rachel Blais appeared in this Elle fashion spread, published in September 2004, while working for Trump’s agency without a proper visa. Elle

Freshly signed to Trump Model Management, the Montreal native traveled to New York City by bus in April 2004. Just like “the majority of models who are young, have never been to NYC, and don’t have papers, I was just put in Trump’s models’ apartment,” she said. Kate and Anna also said they had lived in this apartment.

Models’ apartments, as they’re known in the industry, are dormitory-style quarters where agencies pack their talent into bunks, in some cases charging the models sky-high rent and pocketing a profit. According to the three former models, Trump Model Management housed its models in a two-floor, three-bedroom apartment in the East Village, near Tompkins Square Park. Mother Jones is withholding the address of the building, which is known in the neighborhood for its model tenants, to protect the privacy of the current residents.

When Blais lived in the apartment, she recalled, a Trump agency representative who served as a chaperone had a bedroom to herself on the ground floor of the building. A narrow flight of stairs led down to the basement, where the models lived in two small bedrooms that were crammed with bunk beds—two in one room, three in the other. An additional mattress was located in a common area near the stairs. At times, the apartment could be occupied by 11 or more people.

“We’re herded into these small spaces,” Kate said. “The apartment was like a sweatshop.”

Trump Model Management recruited models as young as 14. “I was by far the oldest in the house at the ripe old age of 18,” Anna said. “The bathroom always smelled like burned hair. I will never forget the place!” She added, “I taught myself how to write, ‘Please clean up after yourself’ in Russian.”

Living in the apartment during a sweltering New York summer, Kate picked a top bunk near a street-level window in the hopes of getting a little fresh air. She awoke one morning to something splashing her face. “Oh, maybe it’s raining today,” she recalled thinking. But when she peered out the window, “I saw the one-eyed monster pissing on me,” she said. “There was a bum pissing on my window, splashing me in my Trump Model bed.”

“Such a glamorous industry,” she said.

Blais, who previously discussed some of her experiences in an interview with Public Radio International, said the models weren’t in a position to complain about their living arrangements. “You’re young,” she remarked, “and you know that if you ask too many questions, you’re not going to get the work.”

A detailed financial statement provided by Blais shows that Trump’s agency charged her as much as $1,600 a month for a bunk in a room she shared with five others. Kate said she paid about $1,200 a month—”highway robbery,” she called it. For comparison, in the summer of 2004, an entire studio apartment nearby was advertised at $1,375 a month.

From April to October 2004, Blais traveled between the United States and Europe, picking up a string of high-profile fashion assignments for Trump Model Management and making a name for herself in the modeling world. During the months she spent living and working in New York, Blais said, she only had a tourist visa. “Most of the girls in the apartment that were not American didn’t have a work visa,” she recalled.

Here’s How Trump (Allegedly) Stiffed an 82-Year-Old Immigrant Over an Unpaid Bill

Anna and Kate also said they each worked for Trump’s agency while holding tourist visas. “I started out doing test-shoots but ended up doing a couple of lookbooks,” Anna said. (A lookbook is a modeling portfolio.) “Nothing huge, but definitely shoots that classified as ‘work.'”

Employers caught hiring noncitizens without proper visas can be fined up to $16,000 per employee and, in some cases, face up to six months in prison.

The three former Trump models said Trump’s agency was aware of the complications posed by their foreign status. Anna and Kate said the company coached them on how to circumvent immigration laws. Kate recalled being told, “When you’re stuck at immigration, say that you’re coming as a tourist. If they go through your luggage and they find your portfolio, tell them that you’re going there to look for an agent.”

Anna recalled that prior to her arrival, Trump agency staffers were “dodging around” her questions about her immigration status and how she could work legally in the United States. “Until finally,” she said, “it came to two days before I left, and they told me my only option was to get a tourist visa and we could work the rest out when I got there. We never sorted the rest out.”

Arriving in the United States, Anna grew terrified. “Going through customs for this trip was one of the most nerve-wracking experiences of my life,” she added. “It’s hard enough when you’re there perfectly innocently, but when you know you’ve lied on what is essentially a federal document, it’s a whole new world.”

“Am I sweaty? Am I red? Am I giving this away?” Anna remembered thinking as she finally faced a customs officer. After making it through immigration, she burst into tears.

Industry experts say that violating immigration rules has been the status quo in the fashion world for years. “It’s been common, almost standard, for modeling agencies to encourage girls to come into the country illegally,” said Sara Ziff, the founder of the Model Alliance, an advocacy group that claimed a major success in 2014 after lobbying the New York State legislature to pass a bill increasing protections for child models.

Bringing models into the United States on tourist visas was “very common,” said Susan Scafidi, the director of Fordham University’s Fashion Law Institute. “I’ve had tons of agencies tell me this, that this used to happen all the time, and that the cover story might be something like ‘I’m coming in for a friend’s birthday,’ or ‘I’m coming in to visit my aunt,’ that sort of thing.”

Read a letter from an immigration attorney confirming Rachel Blais’ eligibility to work in the US. Pierre Roussel/ZUMA

For their part, modeling agencies have complained about the time and resources required to bring a foreign model into the country and have insisted that US immigration laws are out of step with their fast-paced industry. “If there are girls that we can’t get into the United States, the client is going to take that business elsewhere,” Corinne Nicolas, the president of Trump Model Management, told the New York Daily News in 2008. “The market is calling for foreign girls.”

In 2007, a few years before his career imploded in a sexting scandal, former Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) sponsored a bill that would give models the same kind of work visas that international entertainers and athletes receive. The tabloids had a field day­—”Give me your torrid, your pure, your totally smokin’ foreign babes,” screamed a Daily News headline—and the effort ultimately failed.

Trump Model Management sponsored only its most successful models for work visas, the three former models said. Those who didn’t cut it were sent home, as was the case, Blais noted, with many of her roommates.

“It was very much the case of you earn your visa,” Anna said. “Essentially, if you got enough work and they liked you enough, they’d pay for a visa, but you weren’t about to see a dime before you could prove your worth.”

The company eventually secured an H-1B visa for Blais. Such visas allow US companies to employ workers in specialized fields. According to financial records provided by Blais, the company deducted the costs of obtaining a work visa from her earnings. (The agency did not obtain work visas for Anna and Kate, who each left the United States after their stints with Trump Model Management.)

H-1B visas have been increasingly popular in the high-tech field, and Trump’s companies, including Trump Model Management, have used this program extensively in the past. But on the campaign trail, Trump has railed against the H-1B program and those who he says abuse it. “I will end forever the use of the H-1B as a cheap labor program and institute an absolute requirement to hire American workers first for every visa and immigration program,” Trump said in March. “No exceptions.”

Nearly three years after signing with Trump’s agency, Blais had little to show for it—and it wasn’t for lack of modeling jobs. Under the contracts that she and other Trump models had signed, the company advanced money for rent and various other expenses (such as trainers, beauty treatments, travel, and administrative costs), deducting these charges from its clients’ modeling fees. But these charges—including the pricey rent that Blais and her roommates paid—consumed nearly all her modeling earnings. “I only got one check from Trump Models, and that’s when I left them,” she said. “I got $8,000 at most after having worked there for three years and having made tens of thousands of dollars.” (The check Blais received was for $8,427.35.)

“This is a system where they actually end up making money on the back of these foreign workers,” Blais added. She noted that models can end up in debt to their agencies, once rent and numerous other fees are extracted.

This is known in the industry as “agency debt.” Kate said her bookings never covered the cost of living in New York. After two months, she returned home. “I left indebted to them,” she said, “and I never went back, and I never paid them back.”

The experiences the former Trump models related to Mother Jones echo allegations in an ongoing class-action lawsuit against six major modeling agencies by nine former models who have claimed their agencies charged them exorbitant fees for rent and other expenses. One plaintiff, Marcelle Almonte, has alleged that her agency charged her $1,850 per month to live in a two-bedroom Miami Beach apartment with eight other models. The market rate for apartments in the same building ran no more than $3,300 per month, according to the complaint. (Trump Model Management, which was initially named in an earlier version of this lawsuit, was dropped from the case in 2013, after the judge narrowed the number of defendants.) Models “were largely trapped by these circumstances if they wanted to continue to pursue a career in modeling,” the complaint alleges.

Read Alexia Palmer’s complaint against Trump Model Management. Wavebreakmedia/iStock

“It is like modern-day slavery” Blais said of working for Trump Model Management—and she is not alone in describing her time with Trump’s company in those terms. Former Trump model Alexia Palmer, who filed a lawsuit against Trump Model Management for fraud and wage theft in 2014, has said she “felt like a slave.”

Palmer has alleged that she was forced to pay hefty—sometimes mysterious—fees to Trump’s agency. These were fees on top of the 20 percent commission she paid for each job the company booked. Palmer charged that during three years of modeling for Trump’s company, she earned only $3,880.75. A New York judge dismissed Palmer’s claim in March because, among other reasons, she had not taken her case first to the Department of Labor. Lawyers for Trump Model Management called Palmer’s lawsuit “frivolous” and “without merit.”

Palmer filed a complaint with the Department of Labor this spring, and in August the agency dismissed the case. Palmer’s lawyer, Naresh Gehi, said he is appealing the decision. Since he began representing Palmer, he said, fashion models who worked for other agencies have approached him with similar stories. “These are people that are coming out of the closet and explaining to the world how they are being exploited,” he said. “They are the most vulnerable.”

Documents filed in Palmer’s case indicate that she worked in the United States without a work visa after being recruited by Trump’s agency from her native Jamaica. Gehi declined to discuss his client’s immigration status.

Former Trump model Alexia Palmer posed for this Teen Vogue shoot in January 2011. She secured a work visa in October 2011. Teen Vogue

A Caribbean model contest launched Palmer’s career in 2010, and at age 17 she signed an exclusive contract with Trump Model Management in January 2011. Department of Labor records show she received approval to work in the United States beginning in October 2011. Yet according to a financial statement filed as evidence in her case, Palmer started working in the United States nine months before this authorization was granted. Her financial records list a January 22, 2011, job for Condé Nast, when she posed for a Teen Vogue spread featuring the cast of Glee. (The shoot took place at Milk Studios in Los Angeles.)

“That whole period, from January to September, was not authorized,” said Pankaj Malik, a partner at New York-based Ballon, Stoll, Bader & Nadler who has worked on immigration issues for over two decades and who reviewed Palmer’s case for Mother Jones. “You can’t do any of that. It’s so not allowed.”

Trump has taken an active role at Trump Model Management from its founding. He has personally signed models who have participated in his Miss Universe and Miss USA competitions, where his agency staff appeared as judges. Melania Trump was a Trump model for a brief period after meeting her future husband in the late 1990s.

The agency is a particular point of pride for Trump, who has built his brand around glitz and glamour. “True Trumpologists know the model agency is only a tiny part of Trumpland financially,” the New York Sun wrote in 2004. “But his agency best evokes a big Trump theme—sex sells.” Trump has often cross-pollinated his other business ventures with fashion models and has used them as veritable set pieces when he rolls out new products. Trump models, including Blais, appeared on The Apprentice—and they flanked him at the 2004 launch of his Parker Brothers board game, TRUMP.

Part of Blais’ job, she said, was to serve as eye candy at Trump-branded events. Recalling the first time she met the mogul, she said, “I had to go to the Trump Vodka opening.” It was a glitzy 2006 gala at Trump Tower where Busta Rhymes performed, and Trump unveiled his (soon-to-be-defunct) line of vodka. “It was part of my duty to go and be seen and to be photographed and meet Donald Trump and shake his hand,” she remembered.

Trump made a strong impression on her that night. “I knew that I was a model and there was objectification in the job, but this was another level,” she said. Blais left Trump Model Management the year after the Trump Vodka gala, feeling that she had been exploited and shortchanged by the agency.

Kate, who went on to have a successful career with another agency, also parted ways with Trump’s company in disgust. “My overall experience was not a very good one,” she said. “I left with a bad taste in my mouth. I didn’t like the agency. I didn’t like where they had us living. Honestly, I felt ripped off.”

These days, Kate said, she believes that Trump has been fooling American voters with his anti-immigrant rhetoric, given that his own agency had engaged in the practices he has denounced. “He doesn’t like the face of a Mexican or a Muslim,” she said, “but because these models are beautiful girls, it’s okay? He’s such a hypocrite.”

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Former Models for Donald Trump’s Agency Say They Violated Immigration Rules and Worked Illegally

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Creating Panic Is Bad for the Country, But Good for Politicians

by PaulettPearl Posted on August 30, 2016

Mother Jones

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There was another stampede at an airport Sunday night, when passengers at LAX wrongly thought they heard guns being fired:

A loud noise mistaken for gunfire led to rumors that spread at blazing speed in person and on social media, setting off a panic that shut down one of the nation’s busiest airports, as passengers fled terminals and burst through security cordons, and as the police struggled to figure out what was happening and to restore order.

Far from being an isolated episode, it was essentially what had happened on Aug. 13 at a mall in Raleigh, N.C.; on Aug. 14 at Kennedy International Airport in New York; on Aug. 20 at a mall in Michigan; and on Aug. 25 at a mall in Orlando, Fla.

Spreading panic over terrorism has real effects. This is one of them. We are being turned into a nation of babies.

The number of terrorist attacks in the US is minuscule. The number of people in the US who die from terrorist attacks is minuscule. But I suppose the political advantage from scaring the hell out of people about terrorism is fairly substantial. And that’s all that counts, isn’t it?

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Creating Panic Is Bad for the Country, But Good for Politicians

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

by EloisaBastow Posted on August 29, 2016

Mother Jones

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Scientists Just Took a Big Step Toward Ending the Opioid Epidemic

by well Posted on August 29, 2016

Mother Jones

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Scientists are one step closer to designing a drug that relieves pain but doesn’t have the harmful side effects of today’s opioid painkillers.

The need is clear: In 2014, 14,000 Americans died from overdoses involving prescription opioids like oxycodone or hydrocodone (known by brand names OxyContin and Vicodin). The death toll from prescription opioid overdoses has roughly quadrupled since 1999. The drugs, prescribed for chronic pain, frequently lead to addiction; as many as one in four people prescribed opioids for long-term pain struggles with addiction, according to the Centers for Disease Control. When ingested in high doses, the drugs slow down breathing and can be fatal.

A team of researchers, whose work was published earlier this month in Nature, designed a compound named PZM21 that is producing promising results. Multiple experiments on mice appear to reduce pain without slowing down breathing or being addictive. When the rodents treated with the compound were placed on a hot plate, for example, they appeared to experience as much pain relief as those treated with morphine. Mice showed no preference between being in a chamber where they received PMZ21 and another where they received a saline solution.

Rather than tweaking an existing drug, as most drugs are created, the research team used a combination of computational modeling and synthetic drug generation to design a compound from scratch that would bind well with the known structure of the brain’s opioid receptors. Doing so was a four-year effort, involving researchers from Stanford University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of California-San Francisco, and Friedrich-Alexander University in Germany.

Of course, there’s a long way between mice studies and a drug on the market for human use; the authors estimate it will be one to two years until the compound makes its way to the Food and Drug Administration for testing. Still, when it comes to developing a drug that could help mitigate today’s opioid crisis, Aashish Manglik, a Stanford physiologist and the study’s lead author, says he is “cautiously optimistic.”

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Scientists Just Took a Big Step Toward Ending the Opioid Epidemic

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Menstrual Syncing Is Baloney

by RosellaPritt Posted on August 29, 2016

Mother Jones

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Simon Oxenham busts a myth today:

Another popular theory is that when women live together, their menstrual cycles align. The idea has become a popular example of how pheromones can control us, but over time many studies have failed to replicate and confirm the finding. But for some reason, this idea is particularly resilient to debunking, living on in an abundance of newspaper articles and anecdotal conversations between friends.

I can propose one possible reason this idea resists debunking: Nobody is debunking it. I learned about this in college in the late 70s, when it was believed to be true. In the intervening 45 years, this is the first time I’ve heard that it’s wrong. That might be understandable if I didn’t read a lot, but I do. And I’ve never heard until now that the menstrual syncing theory is wrong.

Eventually, I suppose, my generation will die off and younger generations will never have been exposed to this idea, but that process sure takes a while. In the meantime, we are all prisoners of the fact that fascinating scientific results always get a lot of media attention, while the slow work of falsifying them—which is rarely done in a single blockbuster study—ends up buried in academic journals.

I think we need a new academic journal: The Journal of Popular Myths and Delusions, or some such. They would tackle things in two ways. First, when a popular theory gets to the point where it’s widely discredited in the scientific community, they’d write an article about it that would give news organizations a hook to report it. Second, they would annually commission a survey of known scientific falsehoods and then spend the following year debunking the most popular ones. I recommend they start with the whole eight glasses of water thing.

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Menstrual Syncing Is Baloney

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The Next Keystone? Protesters Try to Stop Another Huge Oil Pipeline.

by CorrineGrondin Posted on August 26, 2016

Mother Jones

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Tensions continue to rise over the controversial Dakota Access Pipeline (known also as the Bakken Pipeline), a proposed 1,172-mile project currently under construction. Demonstrations over the pipeline, which will travel from North Dakota’s northwest Bakken region to southern Illinois, have grown steadily over the last few weeks. As many as 4,000 people have reportedly joined the Standing Rock Sioux in protesting the pipeline, which is slated to travel beneath sacred Native lands and cross under the Missouri River, the region’s main source of drinking water. The protesters have gathered along the border of the Standing Rock Sioux’s reservation in Cannon Ball, North Dakota, blocking the construction site. (Read Mother Jones‘ report on the pipeline here.)

RELATED: The government quietly just approved this enormous oil pipeline

On Monday, according to the Bismarck Tribune, Greg Wilz, Division Director of Homeland Security, ordered the removal of the state-owned water tanks and trailers that had been providing the protesters with drinking water. Wilz attributed the decision to alleged criminal activity—specifically two complaints of laser pointers being shined in the eyes of pilots of surveillance aircraft monitoring the protest. “Based on the scenario down there, we don’t believe that equipment is secure,” he said. The supplies were provided last week by the North Dakota Department of Health at the request of the tribe.

Authorities in North Dakota have now arrested 29 protesters in the last two weeks, including the tribal chairman. A federal judge will rule by September 9 on the injunction filed by the Standing Rock Sioux to prevent construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline.

Pipeline protesters—including actors Shailene Woodley and Susan Sarandon—have also gathered in New York and Washington, DC. Woodley has been protesting the pipeline for weeks, documenting the peaceful nature of the Standing Rock demonstration in North Dakota on her Twitter page before returning to DC for the rally, which took place Wednesday outside a federal court building where challenges to the permits were being heard.

Environmentalist Bill McKibben also weighed in on the pipeline with an article published Monday. Indigenous populations like the Standing Rock Sioux “have been the vanguard of the movement to slow down climate change,” wrote McKibben.

Sen. Bernie Sanders issued a press release of his own on Thursday, condemning the pipeline and upholding the grassroots efforts to stop it. “Regardless of the court’s decision, the Dakota Access pipeline must be stopped,” he wrote. “As a nation, our job is to break our addiction to fossil fuels, not increase our dependence on oil. I join with the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and the many tribal nations fighting this dangerous pipeline.”

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The Next Keystone? Protesters Try to Stop Another Huge Oil Pipeline.

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Trump’s Campaign CEO Ran a Secretive Sci-Fi Project in the Arizona Desert

by sammieknowlton Posted on August 26, 2016

Mother Jones

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Long before Stephen Bannon was CEO of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, he held a much different job—as the acting director of Biosphere 2, a $200 million scientific research facility in the mountains outside Tucson, Arizona.

The original Biosphere project, completed in 1991 by a company called Space Biosphere Ventures and funded by a Texas billionaire named Edward Bass, was an attempt to turn science fiction into reality. Eight individuals were to live and work entirely within a series of domed and self-contained buildings, where they would grow their own food, recycle their own waste, and demonstrate that humans might be able to survive in space. But when that two-year experiment ended in disarray—it was overrun by ants and cockroaches—the company turned to a group of outsiders for help in turning it around. At the head of that effort was Bannon.

At the time he was hired by Bass to run Space Biospheres Ventures, Bannon was managing his own investment banking firm, Bannon & Co. Some Biosphere-ites were concerned about Bannon, who had previously investigated cost overruns at the site. Two former Biosphere 2 crew members flew back to Arizona to protest the hire and broke into the compound to warn current crew members that Bannon and the new management would jeopardize their safety.

Under his management, the focus of Biosphere 2 shifted from survival—the Survivor-like challenge of enduring two years inside a literal bubble—to planetary research. Specifically, as Bannon explained in a 1995 interview with C-SPAN, Biosphere 2 would be a place that focused on studying societal challenges like air pollution and climate change.

Breitbart News, the media company which Bannon ran for four years before taking a leave of absence to join Trump’s campaign, has adopted an antagonistic approach toward the topic of climate change, mocking climate science as “tosh” and “eco-propaganda” and claiming that the Earth is actually cooling. But Bannon sang a much different tune when he was interviewed by C-Span at Biosphere 2 in 1995.

“A lot of the scientists who are studying global change and studying the effects of greenhouse gases, many of them feel that the Earth’s atmosphere in 100 years is what Biosphere 2’s atmosphere is today,” Bannon explained. “We have extraordinarily high CO2, we have very high nitrous oxide, we have high methane. And we have lower oxygen content. So the power of this place is allowing those scientists who are really involved in the study of global change, and which, in the outside world or Biosphere 1, really have to work with just computer simulation, this actually allows them to study and monitor the impact of enhanced CO2 and other greenhouse gases on humans, plants, and animals.”

Bannon left Biosphere 2 after two years, and the project was taken over by Columbia University. (It is currently part of the University of Arizona.) But his departure was marred, as the Tucson Citizen reported at the time, by a civil lawsuit filed against Space Biosphere Ventures by the former crew members who had broken in.

During a 1996 trial, Bannon testified that he had called one of the plaintiffs a “self-centered, deluded young woman” and a “bimbo.” He also testified that when the woman submitted a five-page complaint outlining safety problems at the site, he promised to shove the complaint “down her fucking throat.” At the end of the trial, the jury found for the plaintiffs and ordered Space Biosphere Ventures to pay them $600,000—but also ordered the plaintiffs to pay the company $40,089 for the damage they had caused.

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Trump’s Campaign CEO Ran a Secretive Sci-Fi Project in the Arizona Desert

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A Question for the AP

by WilsonBoren4 Posted on August 26, 2016

Mother Jones

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Just curious: are you ever planning to release the names of Hillary Clinton’s non-governmental visitors? You’re a news organization, after all, and this is news. I’d sure like to see them. I bet lots of other people would too.

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A Question for the AP

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There’s a new mega-pipeline in town. Here’s why it has so many protesters in the trenches.

by Justina74L Posted on August 24, 2016

Dakota Access

There’s a new mega-pipeline in town. Here’s why it has so many protesters in the trenches.

By on Aug 24, 2016Share

Update: Judge James E. Boasberg of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia announced on Wednesday afternoon that he would postpone his decision on the Dakota Access Pipeline until September 9, to allow time for further consideration. 

By the end of the year, there will be a new 1,172-mile oil pipeline snaking its way across the Midwest. That is, unless a Native American tribe wins its case that the Army Corps of Engineers failed its due diligence to consider violations to laws like the Clean Water Act and the National Historic Preservation Act.

On Wednesday, August 24, it will be up to a federal court in Washington, D.C. to effectively determine the pipeline’s fate.

Whether you’ve been following closely or this is your first time hearing about one of the biggest battles since Keystone XL, here’s what you need to know:

What is the fuss in court over?

The Dakota Access pipeline (DAPL) would carry 570,000 barrels of oil per day from the Bakken region of northwest North Dakota to a refinery in Illinois. There, the oil would be refined and sent to markets along the East Coast and down to the Gulf of Mexico.

The Army Corps of Engineers gave DAPL permission to build in late July, despite pending lawsuits and active local resistance. One of those lawsuits, filed in federal court by the Standing Rock Sioux tribes against the Army Corps of Engineers, is the one being heard in federal court in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday.

The suit claims the pipeline will cause “irreparable” damage to sacred lands at the confluence of the Cannonball and Missouri Rivers. “Industrial development of that site for the crude oil pipeline has a high potential to destroy sites eligible for listing in the National Register,” according to the lawsuit. It further alleges that Dakota Access LLC failed its responsibility to adequately consult with tribes before construction, in violation of the National Historic Preservation Act. The Missouri River (Standing Rock’s only water source) and “water” itself is of vital cultural importance, the suit adds.

If the court rules in the tribe’s favor, stop-work orders will be issued on construction all along the route.

Who is unhappy?

DAPL’s route crosses agricultural land, protected wildlife habitats, and three major rivers: the Missouri, the Mississippi, and the Big Sioux.

This has a lot of different interests on edge and in the trenches.

Faced with eminent domain, property owners in Iowa are fighting their own legal battle. Nine landowners requested an emergency stop to pipeline construction on the grounds that the Iowa Utilities Board, which granted Dakota Access its construction permits, had done so outside of its jurisdiction. (The board’s application of eminent domain, they argued, would only be legal if Dakota Access were a public utility.)

That legal battle isn’t going so well: On Monday, a district court denied the emergency stop, reports the Des Moines Register.

The pipeline is also bad news for the Standing Rock Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota Nations, for whom Missouri River is a sole source of water on the prairie and who worry that construction will disrupt certain historical sites.

What are the stakes for the environment?

Pipelines, as we know, spill. One of DAPL’s stakeholders, Enbridge Energy, was responsible for one of the worst, preventable oil spills on land in recent memory: more than 1 million gallons in the Kalamazoo River in Michigan.

For climate change activists like Bill McKibben, stopping DAPL construction is another major battle in their campaign to keep fossil fuels in the ground. DAPL, as Mother Jones notes, is just seven miles shorter than the defeated Keystone XL pipeline.

What are protesters doing about it?

An hour south of Bismarck, protesters have gathered since April near Cannon Ball, N.D., where Dakota Access plans to lay pipe under the Missouri River. In recent weeks, the ranks of protests swelled from several dozen to more than 800.

The heavily-policed scene has not been without incident. More than 20 people have been arrested in the last few weeks, and a roadblock guarded by state police established on Highway 1806, which leads to the protest site and the Standing Rock reservation.

Officials pulled state emergency resources like water and trailers from the protest camp on Monday, after the Morton County Sheriff’s Department claimed officers had been threatened with physical violence and pipe bombs (an allegation that protest organizers adamantly denied to Grist and other outlets).

What’s next?

At the protest site, hundreds of protesters plan to continue to occupy the area near Dakota Access’s entry point into the Missouri. Regardless of the outcome of Wednesday’s court date, activists have no plans to back down, organizer Tara Houska told Grist in a phone call last Friday.

“I think it goes without saying that the camp is committed to not have the pipeline put under the river,” she said.

If Standing Rock prevails in D.C. court on Wednesday, construction will halt across the pipeline’s multi-state path, pending more rigorous tribal consultations. The Army Corps of Engineers may also be required to conduct an environmental impact assessment for the pipeline as a whole.

This court battle is one of protesters’ last, best hopes for halting DAPL’s start date. They plan on making a whole lot of noise on Wednesday, and in coming weeks, to make sure they’re heard.

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There’s a new mega-pipeline in town. Here’s why it has so many protesters in the trenches.

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A Federal Appeals Court Just Sided With the Ohio GOP in a Voting Rights Case

by MikelFoy988 Posted on August 23, 2016

Mother Jones

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A divided panel of judges on the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Tuesday that a lower court erred by reinstating Ohio’s “Golden Week,” a period when Ohio voters could register to vote and cast absentee ballots at the same time.

“This case presents yet another appeal (there are several pending in the Sixth Circuit alone) asking the federal courts to become entangled, as overseers and micromanagers, in the minutiae of state election processes,” reads the majority opinion written by Judge David McKeague. He added that Ohio is a “leader” compared with other states when it comes to early voting opportunities, and that the “undisputed factual record shows that it’s easy to vote in Ohio. Very easy, actually.”

The case, Ohio Democratic Party v. Husted, was filed after Republican state lawmakers introduced a host of voting restrictions in 2013, including the elimination of Golden Week and same-day voter registration. The Ohio Democratic Party, among others, sued in May 2015, arguing that the reductions violated the 14th Amendment and Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits discriminatory voting practices or procedures. A district court judge in Ohio agreed, ruling in May 2016 that the cuts impose “a modest, as well as a disproportionate, burden on African Americans’ right to vote.”

Judge Jane Stranch, the one dissenting vote on the ruling, wrote that the majority opinion overturned a decision that was based on a 10-day bench trial that included more than 20 witnesses (8 of whom were experts) and produced a 120-page opinion that dismissed many of the claims by voting-rights advocates. But this decision acknowledged that the elimination of both Golden Week and same-day voter registration went too far, even as the lower court disagreed with other challenges to voting restrictions originally brought in the case. Judge Stranch noted that the trial included evidence that African Americans in Ohio used early in-person voting and Golden Week at higher rates than whites in 2008 and 2012, and that it demonstrated the importance of early voting for black voters because of factors including more limited overall access to transportation and less flexible work schedules than their white counterparts.

“A great deal of work underlies the district court’s conclusion on this important subject,” Stranch wrote. “Both that work and the substantial support found in the record stand in opposition to the majority opinion’s blithe assertion ‘that it’s easy to vote in Ohio. Very easy, actually.'”

Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted, a Republican, celebrated Tuesday’s ruling:

Marc Elias, one of the main Democratic lawyers working the case (and the attorney for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, which was not a party to this case), tweeted:

The Constitutional Accountability Center, a judiciary advocacy group, which had filed an amicus brief in support of keeping Golden Week on the books, slammed Tuesday’s decision. David Gans, the center’s director of the Human Rights, Civil Rights, and Citizenship Program, wrote in a statement, “Today’s 2-1 decision…rubber-stamps Ohio’s decision to cut back on early voting and same-day registration, failing to ensure that the state respected the voting rights of all Ohioans. The court’s decision will make it harder for racial minorities and others to cast a ballot this coming Election day.”

Rick Hasen, an elections expert at the University of California-Irvine, wrote on Tuesday that Ohio’s 29-day early voting period was already “exceedingly generous.” He acknowledged that while he “might support Golden Week as good policy, I worry when courts are used in this way to prevent every cutback in voting, especially after voting rights proponents had settled a suit with Ohio on favorable terms.”

Unless the Ohio Democratic Party appeals to the full 6th Circuit or the US Supreme Court, Golden Week and same-day registration will not be in place for the election in November.

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A Federal Appeals Court Just Sided With the Ohio GOP in a Voting Rights Case

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