Monthly Archives: May 2017

Monsanto Chemical May Leave Orca Pod ‘Doomed to Extinction’

By Carey Wedler. Published 5-10-2017 by The Anti-Media

An orca whale that washed up on the coast of Scotland last year was poisoned by environmental pollutants, according to a report released last week.

The Guardian reported last Tuesday that Lulu, the full-grown whale who died, “was a member of the UK’s last resident pod and a postmortem also showed she had never produced a calf. The pollutants, called PCBs, are known to cause infertility and these latest findings add to strong evidence that the pod is doomed to extinction.Continue reading

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Wisconsin ID Law Kept 200,000 Voters From Polls—And Trump Won by Just 22,748 Votes

‘The lost voters skewed more African-American and more Democrat’

By Nika Knight, staff writer for Common Dreams. Published 5-9-2017

Wisconsin’s voter ID law may have suppressed a stunning 200,000 votes in the 2016 presidential election, a study shown exclusively to The Nation has revealed, and the law disproportionately kept Democratic and African-American voters from the polls.

President Donald Trump won Wisconsin by a mere 22,748 votes.

The study by Priorities USA, a group affiliated with the Democratic Party, looked at states that had passed strict voter ID laws since the 2012 election, comparing them to states that did not. According to The Nation‘s Ari Berman, the study found: Continue reading

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With Muslim Ban 2.0 in Court, Trump Campaign Website Scrubs Call for Ban

Statement calling for “total and complete shutdown on Muslims” entering U.S. removed from Trump campaign website Monday afternoon

By Deirdre Fulton, staff writer for Common Dreams. Published 5-8-2017

This story may be updated.

Minutes after a reporter asked White House press secretary Sean Spicer why President Donald Trump’s campaign website still broadcast his call for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States,” that page went blank, according to reports on Monday afternoon. Continue reading

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World Worries as Trump Set to Dump Paris Climate Deal

Trump has called climate change a “hoax.” Tweeted: “This very expensive GLOBAL WARMING bullshit has got to stop.”

By Common Dreams. Published 5-7-2017

Heads of state cheer after the Paris Climate Change Agreement was signed at COP21, 2015, by 197 parties. (cc/Wikipedia)

The world is worried as Decision Day nears.

At a April 29th rally in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Trump said he would make a “big decision” on Paris within the next two weeks and vowed to end “a broken system of global plunder at American expense.”

Now the Trump administration has a meeting scheduled this Tuesday to decide whether to drop out of the Paris Agreement. Continue reading

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How crossing the US-Mexico border became a crime

Kelly Lytle Hernandez, University of California, Los Angeles

It was not always a crime to enter the United States without authorization. The Conversation

In fact, for most of American history, immigrants could enter the United States without official permission and not fear criminal prosecution by the federal government.

That changed in 1929. On its surface, Congress’ new prohibitions on informal border crossings simply modernized the U.S. immigration system by compelling all immigrants to apply for entry. However, in my new book “City of Inmates,” I detail how Congress outlawed border crossings with the specific intent of criminalizing, prosecuting and imprisoning Mexican immigrants.

Knowing this history is important now. On April 11, 2017, U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced his plan to step up prosecutions of unlawful entries, saying it’s time to “restore a lawful system of immigration.” This may read like a colorblind commitment to law and order. But the law Sessions has vowed to enforce was designed with racist intent.

The Mexican immigration debate

The criminalization of informal border crossings occurred amid an immigration boom from Mexico.

In 1900, about 100,000 Mexican immigrants resided in the United States.

By 1930, nearly 1.5 million Mexican immigrants lived north of the border.

As Mexican immigration surged, many in Congress were trying to restrict nonwhite immigration. By 1924, Congress had largely adopted a “whites only” immigration system, banning all Asian immigration and cutting the number of immigrants allowed to enter the United States from anywhere other than Northern and Western Europe. But whenever Congress tried to cap the number of Mexicans allowed to enter the United States each year, southwestern employers fiercely objected.

U.S. employers had eagerly stoked the era’s Mexican immigration boom by recruiting Mexican workers to their southwestern farms, ranches and railroads, as well as their homes and mines. By the 1920s, western farmers were completely dependent on Mexican workers.

However, they also believed that Mexican immigrants would never permanently settle in the United States. As agribusiness lobbyist S. Parker Frisselle explained to Congress in 1926, “The Mexican is a ‘homer.’ Like the pigeon he goes home to roost.” On Frisselle’s promise that Mexicans were “not immigrants” but, rather, “birds of passage,” western employers successfully defeated proposals to cap Mexican immigration to the United States during the 1920s.

The idea that Mexican immigrants often returned to Mexico contained some truth. Many Mexican immigrants engaged in cyclical migrations between their homes in Mexico and work in the United States. Yet, by the close of the 1920s, Mexicans were settling in large numbers across the Southwest. They bought homes and started newspapers, churches and businesses. And many Mexican immigrants in the United States started families, raising a new generation of Mexican-American children.

Monitoring the rise of Mexican-American communities in southwestern states, the advocates of a whites-only immigration system charged western employers with recklessly courting Anglo-America’s racial doom. As the work of historian Natalia Molina details, they believed Mexicans were racially unfit to be U.S. citizens.

Western employers agreed that Mexicans should not be allowed to become U.S. citizens. “We, in California, would greatly prefer some set up in which our peak labor demands might be met and upon the completion of our harvest these laborers returned to their country,” Friselle told Congress. But western employers also wanted unfettered access to an unlimited number of Mexican laborers. “We need the labor,” they roared back at those who wanted to cap the number of Mexican immigrants allowed to enter the United States each year.

Amid the escalating conflict between employers in the West and advocates of restriction in Congress, a senator from Dixie proposed a compromise.

Blease’s law

Senator Coleman Livingston Blease hailed from the hills of South Carolina. In 1925, he entered Congress committed, above all else, to protecting white supremacy. In 1929, as restrictionists and employers tussled over the future of Mexican immigration, Blease proposed a way forward.

Senator Coleman Blease. Library of Congress

According to U.S. immigration officials, Mexicans made nearly one million official border crossings into the United States during the 1920s. They arrived at a port of entry, paid an entry fee and submitted to any required tests, such as literacy and health.

However, as U.S. immigration authorities reported, many other Mexican immigrants did not register for legal entry. Entry fees were prohibitively high for many Mexican workers. Moreover, U.S. authorities subjected Mexican immigrants, in particular, to kerosene baths and humiliating delousing procedures because they believed Mexican immigrants carried disease and filth on their bodies. Instead of traveling to a port of entry, many Mexicans informally crossed the border at will, as both U.S. and Mexican citizens had done for decades.

When the debate stalled over how many Mexicans to allow in each year, Blease shifted attention to stopping the large number of border crossings that took place outside ports of entry. He suggested criminalizing unmonitored entry.

According to Blease’s bill, “unlawfully entering the country” would be a misdemeanor, while unlawfully returning to the United States after deportation would be a felony. The idea was to force Mexican immigrants into an authorized and monitored stream that could be turned on and turned off at will at ports of entry. Any immigrant who entered the United States outside the bounds of this stream would be a criminal subject to fines, imprisonment and ultimately deportation. But it was a crime designed to impact Mexican immigrants, in particular.

Neither the western agricultural businessmen nor the restrictionists registered any objections. Congress passed Blease’s bill, the Immigration Act of March 4, 1929, and dramatically altered the story of crime and punishment in the United States.

Caged

With stunning precision, the criminalization of unauthorized entry caged thousands of Mexico’s “birds of passage.” By the end of 1930, the U.S. attorney general reported prosecuting 7,001 cases of unlawful entry. By the end of the decade, U.S. attorneys had prosecuted more than 44,000 cases.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Prisons, the vast majority of immigrants imprisoned for breaking Blease’s law were Mexicans. Throughout the 1930s, Mexicans never comprised fewer than 85 percent of all immigration prisoners. Some years, that number rose to 99 percent. By the end of the decade, tens of thousands of Mexicans had been convicted of unlawfully entering or reentering the United States. The U.S. Bureau of Prisons built three new prisons in the U.S.-Mexico border region: La Tuna Prison in El Paso, Prison Camp #10 in Tucson and Terminal Island in Los Angeles.

La Tuna detention farm. U.S. Bureau of Prisons

Only the outbreak of World War II halted the Mexican immigrant prison boom of the 1930s. The war turned the attention of U.S. attorneys elsewhere, and Mexicans workers were desperately needed north of the border.

With few exceptions, prosecutions for unlawful entry and reentry remained low until 2005. As a measure of the war on terror, the George W. Bush administration directed U.S. attorneys to adopt an “enforcement with consequences” strategy. In 2009, U.S. attorneys prosecuted more than 50,000 cases of unlawful entry or reentry. The Obama administration continued the surge, betting that aggressive border enforcement would help bring a recalcitrant Congress to adopt comprehensive immigration reform. It did not.

By 2015, prosecutions for unlawful entry and reentry accounted for 49 percent of all federal prosecutions and the federal government had spent at least US$7 billion to lock up unlawful border crossers.

Throughout this most recent surge, the disparate impact of criminalizing unlawful entry and reentry has endured. Today, Latinos, led by Mexicans and Central Americans, make up 92 percent of all immigrants imprisoned for unlawful entry and reentry.

Attorney General Sessions still wants more. Traveling to southern Arizona to announce his plan to even more aggressively prosecute unlawful entry, he signaled that, in the years to come, most prosecutions will happen on the U.S.-Mexico border and will target Mexicans and Central Americans.

When the number of Mexicans as well as Central Americans imprisoned on immigration charges soon booms, there will be nothing unwitting or colorblind about it. Congress first invented the crimes of unlawful entry and reentry with the purpose of criminalizing and imprisoning Mexican immigrants and it has delivered on that intent since 1929. The Sessions plan will bear a similar result and, in the process, discharge the racist design of Blease’s law.

Kelly Lytle Hernandez, Associate Professor, History and African-American Studies, University of California, Los Angeles

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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‘Worst Bill for Women’ Could Get Worse as 13 Men Tackle Trumpcare in Senate

“When women aren’t at the table, they’re on the menu,” says Planned Parenthood president

By Deirdre Fulton and Andrea Germanos, staff writers for Common Dreams. Published 5-5-2017

Photo: Screenshot Fox News

With House Republicans having voted to pass the “astonishingly evil” American Healthcare Act (AHCA), the Senate GOP has assembled a group to craft that chamber’s version of the bill known as Trumpcare—and its made up of all men.

While Trumpcare would take health insurance away from tens of millions of Americans and raises costs for people nationwide, it has become clear that the Republican healthcare bill passed in the U.S. House Thursday is nothing less than what one advocacy group explicitly called “a declaration of war on women.” Continue reading

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Tillerson Says Human Rights Will Not Interfere with ‘America First’ Agenda

‘In the Tillerson/Trump/Exxon world, values are a liability. They stand in the way of making money and projecting power’

By Lauren McCauley, staff writer for Common Dreams. Published 5-4-2017

Rex Tillerson. Photo: premier.gov.ru [CC BY 4.0) , via Wikimedia Commons

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson stirred outrage on Wednesday when he outlined what an “America First” foreign policy will look like under U.S. President Donald Trump, namely that values such as freedom and human rights will not get in the way of “national security and economic prosperity.”

“I think it is really important that all of us understand the difference between policy and values,” Tillerson told employees during a supposed State Department “pep talk” on Wednesday evening that was reportedly transmitted to U.S. diplomatic outposts around the world. “Our values around freedom, human dignity, the way people are treated—those are our values. Those are not our policies.”  Continue reading

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Rights Groups Hold Emergency Protest vs. Looming ‘License to Discriminate’

‘Nothing could be more un-American’ than order protecting those with a religious objection to same-sex marriage, transgender people, and reproductive rights

By Deirdre Fulton, staff writer for Common Dreams. Published 5-3-2017

“By even considering this discriminatory order he has broken his promise to be a president for all Americans,” says Human Rights Campaign. (Photo: @HRC)

Rights groups protested outside the White House on Wednesday ahead of an anticipated executive order from the Trump administration—one they say is nothing more than a “license to discriminate.”

Politico reported Tuesday that President Donald Trump “has invited conservative leaders to the White House on Thursday for what they expect will be the ceremonial signing of a long-awaited—and highly controversial—executive order on religious liberty.” Continue reading

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How Much to Buy a Congressional Vote? New Research Seeks Answer

Looking at Democrats who stopped supporting banking rules, authors conclude: ‘Substantial numbers of legislators sell out the public interest in exchange for political money’

By Lauren McCauley, staff writer for Common Dreams. Published 5-3-2017

Campaign finance reform advocates protest outside the Capitol building in Washington D.C., 2011. (Photo: takomabibelot/cc/flickr

While it is conventional wisdom that money influences politics, researchers released a report Tuesday aiming to answer the longstanding question of exactly how much political spending it takes to sway a Congressional vote.

Fifty Shades of Green (pdf), published by the Roosevelt Institute, analyzes “the role political finance has played in securing the privileged positions of both high finance and big telecom” by examining how lawmakers evolved in supporting efforts to weaken the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill and net neutrality. Continue reading

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Trump’s USDA Rolls Back School Lunch Guidelines Championed by Michelle Obama

The nutrition rules were long abhorred by industry groups who now have a friend in the White House

By Lauren McCauley, staff writer for Common Dreams. Published 5-1-2017

Ag Secretary Sonny Perdue, joined by Sen. Pat Roberts (left) & Tom Marshall, Loudoun County School Board, signs a proclamation.. Photo: USDA

In one of his first orders of business, President Donald Trump’s newly confirmed Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue took steps to weaken school lunch standards championed by former First Lady Michelle Obama.

In an interim final rule, announced by Perdue while he visited an elementary school in the Washington, D.C. suburb of Leesburg, Virginia on Monday, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) is rolling back nutrition rules that were part of Obama’s Let’s Move campaign that was abhorred by food industry groups. Continue reading

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