"The Voice of the New Due Process Army" ————– Musings on Events in U.S. Immigration Court, Immigration Law, Sports, Music, Politics, and Other Random Topics by Retired United States Immigration Judge (Arlington, Virginia) and former Chairman of the Board of Immigration Appeals PAUL WICKHAM SCHMIDT and DR. ALICIA TRICHE, expert brief writer, practical scholar, emeritus Editor-in-Chief of The Green Card (FBA), and 2022 Federal Bar Association Immigration Section Lawyer of the Year. She is a/k/a “Delta Ondine,” a blues-based alt-rock singer-songwriter, who performs regularly in Memphis, where she hosts her own Blues Brunch series, and will soon be recording her first full, professional album. Stay tuned! 🎶 To see our complete professional bios, just click on the link below.
Crab crisis: Md. seafood industry loses 40 percent of workforce in visa lottery
Celia Serna, a guest worker at the J.M. Clayton processing plant in Cambridge, Md., picks crabs. (Lloyd Fox/Baltimore Sun)
By , Scott DanceMay 3 at 6:35 PM
Maryland’s seafood industry is in crisis: Nearly half of the Eastern Shore’s crab houses have no workers to pick the meat sold in restaurants and supermarkets.
They failed to get visas for their mostly Mexican workforce, including many women who have been coming north to Maryland for crab season for as long as two decades. The Trump administration for the first time awarded them this year in a lottery, instead of on a first-come, first-served basis.
“This is going to cause the price of crabmeat to go out of sight,” said Harry Phillips, owner of Russell Hall Seafood on Hooper’s Island. “There’s not going to be hardly any Maryland crabmeat. . . . It looks like it’s a matter of time before they’re going to shut all of us down.”
Visa shortages have been a perennial issue for the crab industry since the last generations of Eastern Shore women who once picked crabmeat aged out of the tedious seasonal work. In the 1980s, crab houses started bringing workers from Mexico through a program that lets them live and work in the United States during the warmer months and then return to Mexico in the winter, when watermen are prohibited from crabbing.
But crab house owners say these are the most dire circumstances they have faced. They hope federal immigration officials issue more visas in response to skyrocketing demand for seasonal foreign workers. But if they have to compete in another lottery, they say, they worry there won’t be enough workers to fill their facilities.
“Companies that have been relying on this system for 25 years suddenly have no workers,” said Bill Sieling, director of the Chesapeake Bay Seafood Industries Association. “It’s totally unfair and irrational, really.”
The crisis is hitting just as crab season begins. Watermen were allowed to start dropping crab pots into the Chesapeake and its tributaries on April 1, but with cold weather through the month, crabs were slow to emerge from hibernation.
As temperatures rise, this year’s crop of crustaceans is now emerging.
It’s unclear whether or how quickly the problem could be resolved or what effect it could have on crab prices this year. Many of the crabs sold in Maryland come from the Carolinas and Louisiana, and some meat comes from Asia and Venezuela. But a premium is placed on local meat, with a state program called True Blue to identify and market Maryland crabs.
Crab processors theorized that a drastically reduced supply from a shortage of workers could send the price of picked meat skyrocketing. But it could lower the price of steamed crabs, flooding the market with many of the female and undersize crabs that would otherwise get picked.
“We need these processing plants to keep the market running smooth,” said Bryan Hall of G.W. Hall and Sons on Hooper’s Island.
G.W. Hall was able to get the 30 visas it applied for, but Hall says he doesn’t feel fortunate.
“I got them, but I don’t feel right having them,” he said. “It’s not right for me to have them and my fellow people who I deal with not to have them. They depend on them just as much as I do, and they’ve got families to feed just as much as I do.”
Maryland’s 20 licensed crab processors typically employ some 500 foreign workers each season, from April to November, through the H-2B visa program, Sieling said. The visas are for seasonal workers in nonagricultural jobs. Pickers are paid by the pound of meat they produce, and the most productive ones make up to $500 a week.
“Nobody wants to do manual labor anymore,” Sieling said. “It’s just a very, very tight labor market right now, particularly in industries that are seasonal.”
But in February, Sieling said, applications for about 200 of those visas were denied. That leaves women used to making an annual pilgrimage to Maryland stuck at home, with limited options to feed their families.
“Our families depend on us, and going to the United States is the best option because here in Mexico it is very difficult to find a job, and apart from that, you face the risk of so much crime,” Anayeni Chavarria Ponce, a crab picker from the Mexican state of Hidalgo, said via text message in Spanish. “Not to mention you can’t reach a salary even to buy the basics.”
Federal labor officials said there was “unprecedented” demand for H-2B visas in January. They received applications for 81,000 foreign workers when only 33,000 visas were available for work from April through September. The visas have become increasingly desirable over the past five years as overall U.S. unemployment falls.
In the second part of a two-step visa application process, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services received applications to bring some 47,000 workers into the United States for that six-month period. Because there were so many requests, officials decided to award visas by lottery.
Congress included a provision in the $1.3 trillion spending plan it approved in March that authorizes federal immigration officials to issue more H-2B visas. The crab industry is expecting a lottery for 15,000 more to be announced sometime this month. But a spokesman for the federal immigration agency said he had no information about whether or how many new visas might be permitted.
Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) requested that the federal government “take immediate action” to raise the visa cap in a recent letter to the secretaries of homeland security and labor.
“Many of these businesses operate in rural parts of our state and have relied on guest workers for decades,” he wrote. “They will be forced to shut their doors or start importing crab meat if this issue is not addressed immediately.”
The industry has been in a position of begging for mercy in the past, often to powerful former senator Barbara A. Mikulski. The senior Democrat intervened in the early 2000s when northern ski resorts and Florida landscapers were scooping up visas before Maryland crab houses had a chance to apply. She championed a change that divided the annual 66,000-visa allowance into two semiannual allotments.
Now, businesses are asking President Trump for help, in the hope that the guest worker program doesn’t get lost in the administration’s efforts to tighten immigration policies.
“This is not an immigration issue,” said Morgan Tolley, general manager of A.E. Phillips & Son on Hooper’s Island. “They come here, abide by rules, they pay their state and federal taxes, their social security taxes, and they send the majority of their money home to support their family. They are a very important part of our local economies.”
Tolley said he supports the president and trusts that he has businesses’ interests at heart, but Tolley is skeptical and disappointed with the administration’s changes to the visa program.
“I voted for Donald Trump, and I’d vote for President Trump again,” he said. “But I think in small rural towns in America, we’re getting the short end of the stick on labor.”
Waterside communities such as Hooper’s Island are left hoping this visa scare, like others, will pass — and not be the final blow to their industry.
“Nobody’s ever been closed down,” Harry Phillips said. “No doubt there’s been some threats and there’s been some times we’ve been a little late getting them. But we’ve always gotten them.”
— Baltimore Sun
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Pretty depressing. Even when confronted with direct evidence of the stupidity of their own votes, and the irrationality of the Trump GOP’s bias and restrictionist positions on legal immigration, these folks are still in denial. Can’t connect the dots. I guess that’s how democracies disappear.
Maybe guys like Jeff Sessions and Tom Cotton will go out and do some ‘pickin for these employers. Who needs foreign workers? They take all these really great jobs that every American wants! Why, I’ll bet almost every kid over at TC Williams High here in Alexandria aspires to be a seasonal crab picker after graduation! And, the truth is that picking crabs is actually skilled work that arrogant, out of touch, White GOP politicos couldn’t actually do very well. Guys like Sessions & Cotton would last 10 minutes max on the line.
“I don’t care who you are, you bite your god damn tongue!”
By Alex Edelman/Getty Images.
The December 2017 passage of the “Tax Cuts and Jobs Act” was thrilling to a great many people, among them Donald Trump, corporate America, and the uber-rich, whom the legislation was structured to disproportionately benefit. But in truth, the day belonged to one man: CrossFit devoteeand Eddie Munster doppelgängerPaul Ryan, who had fantasized about redistributing wealth to those at the top since his boyhood days in Wisconsin, devoted his entire career to making it happen, and promptly announced his retirement when it became clear that his other lifelong dream—dismantling the social safety net and cutting off the lazy takers—wasn’t going to happen ’til at least 2021. So we imagine it must have really frosted Ryan’s cookies when, in the midst of many a late night and early morning on the Hill devoted to dragging this suckeracrossthe finish line, Reverend Patrick Conroy, the House chaplain since 2011, had the stones to include these outrageous lines in one of his prayers:
“God of the universe, we give You thanks for giving us another day. Bless the Members of this assembly as they set upon the work of these hours, of these days. . . . As legislation on taxes continues to be debated this week and next, may all Members be mindful that the institutions and structures of our great Nation guarantee the opportunities that have allowed some to achieve great success, while others continue to struggle. May their efforts these days guarantee that there are not winners and losers under new tax laws, but benefits balanced and shared by all Americans.”
Ryan, one assumes, had never heard such sacrilegious words from a man of the cloth and was probably of a mind to drag Conroy out of the room by his collar and throw him out on the Capitol steps then and there. But because he is a disciplined lawmaker whose Holy Grail was so close he could taste it, he stayed focused and decided to deal with the blasphemy at a later time. And apparently that time came earlier this month, per The Hill:
House Chaplain Patrick Conroy’s sudden resignation has sparked a furor on Capitol Hill, with sources in both parties saying he was pushed out by Speaker Paul Ryan. Conroy’s own resignation announcement stated that it was done at Ryan’s request.
“As you have requested, I hereby offer my resignation as the 60th Chaplain of the United States House of Representatives,” the April 15 letter to Ryan, obtained by The Hill, states.
While one source claimed that “some of the more conservative evangelical Republicans didn’t like that the Father had invited a Muslim person to give the opening prayer,” others offered a more compelling reason: Ryan “took issue with a prayer on the House floor that could have been perceived as being critical of the G.O.P. tax cut bill.” According to a Democratic aide, Conroy’s ouster was “largely driven by [the] speech on the tax bill that the speaker didn’t like.” The New York Times notes that a week after his sermon, a staffer from Ryan’s office told Conroy “We are upset with this prayer; you are getting too political,” and that the next time he saw the Reverend in person, Ryan told him “Padre, you just got to stay out of politics.” AshLee Strong, a spokesperson for the speaker, declined to explain the personnel decision, noting only Minority Leader Nancy Pelosiand her office “were fully read in and did not object.”
Now, could Ryan have forced the guy to resign for completely legitimate reasons? Sure! But it also seems entirely plausible that this is exactly the sort of thing that would constitute a bridge too far in his book. Stand up for neo-Nazis? Water off a duck’s back. But suggest that a $1.5 trillion tax cut should help all Americans and not just the already-rich? That’s obviously a (potentially!) fireable offense right there. And don’t bother saying sorry after the fact to Ryan, Reverend. Say sorry to God. As a major corporate shareholder and beneficiary of the legislation, you’re in the doghouse with him, too.
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Read the rest of the “Levin Report” at the link!
Obviously, it takes a very special type of pastor to provide spiritual counseling to a bunch of guys who have devoted their entire careers to taking from the underprivileged and giving to the over-privileged. It also takes a very special kind of theological scholarship, since almost all of Christian theology suggests that exactly the opposite is required and that greed, promoting inequality, and abusing the less fortunate are actually sins that could have serious repercussions in eternal life.
These dudes have to face the very real chance that they will pass into an another world where those whom they have dispossessed, mistreated, mocked, dumped on, and scorned in life will be the “honored ones” and the GOP lifetime grifters will be at their mercy. The day of reckoning for today’s GOP and their evangelical backers could get ugly — they almost have to hope that there is no God, or if there is, that She is not a “Just God” or they will have “Hell to Pay” so to speak! No wonder they are in need of serious spiritual help!
Ryan apparently had to act quickly to scotch the blasphemous rumors floating around the Hill: JESUS WASN’T REALLY A RICH WASP. HE WASN’T EVEN A CHRISTIAN, AND HE DIDN’T BELONG TO ANY CHURCH AT ALL. HE SUPPOSEDLY TURNED FISH INTO LOAVES OF BREAD AND DIDN’T EVEN DENY BREAD (let alone cake) TO THE LGBTQ GUYS IN THE CROWD!
Some misguided souls are even claiming that ”our very own” Jesus Christ actually was an indigent swarthy Palestinian disgruntled Jew who led a ragtag band of vagrants — some of whom had quit gainful employment and abandoned their families — around Palestine undermining legal authority, failing to respect THE LAW, and spreading seditious lies like “The meek shall inherit the earth,” “Blessed are the poor,” and “Fat Cats riding camels will never make it through the eye of a needle or pass through the gates of Heaven!” They were “takers” — non-self-supporting, non-contributors to the community, and lived on handouts and public charity!
Some apparently have the audacity to claim that Jesus spoke of a “spiritual kingdom” unrelated to material possessions and tax breaks where rich White Guys would be judged equally with everyone else. Shucks, what’s the purpose of being rich & White if it won’t even buy you preferential treatment? Heck, even a poor guy who wasn’t a lobbyist would have direct access to Mick Mulvaney under that scenario!
This obviously false Prophet reputedly was so poor that he couldn’t afford a lawyer for his trial, not even Rudy Guiliani. He tried to represent himself, and the result was pretty ugly.
False news, false news, false news! Gotta find a true minister who preaches the gospel according to Fox & Friends!
Here are Tal’s pictures. For whatever technical reason, you’ll have to go to the original article at the link to get the captions that go with them!
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Wow! As those of you who read “Courtside” on a regular basis know, I’m a HUGE FAN of Tal’s timely, incisive, concise, and highly accessible reporting. I feature it on a regular basis. I’ve also seen her do a great job on TV and video. But, until now, I didn’t know about her skills as a photojournalist. Tal can do it all!
Also, as my colleague Judge and Super-Blogger Jeffrey Chase pointed out in one of his recent comments on this blog, pictures play an essential role in understanding the immigration saga in America.
Been there, done that in my career. Takes me back to the long past days of riding three wheelers, helicopters, Patrol Cars, looking through infrared night scopes, and even accompanying foot patrol during my days in the “Legacy INS General Counsel’s Office.” (Most often on the border south of San Diego.) We actually took the Trial Attorneys and some of the Assistant U.S. Attorneys prosecuting our cases with us to show them what it was really like at the “ground level.”
Actually doesn’t look all that much different decades later. What is painfully clear is that walls, fences, helicopters, detectors, unrealistically harsh and restrictive laws, and more detention centers (the “New American Gulag”) will never, ever “seal” our borders as some immigration hard-liners insist is possible.
At best, we can control, channel, and regulate the flow of migrants, but not halt it entirely. Human migration was taking place long before the U.S. became a nation, and I daresay that it will continue as long as there are humans left on earth. To think that walls, troops, concentration camps, harsh laws, and prisons are going to halt it completely is a mixture of arrogance and ignorance.
So, rather than pouring more money down the drain on the same “strategies” that have been failing for decades, a “smart” border control policy would involve:
More realistic and generous interpretations of our refugee and asylum laws that should include most of those fleeing for their lives from the Northern Triangle;
A much larger and more “market based” legal immigration system for permanent and temporary migrants that would meet the legitimate needs of U.S. employers and our economy while making it attractive for most prospective workers and employers to use the legal visa system rather than the “black market” of undocumented entry;
A larger and more robust refugee processing program for Northern Triangle refugees so most would be screened and documented outside the U.S.;
Cooperation with the UNHCR and other stable countries in the Western Hemisphere to distribute the flow of long-term and temporary refugees in an equitable manner that will help both the refugees and the receiving countries;
Working with and investing in Mexico and Northern Triangle countries to address and correct the conditions that create migration flows to the Southern Border.
Providing lawyers for asylum applicants who present themselves at the Southern Border so that their claims for protection (which actually go beyond asylum and include protection under the Convention Against Torture) can be fairly, correctly, and efficiently determined in an orderly manner in accordance with Due Process.
No, it’s unlikely to happen in my lifetime. But, I hope that future generations, including the members of the “New Due Process Army,” will find themselves in a position to abandon past mistakes, and develop the smart, wise, generous, humane, realistic, and effective immigration and refugee policies that we need to keep our “nation of immigrants” viable and vitalized for centuries to come. Until then, we’re probably going to have to watch folks repeat variations of the same painful mistakes over and over.
Why did Paul Ryan choose not to run for re-election? What will be the consequences? Your guess is as good as mine — literally. I can speculate based on what I read in the papers, but so can you.
On the other hand, I do have some insight into how Ryan — who has always been an obvious con man, to anyone willing to see — came to become speaker of the House. And that’s a story that reflects badly not just on Ryan himself, not just on his party, but also on self-proclaimed centrists and the news media, who boosted his career through their malfeasance. Furthermore, the forces that brought Ryan to a position of power are the same forces that have brought America to the edge of a constitutional crisis.
About Ryan: Incredibly, I’m seeing some news reports about his exit that portray him as a serious policy wonk and fiscal hawk who, sadly, found himself unable to fulfill his mission in the Trump era. Unbelievable.
Look, the single animating principle of everything Ryan did and proposed was to comfort the comfortable while afflicting the afflicted. Can anyone name a single instance in which his supposed concern about the deficit made him willing to impose any burden on the wealthy, in which his supposed compassion made him willing to improve the lives of the poor? Remember, he voted against the Simpson-Bowles debt commission proposal not because of its real flaws, but because it would raise taxes and fail to repeal Obamacare.
And his “deficit reduction” proposals were always frauds. The revenue loss from tax cuts always exceeded any explicit spending cuts, so the pretense of fiscal responsibility came entirely from “magic asterisks”: extra revenue from closing unspecified loopholes, reduced spending from cutting unspecified programs. I called him a flimflam man back in 2010, and nothing he has done since has called that judgment into question.
So how did such an obvious con artist get a reputation for seriousness and fiscal probity? Basically, he was the beneficiary of ideological affirmative action.
Even now, in this age of Trump, there are a substantial number of opinion leaders — especially, but not only, in the news media — whose careers, whose professional brands, rest on the notion that they stand above the political fray. For such people, asserting that both sides have a point, that there are serious, honest people on both left and right, practically defines their identity.
Yet the reality of 21st-century U.S. politics is one of asymmetric polarization in many dimensions. One of these dimensions is intellectual: While there are some serious, honest conservative thinkers, they have no influence on the modern Republican Party. What’s a centrist to do?
The answer, all too often, has involved what we might call motivated gullibility. Centrists who couldn’t find real examples of serious, honest conservatives lavished praise on politicians who played that role on TV. Paul Ryan wasn’t actually very good at faking it; true fiscal experts ridiculed his “mystery meat” budgets. But never mind: The narrative required that the character Ryan played exist, so everyone pretended that he was the genuine article.
Which brings us to the role of the congressional G.O.P. and Ryan in particular in the Trump era.
Some commentators seem surprised at the way men who talked nonstop about fiscal probity under Barack Obama cheerfully supported tax cuts that will explode the deficit under Trump. They also seem shocked at the apparent indifference of Ryan and his colleagues to Trump’s corruption and contempt for the rule of law. What happened to their principles?
The answer, of course, is that the principles they claimed to have never had anything to do with their actual goals. In particular, Republicans haven’t abandoned their concerns about budget deficits, because they never cared about deficits; they only faked concern as an excuse to cut social programs.
And if you ask why Ryan never took a stand against Trumpian corruption, why he never showed any concern about Trump’s authoritarian tendencies, what ever made you think he would take such a stand? Again, if you look at Ryan’s actions, not the character he played to gullible audiences, he has never shown himself willing to sacrifice anything he wants — not one dime — on behalf of his professed principles. Why on earth would you expect him to stick his neck out to defend the rule of law?
So now Ryan is leaving. Good riddance. But hold the celebrations: If he was no better than the rest of his party, he was also no worse. It’s possible that his successor as speaker will show more backbone than he has — but only if that successor is, well, a Democrat.
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Yup. I’ve said before that Paul Ryan is a 24 carat fraud. He delivered on totally unnecessary tax cuts for the Koch Brothers and other “fat cats” that hurt the rest of America and that will cost us well into the future. He failed on Dreamer relief which should and could have been a “no brainer.” That tells you all you really need to know about this disingenuous creep!
Here’s the latest “Levin Report” from Vanity Fair:
Since the day he developed what would become a lifelong, unremitting, probably-actually-really-awkward-for-his-wife crush on Ayn Rand, House Speaker Paul Ryan has dreamed about two things: cutting taxes on the wealthy and destroying the social safety net. (Three things if you count convincing his wife to style her hair in a side-swept bob, which he’s been told time after time is never gonna happen, so stop asking.) So devoted was he to the hallowed principle of redistributing wealth to the people at the top that, for the past year and a half, he’s put up with just about everything that’s come out of the White House, be it the firing of the F.B.I. director, a refusal to condemn white supremacists, an alleged affair with a porn star, hush money, the attacking of his colleagues via Twitter, and the strong suggestion that special counsel Robert Mueller may be next to get the ax. Because in Donald Trump, Wisconsin’s first son saw the potential for a payoff that outweighed having to align himself with a born swindler who’s made a mockery of the White House and sought to destroy America’s standing in the world: a historic transfer of wealth thinly disguised as tax “reform.” With the bill once known as the “Cut Cut Cut Act” safely signed into law—a moment Ryan cited as one of the proudest of his career—the speaker announced to rank-and-file Republicans on Wednesday that he would retire at the end of the year, ducking out at a crucial crossroads for his party.
So what gives? Aside from facing political headwinds at home, and a pre-emptive battle for his job on the Hill, Ryan likely looked into the future and saw little hope of carrying out the rest of his agenda, even under a Republican president. For a brief moment after the tax legislation was passed, Ryan was lustily eyeing the opportunity to embark on welfare “reform,” positioning it, basically seconds after ushering in a historic giveaway to corporate America and the ultra-wealthy, as the reason the country’s finances were in total disarray. But sadly for Ryan, Mitch McConnell almost immediately put the kibosh on those plans, realizing how politically unfeasible they were. And so, as New York’s Ed Kilgore put it, Ryan likely “look[ed] ahead to a straitened G.O.P. margin in the House . . . and the prospect of having to wait until 2021 at the earliest to resume the fight against the welfare state [and] decided to go home to Wisconsin and regroup.”
By bowing out, Ryan will also be well clear of Washington by the time his tax bill really starts to bear fruit. We speak, of course, of the report released by the Congressional Budget Office just two days before Ryan announced he was throwing in the towel. Among other things, the report estimates that, thanks in large part to December’s tax bill, the U.S. deficit will top $1 trillion annually starting in 2020, with the national debt soaring past $33 trillion by 2028, a situation that increases the likelihood of a fiscal crisis. Which, come to think of it, is something Ryan used to care about when tax cuts weren’t so close he could taste ’em. (Under Barack Obama, Ryan absolutely railed against deficits, turning them into the right’s monster in the closet, and winning a hilariously named “Fiscy” award in 2011 for “being the first [congressman] in several years to step forward with a specific scorable budget plan that would actually solve the nation’s long-term structural deficits.”)
Five years later, however, he can take credit for setting the U.S. on a path to run trillion-dollar deficits from now to eternity, beginning in 2020. Because, as his supply-side brother from another mother Larry Kudlow explained Monday night, deficits are fine when they’re for tax cuts or the type of spending that will line the private sector’s pockets, but for things like Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security? Well, then they’re a total scourge on society that must be stopped at all costs. Luckily, at roughly half the age at which he wants Americans to work until they can retire, Ryan has plenty of years left to collect checks from the Brothers Koch and other corporate donors, who coincidentally just came into a large amount of money.
The Trump organization finds a new way to lower its tax bill
You would think, what with the historic tax law passed in December that was particularly kind to real-estate enterprises like the Trump Organization, that the president’s family business would be content to pay whatever taxes the I.R.S. decides it owes. But, given who we’re dealing with here, you would of course think wrong:
Across the country, the Trump Organization is suing local governments, claiming it owes much less in property taxes than government assessors say because its properties are worth much less than they’ve been valued at. In just one example, the company has asserted that its gleaming waterfront skyscraper in Chicago is worth less than than its assessed value, in part because its retail space is failing and worth less than nothing.
No president in modern times has owned a business involved in legal battles with local governments. “The idea that the president would have these interests and then those companies would sue localities is really a dangerous precedent,” says Larry Noble, of the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center. The dynamic between local and federal governments is impossible to ignore in these cases, says Noble. Municipalities “rely on resources from the federal government and the federal government can make your life easier or much more difficult.” The concern arises because the president did not fully separate from his businesses, he says.
For its part, the Trump Organization has naturally claimed that there’s nothing to see here and that, in fact, anyone suggesting otherwise should be ashamed of him or herself. In a statement, a spokesperson for the firm told ProPublica: “Like any other business or property owner when property taxes become inflated it is not uncommon to challenge the process to ensure fair treatment. This is a routine practice and any suggestion otherwise is simply ridiculous.”
The gun industry can’t believe Bank of America is being so rude
As part of corporate America’s decision, in the wake of the Parkland massacre, to step back and assess whether or not associating with mass murder is a good look, Bank of America has decided to stop lending money to companies that produce assault-style weapons for non-military purposes. And the new policy is not sitting very well with those companies.
The National Shooting Sports Foundation, a firearms industry lobby, puts the economic impact of the gun and ammunition industry at $51.1 billion nationwide in 2017. That organization criticized the bank’s move on Tuesday, saying it’s wrong to deem semiautomatic rifles long available to civilians to be military-style weapons.
“We as an industry would welcome the opportunity to sit down with Bank of America executives and explain our industry’s perspective to discuss what really would work to keep firearms out of the hands of those who should not have them,” Michael Bazinet, a spokesman for the N.S.S.F., told Bloomberg. “We should be part of the discussion.” (Bazinet did not get into specifics, re: what would “really” work to keep guns out of the hands of people who shouldn’t have them, but presumably it falls under the “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” umbrella.)
By April 17, the hedge-fund manager must make federal and state tax payments of about $1 billion, on top of roughly $500 million in taxes he paid late last year, said people close to the firm. That sum is so big it dwarfs the maximum amount the Internal Revenue Service will allow any single taxpayer to pay with a single check. (That’s $99,999,999, in case you’re wondering.)
Mr. Paulson, 62, isn’t exactly struggling to pay the $1.5 billion bill. But he’s also not as flush as the heady days of 2008. In fact, after a string of poor results, a bad bet on pharmaceutical stocks and client defections, Mr. Paulson has been selling various investments to cover the bill. He’s also in the process of cutting costs and shrinking his firm, including laying off senior traders.
“It is safe to say it is one of the largest tax bills on earned income in history,” Henry Bregstein, co–global head of the financial-services group at the law firm Katten Muchin Rosenman LLP, toldThe Wall Street Journal’s Greg Zuckerman.
And speaking of taxes . . .
Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen, whose house, hotel room, and office were raided by the F.B.I. on Monday, reportedly owes $54,000 in taxi-medallion back taxes, which sounds about right.
Scott Pruitt contains multitudes
Time was, we thought E.P.A. administrator was simply all about the cause of destroying the Earth for the benefit of his buddies in the private sector. But according to a new report from The New York Times, he’s actually also a complete and total megalomaniac:
When Scott Pruitt wanted to refashion the Environmental Protection Agency’s “challenge coin”—a type of souvenir medallion with military origins that has become a status symbol among civilians—he proposed an unusual design: Make it bigger, and delete the E.P.A. logo.
Mr. Pruitt instead wanted the coin to feature some combination of symbols more reflective of himself and the Trump administration. Among the possibilities: a buffalo, to evoke Mr. Pruitt’s native Oklahoma, and a Bible verse to reflect his faith. Other ideas included using the Great Seal of the United States—a design similar to the presidential seal—and putting Mr. Pruitt’s name around the rim in large letters, according to Ronald Slotkin, a career E.P.A. employee who retired this year, and two people familiar with the proposals who asked to remain anonymous because they said they feared retribution.
“These coins represent the agency,” Slotkin, a former director of the E.P.A.’s multimedia office, told the Times. “But Pruitt wanted his coin to be bigger than everyone else’s and he wanted it in a way that represented him.”
Elsewhere!
Dow closes more than 200 points lower after Trump taunts Russia (CNBC)
China Talks Stalled Over Trump’s Demands on High-Tech Industries, Source Says (Bloomberg)
Larry Kudlow: Tariffs might come before negotiations with China (CNBC)
Elon Musk is stressed, says he’s sleeping on Tesla factory floor and has no time to go home and shower (CNBC)
It Turns Out $25 Million Won’t Buy Schwarzman His Name on a High School (Bloomberg)
Wynn’s Boston Casino Is Rising on Land Tied to a Mobster (Bloomberg)
Zuckerberg tangles with Congress on control of Facebook data (Reuters)
Federal Reserve policymakers all saw strengthening economy, inflation (Reuters)
Escaped tortoise traveled a five-minute walk in three days (UPI)
Ryan and his “Reverse Robin Hood Philosophy” has always been among the “worst of the worst” frauds in American politics. Like many others, he has benefitted from the “Age of Trump.”
By taking idiocy, ignorance, and inhumanity to new levels, Trump has eclipsed less overtly outrageous yet truly “bad guys” like Ryan and to some degree allowed them to escape complete accountability for their grotesque anti-Americanism and crimes against average Americans. Given the ugliness of today’s GOP, his replacement easily could be even worse. But, still, good riddance!
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—In a fit of pique, David and Charles Koch have unceremoniously listed House Speaker Paul Ryan for sale on the auction site eBay.
The Kochs, who reportedly had purchased Ryan for a sum estimated in the tens of millions, now seem likely to lose their entire investment.
According to Ryan’s listing on the auction site, the Kochs set a five-hundred-dollar asking price for the used congressman, a figure that, in light of the tepid bidding for him, seems optimistic.
“Granted, owning Paul Ryan doesn’t have the benefits that it’s had for David and Charles for all of these years, but the status of owning a former Speaker of the House has to be worth something,” one Koch associate said. “Certainly more than the current high bid of seventeen dollars.”
The eBay listing suggested several possible uses for the former House Speaker, including as a Halloween ornament or garden gnome.
MEXICO CITY — Two out of three people making their way through Mexico as part of a “caravan” that drew President Donald J. Trump’s ire this week have fled Honduras — part of a recent trend that has seen growing numbers of people escape the country’s exorbitant homicide rates, crippling corruption, increasing political persecution, and a floundering economy.
That is a sharp, recent rise — the number of Hondurans apprehended by US Customs and Border Control increased by 66% from Dec. 2017 to March, according to the Washington Office on Latin America, a human rights group. In February, Mexican authorities detained and deported 4,128 Hondurans, up from 2,780 the previous month. It was the highest number since November 2016.
This exodus comes at a time of extraordinary tensions even for Honduras, a country still reeling from the effects of a coup d’état in 2009. A highly contested presidential election in November drew thousands of demonstrators to the streets, where at least 22 protesters and bystanders were killed, most of them by security forces.
“Honduras is a pressure cooker in every single aspect,” said Bertha Oliva, director of the Committee for Families of the Disappeared and Detainees in Honduras. “We are seeing an unprecedented violation of human rights.”
Repression by the state has continued even months after the election, analysts say. According to Annie Bird, director of the Guatemala Human Rights Commission, government forces have been intimidating protest leaders — people have reported receiving threatening phone calls and being followed by unmarked cars.
Some in the caravan brought their politics with them, shouting slogans against Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, who narrowly won a second term last year and is often referred to by his initials, JOH. He has received support from former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, former President Barack Obama, and Trump, but Hernández’s popularity at home is suffering: Many in the caravan yelled “Out with JOH!” as they set off.
The large number of Hondurans caught Trump’s attention.
“The big Caravan of People from Honduras, now coming across Mexico and heading to our “Weak Laws” Border, had better be stopped before it gets there,” Trump tweeted on Tuesday. In subsequent tweets, Trump renewed calls for his border wall and tougher immigration laws, warning about a “massive inflow of drugs and people” across the border.
Victoria Razo / AFP / Getty Images
A man holds a Honduran national flag as Central Americans -taking part in a caravan called “Migrant Viacrucis”- rest in Matias Romero, Oaxaca state, Mexico on April 2, 2018.
Conditions in Honduras were dire even before the election, with 43.6 murders per 100,000 inhabitants, 55% of the workforce underemployed, extortions to small businesses reportedly on the rise, and endemic corruption.
The Central American nation has one of the highest homicide rates in the world and was called the most dangerous country for environmental activists last year. The government’s efforts to clean up the police force were dealt a severe blow earlier this year, after the Associated Press revealed that the head of the national police had helped a cartel leader deliver nearly a ton of cocaine in 2013. And corruption is widespread: the former first lady was arrested in connection to a graft case in February.
Even the anti-corruption mission backed by the Organization of American States, known for its Spanish initials as Maccih, is languishing without a director after Juan Jiménez Mayor resigned in February, citing a lack of support by the head of the OAS.
In the meantime, Hernández has quietly cemented his power, taking control of most of the country’s institutions, including the Supreme Court, which in 2015 struck down a law forbidding presidents from seeking a second term. His administration continues to receive a portion of the $644 million appropriated by the US Congress to assist Central American governments.
Orlando Sierra / AFP / Getty Images
Left, thousands of supporters of the presidential candidate Salvador Nasralla, hold a demonstration in Tegucigalpa on Dec. 3, 2017. Right, riot police officers and army soldiers, use tear gas and a water cannon to disperse supporters of opposition candidate Salvador Nasralla during protests in Tegucigalpa, on Dec. 18, 2017.
Hondurans went to the polls on November 26 in a tense and highly polarized environment. Already distrustful, many voters were incensed after the Honduran electoral commission mysteriously stopped releasing results for 36 hours just as the opposition candidate, Salvador Nasralla, took a 5 point lead over Hernández. When it resumed, Hernández quickly overtook Nasralla.
Violent protests ensued, with people defying a 10-day curfew declared by the government, which deployed the military and police to the streets. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights in Honduras, at least 23 people were killed and at least 60 were injured during the following weeks.
Two days after the election, the State Department certified that the Honduran government had been combating corruption and supporting human rights, a requirement for the US to continue sending it millions of dollars worth of aid.
But a report by the United Nations’ office said that the use of live bullets by security forces “raise serious concerns about the use of excessive lethal force and may amount to extra-judicial killings.”
“The level of desperation has risen since the election,” said Dana Frank, professor of history at the University of California, Santa Cruz. “All signs indicate that the situation is only going to worsen politically, economically, on the human rights front.”
It is unclear whether the post-electoral crisis will push more Hondurans than usual to emigrate this spring, when migrants usually undertake the trek. But despite a clampdown on immigration, Honduran migrants’ are increasingly looking to settle in Mexico, rather than continue on to the US. Last year, 4,272 Hondurans requested asylum in Mexico, up from 1,560 in 2015.
In July, about 86,000 Hondurans living in the US could be forced to leave if their Temporary Protected Status is not renewed. (In January, the Trump administration announced it was ending the program for 200,000 Salvadorans in the country.)
Honduras would struggle to absorb the return of thousands of people and the economy would suffer from the decrease in remittances likely to follow — possibly pushing another wave of Honduras toward the US.
“I call it a self-inflicted wound,” said Eric Olson, deputy director of the Latin America program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington.
“You could create further instability, which leads to further migration.” ■
We can diminish ourselves as a nation, but that won’t stop human migration.
The number of migrants trying to illegally cross into the US at the Mexico border spiked dramatically in March, according to numbers released Wednesday as President Donald Trump announced he was sending National Guard troops to the southern border.
It will take a few months to determine if the spike turns into a full-blown surge similar to a migrant crisis that occurred in 2014, but the increase marked a turn for the administration, which a year ago was touting historically low numbers as the “Trump effect” and is now using the statistics as the reason it needs aggressive new immigration enforcement authorities.
The number of people either caught trying to cross the southern border or rejected for admission increased 37% from February into March, a sudden rise in figures that had been holding relatively steady. The increase was driven especially by a jump in the number of people apprehended trying to cross illegally. The number of families and unaccompanied children trying to come into the US increased at a higher rate than the general population.
Last month’s numbers were three times those of March 2017, when crossings were at their lowest in two decades of records.
That year also defied the usual trend in March, when crossings historically increase as weather improves. In 2013 and 2014, a summer surge of migrants, and especially child migrants, caused a crisis of overcrowding at detention centers and humanitarian concerns. The March uptick lagged those years by several thousand, and numbers in April and May will be key to determining whether the increase marks a trend or a one-off development.
A senior administration official had told reporters on a call Wednesday announcing Trump’s move to send National Guard troops to the border that the numbers were up substantially, using them as a data point in what the President called a “crisis” at the southern border in his memo authorizing troops to be deployed. The monthly numbers were released that evening, slightly ahead of schedule.
Standing at the White House podium Wednesday afternoon, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen noted the historic drop in border crossings that happened in the first few months when Trump took office, calling it the “Trump effect” and touting the work the administration had done on immigration since.
But the numbers by fall had caught up with levels in the last several years under the Obama administration, and Nielsen cited the same statistics Wednesday that the department once cited as proof of its success as the reason more steps were necessary.
“When the President took office, the traffickers, smugglers, TCOs and the illegal aliens that serve as their currency paused to see what our border enforcement efforts would look like and if we could follow through on the deportation and removal,” Nielsen said. “While we have been apprehending aliens at the border with historic efficiency, these illicit smuggling groups saw that our ability to actually remove those who come here illegally did not keep pace. They saw that there were loopholes they could exploit.”
Illegal migration is driven by a number of elements, including what are known as push and pull factors. The administration has been aggressively targeting what it says are pull factors: perceptions that they argue attract immigrants to the US because they believe they will be able to stay. It has discussed the push factors less often, however: the violent and impoverished conditions in Central America that send migrants north out of desperation.
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Get the full story from the ever-amazing Tal at the above link.
Having stupidly turned down the obvious “Dreamers for Wall” deal that almost anyone else could and would have cut, Trump is desperate to show his base at least some “progress” (or more accurately “regress’) on the border.
The facts are:1) there’s no border crisis; 2) the only immigration crisis is that Trump, Sessions and the GOP restrictionists keep perpetuating failed immigration policies; 3) we’re effectively at full employment; 4) the current so-called “undocumented” population is overwhelmingly law-abiding; 5) immigration, both legal and undocumented, has been an essential driving force behold America’s continuing economic success; 6) the border is as well controlled as it ever has been or likely ever will be; 7) DHS Enforcement is so grossly overstaffed and the so-called “criminal alien” population is so small that ICE and CBP agents have little legitimate law enforcement work to do and consequently have turned to “busting” gardeners, maids, roofers, nannies, students, kids, and a wide range of other counterproductive activities to justify their continued existence.
We don’t need more immigration enforcement. What we do need is smarter immigration enforcement. But with biased xenophobes like Trump, Sessions, Miller, Nielsen, and Homan running the show we’re not going to get that without some much-needed “regime change.”
Wake up America! Harm to the most vulnerable among us is harm to all! We can diminish ourselves as a nation, but that won’t stop human migration!
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is known as one of the greatest basketball players in history. During his 20-year professional career with the Milwaukee Bucks and Los Angeles Lakers, he appeared in 19 All-Star Games, won six championships and collected six MVP awards. In retirement, he has become a prominent cultural commentator and writer, a leading voice on the intersection between sports and politics. Recently, he published a memoir about his collegiate career at UCLA, Coach Wooden and Me: Our 50-Year Friendship On and Off the Court.
Fifty years ago he was the most dominant college basketball player America had ever seen. Between 1967 and 1969, he led UCLA to three consecutive national titles and an 88-2 record. Yet, his legacy transcends the game; in the age of Black Power, he redefined the political role of black college athletes. In 1968, when black collegians debated boycotting the Olympics, Lew Alcindor, as he was then still known, emerged as the most prominent face in the revolt on campus.
Why did Alcindor refuse to play in the Olympics? To answer that question we have to return to Harlem, New York, in July 1964, the first of many long, hot summers.
HARLEM, 1964
Basketball player Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (center), then Lew Alcindor, speaks at a news conference at the Power Memorial High School gymnasium in New York City.
DON HOGAN CHARLES/NEW YORK TIMES CO./GETTY IMAGES
The death of James Powell, a 15-year-old black youth from the Bronx, outraged Alcindor. On a sweltering July day in 1964, outside an apartment building on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, Lt. Thomas Gilligan, a white off-duty cop, shot and killed James, piercing the ninth-grader’s chest with a bullet from a .38 revolver. Conflicting accounts grayed a story that many saw in black and white. Gilligan, a 37-year-old war veteran, claimed that James charged at him with a knife, but bystanders insisted that James was unarmed.
Two nights later, on July 18, in the heart of Harlem, a peaceful rally organized by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) turned into a march against police brutality. Demanding justice for Powell, hundreds of demonstrators surrounded the 123rd Street precinct, some threatening to tear the building apart “brick by brick.” Incensed by decades of racial profiling and violent policing, the angry crowd began hurling rocks and bottles at officers. Suddenly, a scuffle broke out and the cops rushed the protesters, cracking their nightsticks against a swarm of black bodies. In a matter of minutes, violence spread through Harlem like a grease fire in a packed tenement kitchen.
That same night, Alcindor, an extremely tall, rail-thin 17-year-old, emerged from the 125th Street subway station, planning to investigate the CORE rally. Climbing up the steps toward the street, he could smell smoke coming from burning buildings. Angry young black men took to the streets and tossed bricks and Molotov cocktails through store windows. Looters grabbed radios, jewelry, food and guns. The sound of gunshots rang like firecrackers. Trembling with fear, Alcindor worried that his size and skin color made him an easy target for an angry cop with an itchy trigger finger. Sprinting home, all he could think about was that at any moment a stray bullet could strike him down.
“Right then and there, I knew who I was, who I had to be. I was going to be black rage personified, Black Power in the flesh.”
For six days, Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant burned. The “Harlem race riots” resulted in 465 arrests, hundreds of injuries and one death. When the smoke cleared, Martin Luther King Jr. visited New York and encouraged black residents to demonstrate peacefully. But Alcindor, like many black youths, had grown impatient with King’s pleas for nonviolence and began questioning the direction of the civil rights movement. That summer, writing for the Harlem Youth Action Project newspaper, he interviewed black citizens who were tired of segregated schools, dilapidated housing, employment discrimination and wanton police violence.
The Harlem uprising fueled his anger toward white America and convinced him more than ever that he had to turn his rage into action. “Right then and there, I knew who I was, who I had to be,” he said a few years later. “I was going to be black rage personified, Black Power in the flesh.” Silence was no longer an option. In the future, he vowed, he would speak his mind.
. . . .
A few days after UCLA beat Dayton for the national title, the NCAA’s National Basketball Committee banned the dunk. The committee argued that too many players got injured stuffing the ball through the hoop or trying to block a player attacking the basket. Coaches were concerned, too, about players breaking backboards and bending rims. Curiously, the committee also claimed, “There is no defense against the dunk, which upsets the balance between offense and defense.” But the truth was that Alcindor threatened the sport’s competitive balance. He upset the balance between offense and defense.
Immediately, critics deemed the dunk ban the “Alcindor rule.” In a time of white backlash against black advancement, the UCLA star interpreted the rule through the lens of race. He could not help but feel like the lily-white committee had targeted him. “To me the new ‘no-dunk’ rule smacks a little of discrimination,” he told the Chicago Defender. “When you look at it … most of the people who dunk are black athletes.
. . . .
Not even the dunk ban could stop Alcindor from dominating the game. In fact, the new restriction made him even better. It forced him to expand his offensive arsenal and develop a devastating signature move: the “skyhook.”
He made it look so easy. With the cool confidence of Miles Davis, Alcindor transformed his game. The skyhook became an innovative expression of individuality and empowerment, a reflection of his intelligence and creativity, an active mind that could see the ball falling through the net like a raindrop the moment the leather sphere touched his fingertips. Over and over again, he pivoted toward the basket, extended his arm toward the sky and gracefully flipped the ball over the outstretched arms of any player who dared to guard him. “Of all the weapons in sports,” Sports Illustrated’s Gary Smith wrote of his skyhook, “none has ever been more dependable or unstoppable, less vulnerable to time, than that little stride, turn, hop and flick from far above his head.”
CLEVELAND, 1967
On June 4, 1967, at 105-15 Euclid Ave. in Cleveland, a collection of some of the top black athletes in the country met with — and eventually held a news conference in support of — world heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali (front row, second from left), about Ali’s refusal to be drafted into the U.S. Army in 1967. News conference shows (front row) Bill Russell, Boston Celtics; Ali; Jim Brown and Lew Alcindor. Back row (left to right): Carl Stokes, Democratic state representative; Walter Beach, Cleveland Browns; Bobby Mitchell, Washington Redskins; Sid Williams, Cleveland Browns; Curtis McClinton, Kansas City Chiefs; Willie Davis, Green Bay Packers; Jim Shorter, former Brown; and John Wooten, Cleveland Browns.
BETTMAN/GETTY IMAGES
Alcindor refused to let the white world define him as a basketball player and as a man. He no longer considered himself a “Negro.” He was black and proud. As he became more politically self-aware, he identified with the most successful, outspoken black professional athletes in America: Muhammad Ali, Bill Russell and Jim Brown. He admired their political activism and their courage to confront white supremacy.
. . . .
Alcindor suddenly found himself at the center of a national controversy. Critics called him a disgrace, unpatriotic and much worse. If he did not play for the U.S. Olympic team, then UCLA should revoke his scholarship, they charged. Many white Americans opposed the boycott because they believed that sports were meritocratic and immune to racism. But their objections also revealed discomfort with assertive black athletes who challenged the power structure of American sports, a plantation culture that valued black bodies more than black minds. New York Times columnist Arthur Daley couldn’t imagine Alcindor thinking for himself and suggested that Edwards was exploiting the UCLA star’s fame for personal gain. “I think that charge is sheer idiocy,” Edwards told the San Jose Mercury News. “How can you manipulate anybody like Lew Alcindor?”
But Alcindor was his own man, and his revolt emanated from the deep history of African-American activism and the burgeoning Black Power movement on campus. What the sports establishment failed to recognize was that his experience in Harlem, his identification with Malcolm X and his connection to Ali had transformed the way he viewed protest, patriotism and American sports. How could he stay silent while police brutality, poverty and prejudice afflicted the black community? How could anyone expect him to represent the United States when the moment he confronted the nation’s racism bigots deluged him with hate mail and death threats? How could they expect him to love America when America didn’t love him back?
NEW YORK, 1968
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, then Lew Alcindor, sits on the bench at the UCLA-Holy Cross game at Madison Square Garden in New York City in 1968.
BARTON SILVERMAN/NEW YORK TIMES CO./GETTY IMAGES
Alcindor had made up his mind. He wouldn’t play for the USA. Although the boycott movement lacked widespread support and ultimately stalled, he and his UCLA teammates Mike Warren and Lucius Allen refused to attend the Olympic trials. His explanation, however, complicated his image as a Black Power hero. Alcindor said that if he participated, then he would miss class and delay his graduation, which was true, but only part of his rationale. He also told a reporter from Life magazine that he and his UCLA teammates “don’t want to get caught in the middle of anything.” He had principles, but discussing them publicly only brought more stress. It was much easier to distance himself from Edwards and the OPHR.
“Yeah, I live here, but it’s not really my country.”
In the summer of 1968, he worked for Operation Sports Rescue, a youth program in New York City. Leading basketball clinics, Alcindor mentored African-American and Puerto Rican youths, encouraging them to get an education. In July, he appeared on NBC’s Today show to promote the program. Co-host Joe Garagiola, a former professional baseball player, began the interview by asking Alcindor why he refused to play in the Olympics. During a heated exchange, Alcindor said, “Yeah, I live here, but it’s not really my country.” Then Garagiola retorted, “Well, then, there’s only one solution, maybe you should move.” It was a common reply among white Americans who demanded accommodation and gratitude from black athletes — a refrain that still exists today.
Alcindor’s comments echoed Malcolm X, who said, “Being born here in America doesn’t make you an American.” If black people were Americans, he argued, then they wouldn’t need civil rights legislation or constitutional amendments for protection. Alcindor recognized that while he was fortunate because of his basketball ability, he couldn’t celebrate his privileged status as long as racial inequality persisted. Only when black citizens enjoyed true freedom could he call America his country.
Although we remember the 1968 Olympics for John Carlos and Tommie Smith’s demonstration on the victory stand, Alcindor was the most famous athlete who avoided the games. More than any other college basketball player, he defined his times, proving also that black athletes could speak their minds and win. No one could tell him to shut up and dribble.
Professor is the Julius C. “Bud” Shaw Professor of Sports, Society, and Technology and an Assistant Professor of History at Georgia Tech. His research focuses on the history of sports and American culture. He is an author whose books include “The Sons of Westwood: John Wooden, UCLA, and the Dynasty That Changed College Basketball,” which explores the emergence of college basketball as a national pastime and the political conflicts in college athletics during the 1960s and 1970s.
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Read Professor Smith’s full article at the link. Not only is Kareem one of the greatest basketball players ever, but he has established himself as an informed, articulate, and committed social commentator. I never saw Kareem play in person during his days with the Milwaukee Bucks. But, Cathy and I once were fortunate enough to see him “live” as a contestant on “Celebrity Jeopardy” at DAR Constitution Hall in Washington DC, ironically a venue where he once would not have been welcome.
Of the untold number of stupid things that have come out of Donald Trump’s mouth, making a strong case for the stupidest was his claim, as he announced his candidacy for president, that he would build a wall on the southern border of the country and make the “criminals” and “rapists” in Mexico pay for it. So dumb was this declaration that even Trump eventually realized he would have to tweak it, probably around the time that Mexico’s president, Enrique Peña Nieto, said there was no way in hell he would fund the project. From there, Mr. Art of the Deal changed his story to taxpayers will put up the money initially, but Mexico will pay us back;which later became Mexico will pay for the wall through import tariffs; which quickly changed to Mexico will pay for the wall indirectly through NAFTA,” which morphed, earlier this month, into the wall will pay for itself. And now, the president has landed on a new idea: make the military pay for it.
Trump has privately been making the case that the Pentagon should use some of the $700 billion it received as part of last week’s spending bill to fund his vanity project, The Washington Postreported Tuesday. After mentioning it to several advisers last week, Trump reportedly floated the idea by House Speaker Paul Ryan in a meeting on Wednesday at the White House, to which Ryan “offered little reaction.” During another meeting, this one with senior aides, Trump apparently whined about how much money the Department of Defense was getting, noting that surely the Pentagon could afford to part with a few (or, say, 67) billion dollars. According to reporters Josh Dawsey and Mike DeBonis, President Temper Tantrum has had a hard time watching TV lately—heretofore his only solace in this cruel world—due to criticism of the spending deal he signed last week, and the fear that his base could sour on him without any wall progress. (The fact that he allegedly had an affair with a porn star, whom he subsequently paid off to stay quiet, is obviously a plus for them.) Currently, just $641 million is earmarked for new fencing, and it can only be used on “operationally effective designs that were already deployed last May,” meaning that unless something changes, the prototypes Trump recently visited in California will be just for show.
Of course, as everyone but the president seems to understand, it’s highly unlikely that the Pentagon would divert funds from the military to finance the wall, which experts say won’t actually stop the flow of illegal immigration at all, and which would require Congressional votes that Trump obviously doesn’t have. Not only will Democrats take a hard pass military spending paying for his fence, but Pentagon officials, per White House advisers, “may also blanch at the possibility.” In a statement to the Post,Minority Leader Chuck Schumer made his feelings pretty clear. “First Mexico was supposed to pay for it, then U.S. taxpayers, and now our men and women in uniform? This would be a blatant misuse of military funds and tied up in court for years. Secretary [James] Mattis ought not bother and instead use the money to help our troops, rather than advance the president’s political fantasies,” he said.
That virtually no one is going for the idea hasn’t stopped Trump from floating it in his preferred venue of choice. Over the weekend he suggested on Twitter that the military should scrounge up the money for national security reasons:
The national security argument might hold a bit more water if the Trump administration hadn’t targeted traditional border security measures for for cuts or delays in funding that experts say “[pose] a serious threat to border security.” (Those experts also say that the The Wall will largely useless “unless it’s 35,000 feet high.”) Meanwhile, at the White House, good soldier Sarah Sanders on Tuesday told reporters that the administration “still has plans to look for potential ways” for Mexico to pay for the wall.
Anyway, stay tuned for next week when Trump privately presses for the Department of Veterans Affairs to quit being so stingy and pony up the dough. How much money do they really need to treat PTSD?
Team Trump has a special treat in store for the bank industry
It’s the appointment of Jelena McWilliams at the F.D.I.C., which will result in a trifecta of deregulation-happy officials atop the nation’s banking regulators, per The Wall Street Journal:
When that happens, the F.D.I.C., the Federal Reserve and Office of the Comptroller of the Currency will be able to move ahead on a number of the Trump administration’s policy priorities, such as adjusting capital and liquidity requirements, easing restrictions on short-term consumer loans and relaxing the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial law’s proprietary trading ban, the Volcker rule.
Ms. McWilliam’s arrival likely will coincide with the completion of a bill in Congress aimed at easing crisis-era banking regulations, another catalyst for changes to the financial rule book.
Isaac Boltansky, the policy research director at Compass Point Research & Trading LLC, told W.S.J.that, “With Congress likely to pass the only financial deregulatory bill for the near future, it will be the alphabet soup of new regulators who decide the tone and tenor of the new deregulatory agenda.” #MAGA!
Wilbur Ross does the G.O.P. a solid
Overriding the advice of career officials who warned that adding a question to the 2020 census about citizenship will lead to fewer responses from people worried about deportation, Ross decided on Monday to just go for it, writing in a memo he had “determined that reinstatement of a citizenship question on the 2020 decennial census questionnaire is necessary to provide complete and accurate census block level data” (the last time the citizenship question was on the census was in 1950). That’s an interesting argument, given that the very reason census officials didn’t want to reinstate the question is a fear that it will lead to lower response rates. Which may be all part of the plan:
Critics of the change and experts in the Census Bureau itself have said that, amid a fiery immigration debate, the inclusion of a citizenship question could prompt immigrants who are in the country illegally not to respond. That would result in a severe undercount of the population—and, in turn, faulty data for government agencies and outside groups that rely on the census. The effects would also bleed into the redistricting of the House and state legislatures in the next decade.
Others argued that an undercount in regions with high immigrant populations would lead not only to unreliable data but also to unfair redistricting, to the benefit of Republicans.
More threatening essentially to break or evade the law from our “Con-Man-In-Chief.” “Normalizing” this erratic, “Third World Dictator” conduct doesn’t make it “normal” or “acceptable.” It reflects on the folks willing to enable and apologize for Trump (although apology is something he never does, no matter how egregious his lies or misconduct.)
Ironically, Trump likely could have had “His Wall” funded if he had been willing to support a bipartisan “Dreamer Compromise” just a few weeks ago.
Emma Brown & Frances Stead Sellers report for WashPost:
Stormy Daniels said Saturday that her work in the porn industry has helped her prepare for the international attention she faces on the eve of a much-anticipated television interview about her alleged affair with Donald Trump and the hush money she says she received to keep it quiet.
“Being in the adult industry, I’ve developed a thick skin and maybe a little bit of a dark sense of humor,” she told The Washington Post. “But nothing could truly prepare someone for this.”
Daniels is scheduled to be the star attraction of the CBS newsmagazine “60 Minutes” on Sunday evening, a broadcast that caps a two-week media blitz by her attorney, Michael Avenatti. As Daniels’s image and story have become 24/7 fodder for cable news shows, Avenatti has hinted repeatedly that there are more details yet to come out — including in a tweet Friday suggesting that he has a DVD with new information.
In a brief interview Saturday evening, with Avenatti on the line, Daniels sounded upbeat, even as she acknowledged that the media circus she’s attracted has changed her day-to-day life as a wife, mother and adult-film director.
“Without a doubt it’s cutting into my horse show time,” said Daniels, who is an avid equestrian. “And time with friends.”
. . . .
Daniels told The Post on Saturday that she’s been the target of hatred on social media in recent weeks. But she said she also has been overwhelmed by an outpouring of support. When somebody recently accused her of being a liar on Twitter, she said, she received a flood of messages with hashtags like #Ibelieveyou and #teamstormy.
“I didn’t do this to get any sort of approval from anyone or recognition,” she said. “I simply wanted to tell my personal truth and defend myself.”
. . . .
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Go on over to WashPost at the above link for the complete article by Emma and Frances.
So far, the Stormster has outfoxed the Trumpster at ever turn. Which always brings me back to the same question: How did a smart, multi-talented, personable, on the ball individual like Daniels/Clifford get mixed up with a creep like Trump in the first place?
Tune in to “60 Minutes” tonight and maybe you’ll find out!
Melissa Bailey reports for Kaiser Health News in the Washing gton Post:
BOSTON — The two women have been together since 2011, a 96-year-old originally from Italy and a Haitian immigrant who has helped her remain in her home — giving her showers, changing her clothes, taking her to her favorite parks and discount grocery stores.
“Hello, bella,” Nirva greets Isolina Dicenso, using the Italian word for “beautiful.”
“Hi, baby,” Dicenso replies.
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But changes to federal immigration policy are putting both at risk. Haitian caregivers like Nirva, who got temporary permission to stay in the United States after the 2010 earthquake destroyed much of their homeland, now face a July 22, 2019 deadline for returning. If they and tens of thousands of other immigrants with similar jobs and tenuous legal status are forced to leave the country, Americans living with disabilities, serious illness or, like Dicenso, the frailties of old age could find themselves with few options besides nursing homes.
And many of those facilities could themselves be caught short of staff, at a time when more of the country’s aging baby boom generation could need care.
The situation reflects the crosscurrents that often roil immigration debates, with a central question being how many Americans are willing to fill the arduous, low-pay positions that immigrants often work. The expected fallout offers a glimpse into how such policy changes under President Trump will affect older Americans nationwide, especially those in large cities.
Some 59,000 Haitians live in the United States under temporary protected status (TPS), a humanitarian program that has given them permission to live and work in this country since the earthquake. Many are nursing assistants, home health aides and personal care attendants — the trio of jobs that often defines direct-care workers.
The Trump administration decided last November to curtail that protection, saying the island no longer faced the same adverse conditions and giving the immigrants until mid-2019 to leave or face deportation. In Boston, the city with the nation’s third-highest Haitian population, the action has prompted panic from TPS holders and pleas from health-care agencies that rely on their labor.
The decision “will have a devastating impact on the ability of skilled nursing facilities to provide quality care to frail and disabled residents,” Tara Gregorio, president of the Massachusetts Senior Care Association, warned in a letter published late last year in the Boston Globe. Nursing facilities in the state, which already are grappling with a shortage of several thousand workers, employ about 4,300 Haitians, according to Gregorio.
Nationwide, 1 in 4 direct-care workers are immigrants, said Robert Espinoza, vice president of policy at the New York-based Paraprofessional Healthcare Institute.
It’s not clear how many of those workers rely on the TPS program, but the Institute calculates that there are 34,600 who are non-U.S. citizens from Haiti, Nicaragua (for which TPS will end in January), El Salvador (in September 2019) and Honduras (in July, unless the Trump administration decides to renew protected status for individuals from this country). TPS decisions cannot legally take economic considerations into account, a Department of Homeland Security official said.
In addition, another 11,000 workers come from countries affected by Trump’s travel ban, primarily from Somalia and Iran, and about 69,800 are non-U.S. citizens from Mexico, according to the Institute.
Even immigrants with secure legal status may be affected when family members are deported, Espinoza noted: Under Trump, noncriminal immigration arrests have doubled. The “totality of the anti-immigrant climate” threatens the stability of the workforce — and “the ability of older people and people with disabilities to access home health care,” he said.
The Federation for American Immigration Reform, which supports more restrictive immigration policies, disputes such dire scenarios. Since three-quarters of direct-care workers are U.S. citizens, spokesman David Ray argues, then “these are clearly not ‘jobs that Americans won’t do.’ ” He does the math this way: The country has 6.7 million unemployed people, and if the health-care industry can’t find enough workers to replace those who lose TPS and other protected statuses, “then it needs to take a hard look at its recruiting practices and compensation packages.”
Yet nursing homes in Massachusetts are already losing immigrant workers who have left the country in fear, because of the White House’s immigration proposals and public remarks , according to Gregorio. Nationally, thousands of Haitians have fled to Canada.
“What people don’t seem to understand is that people from other countries really are the backbone of long-term care,” said Sister Jacquelyn McCarthy, chief executive of Bethany Health Care Center in Framingham, Mass., which runs a nursing home with 170 patients. She has eight Haitian and Salvadoran workers with TPS, mostly certified nursing assistants, who show up reliably for 4:30 a.m. shifts and never call out sick, she said. She already has six CNA vacancies and can’t afford to lose more, she said.
“There aren’t people to replace them if they should all be deported,” McCarthy said.
Nirva, who asked that she be identified only by her first name, works 70 hours a week taking care of senior citizens, sick and disabled patients. She started working as a CNA shortly after she arrived in Boston in March 2010 with her two sons.
She said she chose this work because of her harrowing experience in the earthquake, which destroyed her home and killed hundreds of thousands, including her cousin and nephew. After the disaster, she walked 15 miles with her sister, a nurse, to a Red Cross station to try to help survivors. When she got there, she recounted, the guards wouldn’t let her in because she wasn’t a nurse.
“So, when I came here — I feel, people’s life is very important,” she said. But at first, caring for elderly patients was difficult. “At the beginning, it was very tough for me,” she acknowledged, especially “when I have to clean their incontinence. . . . Some of them, they have dementia, they are fighting. They insult you. You have to be very compassionate to do this job.”
Nirva, 46, works with a soft voice, a bubbling laugh and disarming modesty. She says her faith in God — and a need to pay the bills to support her sons, now in high school and college — help her get through each week.
She started caring for Dicenso in her Boston home as the older woman recovered from surgery in 2011. With support from Nirva, another in-home aide and her daughter, Dicenso has been able to continue living alone. She now sees Nirva once a week for walks, lunch outings and shopping runs. The two have grown close, bonding in part over their Catholic faith. At home, Dicenso proudly displays a bedspread that Nirva gave her, emblazoned with the word LOVE.
Nirva also fills three shifts a week at a chiropractor’s office as a medical assistant. Five nights a week, she does an overnight shift at a Boston rehabilitation center.
The Trump administration’s immigration restrictions may exacerbate a serious shortage of direct-care workers, warns Paul Osterman, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management. He forecasts a national shortfall of 151,000 workers by 2030 and of 355,000 workers by 2040. If immigrants lose their work permits, the gap would widen further.
“People aren’t going to be able to have quality care,” he said. “They’re not going to be able to stay at home.”
Angelina Di Pietro, Dicenso’s daughter, worries about who could help her mother if Nirva can’t. “There’s not a lot of people in this country who would take care of the elderly,” she said. “Taking care of the elderly is a hard job.”
“Nirva, pray to God they let you stay,” said Dicenso, sitting in her living-room armchair after a long walk and ravioli lunch. “What would I do without you?”
Kaiser Health News (KHN) is a nonprofit news service covering health issues. It is an editorially independent program of the Kaiser Family Foundation that is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.
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Restrictionist myths:
Health care workers are unskilled;
At virtually 100% employment, there are other American workers to take these jobs;
There wasn’t a rational basis for continuing Haitian TPS;
There is a legal prohibition on taking humanitarian factors and US interests into account in making discretionary, unreviewable TPS determinations;
That legal requirements are a factor in the actions of the Trump Administration (the most lawless and dishonest Administration in US history).
What will happen when xenophobes like David Ray of FAIR need help in their old age? Will they will get the benefit of the qualified, compassionate care that they would deny the rest of us? Or, will they be cared for by “anybody off the street” as they propose for others?
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—As America’s bridges, roads, and other infrastructure dangerously deteriorate from decades of neglect, there is a mounting sense of urgency that it is time to build a giant wall.
Across the U.S., whose rail system is a rickety antique plagued by deadly accidents, Americans are increasingly recognizing that building a wall with Mexico, and possibly another one with Canada, should be the country’s top priority.
Harland Dorrinson, the executive director of a Washington-based think tank called the Center for Responsible Immigration, believes that most Americans favor the building of border walls over extravagant pet projects like structurally sound freeway overpasses.
“The estimated cost of a border wall with Mexico is five billion dollars,” he said. “We could easily blow the same amount of money on infrastructure repairs and have nothing to show for it but functioning highways.”
Congress has dragged its feet on infrastructure spending in recent years, but Dorrinson senses growing support in Washington for building a giant border wall. “Even if for some reason we don’t get the Mexicans to pay for it, five billion is a steal,” he said.
While some think that America’s declining infrastructure is a national-security threat, Dorrinson strongly disagrees. “If immigrants somehow get over the wall, the condition of our bridges and roads will keep them from getting very far,” he said.
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WARNING: THIS IS “FAKE NEWS” BUT COMES WITH MY ABSOLUTE, UNCONDITIONAL, MONEY BACK GUARANTEE THAT IT CONTAINS MORE TRUTH THAN THE AVERAGE TRUMP TWEET OR SARAH HUCKABEE SANDERS NEWS BRIEFING, AND ALSO MORE FACTUAL ACCURACY THAN ANY REPORT PREPARED UNDER THE DIRECTION OF “AGENT DEVON!”
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Yup. It’s a sign of how far we’ve fallen as a nation that some of us are reduced to thinking that wasting money on “The Wall” as part of a “deal” to take care of Dreamers (who should get green cards “no strings attached”) is an “OK deal” because unlike some of the other GOP proposals “nothing gets broken, nobody (except the US taxpayers) gets hurt.”
The call to abolish ICE is, above all, a demand for the Democratic Party to begin seriously resisting an unbridled white-supremacist surveillance state that it had a hand in creating. Though the party has moved left on core issues from reproductive rights to single-payer health care, it’s time for progressives to put forward a demand that deportation be taken not as the norm but rather as a disturbing indicator of authoritarianism.
White supremacy can no longer be the center of the immigration debate. Democrats have voted to fully fund ICE with limited fanfare, because in the American immigration discussion, the right-wing position is the center and the left has no voice. There has been disturbing word fatigue around “mass deportation,” and the threat of deportation is so often taken lightly that many have lost the ability to conceptualize what it means. Next to death, being stripped from your home, family, and community is the worst fate that can be inflicted on a human, as many societies practicing banishment have recognized. It’s time to rein in the greatest threat we face: an unaccountable strike force executing a campaign of ethnic cleansing.
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Read the rest of McElwee’s well-written and very provocative article at the link.
Not going to happen! Yet the out of control misconduct by ICE and its leadership during this Administration certainly helps McElwee make a powerful moral, if not practical political, case for elimination. Definitely worth a read.
