[MORE] According to Funktionary, a probot is a propagandizing programmed robot. (An official representative from an organization, agency or institution whose assignment is to make prepared statements and answer "cooked" (prepared) questions at news conferences, briefings and the like. A probot is a proxymoron who conveys programmed disinformation in computerized language and bureaucratese jargon. A probot is one who disseminates lies, distortions and convenient mass truths composed by a superior overruling elite. A Black probot, mechanically efficient but with no awareness, is a robot who has been programmed in service of white domination.
Dr. Blynd explains, a proxymoron is one moron who speaks on behalf of another moron or a whole gang of morons. [MORE]
Sheriff David Clarke is both. He is also a SNigger, sambo and traitor to his race. Go fuck yourself buddy.
From [HERE] A judge for the US District Court for the District of Columbia [official website] on Monday turned down a request [JURIST report] to stop construction on the final stretch of the Dakota Access Pipeline. Judge James Boasberg rejected [blog post] the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe's [official website] argument that the pipeline could contaminate the waters that the tribes use to practice their religion as it is a part of their sacred ground. The judge claimed [Law360 report] that the filing was premature. "I think it's important to have time to fully brief and analyze the issues in the context of a preliminary injunction motion or a motion for summary judgment. I would benefit from further attention and analysis, so I will deny the motion for a temporary restraining order." He said that there is no immediate harm until oil begins flowing down the pipeline to grant the temporary restraining order requested [text, PDF]. The judge also ordered Energy Transfer Partners [corporate website] to update the court on the status of the pipeline weekly. A hearing for the request for a preliminary injunction [text, PDF] filed by the tribe is set for February 27.
From [HERE] and [HERE] White House adviser Stephen Miller doubled down on the Trump administration's groundless claims of voter fraud in New Hampshire — and across the nation — during in an interview on ABC's This Week on Sunday.
Earlier this week President Trump claimed, with no evidence, that voters from Massachusetts were bused to New Hampshire to vote illegally.
A member of the Federal Election Commission called it an "extraordinarily serious and specific charge" and asked Trump to "immediately share his evidence with the public." [MORE] Don't hold your breath in this racist system. This is all prelude to more election theft or "tricks of the elect" while stupid, sleeping Democracts do nothing to protect the so-called "voting rights" of the Black & Brown votary they represent.
White people are the vanishing majority in the U.S. The white population in the U.S. is shrinking and white folks have a growing fear of their "numerial inadequacy." The U.S. Census Bureau has reported that by 2047 non-white persons will be the majority of the US population. Since 2013, census figures have also showed that for the first time in U.S. history, the majority of babies are non-white. Since 2013 more white people have died in the United States than were born. Furthermore, the Census Bureau says that the ranks of white Americans will likely drop with every passing year. No other group showed a similar falloff. [MORE]
As whites have been consistently declining, Black and Brown populations are surging.[MORE] and [MORE] and [MORE].
Additionally white people are genetic recessive. They are unable to produce color. In general, this means they cannot reproduce a white child when they have sexual relations with non-whites. The white "race" can be replaced or "genetically annihilated" through such assimilation or social intermingling with non-whites;
The above Cheerios commercial freaked out racists in 2013 b/c it featured a non-white Brown baby who was the product of an interracial, Black and White couple. Similarly, a GAP ad featuring a white woman and a Sikh man caused an uproar among racists.
Non-whites can never be integrated into the white supremacy system. If white people were to do this it would mean active participation in white genocide - something racists will never do.
The racist's worst and most basic fear sill remains genetic annihilation in the form of the fear of the impending "Black Planet." Racists go through much effort to conceal their numerical inadequacy from non-whites. White supremacy programming or psy-ops on non-whites, especially on Black people, has 'socially engineered Black consciousness and/or is responsible for the falsification of Black consciousness.' [MORE] Racists have told so many lies to Black follks and Black people's belief in such lies maintains the master/servant relationship. One such major deception is that non-whites are "minorities" or are outnumbered by whites worldwide. Many non-whites do not realize that non-whites make up the overwhelming majority on the planet - as whites now represent less than 10% of the world's population. That is, 9 out of 10 people of the world's population (7 billion) are non-white or over 90% of the world is non-white. [MORE] and [MORE] and [MORE].
Nevertheless, as explained by Welsing, "the white "race" has structured and manipulated their own thought processes and conceptual patterns, as well as those of the entire non-white world majority, so that the real numerical minority (whites) illusionally feels and represents itself as the world's majority, while the true numerical majority (non-whites) illusionally feels and views itself as the minority.[MORE] Psy-ops on non-whites has been highly effective on African Americans, as 'everywhere one finds Whites and Blacks in close proximity to each other, whether it is Ferguson, Mo. or Zimbabwe, the whites are in control. Yet Blacks rarely question this extraordinary universal phenomenon which defies every known statistical law of probability.' [MORE] This implies that there must exist a political, social situation wherein the mental orientation of Black people must be so structured that the power and the ability of the Europeans to rule this earth are continually maintained.' [MORE] Toward that end, a major goal of elite whites is to make white dominance and control over everything seem natural. [MORE]
Due to the changing demographics in the US racists now believe they are in a state of peril. Dr. Welsing explained White people are playing a survival game with non-white people, engaging in behaviors—in economics, education, entertainment, labor, law, politics, religion, sex and more—in order for them to survive on the planet, by any means necessary. White people practice racism to survive -- the operating system of white supremacy functions to keep them alive. "If white people had not created such a global system in which they established power over the world's non-white majority, the white collective would have been genetically extinct a long time ago." [MORE]
Your Meaningless Right To Vote is Also Fake. The GOP is the party of the vanishing majority in the U.S. - white folks. "The Republican party is a racial identity party. It is designed to appeal to white people as white people... not as union-members or as unemployed people or as home-owners... as white people. It is a crude racial-identity party and the numbers bear that out. It is an almost exclusively white party. Many white people vote Democratic, but the Republican party is pretty close to all white. (A fact that is soft-pedaled in out national dialog because it makes the modern Republican party sound like a racist institution, which it is.") [MORE] Republicans now depend on this vanishing majority of whites for fully 90 percent of their votes in presidential elections, while the Democratic Party wins 60 to 70 percent of the Asian and Hispanic vote and 90 to 95 percent of the black vote. The Democratic base is growing inexorably, while the Republican base is shriveling. [MORE]
Already, California, Illinois and New York are lost. The GOP has not carried any of the three in seven presidential elections. When Texas and/or Arizona– where whites are a minority and a declining share of the population – tips, how does the GOP put together an electoral majority? [MORE]
In order for the white party (gop) to survive it will have to suppress, not count, purge and disenfranchise Blacks, Latinos and Asians or or just rig these meaninglesselections [yes another lie] -- one after and another.
White GOP Votary Too Small. From [HERE] and [HERE] Electionologist and investigative journalist Greg Palast, explains 'that the GOP's Trump white votary was not large enough to elect Donald Trump. That is, there were not enough white republican voters to carry a victory for Trump unless the GOP was able to systematically wipe out voter registrations of voters of color.
In 2016 GOP built and put into action a voter erasing system called Interstate Crosscheck. Crosscheck along with thousands of votes intentionally not counted in Black voting areas, such as Flint & Detroit chose the president and determined who controls Congress.' [MORE]
Palast's undisputed findings reveal that millions of Black, Latino & Asian voters were removed from voter rolls in swing states by Interstate Crosscheck, a so-called "voter fraud" program created by the GOP. Thirty (30) states participate in Interstate Crosscheck. Palast calls Crosscheck the "Great White Hope Machine."
Interstate Crosscheck removed voters from the voter list if a voter's name appeared to be registered in more than one state. Around 7 million names were put on the list of “potential double voters” before the 2014 election. Crosscheck then compares each state’s list with lists from other states in the program. Specifically, according to Palast, the Crosscheck list contains 7,264,422 voters.
Although the Crosscheck program aims to prevent individuals from voting in more than one state in the same election, Crosscheck has been doing the exact opposite and is used to remove legitmate voters from voting rolls. Greg Palast has claimed that before a single vote was even cast, the election was already fixed by Trump operatives who eliminated millions of legitimate African American, Latino and Asian voters from the voter rolls in North Carolina, Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.
Palast reveals that millions of Black, Latino & Asian voters were removed from voter rolls in swing states by Interstate Crosscheck, a so-called "voter fraud" program created by the GOP. Thirty (30) states participate in Interstate Crosscheck. Palast calls Crosscheck the "Great White Hope Machine."
Interstate Crosscheck removed voters from the voter list if a voter's name appeared to be registered in more than one state. Around 7 million names were put on the list of “potential double voters” before the 2014 election. Crosscheck then compares each state’s list with lists from other states in the program. Specifically, according to Palast, the Crosscheck list contains 7,264,422 voters.
Although the Crosscheck program aims to prevent individuals from voting in more than one state in the same election, Crosscheck has been doing the exact opposite and is used to remove legitmate voters from voting rolls. Greg Palast has claimed that before a single vote was even cast, the election was already fixed by Trump operatives who eliminated millions of legitimate African American, Latino and Asian voters from the voter rolls in North Carolina, Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.
From [Bloomberg] and [MORE] For all its resources, Wal-Mart shares little with its employees. In the autumn of 2012, when Walmart first heard about the possibility of a strike on Black Friday, executives mobilized with the efficiency that had built a retail empire. Walmart has a system for almost everything: When there’s an emergency or a big event, it creates a Delta team. The one formed that September included representatives from global security, labor relations, and media relations. For Walmart, the stakes were enormous. The billions in sales typical of a Walmart Black Friday were threatened. The company’s public image, especially in big cities where its power and size were controversial, could be harmed. But more than all that: Any attempt to organize its 1 million hourly workers at its more than 4,000 stores in the U.S. was an existential danger. Operating free of unions was as essential to Walmart’s business as its rock-bottom prices.
OUR Walmart, a group of employees backed and funded by a union, was asking for more full-time jobs with higher wages and predictable schedules. Officially they called themselves the Organization United for Respect at Walmart. Walmart publicly dismissed OUR Walmart as the insignificant creation of the United Food and Commercial Workers International (UFCW) union. “This is just another union publicity stunt, and the numbers they are talking about are grossly exaggerated,” David Tovar, a spokesman, said on CBS Evening News that November.
Internally, however, Walmart considered the group enough of a threat that it hired an intelligence-gathering service from Lockheed Martin, contacted the FBI, staffed up its labor hotline, ranked stores by labor activity, and kept eyes on employees (and activists) prominent in the group. During that time, about 100 workers were actively involved in recruiting for OUR Walmart, but employees (or associates, as they’re called at Walmart) across the company were watched; the briefest conversations were reported to the “home office,” as Walmart calls its headquarters in Bentonville, Ark.
The details of Walmart’s efforts during the first year it confronted OUR Walmart are described in more than 1,000 pages of e-mails, reports, playbooks, charts, and graphs, as well as testimony from its head of labor relations at the time. The documents were produced in discovery ahead of a National Labor Relations Board hearing into OUR Walmart’s allegations of retaliation against employees who joined protests in June 2013. The testimony was given in January 2015, during the hearing. OUR Walmart, which split from the UFCW in September, provided the documents to Bloomberg Businessweek after the judge concluded the case in mid-October. A decision may come in early 2016.
"Racism (white supremacy), having begun as a form of self-alienation, has evolved into the most highly refined form of alienation from others as well. The Color-Confrontation theory views all of the present battlegrounds in the world as vivid reflections of this reality; the destructive and aggressive behavioral patterns being displayed by white peoples towards all non-white peoples is evidence of the inner hate, hostility and rejection they feel towards themselves and of the depth of self-alienation that has evolved from the genetic and psychological kernel of color inadequacy.
The mass inability of whites to live and attend school in the presence of non-whites is expressed in the patterns of Black and white housing and education throughout this country and the world. In terms of the Color-Confrontation thesis, this inability is seen as the apparent psychological discomfort experienced by whites in situations where, in confronting their neighbors of color, they must face their color inadequacy daily . Also, the myth of white superiority is exploded in the presence of equitable social and economic opportunity. The white personality, in the presence of color, can be stabilized only by keeping Blacks and other non-whites in obviously inferior positions. The situation of mass proximity to Blacks is intolerable to whites because Blacks are inherently more than equal. People of color always will have something highly visible that whites never can have or produce — the genetic factor of color. Always, in the presence of color, whites will feel genetically inferior.
The difficulty whites have in according non-whites socio-political and economic equality within the white supremacy structure stems neither from a moral issue nor from political or economic need, but from the fundamental sense of their own unequal condition - in regards to their numerical inadequacy and color deficiency. They can compensate for their color inadequacy only by placing themselves in socially superior positions. The color inadequacy of whiteness necessitates a social structure based on white superiority. Only tokenism can be tolerated by such a motivational psychological state, wherein the evolution of the myth of the exceptional non-white is used, again, as a defense mechanism.
The thrust towards superiority over peoples of color, the drive towards material accumulation, the drive towards a technological culture and the drive towards power are all cornerstones of the universal white supremacy culture, and they are viewed - in terms of the Color-Confrontation thesis - as responses to the core psychological sense of inadequacy. This inadequacy is not measured in terms of infant size as compared with that of the adult, as postulated by Alfred Adler. Rather, it is an inadequacy rooted in the inability to produce melanin. This genetic state is, in actuality, a variant of albinism." [MORE]
From [HERE] and [HERE] Federal immigration officials arrested more than 600 people across at least 11 states last week, detaining 40 people in the New York City area in a series of raids that marked the first large-scale enforcement of President Trump’s Jan. 25 order to crack down on the estimated 11 million immigrants living here illegally.
Officials said the raids targeted known criminals, but they also netted some immigrants without criminal records, an apparent departure from similar enforcement waves during the Obama administration. Last month, Trump substantially broadened the scope of who the Department of Homeland Security can target to include those with minor offenses or no convictions at all.
Trump has pledged to deport as many as 3 million undocumented immigrants with criminal records.
Immigration officials confirmed that agents this week raided homes and workplaces in Atlanta, Chicago, New York, the Los Angeles area, North Carolina and South Carolina, netting hundreds of people. But Gillian Christensen, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), said they were part of “routine” immigration enforcement actions. ICE dislikes the term “raids,” and prefers to say authorities are conducting “targeted enforcement actions,” she said.
Christensen said the raids, which began Monday and ended Friday at noon, found undocumented immigrants from a dozen Latin American countries. “We’re talking about people who are threats to public safety or a threat to the integrity of the immigration system,” she said, noting that the majority of those detained were serious criminals, including some who were convicted of murder and domestic violence.
Immigration activists said the crackdown went beyond the six states DHS identified, and said they had also documented ICE raids of unusual intensity during the past two days in Florida, Kansas, Texas and Northern Virginia.
That undocumented immigrants with no criminal records were arrested and could potentially be deported sent a shock wave through immigrant communities nationwide amid concerns that the U.S. government could start going after law-abiding people.
“This is clearly the first wave of attacks under the Trump administration, and we know this isn’t going to be the only one,” Cristina Jimenez, executive director of United We Dream, an immigrant youth organization, said Friday during a conference call with immigration advocates.
ICE agents in the Los Angeles area Thursday took a number of individuals into custody over the course of an hour, seizing them from their homes and on their way to work, activists said.
David Marin, ICE’s field director in the Los Angeles area, said in a conference call with reporters Friday that 75 percent of the approximately 160 people detained in the operation this week had felony convictions; the rest had misdemeanors or were in the United States illegally. Officials said Friday night that 37 of those detained in Los Angeles had been deported to Mexico.
“Dangerous criminals who should be deported are being released into our communities,” Marin said.
Spanish language radio stations and the local NPR affiliate in Los Angeles have been running public service announcements regarding the hourly “Know Your Rights” seminars the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles scheduled for Friday and Saturday. By the time the 4 p.m. group began Friday, more than 100 others had gathered at the group’s office in the Westlake neighborhood just outside downtown.
A video that circulated on social media Friday appeared to show ICE agents in Texas detaining people in an Austin shopping center parking lot. Immigration advocates also reported roadway checkpoints, where ICE appeared to be targeting immigrants for random ID checks, in North Carolina and in Austin. ICE officials denied that authorities used checkpoints during the operations.
“I’m getting lots of reports from my constituents about seeing ICE on the streets. Teachers in my district have contacted me — certain students didn’t come to school today because they’re afraid,” said Greg Casar, an Austin City Council member. “I talked to a constituent, a single mother, who had her door knocked on this morning by ICE.”
Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Tex.) said he confirmed with ICE’s San Antonio office that the agency “has launched a targeted operation in South and Central Texas as part of Operation Cross Check.”
“I am asking ICE to clarify whether these individuals are in fact dangerous, violent threats to our communities, and not people who are here peacefully raising families and contributing to our state,” Castro said in a statement Friday night.
Hiba Ghalib, an immigration lawyer in Atlanta, said the ICE detentions were causing “mass confusion” in the immigrant community. She said she had heard reports of ICE agents going door-to-door in one largely Hispanic neighborhood, asking people to present their papers.
“People are panicking,” Ghalib said. “People are really, really scared.”
From [HERE] One of President Donald Trump’s biggest campaign themes was that the United States is experiencing a crime plague of historical proportions. On Feb. 7, the newly elected chief executive invited a group of county sheriffs to the White House -- and proceeded to cite a startling crime statistic.
"The murder rate in our country is the highest it’s been in 47 years, right?" Trump said. "Did you know that? Forty-seven years. I used to use that -- I’d say that in a speech and everybody was surprised, because the press doesn’t tell it like it is. It wasn’t to their advantage to say that. But the murder rate is the highest it’s been in, I guess, from 45 to 47 years."
Racism is a virus in the mind. The national homicide rate is considerably lower than its peak in the 1990s.
Specifically, the number of murders declined by 42 percent between 1993 and 2014, even as the U.S. population rose by 25 percent over the same period. So while homicides have recently risen -- a legitimate concern, experts say -- they are far below their high levels of the early 1990s, when the nation’s population was much smaller.
"Violent crime rates are up compared with historic lows, and they are still very, very low compared with just five or 10 years ago," Raymond Paternoster, a University of Maryland criminologist, told us in October.
But racists live in their imagination. Fuck reality. [MORE] According to FUNKTIONARY, to "believe" is to wish one had proof or could rely on the illusion of proof to uphold a cherished assumption not based in or supported by the fundamental nature and workings of reality. All believing is make believing b/c to know, only you just have to know; whereas to believe, you have to make others believe also."
Trump knows what his believers want to hear. He knows that they want to be deceieved.
Despite double-digit percentage decreases in U.S. violent and property crime rates since 2008, most white voters say crime has gotten worse during that span, according to a new Pew Research Center survey. The disconnect is nothing new, though: white mericans’ perceptions of crime are often at odds with the data.
Leading up to Election Day, a majority (57%) of those who had voted or planned to vote said crime has gotten worse in this country since 2008. Almost eight-in-ten voters who supported President-elect Donald Trump (78%) said this, as did 37% of backers of Democrat Hillary Clinton. Just 5% of pro-Trump voters and a quarter of Clinton supporters said crime has gotten better since 2008, according to the survey of 3,788 adults conducted Oct. 25-Nov. 8.
Official government crime statistics paint a strikingly different picture. Between 2008 and 2015 (the most recent year for which data are available), U.S. violent crime and property crime rates fell 19% and 23%, respectively, according to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program, which tallies serious crimes reported to police in more than 18,000 jurisdictions around the nation.
Another Justice Department agency, the Bureau of Justice Statistics, produces its own annual crime report, based on a survey of more than 90,000 households that counts crimes that aren’t reported to police in addition to those that are. BJS data show that violent crime and property crime rates fell 26% and 22%, respectively, between 2008 and 2015 (again, the most recent year available)." [MORE]
Dr. Amos Wilson offers the following to explain the disconnect with reality:
White American Paranoia
To look at the world or a segment of it with a rigid, hyper-alert, and all-consuming expectation — to search reality repetitively only for confirmation of one's suspicions while ignoring aspects of that reality which disconfirm those suspicions; to pay no attention to opposing rational arguments, cogent, well-founded evidence, except to find in them only those features that seem to confirm one's original views; to examine reality with extraordinary prejudice, rejecting facts, information and alternative possibilities while seizing on and exaggerating any scintilla of often irrelevant evidence that supports one's original expectations — denotes a driven need: a psychoneurotic, psychopathological need to defend an ego perilously in danger of disintegration and to defend it regardless of cost to oneself and others. Such a suspicious and paranoid orientation speaks to the need to rigidly construct and control reality so as to maintain self-control, to empower the ego and to gainfully exploit a relevant situation. This rigidity of attention, stereotypical viewing of the world; this chronic condition of hyper-alertness, hypersensitivity; this need to create the world according to one's own deluded images, to subject others to one's paranoid views, to exploitatively have them serve that need, bespeaks the greater need to gain ego satisfaction and enhancement, self-definition and material gain through manipulating the behavior and consciousness over others. Paradoxically, this greater need bespeaks a fundamental dependency on a world and others and simultaneously, of a protest against and denial of that dependency. It expresses an ego vulnerability which must remain defensively hidden, an ego weakness which must appear to itself and others as strength, an extremely tense, unstable ego whose tenuous equilibrium can only be maintained by projecting that tension and vulnerability into the world and others. Thus the keeper of law comes to need the outlaw. And needing him, creates him. The keeper of the disturbs the peace by projecting hallucinated hostile threats where they do not exist.
That the White American must see virtually every Black male as criminal or as a potential criminal regardless of facts to the contrary, bespeaks an intense psychic need of White America to perceive him as such.
From [HERE] The technique has been called (by this columnist) “immunity through profusion.” By keeping the molten lava of falsehoods flowing, the volcano that is Donald Trump can inundate the public and overwhelm his auditors’ capacity to produce a comparable flow of corrections. This technique was on display the other day when the president met with some sheriffs.
He treated them to a whopper that is one of his hardy perennials, market-tested during the campaign: He said the U.S. murder rate is “the highest it’s been in 47 years.” (Not even close: The rate — killings per 100,000 residents — is far below the rates in the 1970s and 1980s.) This Trump Truth (Sen. Eugene McCarthy’s axiom: Anything said three times in Washington becomes a fact) distracted attention from his assertion to the sheriffs that there is “no reason” to reform law enforcement’s civil forfeiture practices.
There is no reason for the sheriffs to want to reform a racket that lines their pockets. For the rest of us, strengthening the rule of law and eliminating moral hazard are each sufficient reasons.
Civil forfeiture is the power to seize property suspected of being produced by, or involved in, crime. If property is suspected of being involved in criminal activity, law enforcement can seize it. Once seized, the property’s owners bear the burden of proving that they were not involved in such activity, which can be a costly and protracted procedure. So, civil forfeiture proceeds on the guilty-until-proven-innocent principle. Civil forfeiture forces property owners, often people of modest means, to hire lawyers and do battle against a government with unlimited resources.
And here is why the sheriffs probably purred contentedly when Trump endorsed civil forfeiture law — if something so devoid of due process can be dignified as law: Predatory law enforcement agencies can pocket the proceeds from the sale of property they seize.
The Constitution’s Fifth Amendment says property shall not be taken without just compensation, and the 14th Amendment says it shall not be taken without due process of law. President Trump, 18 days from having sworn to “preserve, protect and defend” the Constitution, sympathized with the sheriffs’ complaint that they are being pressured to reform civil forfeiture practices.
These practices are a textbook example of moral hazard — of an incentive for perverse behavior. They give law enforcement a financial interest in the outcome of cases.
It is conceivable that Trump’s studiousness has been stretched too thin to encompass the facts of civil asset forfeiture. He says he would like to “look into” it. Meanwhile, however, he is for it because he assumes “bad people” are behind the pressure for reform. And speaking of a Texas state legislator who favors reform, Trump said, “We’ll destroy his career.” Just another day on America’s steep ascending path back to greatness.
Travis County prosecutors as early as Friday will begin notifying about 2,200 convicted criminals — including people in prison for murder and rape — that forensic evidence in their cases may have been flawed because of faulty testing at the Austin police crime lab, and that they may be entitled to an appeal.
The first batch of letters will be mailed to 642 people who have addresses that prosecutors and investigators have been able to recently verify, and officials said they are pressing forward to locate the other 1,559 defendants in coming days and to notify them as soon as possible. [MORE]
From [The Intercept] ON JANUARY 25, Donald Trump signed two executive orders calling for a series of dramatic new measures aimed at hardening the country’s domestic immigration enforcement apparatus. Despite their grave implications for millions of undocumented immigrants living in the U.S., the measures were largely overshadowed by a particularly high-profile component of the directives — the construction of a border wall between the U.S. and Mexico — and receded further into the background two days later, when Trump signed another order banning travelers from seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the United States.
As the world’s attention was occupied with the chaotic implementation of the travel ban and its dramatic domestic and international impacts, the Trump administration and the Department of Homeland Security has quietly moved forward with elements of the earlier executive orders, according to internal communications obtained by The Intercept.
Trumps orders on border security and public safety in the interior of the U.S. resurrect some of the most controversial immigration enforcement programs of recent years, seek to deputize state and local law enforcement as immigration officials across the country, and threaten major cuts to federal funding for cities that fail to fall in line with the administration’s vision.
In order to address the massive strain those efforts would place on the nation’s already overburdened immigration system, Trump has called for the construction of new immigrant detention facilities along the U.S. border with Mexico — including through private contracts — as quickly as possible. Trump has also directed DHS to “allocate all legally available resources to immediately assign asylum officers to immigration detention facilities” for the purpose of conducting so-called credible fear hearings for asylum seekers. According to internal DHS communications obtained by The Intercept, this latter step is already underway.
In an email sent to personnel on Monday, Kathy Valerin, chief of staff at the Arlington Asylum Office for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, put out a call for asylum officer volunteers to conduct screening interviews at two for-profit immigrant detention facilities in Arizona as part of an ongoing effort to support the president’s orders beginning this week.
“In response to the recent Executive Orders, asylum offices have been instructed to immediately begin sending employees to conduct in-person CF and RF interviews [at] several detention facilities,” Valerin wrote, referring to “credible fear” and “reasonable fear” interviews, which are legally required in asylum cases, depending on the status of the individual. Specifically, Valerin added, USCIS was looking for volunteers to take up posts at private immigrant detention centers in Eloy and Florence, Arizona, “for two-week minimum increments through mid-March.”
From [HERE] A state judge has ruled that the NYPD cannot keep secret information related to surveillance operations it carried out several years ago on Black Lives Matter protests at Grand Central Terminal, a victory for civil libertarians who had claimed the NYPD was ignoring state freedom of information rules.
The suit, brought by protester James Logue, had sought to compel the NYPD to release information on video and audio recordings collected at protests from the fall of 2014 through January 2015. Logue had originally filed a Freedom of Information Law request for the data, but the NYPD rejected the request, claiming that it needed to keep the information proprietary to protect law enforcement strategies.
Logue was in attendance at a BLM protest at Grand Central in November 2014 when he noticed uniformed and plainclothes police officers recording the proceedings. Believing these actions infringed upon protesters' First Amendment rights, he filed his FOIL request.
The NYPD had said that releasing information about surveillance would reveal information about counter-terrorism activities, particularly related to potential activities by ISIS, but the presiding judge, Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Manuel Mendez, ruled that the department's claims failed "to provide a causal connection to the protesters and are insufficient to state a generic risk." He also noted that redaction could mitigate any legitimate departmental concerns about sensitive operations.
David Thompson, Logue's attorney, told the Daily News that the NYPD frequently ignores transparency laws. "Their practice is to simply deny all the requests," he said.
From [HERE] Missouri Governor Eric Greitens signed a bill [text] into law on Monday, making Missouri the most recent right to work state. The law, which will go into effect August 28, prevents employers from requiring union membership or dues to support a union as a condition of employment, making it a misdemeanor to do so. Missouri will become the twenty-eighth state to have right to work legislation when the law goes into effect. Greitens signed the bill just weeks into his first term. Former governor Jay Nixon vetoed [St. Louis Post-Dispatch report] such a bill in 2015.
The Missouri branch of the labor union the AFL-CIO issued vowed to fight the measure, filing a referendum [Kansas City Star report] to overturn it. Right to work laws have become more prevalent across the country in recent years. Earlier this month the Kentucky House of Representatives advanced a bill [JURIST report] that would allow workers to avoid paying dues at union workplaces. The West Virginia legislature passed the WV Workplace Freedom Act in February 2016 [JURIST report], overruling a veto by the Democratic Governor Earl Ray Tomblin the day before. West Virginia became the twenty-sixth state in the country with a right to work law. In May the Wisconsin Court of Appeals stayed [JURIST report] a lower court's decision striking down Wisconsin's "right to work" law, thus reinstating it at least for the time being.
While it is an effective political slogan, the phrase "right-to-work" is a misnomer because the lack of such a law does not deprive anyone of the right to work; a right-to-work law simply "gives employees the right to be free riders—to benefit from collective bargaining without paying for it".Under labor laws in the United States, the union as the exclusive collective bargaining agent has a duty of fair representation for all persons in the bargaining unit, including those who choose not to be members and pay dues. Thus, in Abood v. Detroit Board of Education, the Supreme Court of the United States permitted agency fees so that employees in the public sector could be required to pay for the costs of representation, even as they opted not to be a member. The right to challenge the fees must include the right to have it heard by an impartial fact finder.
Freedom of contract and association
Opponents argue that right-to-work laws restrict freedom of association, and limit the sorts of agreements individuals acting collectively can make with their employer, by prohibiting workers and employers from agreeing to contracts that include "fair share fees". This creates a free rider problemamong non-union employees who find the union contract beneficial. Thus, union members may end up subsidizing non-union members.Moreover, American law imposes a duty of fair representation on unions; consequently non-members in right to work states can and do force unions to provide without compensation grievance services that are paid for by union members. Hence right-to-work laws are not neutral, but rather impose an active and artificial burden on labor unions.
In December 2012, libertarian writer J.D. Tuccille, in Reason magazine, wrote: "I consider the restrictions right-to-work laws impose on bargaining between unions and businesses to violate freedom of contract and association. ... I'm disappointed that the state has, once again, inserted itself into the marketplace to place its thumb on the scale in the never-ending game of playing business and labor off against one another. ... This is not to say that unions are always good. It means that, when the state isn't involved, they're private organizations that can offer value to their members."
In the early development of the Right to Work policy segregationist sentiment was used as an argument, as many people in the south felt that it was wrong for Blacks and Whites to belong to the same unions. Vance Muse, one of the early developers of the Right to Work philosophy in Texas used this type of argument in the development of anti-union laws in Texas in the 1940s. [MORE]
From [gizmodo] The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) published a damning report today that shows how the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), better known as your airport’s security force, created and then expanded a program meant to spot suspected terrorists based on deceptive behavior, even though it relied on unscientific data and ultimately led to racial profiling and harassment in airports nationwide.
The TSA program in question—called behavior detection program—started in 2007 under the name SPOT, or Screening Passengers by Observation Techniques. It originally required special “behavior detection officers” to roam airports in uniform or plain clothes, looking behavioral clues from people that may have an intent to harm others.
But the TSA has never produced empirical evidence in support of the programs, despite rapidly expanding it in the last few years, costing taxpayers a total of $1.5 billion between 2007 and 2015. When the TSA commissioned a 2011 study to validate its behavior detection techniques, an assessment from Government Accountability Office (GAO) found the study “did not demonstrate their effectiveness because of study limitations, including the use of unreliable data.”
The GOA recommended in 2014 that future funding for the TSA’s behavior detection programs be stopped, citing “400 studies from the past 60 years” that found “the human ability to accurately identify deceptive behavior based on behavioral indicators is the same as or slightly better than chance.”
It’s not the only agency fighting the behavioral detection program, either. Government watchdogs, members of Congress, and the ACLU have vehemently fought against the program, claiming it lacks grounding in science. In an effort to prove this theory, the ACLU filed a lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) in June 2015 and published a report today based on the 13,000 pages of TSA documents it obtained through the lawsuit.
The new TSA documents reveal that the agency relied on academic studies to justify the program that according to the ACLU “broadly reject” the notion of identifying criminals based on the way they look and behave. The documents obtained through the ACLU’s lawsuit include several details that have not previously been public. The new revelations include TSA files filled with academic research that undermine the validity of behavioral detection program.
From [HERE] US Department of Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly has informed Congress that the DHS is considering requiring refugees and visa applicants from seven Muslim-majority nations to hand over their social media credentials from Facebook and other sites as part of a security check. "We want to get on their social media, with passwords: What do you do, what do you say?" he told the House Committee on Homeland Security on Tuesday. "If they don't want to cooperate, then you don't come in."
Kelly was referencing Syria, Iraq, Iran, Somalia, Sudan, Libya and Yemen, citizens of which were barred from entering the US by President Trump's executive order. That order, however, remains in legal limbo after a federal judge blocked its enforcement. The Trump administration urged a federal appeals court on Tuesday to overturn the lower court's ruling.
Kelly told the House panel that the idea was among "the things we're thinking about" to bolster border security. Another form of vetting under consideration, he said, is demanding financial records. "We can follow the money, so to speak. How are you living, who's sending you money?" he said. "It applies under certain circumstances, to individuals who may be involved in on the payroll of terrorist organizations." [MORE]
From [HERE] On Tuesday, word came from Washington, D.C. that the Trump administration would be issuing the final easement needed to complete the controversial Dakota Access Pipeline. The announcement was a deep blow to the Standing Rock Sioux. The tribe has been protesting the pipeline for months, along with environmentalists and social justice activists from around the world. Their resistance culminated in President Barack Obama’s decision to halt the project in December — a hard-fought victory seemingly wiped away in a matter of weeks.
But hours later, across the country, something different happened in Washington state. On a chilly afternoon, cheers and chants of “Mni Wiconi,” or “Water is Life,” erupted outside Seattle City Hall as news broke that the city council had unanimously voted to sever ties with Wells Fargo over the bank’s funding of the Dakota Access Pipeline.
In deciding not to renew its contract with Wells Fargo when it expires in 2018 — effectively removing some $3 billion in city funds from the bank — Seattle became the first major city in the country to sever ties with the bank over its relationship to the pipeline.
Wednesday, February 15, 2017 at 05:46AM 
