Funes writes: "Simply put, the environmental sciences have a diversity problem."
Aradhna Tripati holds a meeting in her UCLA lab. (photo: UCLA)
Green Science's White People Problem
By Yessenia Funes, Grist
19 February 18
The environmental sciences lack diversity — and that leaves holes in our understanding of health.
t’s been 20 years since Esteban González Burchard took a trip to Chicago that changed his life. The asthma researcher had been to the Windy City before, so tourism wasn’t on his agenda. Rather, he was there to attend the American Thoracic Society Conference for the first time. And he was on a mission.
The then-senior medical resident at Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital had given himself a steep challenge: Read all the posters within his field, epidemiology. (Just so you know, there were hundreds of them.)
Amid the flood of research abstracts, images, and data, one graphic caught his eye. Colored in blue hues, a map from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention depicted asthma prevalence among Latinos in the United States. A quick glance seemed to tell a simple tale: Latinos in New York, Massachusetts, and other northeastern states experienced asthma at significantly higher rates than Latinos living in other parts of the country.
Except Burchard realized this wasn’t the whole story. When he studied the poster more closely, he was able to connect it with his own work on a certain mutation to the interleukin-4 gene. He knew that a certain variant of the gene, which he’d linked to increased asthma severity, is more common in African-Americans, and that Puerto Ricans have a deeper African ancestry than other Latinos. So this asthma hotspot in the U.S. Northeast was a reflection, in part, of the heavy Puerto Rican population in that region.
“I was like, ‘I know what this is,’” Burchard tells Grist. “This is the African gene coming through Puerto Rican populations.”
The Mexican American scientist, now a professor and principal investigator at the University of California, San Francisco’s Asthma Collaboratory, grew up in California, home to the largest number of Latinos, most of whom are of Mexican origin. But he also spent time in Boston, where the Latino population is largely Puerto Rican. And he thought those regional differences might be behind the disparate asthma rates.
“It was because of my personal experiences that I was able to look at a scientific problem and nail it on the head in 30 seconds,” Burchard says.
Puerto Ricans have the highest asthma rate among Latinos in the United States, whereas Mexican Americans have the lowest (13.6 percent of the population versus 5.3 percent, respectively), according to more recent data from the CDC. With his revelation 20 years ago, Burchard helped birth the Genetics of Asthma in Latino Americans study, the largest survey of Latino children with asthma across the country. Through his work, he has collected DNA from more than 10,000 children of African American or Latino descent from around the country.
“No one was studying this prior to us,” Burchard says. “So the fact that I’m Latino, the fact that I’m interested in this, the fact that I’m trained in medicine and genetics, was a tremendous benefit to the field.”
But we may not be getting insights like the one Burchard had at the rate we could be. After all, there’s an overall lack of people of color in science. And that’s especially true of the environmental and climate sciences. An analysis of science employment patterns found the workforce in the medical and life sciences is the most diverse, while the makeup of environmental scientists and geologists is among the least diverse.
Adam Pearson, an associate professor of psychology at Pomona College in Southern California, performed that employment survey. He says the so-called “green STEM fields” are unique in their overrepresentation of white people compared with the other sciences. Even Asian Americans, who are well represented in other sciences, aren’t prevalent in them.
“In green STEM fields — broadly defined as conservation sciences, environmental sciences, climate-related sciences, earth, and atmosphere — you find up to twice the level of disparities, sometimes up to three times the level of disparities as you do in other physical sciences,” Pearson says. “That was really striking to us, and that’s across the board.”
Simply put, the environmental sciences have a diversity problem, and it’s not just costing us eureka moments like Burchard’s. After all, people of color are more likely to live in places with dirty air and are, thus, more often at risk from health problems linked to polluting industries and climate change. Yet they’re often getting overlooked.
According to Burchard’s own work, fewer than 5 percent of the respiratory disease research programs funded by the National Institute of Health between 1993 and 2013 involved studies that included non-white participants — even though they make up nearly 40 percent of the U.S. population. So in a subject area like asthma, there’s likely a dearth of data on groups where the illness is highly prevalent. That not only limits our understanding of the condition, but it could also impede the discovery of preventative measures and treatments.
***
So why are people of color underrepresented in the environmental sciences? It’s not for a lack of interest. Studies have found that Latinos, for example, tend to be more worried about climate change than people from other ethnic groups, according to a report the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication released in September (coincidentally right around the time Hurricane Maria struck Puerto Rico).
“These are groups that are, in fact, not only disproportionately affected by environmental problems but are also the most concerned — more concerned in most public opinion surveys than whites and higher-income groups,” says Pearson. “But the public doesn’t see it that way, so there’s a prominent archetype: the myth of the white environmentalist.”
This image of an older white person that the word “environmentalist” conjures has certainly played a part in determining who goes on to study environmental science. Pearson is one of many who are eager to find solutions to what he calls “the diversity crisis” among researchers. Another is Aradhna Tripati, who is out to smash outdated archetypes — and, ultimately, transform the field.
Tripati is an associate professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, whose work straddles the climate sciences and geology. Her research on the history of the Earth’s climate landed her on former President Barack Obama’s radar: Just prior to leaving office last year, he presented her with the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers. And with the help of this distinction, Tripati launched the UCLA Center for Diverse Leadership in Science in July, which focuses on the role of race in the environmental sciences.
“My thought was that we need to explicitly elevate this — diversity as a value,” Tripati tells Grist.
Tripati herself had a unique path to the research lab. The daughter of Fijian immigrants, she grew up in a single-parent household for part of her childhood. For the past 25 years, her father has been incarcerated for his role in a fraud scheme. (Numerous witnesses who testified against him have subsequently recanted their testimony, Tripati says). Her mother, a nurse, was left to take care of Tripati and her younger sister. A once-decorated healthcare worker, she was briefly homeless after her husband was incarcerated.
And it’s her mom who Tripati credits with giving her the support and access to opportunities that helped her get from a childhood marked by isolation and bullying to where she is now: director of her own UCLA research center and lab. “She was also a person who, at other times, had nothing and, in fact, dealt with the consequences of systemic racism,” Tripati says of her mother. “That’s something that’s defined my family, my mom’s trajectory through life — as well as of course my dad’s — but my mom’s, my sister’s, my own.”
Paying her mom’s gift forward, Tripati is trying to pave a path for other people of color. This work isn’t anything new to her — diversity has been a founding principle in assembling the members of her research lab since 2013. She’s disturbed to see how often her minority students support their families while in school and how often they’ve had to deal with violence — from sexual assault to psychological violence that she says stems from racism.
Tripati’s center ensures practical measures are in place to help younger students in the community surrounding UCLA have the same opportunities as more privileged classmates. A key component of her new effort is drumming up financial support. Eventually, she hopes to offer scholarships and fellowships every year to 150 recipients interested in the sciences. These fellows could include high school students, undergrads, graduate students, researchers, faculty, and people working outside of academia. Fellows of the Center for Diverse Leadership in Science could be paired up with younger students from the community — for instance, helping high school kids learn how to conduct their own research.
Jesse Bloom Bateman is a postdoctoral researcher at UCLA’s Institute of the Environment and Sustainability. Like Tripati, he studies what the Earth’s climate was like thousands of years ago. He’s also a volunteer for the center, working with young, diverse students in Los Angeles.
“As a black man in geology — where that is fairly unique — I can see how having a diverse group of people with diverse backgrounds helps us get to more interesting answers and also ask deeper and broader questions,” Bateman tells Grist.
Tripati’s hope is that her fellows can become leaders who recruit a new generation of scientists from underrepresented groups. They and future researchers can then design and execute better studies that can help untangle major structural problems that disproportionately affect diverse populations.
“Communities of color in the U.S. face higher rates of asthma, lead poisoning, environmental harm, and are the least likely to get the relief services they need to survive during natural disasters like Hurricanes Maria, Katrina, and Harvey,” Tripati says. “Having representation changes the nature of the priorities that get made, the questions we ask, and the solutions that are proposed.”
***
As the Trump administration rolls back environmental protections and gives more power to fossil fuel corporations, there are fears that air pollution and other toxic exposures will rise in the near future. Vulnerable, low-income communities and people of color are most often the populations surrounding hazardous waste sites, petrochemical plants, and highly trafficked roadways. This proximity to pollution coupled with genetic predisposition is a recipe for poor health.
According to Esteban Burchard’s colleague Sam Oh, director of epidemiology at the Asthma Collaboratory, diverse scientists have an advantage in working with communities that aren’t often part of research efforts. “If [scientists] share your culture, if they look like you,” Oh says, “you’re going to be more likely to identify with them and be more receptive.”
Looking at a subject like asthma, having ethnic variation in research subjects can help scientists tease out various triggers that lead to the development a disease. For example, studies that don’t include Puerto Ricans and black people — two groups that suffer some of the highest rates in the U.S. — won’t be as effective in pinpointing patterns about the prevalence in those populations or even in the country overall.
“In many diseases — not just asthma — there are differences in genetic risk factors that vary across race,” Oh tells Grist. “Just because you have that risk factor doesn’t mean you’re going to automatically develop the disease. There are a lot of pieces to this puzzle, and once all those pieces are put in, then a person develops disease.”
In 2013, a large research team, including Burchard and Oh published a study that examined the asthma risk among black and Latino children exposed to air pollution in cities across the U.S. In San Francisco, in particular, the results were stark across racial lines: Air pollution seemed to impact asthma rates in black children more so than their Mexican-American neighbors.
Late last year, the American Petroleum Institute seized on the results of studies that have found similar differences in asthma rates among minorities. It used that data to rebuff an NAACP report about skyrocketing asthma rates among black communities living near oil and gas operations. Among other potential causes, such as indoor allergens, they pointed to a body of research that found a genetic predisposition for developing the debilitating respiratory illness among African Americans.
Burchard says the argument was Big Oil attempting to “wash its hands” of a problem it contributed to. As for Oh, he doesn’t attribute the pattern of differences in asthma incidence found in the 2013 study directly to ethnicity — where these groups tended to live could also influence whether they’ll develop asthma. As any scientist worth his salt would say — and Oh did — no single factor leads a person to develop asthma, including ancestry. Plus, there’s more data to be collected, especially from minority communities, that could change the way we treat asthma.
“As long as we understand the biology of disease better — and that comes from studying more diverse populations — we can develop better therapies that can be applied to all people,” Oh says.
This isn’t a chicken-and-egg problem, if you ask people like Burchard or Aradhna Tripati. The impetus for studying new or previously overlooked populations will most likely come from bringing members of those groups into the scientific community in higher numbers. And that could mean more aha! moments that will benefit us all.
Burchard sums up the issue succinctly: “Increased diversity in science and medicine leads to better science.”
Millions of Americans Demand $130,000 for Not Having Sex With Trump
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=9160"><span class="small">Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker</span></a>
Sunday, 18 February 2018 15:28
Borowitz writes: "Millions of Americans on Wednesday demanded that Donald J. Trump's personal lawyer, Michael D. Cohen, issue them checks in the amount of $130,000 for not having sex with Trump."
Millions of Americans clamored to be compensated for abstaining from sex with Trump. (photo: Mait Juriado/Getty Images)
Millions of Americans Demand $130,000 for Not Having Sex With Trump
By Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker
18 February 18
The article below is satire. Andy Borowitz is an American comedian and New York Times-bestselling author who satirizes the news for his column, "The Borowitz Report."
illions of Americans on Wednesday demanded that Donald J. Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael D. Cohen, issue them checks in the amount of $130,000 for not having sex with Trump.
After Cohen revealed that he had issued such a check to Stormy Daniels, a porn star who he claims never had intimate relations with his client, there was widespread outrage among other Americans who had also not had sex with Trump but had not been paid for not doing so.
“Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy for Stormy Daniels,” Tracy Klugian, a florist in Santa Rosa, California, said. “I just want my check, too.”
Harland Dorrinson, a bank teller in Akron, Ohio, said that he had already e-mailed Cohen to demand payment. “I have never come close to having sex with Trump, and that should be worth something,” he said. “Specifically, $130,000.”
But, even as millions of Americans clamored to be compensated for abstaining from sex with Cohen’s client, others, like Carol Foyler, of Tallahassee, Florida, took a different view. “Never having sex with Donald Trump should be a reward in itself,” she said.
Engelhardt writes: "If you're in the mood, would you consider taking a walk with me and, while we're at it, thinking a little about America's wars? Nothing particularly ambitious, mind you, just - if you're up for it - a stroll to the corner."
Afghan National Army soldiers, left, and American soldiers blew up a Taliban firing position in the village of Layadira, Kandahar Province, in 2013. (photo: Bryan Denton/NYT)
A Trip Down Memory Lane, Pentagon-Style
By Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
18 February 18
f you’re in the mood, would you consider taking a walk with me and, while we’re at it, thinking a little about America’s wars? Nothing particularly ambitious, mind you, just -- if you’re up for it -- a stroll to the corner.
Now, admittedly, there’s a small catch here. Where exactly is that corner? I think the first time I heard about it might have been back in January 2004 and it was located somewhere in Iraq. That was, if you remember, just nine months after American troops triumphantly entered a burning Baghdad and the month after Iraq’s autocratic ruler, Saddam Hussein, was captured near his hometown, Tikrit. Yet despite President George W. Bush’s unforgettable May 1, 2003, “mission accomplished” moment when, from the deck of an aircraft carrier off the coast of San Diego, he declared "major combat operations in Iraq... ended," the American war there somehow never actually stopped. An insurgency had already flared, U.S. bases were being periodically mortared, and American officials feared that some kind of civil war was in the offing between the country’s formerly reigning Sunni minority and its rising Shiite majority.
It was then that Major General Charles Swannack Jr., commander of the 82nd Airborne Division, mentioned that corner (and as you’ll gather from his comments, it wasn’t even the first time he'd brought the subject up). Here, as New York Times correspondent John Burns reported it, was Swannack’s assessment of the situation:
“The general, a large, imposing figure renowned among his troops for his no-nonsense ways, began his remarks by reminding the reporters that he had appeared in Baghdad six weeks ago, about the time of the insurgents' Ramadan offensive, and had said he believed [troops] in his area were ‘turning the corner.’
“Now, he said, 'I'm here to tell you that we've turned that corner. I can also tell you that we are on a glide path towards success, as attacks on our forces have declined by almost 60 percent over the past month.’”
As it happened, Americans would remain on the glide path to that corner of ultimate success for some time, not just in Iraq but in Washington, too. There, as Rowan Scarborough reported more than a year later, in March 2005, "in the privacy of their E-ring offices, senior Pentagon officials have begun to entertain thoughts that were unimaginable a year ago: Iraq is turning the corner. 'This is still a tough fight. We don't want anyone to think that it is not,' said retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Thomas McInerney, a military analyst who strongly supports Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. 'But the momentum is in our direction.'”
Corner-less Iraq
Here was the problem: every time American troops actually turned that corner, what they found there were insurgents armed with rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) and other weaponry, sometimes even American-produced arms. In addition, the streets around that corner turned out to be pitted with half-buried improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, those same insurgents could build from instructions on the Internet and that could destroy the most well-armored Humvee for the price of a pizza. (Early on, in fact, some of the places down which American troops had to turn were already being given grimly sardonic names like “RPG Alley.”) There were, as it happened, so many corners to turn and yet, from 2003 on, seemingly nowhere to go.
I don’t doubt that those of you of a certain age preparing for our little walk are already thinking about a somewhat more perilous image from another war: the infamous “light at the end of the tunnel” that will forever be connected with Vietnam. That phrase was repeatedly used by Americans to describe the glide path to victory in that conflict and would long be associated with the commander of U.S. forces, General William Westmoreland. He used it to remarkable effect in 1967, a mere 10 weeks before the enemy launched its devastating Tet Offensive.
However, the general was anything but alone in his choice of imagery. That “tunnel” was also occupied by a range of top U.S. officials, from President Lyndon Johnson to National Security Advisor Walt Rostow. And it wasn’t the newest of images either. After all, General Henri Navarre had used it a decade and a half earlier in the French version of that losing war.
For those in the antiwar movement of the era, it was an image that always had a particularly ominous resonance, since you weren’t just heading for “the corner” but deep inside a dark tunnel where, just beyond the light glimmering at its end, it was easy enough to imagine a train bearing down on you. By the way, lest you think there’s anything especially original about the American military in the twenty-first century, Westmoreland also spoke with hope in 1967 (but assumedly before he found himself in that tunnel) of how the U.S. “had turned the corner in the war” and how its end had begun “to come into view.”
In Iraq, the light at the end of the corner would prove no more evident than it had been in that Vietnamese tunnel and, as a result, the corner itself simply disappeared. In fact, in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee in April 2008, U.S. commander (and Iraq surge general) David Petraeus even admitted, however reluctantly, that “we haven’t turned any corners, we haven’t seen any lights at the end of the tunnel.” And soon after that, corners of any sort were largely abandoned (at least as figures of speech). Or perhaps, thought of another way, the problem of finding a corner, no less any good news on the other side of it, would be solved by a change in tactics in the second iteration of Washington’s Iraq War in this century: the one against the Islamic State. From August 2014 on, the U.S. Air Force would be called in to play a major role in turning Iraq’s embattled cities, from Fallujah to Mosul, into so much rubble. No corners, no problems, you might say.
Now, I don’t want you to be disappointed. I was serious about that walk to the corner, just not in Iraq. Consider corner-less Iraq no more than background information for the real walk we’re going to take.
But before we leave Iraq, let me mention -- and I hope you won’t consider me too much of an optimist for this -- that I just might see a little light glimmering at the end of the rubble. Is it possible that, some 14 years late, America’s mission-accomplished moment is finally arriving? After all, the “caliphate” of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is history and, in December, President Donald Trump even declared victory over ISIS. (“We’ve won in Iraq,” he said without hesitation or qualification.) No tunnel, no corner, no glimmers of light, just the whole shebang.
Now admittedly, while the so-called caliphate is gone and its militants driven out of the Iraqi and Syrian cities they had occupied, some of its fighters seem to be turning themselves back into guerrilla warriors and suicide bombers -- the first post-caliphate bombings in Baghdad have evidently begun -- and aren’t quite acting like they’re down for the count. Not yet anyway (and let’s not forget as well that, in the years leading to Washington’s “victory,” the Islamic State did somehow manage to turn itself into a global terror brand).
Still, give me a little leeway here. I’m just talking about glimmers, and... oh, wait, I should mention one more thing: in neighboring Syria, all a-glimmer itself these days, the U.S. is now seemingly on the brink of involvement in a whole new war between NATO ally Turkey and the Kurdish forces it’s still backing against ISIS and, talking about what’s glimmering in the distance, a possible future war with Iran also seems to be lurking just around the next turn of the Trumpian corner.
Still, let’s keep the good news in full view. U.S. troops are actually being drawn down in Iraq and a mere 14 years after that mission-accomplished moment, some of them are evidently being sent to the place where that corner-to-be-turned still evidently stands, where for America’s war-fighting generals and other key officials, there have always been corners to turn beyond compare.
“Enhancing Security and Stability in Afghanistan”
So how about taking that little walk of ours somewhere in Afghanistan? After all, a mere 16 years after the Bush administration invaded and liberated that land -- at the end of November 2017, to be exact -- U.S. commander Army General John Nicholson, who had only recently been claiming that the fight against the Taliban (and a new branch of ISIS) was “still in a stalemate,” suddenly suggested... yes, you guessed it... that the by-now famous corner, so long sought after, was once again being turned. He managed to make the point by quoting a recent statement of Afghan President Ashraf Ghani, saying, “Now, looking ahead to 2018, as President Ghani said, he believes we have turned the corner and I agree. The momentum is now with the Afghan Security Forces and the Taliban cannot win in the face of the pressures that I outlined. Again, their choices are to reconcile, live in irrelevance, or die.”
If, so many years later, General Nicholson were alone in such a conclusion, you might question his claim, given that the Taliban now control or contest more Afghan territory than at any time since they were driven from power in 2001; that President Ghani’s government seems shakier than any since the U.S. “liberated” the country; that the Afghan security forces have been taking a beating; and that the capital, Kabul, the heartland of government control, has been a veritable inferno of terror attacks. Still, here’s what gives Nicholson’s statement its power: he’s not alone. His conclusion has been backed by a remarkable array of knowledgeable officials since at least 2010.
Here’s just a partial list: U.S. Afghan commander General Stanley McChrystal in February 2010 (the U.S. had “turned the corner” in Helmand Province in the embattled poppy-producing southern heartland of the country); Secretary of Defense Robert Gates on June 7, 2011 ("I leave Afghanistan today with the belief that if we keep this momentum up, we will deliver a decisive blow to the enemy and turn the corner in this conflict”) and his boss President Barack Obama on the same day (“We’ve broken the Taliban’s momentum, trained Afghan security forces, and are now preparing to turn a corner in our efforts"); Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Martin Dempsey in April 2012 (“In my opening months as chairman, I worked with the secretary of defense and the president to fashion a new defense strategy, guidance that would address the security paradox. This guidance is meant to help our military... turn the corner from a decade of focus on stability operations and find a new way forward to address that wider spectrum of threats”); and Gates’s successor, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, in September 2012 (“We have turned the corner”); and so it’s gone in Afghanistan.
Or put another way, never have so many prospective corners been turned over so many years to so little effect. Nonetheless, if you’re game, let’s think about heading out in search of just such a corner one more time. Before we go, though, let me mention one other thing. Given the experiences of the British and the Soviets, among others, Afghanistan has long been called “the graveyard of empires.” However, for Afghans since 1979, when the first iteration of America’s wars there began, it has simply been a graveyard. This year, things have already gotten so bad in Kabul -- from attacks on a major hotel and a military academy to a devastating bomb concealed inside an ambulance -- that city dwellers have reportedly taken to carrying “in case I die” notes with them, lest their bodies be shredded and left unidentifiable by the latest Taliban or ISIS terror assault.
Across the country, in winter -- usually a time of little fighting -- the war(s) are simply being ratcheted up. The Trump administration and the Pentagon are sending in more troops (“advisers”), more planes, and more drones. The U.S. military has announced soaring numbers of air strikes, as well as more bombings (including record ones) than at any time since 2012 when 100,000, not 14,00-15,000, U.S. troops were in-country. And the U.S. air commander there, Air Force Major General James Hecker, recently threatened more of them, claiming that “the Taliban still has not felt the full brunt of American and Afghan air power.” And yet, according to both the Pentagon and a recent BBC study, the Taliban is now contesting more territory than at any time since 2002 and militants from the ISIS branch there have similarly been spreading to new parts of the country.
Yes, the U.S. military (in support of Afghan security forces) and the Taliban (as well as ISIS) are fighting each other, but functionally, when it comes to ordinary Afghans, they are colluding in killing striking numbers of civilians across the country. In other words, more than a decade and a half later, despite those corners, it all only seems to be getting worse with no end in sight.
After all, in these years, the two groups the Bush administration went after in 2001, al-Qaeda and the Taliban, have somehow morphed into “more than 20 terrorist and insurgent groups” on either side of the Afghani-Pakistani border. (And in case you doubt those figures, they're straight out of a recent ill-titled Pentagon report, “Enhancing Security and Stability in Afghanistan.”) Beyond Afghanistan, in these years, the same process has been repeating itself, as the original al-Qaeda morphed into a whole range of groups (al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, and so on) and the same thing is now happening to ISIS.
In fact, I’m starting to wonder about almost any corner in much of the Greater Middle East and Africa, which means it’s true: I’m the one who’s hesitating now. I know what I promised you, but to be honest, I’m having my doubts about this walk of ours. I’m worried about what exactly will happen if we ever do get to that corner. Who, after all, wants to whistle past a graveyard?
So here’s my suggestion. Why don’t we just postpone our walk for a while? Bad as things are right now, experience tells us -- or at least our military commanders swear to it -- that they’ll get better sooner or later. What if we check back this fall, or maybe early next year, or perhaps sometime in 2020, or even 2021? By that time, there has to be at least one corner around which we could... well, you know what I’m about to say. Count on one thing: I’ll be in touch.
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=36361"><span class="small">Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Facebook Page</span></a>
Sunday, 18 February 2018 11:44
Reich writes: "Wednesday's attack at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, in Parkland, Florida, in which 17 people were killed, was the eighth school shooting this year that has resulted in death or injury. And, remember, the year began less than 6 weeks ago."
Robert Reich. (photo: unknown)
When Will This Nation Wake Up?
By Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Facebook Page
18 Wednesday 18
ednesday’s attack at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, in Parkland, Florida, in which 17 people were killed, was the eighth school shooting this year that has resulted in death or injury. And, remember, the year began less than 6 weeks ago.
According to local police, the Florida shooter was armed with an AR-15 assault-style rifle. It’s the same type of gun that another shooter used to kill 26 children and staff at Sandy Hook Elementary School, in December, 2012. The AR-15 assault rifle fires bullets that can penetrate a steel helmet from a distance of 500 yards. The bullets don’t merely penetrate the human body; they tear it apart.
Why are such weapons allowed to be manufactured and purchased in America? I have always assumed that the minimal responsibility of government is to protect its citizens from deadly violence.
Law and order, safety and security, is the bedrock campaign slogan of the Republican Party. Yet, as John Cassidy points out, when it comes to mass shootings, the Republican Party falls back on constitutional arguments that have no proper basis in history, and it refuses to budge from this stance. Nothing can shift it—not Sandy Hook, not the Orlando night-club shooting, not the Las Vegas massacre, not weekly shootings in schools. The Democrats have not been without fault when it comes to controlling gun violence, but the GOP’s lack of integrity on this issue is beyond the pale.
The crisis is getting worse. When will this nation wake up? What do you think?
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=44284"><span class="small">Bernie Sanders, Medium</span></a>
Sunday, 18 February 2018 09:33
Sanders writes: "The whole debate that we are now undertaking over immigration and the Dreamers has become somewhat personal for me, because it has reminded me in a very strong way that I and my brother are first-generation Americans."
Dreamers Protesting at the Capitol. (photo: Medium)
The Great Moral Issue of Our Time
By Bernie Sanders, Medium
18 February 18
Remarks delivered on the Senate floor Feb. 14, 2018
et me begin by congratulating Chloe Kim, a first-generation American, who won a gold medal for the United States in the women’s halfpipe snowboarding event this week.
Her father, Jong Jin Kim, emigrated from South Korea to the United States in 1982, became a dishwasher at a fast food restaurant. He studied engineering at El Camino College after working at low-skill jobs and then became an engineer. He left his engineering job to support his daughter’s snowboarding ambitions, so that he could drive her 5 and a half hours to the mountain for training.
Congratulations to Chloe and her entire family. You make the United States proud.
The whole debate that we are now undertaking over immigration and the Dreamers has become somewhat personal for me, because it has reminded me in a very strong way that I and my brother are first-generation Americans. We are the sons of an immigrant who came to this country at the age of 17 without a nickel in his pocket, young man who was a high school dropout who did not know one word English and had no particular trade.
A few years ago my brother and I and our family went to the small town that he came from and it just stunned me the kind of courage that he showed and millions of other people showed leaving their homeland to come to a very different world?—?without money, in many cases, without knowledge of the language.
My father immigrated to this country because the town he lived in in Poland was incredibly poor, there was no economic opportunity for him, people there struggled to put food on the table for their families. Hunger was a real issue in that area. My father came to this country to avoid the violence and bloodshed of World War I which had come close to his part of the world in a ferocious manner. He came to this country to escape the religious bigotry that existed then because he was Jewish.
My father lived in this country until his death in 1962. He never made a lot of money. He was a paint salesman.
My father was not a political person but it turned out that, without talking much about it, he was the proudest American that you ever saw. And he was so proud of this country because he was deeply grateful that the United States had welcomed him in and allowed him opportunities that would have been absolutely unthinkable from where he came.
But the truth is that immigration is not just my story. It’s not just the story of one young man coming from Poland who managed to see two of his kids go to college and one of his sons becoming a United States Senator. It’s just my family’s story. It is the story of my wife’s family who came from Ireland. And it is the story of tens of millions of American families who came from every single part of this world.
In September of 2017, President Trump precipitated the current crisis we are dealing with by revoking President Obama’s DACA executive order. If President Trump believed that that executive order was unconstitutional and needed legislation, he could have come to Congress for a legislative solution without holding 800,000 young people hostage by revoking their DACA status. But President Trump chose not to do that. He chose to provoke the crisis that we are experiencing today. And that is a crisis we have to deal with, and here in the Senate we have to deal with it now.
And let us be very clear about the nature of this crisis. Some people say, “Well, it’s really not imminent, it’s not something we have to worry about now.” Those people are wrong. As a result of Trump’s decision, 122 people every day are now losing their legal status, and within a couple of years hundreds of thousands of these young people will have lost their legal protection and be subject to deportation.
The situation we are in right now as a result of Trump’s action means that if we do not immediately protect the legal status of some 800,000 Dreamers?—?young people brought into this country at the age of 1, or 3, or 6, young people who have known no home other than the United States?—?let us be clear that if we do not act and act soon these hundreds of thousands of young people could be subject to deportation.
And that means they could be arrested outside of the home where they have lived for virtually their entire life and suddenly be placed in a jail.
They could be pulled out of a classroom where they are teaching, and there are some 20,000 DACA recipients who are now teaching in schools all over this country. And if we do not act and act now, there could be agents going into those schools and pulling those teachers right out and arresting them and subjecting them to deportation.
Insane as it may sound, I suppose that the 900 DACA recipients who now serve in the United States military today could find themselves in the position of being arrested and deported from the country that they are putting their lives on the line to defend. And some people say, “Well, that’s farfetched.” Well, I’m not so sure. It could happen. How insane is that? But that’s where we are today and that’s what could happen if we do not do the right thing and this week pass legislation here in the Senate to protect the Dreamers.
We have a moral responsibility to stand up for the Dreamers and their families, and to prevent what will be an indelible moral stain on our country if we fail to act. I do not want to see what the history books will be saying about this Congress if we allow 800,000 young people to be subjected to deportation, to live in incredible fear and anxiety.
But here is the very, very good news regarding the Dreamers. And it’s actually news that I, a couple of years ago, would not have believed to be possible. And that is that the overwhelming majority of the American people?—?Democrats, Republicans, Independents?—?absolutely agree that we must provide legal protection for the Dreamers, and that we should provide them with a path towards citizenship. That is not Bernie Sanders talking. That is what the American people are saying in poll after poll after poll.
Just recently, a Jan. 20 CBS News poll found that nearly 9 in 10 Americans, 87 percent, favor allowing young immigrants who entered the U.S. illegally as children to remain in the United States. Eighty-seven percent. In Iowa, in Vermont, and in every state in this country, strong support for legal status for the Dreamers and a path toward citizenship.
On Jan. 11 a Quinnipiac poll found that 86 percent of American voters, including 76 percent of Republicans, say they want Dreamers to remain in the country.
On Feb. 5, in a Monmouth poll, when asked about Dreamers’ status, nearly 3 out of 4 Americans support allowing these young people to automatically become U.S. citizens as long as they don’t have a criminal record.
In other words the votes that are going to be cast hopefully be cast today, maybe tomorrow, are not profiles in courage! They are not members of the Senate coming up and saying, “Against all of the odds, I believe that I’m going to vote for what is right!” This is what the overwhelming majority of the American people want. And maybe, just maybe, it might be appropriate to do what the American people want, rather than what a handful of xenophobic extremists want. Maybe we should listen to the American people. Democrats, Republicans and Independents who understand that it would be a morally atrocious thing to allow these young people to be deported.
I think from a political perspective, about 80, 85, 90 percent of the American people support anything in a nation which is as divided as we are today?—?you can’t get 80 percent of the American people to agree on what their favorite ice cream is but we got 80 percent of the American people who are saying, do not turn your backs on these young people who have lived in this country for virtually their entire lives.
We have got to act and act soon here in the Senate and there is good legislation that would allow us to do that. And in the House the good news is that there is bipartisan sponsored by Congressman Hurd and Congressman Aguilar, which will provide protection for Dreamers and a path toward citizenship.
My understanding that that bipartisan legislation now has majority support, and I urge in the strongest terms possible, that Speaker Ryan to allow democracy to prevail in the House. Allow the vote to take place if you have a majority of members in the House in a bipartisan way who support legislation, allow that legislation come to the floor. Let the members vote their will and if that occurs I think the Dreamers legislation will prevail.
We all understand that there is a need for serious debate and legislation regarding comprehensive immigration reform. This is a difficult issue. An issue where there are differences of opinion, a whole lot of aspects to it. How do we provide a path toward citizenship for the 11 million people in this country who are currently undocumented but who are working hard, or raising their kids, who are obeying the law.
What should the overall immigration policy of our country be?—?how many people should be allowed into this country every year, where they come from?—?all of this is very, very important, and needs to be seriously debated. But that debate and that legislation is not going to be taking place in a two-day period. It’s going to need some serious time, some hearings, some committee work, before the Congress is prepared to vote on comprehensive immigration reform. It will not and cannot happen today or tomorrow or this week.
Our focus now as a result of Trump’s decision in September must be on protecting the Dreamers and their families, and on the issue of border security.
There will be important legislation coming to the floor of the Senate today or maybe tomorrow. And I would hope that we could do the right thing, do the moral thing and do something that history will look back on as very positive legislation. Let us go forward. Let us pass the Dreamers bill. Let us deal with border security. And then in the near future let us deal with comprehensive immigration reform.
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