Chris Hedges's Blog, page 540

Trump to Rescind Obama-Era Guidance on Affirmative Action

WASHINGTON—The Trump administration is rescinding Obama-era guidance that encouraged schools to take a student’s race into account to encourage diversity in admissions, a U.S. official said Tuesday.

The shift would give schools and universities the federal government’s blessing to take a race-neutral approach to the students they consider for admission. Such guidance does not have the force of law, but schools could use it to help defend themselves against lawsuits over their admission policies.

The action comes amid Supreme Court turnover expected to produce a more critical eye toward schools’ affirmative action policies.

The high court’s most recent significant ruling on the subject bolstered colleges’ use of race among many factors in the college admission process. But the opinion’s author, Anthony Kennedy, announced his resignation last week, giving President Donald Trump a chance to replace him with a justice who will be more reliably skeptical of affirmative action.

A formal announcement was expected later Tuesday from the Justice and Education departments, according to the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the official was not authorized to speak on the record.

The guidance from the Obama administration gave schools a framework for “considering race to further the compelling interests in achieving diversity and avoiding racial isolation.”

In a 2011 policy document, the administration said schools have a “compelling interest” in ensuring a diverse student body, and that while race should not be the primary factor in an admission decision, schools could lawfully consider it in the interest of achieving diversity.

“Institutions are not required to implement race-neutral approaches if, in their judgment, the approaches would be unworkable,” the guidance said. “In some cases, race-neutral approaches will be unworkable because they will be ineffective to achieve the diversity the institution seeks.”

The administration issued a similar guidance document in 2016 aimed at giving schools a framework for “considering race to further the compelling interests in achieving diversity and avoiding racial isolation.”

The Obama approach replaced Bush-era policy from a decade earlier that discouraged affirmative action programs and instead encouraged the use of race-neutral alternatives, like percentage plans and economic diversity programs.

The Trump administration signaled Tuesday that it planned to reinstate the Bush administration’s philosophy.

Civil liberties groups immediately decried the move, saying it went against decades of court rulings that permit colleges and universities to take race into account.

“We condemn the Department of Education’s politically motivated attack on affirmative action and deliberate attempt to discourage colleges and universities from pursuing racial diversity at our nation’s colleges and universities,” Kristen Clarke, president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, said in a statement.

In 2016, the Supreme Court, in an opinion written by Kennedy, granted affirmative action policies a narrow victory by permitting race to be among the factors considered in the college admission process.

Kennedy wrote that the University of Texas’ admission plan was in line with past court decisions that allowed for the consideration of race to promote diversity on college campuses.

The ruling bitterly disappointed conservatives who thought that Kennedy would be part of a Supreme Court majority to outlaw affirmative action in education. Justice Antonin Scalia died after the court heard arguments in the case but before the decision was handed down.

Eight states already prohibit the use of race in public college admissions: Arizona, California, Florida, Michigan, Nebraska, New Hampshire, Oklahoma and Washington.

The Wall Street Journal first reported the move.

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Follow Eric Tucker on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/etuckerAP

Associated Press writers Mark Sherman and Jesse Holland in Washington contributed to this report.

How Much All-Seeing AI Surveillance Is Too Much?

BOSTON—When a CIA-backed venture capital fund took an interest in Rana el Kaliouby’s face-scanning technology for detecting emotions, the computer scientist and her colleagues did some soul-searching—and then turned down the money.

“We’re not interested in applications where you’re spying on people,” said el Kaliouby, the CEO and co-founder of the Boston startup Affectiva. The company has trained its artificial intelligence systems to recognize if individuals are happy or sad, tired or angry, using a photographic repository of more than 6 million faces.

Recent advances in AI-powered computer vision have accelerated the race for self-driving cars and powered the increasingly sophisticated photo-tagging features found on Facebook and Google. But as these prying AI “eyes” find new applications in store checkout lines, police body cameras and war zones, the tech companies developing them are struggling to balance business opportunities with difficult moral decisions that could turn off customers or their own workers.

El Kaliouby said it’s not hard to imagine using real-time face recognition to pick up on dishonesty—or, in the hands of an authoritarian regime, to monitor reaction to political speech in order to root out dissent. But the small firm, which spun off from an MIT research lab, has set limits on what it will do.

The company has shunned “any security, airport, even lie detection stuff,” el Kaliouby said. Instead, Affectiva has partnered with automakers trying to help tired-looking drivers stay awake, and with consumer brands that want to know if people respond to a product with joy or disgust.

Such queasiness reflects new qualms about the capabilities and possible abuses of all-seeing, always watching AI camera systems—even as authorities are growing more eager to use them.

In the immediate aftermath of Thursday’s deadly shooting at a newspaper in Annapolis, Maryland, police said they turned to face recognition to identify the uncooperative suspect when fingerprint analysis ran into delays. They did so by tapping a state database that includes mug shots of past arrestees and, more controversially, everyone who registered for a Maryland driver’s license.

In June, Orlando International Airport announced plans to require face-identification scans of passengers on all arriving and departing international flights by the end of this year. Several other U.S. airports have already been using such scans for some, but not all, departing international flights.

Chinese firms and municipalities are already using intelligent cameras to shame jaywalkers in real time and to surveil ethnic minorities, subjecting some to detention and political indoctrination. Closer to home, the overhead cameras and sensors in Amazon’s new cashier-less store in Seattle aim to make shoplifting obsolete by tracking every item shoppers pick up and put back down.

Concerns over the technology can shake even the largest tech firms. Google, for instance, recently said it will exit a defense contract after employees protested the military application of the company’s AI technology. The work involved computer analysis of drone video footage from Iraq and other conflict zones.

Similar concerns about government contracts have stirred up internal discord at Amazon and Microsoft. Google has since published AI guidelines emphasizing uses that are “socially beneficial” and that avoid “unfair bias.”

Amazon, however, has so far deflected growing pressure from employees and privacy advocates to halt Rekognition, a powerful face-recognition tool it sells to police departments and other government agencies.

Saying no to some work, of course, usually means someone else will do it. The drone-footage project involving Google, dubbed Project Maven, aimed to speed the job of looking for “patterns of life, things that are suspicious, indications of potential attacks,” said Robert Work, a former top Pentagon official who launched the project in 2017.

While it hurts to lose Google because they are “very, very good at it,” Work said, other companies will continue those efforts.

Commercial and government interest in computer vision has exploded since breakthroughs earlier in this decade using a brain-like “neural network” to recognize objects in images. Training computers to identify cats in YouTube videos was an early challenge in 2012. Now, Google has a smartphone app that can tell you which breed.

A major research meeting—the annual Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, held in Salt Lake City in June—has transformed from a sleepy academic gathering of “nerdy people” to a gold rush business expo attracting big companies and government agencies, said Michael Brown, a computer scientist at Toronto’s York University and a conference organizer.

Brown said researchers have been offered high-paying jobs on the spot. But few of the thousands of technical papers submitted to the meeting address broader public concerns about privacy, bias or other ethical dilemmas. “We’re probably not having as much discussion as we should,” he said.

Startups are forging their own paths. Brian Brackeen, the CEO of Miami-based facial recognition software company Kairos, has set a blanket policy against selling the technology to law enforcement or for government surveillance, arguing in a recent essay that it “opens the door for gross misconduct by the morally corrupt.”

Boston-based startup Neurala, by contrast, is building software for Motorola that will help police-worn body cameras find a person in a crowd based on what they’re wearing and what they look like. CEO Max Versace said that “AI is a mirror of the society,” so the company only chooses principled partners.

“We are not part of that totalitarian, Orwellian scheme,” he said.

A Mother Confronts Scott Pruitt in Restaurant, Demands His Resignation

Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Scott Pruitt on Monday became the latest member of the Trump administration to be called out while dining at a D.C. restaurant when Kristin Mink walked up, introduced her two-year-old child, and demanded Pruitt resign because, as she put it, “We deserve to have somebody at the EPA who actually does protect our environment, somebody who believes in climate change and takes it seriously, for the benefit of all of us, including our children.”

“Hi, I just wanted to urge you to resign because of what you’re doing to the environment and our country. This is my son. He loves animals. He loves clean air. He loves clean water. Meanwhile, you’re slashing strong fuel standards for cars and trucks, for the benefits of big corporations,” Mink said.

Noting Pruitt’s contentious condo rental from an energy lobbyist’s wife and the more than a dozen other federal probes he’s prompted, she concluded, “I would urge you to resign before your scandals push you out.”

Watch:

Mink posted the video—with a message saying Pruitt did not respond and left the restaurant—to her personal Facebook account along with a link to the Sierra Club’s petition imploring President Donald Trump and Congress #BootPruitt because, as the group says, the EPA chief’s “dirty dealings put us in danger.” While Pruitt’s mountain of scandals involving a used hotel mattress, pricey moisturizer, and Chick-fil-A have elicited outrage, so has the polluter-friendly deregulatory agenda he is pushing through at the behest of the chemical and fossil fuel industries.

 In her post, Mink wrote of Pruitt: “This man is directly and significantly harming my child’s—and every child’s—health and future with decisions to roll back environmental regulations for the benefit of big corporations, while he uses taxpayer money to fund a lavish lifestyle. He’s corrupt, he’s a liar, he’s a climate change denier, and as a public servant, he should not be able to go out in public without hearing from the citizens he’s hurting.”

This confrontation comes just two weeks after Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen was driven out of a Mexican restaurant in D.C. by members of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and, at another D.C. establishment, a patron called Trump senior adviser Stephen Miller a “fascist,” over their roles in the Trump administration’s family separation policy.

Critics of the policy also protested outside of Nielsen’s Alexandria, Virginia home and Miller’s apartment complex in D.C. Following all of those events, the owner of a Red Hen restaurant in Lexington, Virginia refused to serve White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders and asked her to leave.

These recent encounters between members of the Trump adminstration and the public have provoked an intense national debate over “incivility.” Michelangelo Signorile wrote last week for The Huffington Post, “It’s outrageous, but not at all shocking, to see calls for ‘civility’ from some Beltway media pundits and prominent Democratic operatives and politicians in the wake of the recent in-your-face protests of Trump officials.”

As Signorile explained:

Acting up is not about impulsiveness and feeling good (though it does feel good to speak truth to power). It’s about saving lives by strategically targeting people for protest. Yes, shaming does work. …It’s not about changing the minds of Trump supporters. It’s about lighting a spark under those who aren’t paying attention―many of whom may have dropped out under the weight of the daily atrocities―or who might now feel hope when they see others speaking out. More strident protest also forces the media to cover issues―even as journalists carp and complain about the tactics―and to focus on the fact that many Americans see a national emergency unfolding.

“So, it’s time to raise hell. It’s time to scream out loud. It’s time to wake up everyone we can, before it’s too late,” he concluded. “Let it not be said that we stayed silent and ‘let the Trump team eat in peace’ while it rather rapidly turned America into a fascist state.”

California Dreaming: Cannabis Cash, Public Banks—and the State’s Own Mini-Fed?

Spurred by the heavily cash-reliant cannabis industry, Los Angeles residents will be the first in the country to vote on a public banking mandate, after the City Council agreed on June 29 to put a measure on the November ballot that would allow the city to form its own bank.

The charter for the nation’s second-largest city currently prohibits the creation of industrial or commercial enterprises by the city without voter approval. The measure, introduced by City Council President Herb Wesson, would allow the city to create a public bank, though federal and state legal hurdles would remain to be cleared.

The bank is also expected to save the city millions, if not billions, of dollars in Wall Street fees and interest paid to bondholders, while injecting new money into the local economy, generating jobs and expanding the tax base. It could respond to the needs of its residents and reinvest in low-income housing, critical infrastructure projects and clean energy.

The push for such a bank comes amid ongoing concerns involving the massive amounts of cash generated by the cannabis business, which was legalized by California’s Proposition 64 in 2016. Wesson has said cannabis has “kind of percolated to the top” of the public bank push, “but it’s not what’s driving” it, citing affordable housing and other key issues. He added the concept of a public bank should be pursued regardless of the cannabis issue.

However, the prospect of millions of dollars in tax revenue is an obvious draw. Los Angeles is the largest cannabis market in the state, with Mayor Eric Garcetti estimating it would bring in $30 million in taxes for the city.

State Board of Equalization member Fiona Ma, who is running for state treasurer, says California’s $8 billion to $20 billion cannabis industry is still operating mostly in cash almost two years after state legalization. She adds that the majority of businesses are operating on the black market without paying taxes. This is in large part because federal law denies them access to the banking system, forcing them to deal only in cash and causing logistical nightmares when paying taxes and transferring money.

Cannabis is still a forbidden Schedule 1 drug under federal law, and the Federal Reserve has refused to give a master account to banks taking cannabis cash. Without a master account, they cannot access Fedwire transfer services, essentially shutting them out of the banking business.

In a surprise move in early June, President Trump announced he “probably will end up supporting” legislation to let states set their own cannabis policy. But Ma says that while that is good news, California cannot wait on the federal government. She and state Sen. Bob Hertzberg, D-Los Angeles, have introduced Senate Bill 930, which would allow state-chartered banks and financial institutions to apply for a special cannabis banking license to accept clients after a rigorous process that follows regulations from the U.S. Treasury Department. The bill cleared a major legislative hurdle when it was approved by the state Senate on May 30.

SB 930 focuses on California state-chartered banks, which can operate under a closed-loop system with private deposit insurance, unlike federally chartered banks. As Ma explained in a May 17 article in the Sacramento Bee:

There are two types of banks—those with federal charters, and banks with California charters. Because cannabis is still considered a Schedule 1 narcotic, we cannot touch federal banking wires. We want state-chartered banks that are protected, regulated and certified under California law, and not required to be under the FDIC.

State income taxes, sales taxes, unemployment, workers’ compensation and property taxes could all be paid through a closed-loop system that takes in revenue from the cannabis industry, but is apart from the federal banking system. … Cannabis businesses could be part of a cashless system similar to Apple Pay, and their money would be insured by a state-licensed institution.

That is a pretty revolutionary idea—a closed-loop California banking system that is independent of the Federal Reserve and the federal system. The provisions of SB 930 would allow only cannabis cash to bypass the federal system, and the bill strictly limits what the checks issued by pot banks can be. But the prospects it opens up are interesting. California is now the fifth-largest economy in the world, with 39 million people. It has the resources for its own cashless “CalPay” or “CalCoin” system that could bypass the federal system altogether.

The Bank of North Dakota, currently the nation’s only state-owned depository bank, has been called a “mini-Fed” for that state. California, with more than 50 times North Dakota’s population, merits its own mini-Fed as well. The Bank of North Dakota partners with local banks to make below-market loans for community purposes, including 2 percent loans for local infrastructure, while at the same time turning a tidy profit for the state. In 2017, it recorded its 14th consecutive year of record profits, with $145.3 million in net earnings and a return on the state’s investment of 17 percent.

It is significant that the proposal for a closed-loop California system is coming from players that have political clout. Ma won the June primary election for state treasurer by a landslide, and the current state treasurer, John Chiang, has been exploring for over a year the possibility of a public bank that could take cannabis cash. Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, the front-runner for governor, also has called for the creation of a public bank. These are not armchair academics but the people who make political decisions for the state, and they have substantial popular support.

Public bank advocacy groups from cities across California have joined to form the California Public Banking Alliance, a coalition to advance legislation that would make it easier to establish municipal banks statewide under a special state charter.

A press release by Public Bank Los Angeles, one of its founding advocacy groups, notes that 15 pieces of legislation for public banks are being explored in the U.S. through municipal committees and state legislators, and more than three dozen public banking movements are growing across the country. San Francisco has created a 16-person Municipal Bank Feasibility Task Force; Seattle and Washington, D.C., have approved $100,000 each for public banking feasibility studies; and Washington state legislators have added nearly $500,000 to their budget to produce a business plan for a public depository bank. New Jersey state legislators, with the backing of Gov. Phil Murphy, have introduced a bill to form a state-owned bank, and GOP and Democratic lawmakers in Michigan have filed a bipartisan bill to create one in that state.

Cities and states are seeking ways to better leverage taxpayer dollars and reinvest them in the needs of local communities. Public banking serves that purpose, providing local determination and the opportunity for socially and environmentally responsible lending and investments. The City Council of Los Angeles is now taking it to the voters, and where California goes, the nation may well follow.

3-Year-Old Dies After Being Stabbed at Her Birthday Party

BOISE, Idaho—A 3-year-old Idaho girl who was stabbed at her own birthday party died Monday, two days after a man invaded the celebration and attacked nine people with a knife, authorities said.

Timmy Kinner is accused of stabbing a group of children and the adults who tried to protect them at the party at an apartment complex that is home to many refugee families.

Word of the child’s death came at Kinner’s first court appearance, where Ada County Magistrate Judge Russell Comstock told him that he was charged with first-degree murder and other felonies in connection with the Saturday night attack.

Comstock told Kinner he was “an extreme danger to the community” and ordered him held without bond.

Kinner is American, and the victims are members of refugee families from Syria, Iraq and Ethiopia. Boise Police Chief William Bones said the evidence does not suggest the attack was a hate crime.

The suspect had recently stayed at the apartment complex but was asked to leave Friday over bad behavior, Bones said.

The 30-year-old appeared in court through closed-circuit video, a common practice for first appearances in Idaho. Wearing a tattered off-white sweatshirt with his arms shackled to his waist, Kinner told the judge he didn’t understand the charges or proceedings. He also said he wanted to represent himself.

The judge ordered that he be appointed a public defender anyway.

“I can’t explain the charges any more clearly than I just did,” he told Kinner.

Three of the stabbing victims were adults, the others children: the 3-year-old girl who died, two 4-year-olds, a 6-year-old, an 8-year-old and a 12-year-old.

If convicted, Kinner could be eligible for execution under Idaho law. Ada County Prosecutor Jan Bennetts said her office has not yet decided whether to seek the death penalty, saying those “high-level decisions” are made only after all the facts are in.

Immigration Standoff in Germany Ends in a Deal

BERLIN—Chancellor Angela Merkel and her rebellious political allies broke an impasse over immigration that threatened to bring down Germany’s coalition government by agreeing on a compromise late Monday that both sides said addressed their concerns.

Merkel has been at odds for more than three weeks with Interior Minister Horst Seehofer over his insistence that migrants who have sought asylum elsewhere in the European Union should be turned away at Germany’s borders. Seehofer leads the Christian Social Union, the sister party to the chancellor’s Christian Democratic Union.

Merkel was equally steadfast in arguing that such a unilateral action would cause other countries to close their borders and jeopardize the passport-free movement that is a hallmark of Europe’s Schengen zone.

But the two emerged from about five hours of talks saying they agreed to establish “transit centers” on Germany’s border with Austria where asylum-seekers would be evaluated and, if it turned out they already had applied for protection in another EU country, sent back to that country.

Individuals who are rejected by those countries will be pointed back into Austria “upon agreement” with Vienna, according to the deal that Merkel called a “very good compromise.”

“The spirit of partnership within the European Union is protected, and at the same time it’s a decisive step to regulate and organize secondary migration,” she told reporters without taking questions.

It was not immediately clear whether Austria had already agreed to the provision. Whether the two conservative parties would be able to get Merkel’s junior coalition partner, the center-left Social Democratic Party, to agree also was an open question. The Social Democrats previously rejected the idea of transit centers.

While the deal sounded very similar to one offered by Merkel and rejected by Seehofer last week, the interior minister said he was happy with it, saying the compromise would have a “very clear lasting effect on the future.”

Seehofer offered his resignation both as interior minister and leader of the Bavaria-only CSU at a party meeting Sunday. He agreed to put it off until after one more round of talks with Merkel and said Monday he would remain in both posts.

“I’m happy we were able to achieve this compromise, and it shows that it pays off to fight for your convictions,” Seehofer said.

Seehofer and Merkel have long had a difficult relationship and sparred over Germany’s approach to managing immigration on and off since 2015, when the chancellor welcomed refugees into the country.

However, the current dispute arose as far fewer newcomers have sought to enter Germany. It came ahead of a difficult Bavarian state election set for October that has the CSU determined to show that it is tough on migration.

In recent days, speculation focused on the possibility that Merkel would fire Seehofer if he went ahead with his plan. That would likely have ended the seven-decade partnership of the CDU and CSU, which have a joint parliamentary group, and would leave the government just short of a majority.

In comments to the Sueddeutsche Zeitung newspaper ahead of Monday’s renewed talks with Merkel, Seehofer complained he was in an “inconceivable” situation.

“I won’t let myself be fired by a chancellor who is only chancellor because of me,” he was quoted as saying, an apparent reference to the CSU’s traditionally strong election results in Bavaria.

Before the sides met, CDU leaders and lawmakers stressed the importance of maintaining the conservative alliance, Germany’s strongest political force for much of its post-war history.

Merkel had argued a plan to regulate immigration that EU leaders approved Friday and bilateral agreements in principle that she hashed out with some EU countries for them to take back migrants would accomplish what Seehofer seeks.

But the more conservative CSU worried its credibility was at stake as it tries to curb support for the rival anti-migration Alternative for Germany party, known as the AfD, in the Bavarian election.

So far, however, the gambit has played poorly in polls and Germans seem to be losing their patience.

“I think it’s caused by the atmosphere with the AfD,” said Joerg Hauvede, 47, as he left Berlin’s main train station. “I hope that the CSU will receive their just deserts for their actions.”

The Social Democrats, who have largely been bystanders so far, demanded that their coalition partners get their act together, and planned a meeting with the conservative leaders. Party leader Andrea Nahles said “the CSU is on a dangerous ego trip that is paralyzing Germany and Europe.”

“The blame game between CDU and CSU must end, because it is irresponsible,” she said.

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Miriam Karout contributed to this story.

A Fresh Look at Labor Issues in ‘Sorry to Bother You’

Where mainstream filmmakers hesitate to address sensitive political issues, their indie counterparts have taken up the gauntlet with such movies as last year’s “The Florida Project,” a masterful look at children on the brink of homelessness, and this summer’s “BlacKkKlansman,” Spike Lee’s highly anticipated, true-story account of a black cop who infiltrated the KKK. Both films provide keen insight on issues that never seem to get resolved.

A darling of Sundance Film Festival in January, “Sorry to Bother You,” by rapper-turned filmmaker Boots Riley (Raymond Lawrence Riley), is a movie in a similar vein but in a world of its own. Kudos to Annapurna Pictures, the gutsiest mainstream production company in Hollywood, for taking on the new film, and commendations to Riley for his often hilarious, hyperreal, chilling and politically cogent directorial debut.

Lakeith Stanfield stars as Cassius Green, a regular guy in a dystopian Oakland, Calif., one where TV’s top show is “I Got the Shit Kicked Out of Me,” and contestants are beaten bloody or otherwise humiliated. The world’s largest company is a Foxconn-like organization called Worry Free, which houses employees in bunks and feeds them on worksites.

Green’s girlfriend, Detroit (Tessa Thompson), is a street-corner sign-spinner by day, an artist by night and, by dead of night, a secret member of Left Eye, a radical anti-Worry Free group. She mollifies Green’s self-doubt as they wake together in his shabby digs. But when things heat up, the wall swings open and we realize Green lives in the garage of his uncle (Terry Crews), to whom he owes four months’ rent.

Fortune arrives in the form of Regal View Telemarketing, where Green gets a job phoning strangers. Riley shows him physically plummeting during sales pitches, desk and all, into potential customers’ homes, whether they’re cooking or having sex. His co-workers at Regal View include the lighthearted Salvador (Jermaine Fowler), a labor organizer named Squeeze (Steven Yeun) and an old guy called Langston (Danny Glover), who teaches Green the most important sales tip of all: “Use your white voice.”

Rapidly racking up sales, Green is promoted to “Power Caller,” a status that permits him to board a luxury elevator up to where other Power Callers lounge about in luxurious, glass-walled cubicles with city views, headsets and iPads. Their product: cheap labor, courtesy of Regal View’s top client, Worry Free.

As labor tensions heat up, Green is forced to cross a hostile picket line each morning, becoming a target of his old friends—Salvador, Squeeze and, increasingly, Detroit. The night of her gallery opening, she asks Green to choose between her event and a must-go party at the mansion of Steve Lift (Armie Hammer), the Steve Jobs-like head of Worry Free. If marketing slave labor isn’t enough to test Green’s conscience, then Lift’s secret plan for a new kind of worker should be.

It comes as no surprise to learn that Boots Riley is the son of two radical organizers from Chicago. “Sorry to Bother You” is rife with references to casual and institutional racism, corporate greed, class subjugation and coarsening public discourse. What is surprising is just about everything else in this movie. Unlike most of today’s films, whose storylines can generally be discerned by a glance at the poster, it’s impossible to tell where “Sorry to Bother You” is going. Riley establishes his world in a slightly adjacent universe, and when Green suffers a head injury and the narrative tips toward surrealism, it becomes even harder for viewers to locate their bearings.

More refreshing than its originality is its politics. Not since the ’70s have we seen an American filmmaker take such unabashedly progressive stances. Fans of Riley’s music career will recognize themes in his lyrics for the band The Coup.

“Whole family sleepin’ on a futon while you’re clippin’ coupons / Eatin’ salad tryin’ to get full off the croutons / ’Cross town, the situation is identical / Somebody’s getting strangled by the system and its tentacles,” he raps on the band’s 1998 record, “Steal this Album,” adding, “Crime rise consistent with the poverty rate / You take the workers and jobs, you gonna have murders and mobs / A gang of preachers screamin’ sermons over murmurs and sobs.”

Riley finds a passively expressive leading man in Stanfield, who many remember from his key supporting part in last year’s “Get Out,” and others know from TV’s “Atlanta,” where he plays the fatalistic and philosophical Darius. His work here is a minimalist progression from bemused withdrawal to woke. It’s hard to build momentum around a passive character, but Stanfield, working under Riley’s critical eye, makes it appear effortless.

His chemistry with Thompson is not always cookies and cream, but often the uneasy bond between a woman who knows who she is and a guy who’s still searching. Famous for playing corporate overlord Charlotte Hale on HBO’s “Westworld,” Thompson brings humanity and warmth to Detroit, along with a convincing dose of conviction and courage as hell breaks loose in the last act.

As the poster boy for white male privilege on steroids, Hammer is a perfect fit, taking his own greatness for granted and dominating everything and everyone around him in a drug-fueled rampage to renegade profits through dehumanization. Riley calls in favors from numerous showbiz friends, such as Forest Whitaker, Lily James, Patton Oswalt and David Cross (who provides Green’s white voice), but more impressive than his contacts are his cinematic wit and invention, illustrated, for example, when Green’s apartment transforms through stop-motion following his salary hike.

Occasionally juvenile, heavy-handed and gimmicky, “Sorry to Bother You” isn’t perfect, but it’s seldom at its worst. And at its best, it’s an entertaining, jacked-up, hypnagogic hike into the darkest chasm between the 1 percent and the rest of us.

Denmark Imposes New Restrictions on Immigrants

Denmark is requiring residents in 25 majority-immigrant enclaves to send their children to mandatory Christian and Danish values classes or risk losing their welfare benefits. It’s the latest in a series of immigrant-restricting proposals not only from the Danish government, but from far-right politicians across Europe who are revising government policies regarding immigrants.

In June, Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban implemented the “Stop Soros” law (named after Hungarian philanthropist George Soros), which bans individuals and organizations from providing aid to undocumented immigrants. As Vox explains, “ [The law] is so broadly worded, that, in theory, the government could arrest someone who provides food to an undocumented migrant on the street.”

Also in June, Italy’s Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini proposed a census of the country’s Roma population, drawing parallels, as CNN observes, “with race laws approved during the regime of Benito Mussolini.” It’s not yet a law, but as Al-Jazeera reported Sunday, local authorities cleared a Roma camp of  approximately 450 people shortly after Salvini called for the census.

Denmark’s laws, however, are particularly striking, both in terms of how they target specific areas based on immigrant population, and in the severity of punishments for noncompliance, which in some cases can result in jail time or loss of the country’s extensive welfare benefits.

The Danish government, The New York Times reports, is “introducing a new set of laws to regulate life in 25 low-income and heavily Muslim enclaves, saying that if families there do not willingly merge into the country’s mainstream, they should be compelled.”

The series of laws, also known as “the ghetto package,” includes proposals to double jail time for certain crimes committed in the neighborhoods and to punish parents for sending their children on long trips to their country of origin. One proposal that was rejected for being too radical would have banned certain immigrant children from the 25 enclaves from being outside their homes after 8 p.m.

The proposal requiring mandatory Danish and Christian values education, however, was passed by the Danish parliament last month.

From the time children are 1 year old, the Times explains, they “must be separated from their families for at least 25 hours a week, not including nap time, for mandatory instruction in ‘Danish values,’ including the traditions of Christmas and Easter, and Danish language. Noncompliance could result in a stoppage of welfare payments. Other Danish citizens are free to choose whether to enroll children in preschool up to the age of six.”

Danish Minister of Education Merete Riisager explained the reasoning behind the law to The Copenhagen Post, saying, “There are a number of parents who come from the Middle East who have a totally different understanding of pedagogy, childhood and school than their Scandinavian counterparts.”

In addition to Danish and Christian education for preschoolers, Time magazine reports that 5- and 6-year-old students in 24 Danish schools will be “ ‘guinea pigs’ for a new policy aimed at integrating non-Western immigrants into Danish society. From 2019, it will become law for schools that take more than 30 percent of their students from “ghetto” areas to force their students to take language tests.”

Denmark has long struggled with how to balance its generous welfare state, intended to serve a small, mostly white, Christian population, with an influx of immigrants, many of them Muslim. The white Danes the Times quoted were as supportive of these new laws as they were disparaging of immigrants.

Anette Jacobsen, a retired pharmacist’s assistant, praised the welfare benefits that gave her and her four children free education and health care, saying that  “she felt a surge of gratitude every time she paid her taxes,” but maintaining that she and other white Danes are deserving of Denmark’s benefits, unlike immigrants, who Jacobsen believes abuse the system. As she explained, “There is always a cat door for someone to sneak in,” and, she continued, “their culture doesn’t fit here.”

Never mind that, as Rokhaia Naassan, a daughter of Lebanese refugees and a resident of an affected neighborhood told the Times, not only does she speak fluent Danish, she talks to her children in Danish, so much so that her children’s grandparents complain that they can’t talk to their grandchildren in Arabic. In addition, Naassan and her sisters said, they’d move out of their neighborhood if they could afford to.

When they were growing up, the sisters said they rarely encountered Islamophobia. Now, Rokhaia’s sister Sara wonders, “Maybe this is what they always thought, and now it’s out in the open.” She added, “Danish politics is just about Muslims now. They want us to get more assimilated or get out. I don’t know when they will be satisfied with us.”

 

 

 

Migrant Children at Risk of Disease Outbreak, Doctors Warn

As thousands of migrant children have been taken from their parents and sent to facilities across the country, questions are growing about the medical care they are receiving – or, as health experts fear, not receiving.

Since President Donald Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy for unlawful entry into the country went into effect in April, more than 2,300 children, including infants, have been forcibly separated from their parents.

Although Trump last week ordered families to now be detained together, federal officials from several agencies have refused to give any information on the children’s welfare or what medical care they’re receiving. In addition, more than 10,000 other children who crossed the border unaccompanied were being held at detention centers as of last month.

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said that 243 migrant children separated from their parents at the border were sent to the Cayuga Centers foster care facility in East Harlem. When de Blasio visited the facility last week, staff told him that some of the children had illnesses they likely picked up at border facilities.

“Officials at one of the foster care providers told us that a number of children arrived with lice, bedbugs, chickenpox and other diseases,” said Danielle De Souza, press officer for the New York City Health Department. “The city only has anecdotal information at this point.”

De Souza said de Blasio asked the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services for information about the children, but has not heard back.

Dr. Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine and a Baylor College of Medicine professor of pediatrics and molecular virology and microbiology, said he would expect the same types and abundance of illnesses in the detention centers as surfaced in evacuation shelters after hurricanes or other disasters, where infections spread quickly.

The biggest concerns are viral respiratory diseases, noroviruses, which cause severe vomiting and diarrhea, and enteroviruses, which can cause meningitis, Hotez said.

Dr. Julie Linton, co-chair of the American Academy of Pediatrics Immigrant Health Special Interest Group, said “access to care is profoundly limited” at the detention facilities on the border.

In 2016, Linton traveled to Texas to visit three of these facilities, including McAllen, the largest processing center, known as “Ursula.” She said the conditions and access to health care vary by facility. Some processing centers screen children for obvious diseases, such as lice, chickenpox and scabies. But none of them take medical histories or conduct physical exams.

In the past, delayed access to basic care for viral infections at immigrant facilities has led to pneumonia and hospitalization of children, said Linton, a pediatrician in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

Many of the children are weak and malnourished after traveling for several weeks with limited access to food and safe water, said Dr. Omolara Thomas Uwemedimo, director of the global health training program at Cohen Children’s Medical Center of New York.

The cramped conditions at detention facilities, combined with the stress of separation from their parents, could further weaken the children’s immune systems, making them more susceptible to illness and infection, Uwemedimo and other doctors said.

“Anytime you throw children together who are living under conditions of stress and crowding, you worry about disease outbreak,” Hotez said.

Temperatures hovered around the mid- to upper-90s for the past few weeks in the U.S. Customs Border Protection detention center in McAllen, Texas. But there’s an unshakeable chill inside the facility. As one 10-year-old girl told an MSNBC reporter, detained children call these places la hielera – the freezer.

Children at border detention facilities are supposed to receive screening and treatment for easily diagnosed health issues, such as lice and chickenpox, before they are sent to one of the dozens of shelters in 18 states for “unaccompanied minors” operated by the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which is under the Department of Health and Human Services.

Federal officials did not respond to repeated requests for comment about whether those protocols are being followed or what measures they’re taking to stem the spread of disease.

Linton said the quality of health care at federally contracted shelters is generally better than what’s available at the border detention centers. She said some have good access to doctors and even specialists.

“I have treated some of these kids myself,” she said.

But, she added, “we have put many of these shelters beyond capacity by separating children from parents. This has led to an unexpected increase in numbers that puts pressure on these facilities, and having to meet these additional needs is challenging.”

On Wednesday, Trump issued an executive order to end forced family separation. But the order maintained the zero tolerance policy and called for families to be detained together. Civil rights groups say the order violates a decades-old court settlement that prohibits children from being held in detention longer than 20 days. At least 2,000 children remain separated from their parents with no clear plan to reunite the families.

Doctors for America, an advocacy group of physicians and medical students, plans to mobilize its membership to demand that federal officials allow them to meet with the children in the detention centers, said its executive director, Jim Duffett.

So far, only Dr. Colleen Kraft, the president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, has been granted access to a confined area of one center, back in April. She was not allowed to identify the location but said it was in the Rio Grande Valley. The facility was clean and the kids had food and toys, but detaining children without their parents “amounts to child abuse,” Kraft told CNN.

Tom McPheron, the academy’s press officer, said Kraft will attempt to tour Texas detention facilities again later this week, but is not sure whether she will be granted access.

The pediatricians’ academy issued a statement condemning Trump’s plan to detain families together.

“Continuing to maintain the ‘zero tolerance’ policy will put more children in detention facilities, an environment the AAP states is no place for a child, even if they are accompanied by their families,” the group said. “Studies of detained immigrants have shown that children and parents may suffer negative physical and emotional symptoms from detention, including anxiety, depression and posttraumatic stress disorder. Conditions in U.S. detention facilities, which include forcing children to sleep on cement floors, open toilets, constant light exposure, insufficient food and water, no bathing facilities and extremely cold temperatures, are traumatizing for children. No child should ever have to endure these conditions.”

As a candidate in 2015, Trump blamed Mexican immigrants for bringing “tremendous infectious disease” across the border.

Hotez said that despite high poverty levels, Mexico and Central America have very high child vaccination rates: between 88 and 98 percent. Children there are routinely vaccinated for measles, diphtheria, whooping cough and other common childhood diseases. In the U.S., vaccination rates for these diseases range from 85 to 95 percent.

“The idea that children are going to bring in diseases goes against the science,” Hotez said. “In Texas, we’ve had such a decline in vaccine coverage due to an aggressive anti-vaccine movement that it’s the children on the U.S. side of the border that pose the risk.”

In a paper published this month, Hotez and his colleagues identified several U.S. cities that could be vulnerable to infectious disease outbreaks due to large numbers of unvaccinated U.S. children. Several of these cities, including Houston, Seattle, Portland and Detroit, have shelters for migrant children who enter the country on their own.

With no indication when or if breastfeeding children will be reunited with their mothers, the Academy of Breastfeeding Medicine, an international physicians’ organization, also issued a statement condemning Trump’s policy.

“Infants who are not breastfed face increased risks of ear infections, gastroenteritis and pneumonia,” the group said. “Separation of any infant from their mother also has untold emotional harms on those children. These risks are magnified if they are housed in facilities where proper preparation of formula or washing bottles and teats is not available.”

But it’s the trauma of separation that worries health experts the most.

On Saturday, de Blasio sent Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar an urgent request to explain, among other things, how the federal government plans to treat the children who need immediate medical care for the “profound emotional trauma” he witnessed. He’s still waiting for a response.

“As pediatricians, we recommend screening children for several infectious diseases as well as chronic conditions,” said Linton. “But I can tell you that the most prevalent issue I see by far, clinically, is trauma.”

Ocasio-Cortez Takes Democratic Senator to Task on Twitter

Echoing what has become a go-to talking point among prominent Democrats in the aftermath of democratic socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s landslide victory over New York Rep. Joe Crowley in last week’s primary election, Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.) asserted without evidence on Sunday that candidates can’t “go too far to the left and still win the Midwest.”

Duckworth’s claim that Ocasio-Cortez’s bold agenda of Medicare for All, a federal jobs guarantee, and housing as a human right is “the future of the party in the Bronx” but not in wide swaths of the U.S. sparked swift backlash from progressives—including Ocasio-Cortez herself—who pointed to Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-Vt.) victories in the Midwest during the 2016 Democratic presidential primaries as evidence that an ambitious left-wing agenda has broad appeal among the American electorate.

“With respect to the senator, strong, clear advocacy for working class Americans isn’t just for the Bronx,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote in response to Duckworth’s comments, highlighting Midwestern states that Sanders won in 2016—several of which Hillary Clinton went on to lose to President Donald Trump in the general election.

With respect to the Senator, strong, clear advocacy for working class Americans isn’t just for the Bronx.

Sen. Sanders won:

– Michigan

– Minnesota

– Kansas

– Nebraska

– Wisconsin

– Indiana

We then lost several of those states in the general. What’s the plan to prevent a repeat? https://t.co/99K08qr7SH

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@Ocasio2018) July 1, 2018

Briahna Gray, senior politics editor at The Intercept, argued that efforts by Duckworth, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), and other high-ranking Democrats to downplay the popularity of Ocasio-Cortez’s platform is motivated by a desire to preserve “the party’s failing strategies, and the strategists paid to enact them, for another election cycle.”

But, Gray writes, Ocasio-Cortez’s unwavering embrace of democratic socialism in the face of hand-wringing and criticism from old-guard Democrats is the primary reason she has been able to “articulate a holistic progressive vision for America,” which “the Democratic Party has long failed to do.”

In response to Duckworth’s warning against embracing policies that are “too far to the left,” Gray tweeted a graphic that echoed Ocasio-Cortez’s point about the broad appeal of Sanders’ agenda in the Midwest.

Tammy Duckworth: I don’t think Dems can win the midwest with leftist policy.

Bernie Sanders in 2016: