Apr 27

Trump Says Mexico And Canada Convinced Him To Stay In NAFTA

Posted in: Today's Chili

WASHINGTON ― President Donald Trump said Thursday that he was on the verge of withdrawing the United States from the North American Free Trade Agreement until the leaders of Mexico and Canada talked him out of it.

“I was going to terminate NAFTA as of two or three days from now,” Trump said at the White House.

But then, Trump said, he got phone calls from the leaders of Canada and Mexico, two men he likes very much.

“They called me and they said, rather than terminating NAFTA, could you please renegotiate?” Trump said. “I respect their countries very much. The relationship is very special and I said I will hold on the termination, let’s see if we can make it a fair deal.”

The announcement seemed to mark an abrupt turn of events from the previous day, when Trump was seriously considering giving the two North American nations notice that he planned to withdraw from the free trade agreement, according to multiple reports.

The reports, attributed to White House officials, prompted Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to call Trump.

With the 100-day mark of his presidency looming this Saturday, Trump has announced a number of trade policy initiatives aimed at fulfilling campaign promises to reduce the United States’ global trade deficit. In perhaps its most concrete measure to date, the White House imposed a 20 percent tariff on Canadian softwood lumber Monday as part of a long-standing dispute in which the U.S. has claimed the Canadian government illegally subsidizes its lumber industry.

Trump has also fumed about Canada’s recent decision to tax U.S. exports of ultrafiltered milk, vowing to resolve the issue on behalf of American dairy farmers. And the administration has opened investigations into whether the volume of steel and aluminum imports represents a threat to national security (the argument is that the U.S. might not be able to make enough military equipment if its manufacturing base is too small). Experts believe the administration has the authority to use those investigations to limit foreign goods.

Scott Paul, president of the Alliance for American Manufacturing, a trade group supported by steel companies and the United Steelworkers Union, said the administration seems to be trying multiple negotiating strategies at once.

“I think that the administration is trying to figure out how to gain the most leverage in NAFTA talks,” Paul said. “Whether it’s to threaten, whether it’s to take a hard line on trade enforcement actions, or the kind of conciliatory phone calls where we’re your friend, or threaten to set the timer, which is what the withdrawal would have done.”

Trump has not made clear how or when he plans to reshape NAFTA, beyond repeating that absent a better deal for the United States, he would withdraw from the treaty entirely. Since the campaign, he’s been saying the same thing he said on Thursday ― that he’ll withdraw without a better deal.

Trump would have to notify Congress 90 days in advance of reopening NAFTA negotiations. He is also required to inform Canada and Mexico six months ahead of time if he plans to pull out of the agreement. 

Economists generally credit NAFTA with improving economic growth since it took effect in 1994, though experts say it has had a negative effect on some blue-collar workers forced to compete with cheaper labor in Mexico. During his campaign for the presidency, Trump made NAFTA a symbol of all that is wrong with Washington, with elite politicians selling out working Americans.  

By 2010, NAFTA had cost the United States 682,000 jobs, most of which were in manufacturing, according to an analysis by the Economic Policy Institute, a progressive think tank that gets funding from labor unions.

“It’s been very good for Canada, it’s been very good for Mexico, but it’s been horrible for the United States,” Trump said Thursday. “So they asked me to renegotiate. I will, and I think we’ll be successful in the renegotiation. Which frankly will be good because it’ll be simpler. So I decided rather than terminating NAFTA, which would be a pretty big, you know, shock to the system, we will renegotiate.”

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Apr 27

The Real Winner Of Trump's 100 Days: Private Prisons

Posted in: Today's Chili

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WASHINGTON ― When Donald Trump was running for president, the private prison industry in the United States was down for the count. An undercover reporter exposed abuse at a private prison in Louisiana. A report from the Department of Justice’s Office of the Inspector General found private prisons had higher rates of assault than regular prisons.

The Obama administration announced in August that it was phasing out the use of private prisons to house federal inmates; private prison stock subsequently plunged. And Trump’s foe, Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton — who had received donations from private prison lobbyists — said she was “glad” to see the end of private prisons. “You shouldn’t have a profit motivation to fill prison cells with young Americans,” she added.

Then Trump won.

In his first 100 days, Trump has failed to fulfill the populist promises of his campaign, while industries like Wall Street have made big gains. But the private prison industry in the U.S. — which is heavily dependent on federal contracts from the Federal Bureau of Prisons, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the U.S. Marshals Service — has had one of the biggest turnarounds of all, winning Justice Department approval, new and extended contracts, and an administration that is expected to bolster the demand for a lot of detention beds.

The Obama administration’s 2016 directive to reduce and ultimately end the use of privately operated prisons on the federal level “put these companies on the defensive in a way that we had not seen for at least 15 years,” Carl Takei, a staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union’s national prison project, told HuffPost. “But now, we face a total reversal of that situation.”

In February, Attorney General Jeff Sessions withdrew the Obama-era directive, claiming that it “impaired the [Bureau of Prisons’] ability to meet the future needs of the federal correctional system.” One day after that announcement, CNN reported that the stocks of CoreCivic (previously called Corrections Corporation of America) and GEO Group, the two largest private prison operators, were up 140 percent and 98 percent, respectively, since Trump’s election.

“The attorney general’s announcement in February validated our position that the DOJ’s previous direction was not reflective of the high-quality services we have provided,” said Jonathan Burns, a spokesman for CoreCivic.

But the wins for private prison operators go further than the Trump administration’s reversal of the Obama administration’s memo, which technically only applied to a sliver of federal prisons, not state lockups or immigration detention facilities. 

The Trump administration is also expected to implement tough-on-crime policies and large-scale deportations. Just this month, Sessions announced plans to weigh criminal charges for any person caught in the U.S. who has been previously deported, regardless of where they’re arrested.

CoreCivic does not draft legislation or lobby for proposals that might determine the basis or duration of a person’s incarceration, the company spokesman told HuffPost.

But private prison operators acknowledge that “new policies, priorities under the new administration [have helped create] an increased need for detention bed space,” as J. David Donahue, GEO Group senior vice president, told investors in February.

Donahue said his company was having ongoing discussions with ICE about its capabilities, which included “3,000 idle beds and 2,000 underutilized beds.” In April, GEO Group announced it had been awarded an ICE contract to build a new 1,000-bed detention center in Texas.

CoreCivic also announced a contract extension in April at a 1,000-bed detention facility in Texas. The company cited “ICE’s expected detention capacity needs” and “the ideal location of our facility on the southern border” as reasons ICE might extend its contract even further.

The Department of Homeland Security has identified 33,000 more detention beds available to house undocumented immigrants as it ramps up immigration enforcement, according to an internal memo obtained by The Washington Post and dated April 25.

“We can expect that the private prison industry will get rich off of any push by the Trump to expand the number of people in federal custody,” the ACLU’s Takei said.

If you’re determined to lock everybody up as long as possible, whether they’re dangerous or not, you need a place to put them and lots of money to pay for it.
Molly Gill, director of federal legislative affairs at FAMM

In February, Trump re-emphasized his support for Kate’s Law, backed by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), which would establish a five-year mandatory minimum prison sentence for undocumented immigrants who re-enter the United States after being convicted twice for illegal re-entry. The ACLU has estimated that even the most limited version of Kate’s Law would require nine new federal prisons.

Sessions has also tapped Steven Cook, who previously headed a group that opposed the Obama administration efforts to implement sentencing reforms, for a key role in a task force that will re-evaluate how the federal government deals with crime. This suggests that the Trump administration is planning to fulfill its promises to prosecute more drug and gun cases federally.

“If you’re determined to lock everybody up as long as possible, whether they’re dangerous or not, you need a place to put them and lots of money to pay for it,” said Molly Gill, director of federal legislative affairs at FAMM, a group that opposes mandatory minimums.  

Although the federal prison population has declined in recent years, federal prisons are still over capacity. Congress “does not seem to have much of a taste for building new prisons,” Gill noted, so “private prison contractors could make up the difference.”

Private prison critics claim that the industry has an incentive to spend less money on inmate services, as well as sufficient staffing, which can have disastrous human rights consequences including reliance on solitary confinement, poor mental health care, and violence. Private prisons are also not subject to the Freedom of Information Act, which means any misconduct is often shrouded in secrecy. (The CoreCivic spokesman said “the comments raised by critic groups are misinformed and neglect the history of our company.”)

A spokesman for GEO Group told HuffPost that the company believes the Obama administration decision to phase out private prisons last August “was based on a misrepresentation” of an Inspector General report that he said demonstrated that privately run facilities “are at least as equally safe, secure, and humane as publicly run facilities and in fact experienced lower rates of inmate deaths.”

In fact, investigators found that in “most key areas, contract prisons incurred more safety and security incidents per capita than comparable [Bureau of Prisons] institutions.” (At the time, GEO Group said higher incidents numbers could be chalked up to better reporting.)

Civil rights advocates, nonetheless, have deep concerns. “Handing control of prisons to for-profit companies is a recipe for abuse and neglect,” Takei argued. “We expect that even greater reliance on private prisons will lead to similar problems, but on a larger scale,” he added.

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Apr 27

Mormon Scholars Are Reaching Back Into Church History To Support Muslims

Posted in: Today's Chili

President Donald Trump’s beleaguered travel ban has encouraged one group of Mormon scholars to come forward to stand in solidarity with Muslims.

Nineteen Mormon scholars filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, where judges are preparing to hear arguments next month about Trump’s revised executive order on immigration.

The order, which a Hawaii federal judge has blocked from being implemented nationwide, seeks to cap refugee resettlement, ban some nationals from six predominantly Muslim countries from entering the country for 90 days, and carry out other goals.

Critics have called the order a backdoor Muslim ban. 

In the amicus brief, the scholars reached back into history to draw a striking parallel between how the United States government treated Mormons in the past and how Muslims are treated today.

The signers were experts in Mormon studies and American history, not all of whom identify as Mormon. They included prominent thinkers like Harvard University’s Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, University of Virginia’s Kathleen Flake, and University of Richmond’s Terryl Givens. 

Together, they urged the Court to make sure “history does not repeat itself.”

“If the Executive Order does target Muslims for disfavored treatment, then the history of the federal government’s mistreatment of Mormons suggests it could take decades—if not longer—to undo the damage that such official action would do to the body politic and to the place of Muslims in American society,” the scholars wrote.

The brief describes how members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints were regarded as aliens in America, by birth and by principle. They were subjected to “legal attacks” by the federal government and mob violence because of their religion.

After the church was founded in 1830, mobs in Missouri drove Mormons from their homes. The governor of Missouri issued an order declaring “‘[t]he Mormons must be treated as enemies, and must be exterminated or driven from the State.’”

The Mormons relocated to Illinois, but in 1844 an anti-Mormon mob broke into a jail cell where the faith’s founder, Joseph Smith, was being held. They murdered Smith, which eventually sparked another mass exodus of persecuted Mormons from Illinois. They settled in Utah’s Valley of the Great Salt Lake, which is now the headquarters of the global church.

The brief then went on to describe how the religious persecution of Mormons continued and was codified into law, even after the church abandoned its support of polygamy. The scholars pointed out that Mormon converts were restricted from immigrating to the United States. 

In the media, Mormonism was painted as a “danger to the American political system and way of life.” 

Taking the church’s history into account, the scholars encouraged the court to look at the context in which the travel ban arose.

“The Mormon historical experience underscores the necessity for rigorous judicial scrutiny of allegedly discriminatory government action, and for careful consideration of the purposes behind even facially neutral orders.”

Nate Oman, a professor of law at the College of William & Mary and a main author of the brief, told Deseret News that he hopes the brief will encourage Mormons to speak up.

“There is a history of targeting Mormons both here and around the world,” he said. “If any groups should be concerned about demonizing religious minorities, it should be Latter-day Saints. I hope they recognize the lessons of history and apply those lessons to current events.”

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Apr 27

Comedians Trick TV Show Into Booking Them As 'Fitness Experts,' Get Sued

Posted in: Today's Chili

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It’s no joke: The owners of a Wisconsin TV station are suing two comedians who pranked the morning news show by pretending to be fitness experts.

Back in November, New York-based comedians Joe Pickett and Nick Prueher appeared as a “strongman duo” named Chop and Steele on “Hello Wisconsin,” a news program on WEAU-TV in Eau Claire.

As “Joe ‘Chop’ Shopsin” and “Nicholas ‘Steele’ Stelling,” the duo offered a variety of bizarre fitness tips including: Tennis racket sword fights.

via GIPHY

Karate-chopping sticks.

via GIPHY

Stomping on straw baskets.

via GIPHY

And whatever the heck this is.

via GIPHY

Atlanta-based Gray Television, which owns WEAU-TV, is suing Pickett and Prueher for using fake names and materials to fraudulently convince station producers to book them on the show, according to the Mercury News.

They “performed ridiculous bits and provided false information to WEAU viewers,” the complaint states.

The two comedians don’t deny that.

“We hated doing promotional appearances on morning shows as ourselves so we thought it would be funny and interesting to see if we could book fake people on these morning shows,” Prueher told the New York Daily News.

“Chop and Steele” managed to get booked on seven morning shows. Prueher thinks the segments were more fun than if they just promoted their regular gig: The Found Footage Festival, a touring show of strange and unusual videos.

The segments were supposed to be funny, but there is a higher purpose, according to Prueher.

“Our prank establishes the point about how easy it it is to put forth fake news,” he told CleveScene.com. 

Attorneys for Gray Television aren’t commenting on the suit, but the complaint alleges the duo infringed on the copyright of the Nov. 29 episode of “Hello Wisconsin,” and is likely to do so again unless the court issues a permanent injunction, according to the Mercury News.

The suit also asks for a judgment against the Found Footage Festival “for any profits or gains attributable to the infringement, along with compensatory and punitive damages, costs and attorneys’ fees incurred in pursuing the action and interest.”

Prueher told the New York Daily News that WEAU bears at least some responsibility for allowing the prank to go through.

“A simple Google search could have vetted this,” he said.

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Apr 27

ICYMI: Boston's book cleaning machine and Disney's new SFX tricks

Posted in: Today's Chili

Today on In Case You Missed It: We take a look at the Boston Public Library’s novel method of keeping its archives clean. Hint: it involves pushing them through a portable vacuum cleaner. The Depulvera book cleaning machine, as it’s called, can s…

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Apr 27

LG's smartphones are no longer hurting the company

Posted in: Today's Chili

It’s a testament to how topsy-turvy the mobile world is that a company can make its seventh successive quarterly loss and still feel good. That’s because LG’s mobile division, which managed to burn almost 500 billion Korean won in the last three mont…

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Apr 27

Apple Music redesign will put video in the spotlight

Posted in: Today's Chili

We know all about Apple’s plans for Planet of the Apps and Carpool Karaoke, but it looks like the company has bigger things in mind for its music-focused series. Bloomberg reports an Apple Music redesign will accompany the next version of iOS we’re l…

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Apr 27

What Lethal Injection Drugs Actually Do

Posted in: Today's Chili

The drugs used in lethal injections were not designed to kill people, and they are on the market today because of their use in medicine. Pharma companies don’t allow them to be used for executions, but Arkansas got their hands on some anyway. Here’s what the three drugs in the state’s lethal injection cocktail…

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Apr 27

The Nuclear Security Administration Lost a Film Titled 'Skull Melting Demonstration'

Posted in: Today's Chili

Back in August, I submitted a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for a bunch of films held by the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). We looked at one yesterday from 1976 about nuclear extortion, and we’ll explore the others in the coming weeks. But there was one that I requested that the NNSA…

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Apr 27

Foxconn Gossip Claims No iPhone 8 Coming This Year

Posted in: Today's Chili


For the past few months now we’ve been hearing all kinds of rumors and reports about the iPhone 8. At that time the rumor mill appeared to be in consensus that Apple was going to release this iPhone later on in 2017. Over the past few weeks, we’ve started seeing reports that question whether or not the iPhone 8 will be out this year. Various reasons are being provided, including but not limited to supply shortages of the OLED display panel. A new report brings gossip from Apple’s contract iPhone manufacturer from Foxconn which will have us believe that the iPhone 8 won’t be launched this year at all.

The report, based on unsubstantiated gossip from inside Foxconn, claims that Apple is not going to release the iPhone 8 this year. Foxconn is Apple’s main contract manufacturer for the iPhone so it’s not like people who are working in its factories don’t know bits and pieces about what’s going on as far as new iPhone are concerned.

The scuttlebutt from inside Foxconn will have you believe that Apple has only placed orders for the iPhone 7s and iPhone 7s Plus this year. It’s even claimed that the packaging materials for these units will start arriving in Foxconn’s factories by the end of June.

Recent reports have claimed that supply issues might force Apple to delay the iPhone 8 to 2018. Whether or not that really ends up happening remains to be seen. It’s not like we can ever expect the company to comment on such rumors.

New iPhones are normally announced in the fall and it’s likely to be the same this year as well.

Foxconn Gossip Claims No iPhone 8 Coming This Year , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.

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