Month: February 2017

For the Southern Poverty Law Center, the move suggests that “President Trump wants the government to stop its efforts to prevent terrorism by far-right extremists.” For Jezebel, it’s “another victory in a long series of wins for Neo Nazis, the KKK, and other violent and terroristic groups.” Salon calls it “pandering to white supremacists.” The target of their ire: a plan to rebrand the federal government’s Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) program. According to Reuters, which cites “five people briefed on the matter,” the Trump administration wants to rename it “Countering Radical Islamic Extremism,” or maybe just “Countering Islamic Extremism,” and to focus its attention on Muslim terrorists rather than the various domestic right-wing kinds.

In practice, CVE’s efforts are already focused overwhelmingly on Muslims. But the big question here shouldn’t be which groups ought to be the program’s targets. It’s whether the program should exist at all. No matter whether it’s aimed at Islamists, white nationalists, or anyone else, the CVE approach has two big problems.

First: It rests on the idea that the best way to root out terrorism is to fight “radicalization.” This idea has support among both Democrats and Republicans, but the evidence supporting it is sparse. When investigators at the British think tank Demos (not to be confused with the U.S.-based liberal group of the same name) spent two years studying the differences between violent and nonviolent radicals, they found that while nonviolent radicalism can be a stepping stone to terrorism, it can draw people away from terrorism too. Meanwhile, there were other forces pulling people into terrorism that didn’t have much to do with ideology at all. Other probes have reached similar conclusions. So the focus here is all wrong: Radical ideas do not usually lead to violent tactics, and violent tactics do not emerge only from radical ideas.

Second: That focus can lead to some serious civil liberties problems. “Even though the agencies running the programs promised that they wouldn’t use CVE for intelligence purposes (as they did in earlier iterations of it), the program itself is designed to teach community members, teachers, police, social workers, and religious leaders to identify and report to law enforcement people showing signs of ‘radicalization,'” comments Michael German, a former FBI agent who now hangs his hat at the Brennan Center for Justice. So in practice, he argues, you get “soft surveillance,” and that surveillance “is intended to suppress ideas, which is likely to cause more problems than solve them. It encourages the identification, reporting, and ‘treatment’ of people with bad ideas, which will only lead to misuse of security resources and deprivation of civil liberties.”

Needless to say, that sort of surveillance can itself radicalize people. So CVE also runs the risk of contributing to the very process it’s meant to stop.

Rebranding “Countering Violent Extremism” as “Countering Radical Islamic Extremism” won’t solve any of these issues. Indeed, it could conceivably make the effort even less effective. (German points out that the new name could alienate many of the Muslim groups whose cooperation the program relies on, since they could construe it as a sign the program is “antagonistic to the community.”) But neither would it be a good idea to expend more CVE attention on the radical right; all the same problems would be in place there too. Better to drop the approach. End it, don’t mend it.

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Earlier in the week, the White House put out a statement that President Donald Trump is going to maintain President Barack Obama’s executive order prohibiting federal agencies and federal contractors from discriminating against gay and transgender employees. So why are some people afraid this is just a big smoke screen?

People might be a little confused at news reports that there’s an executive order floating around the White House that does nearly the opposite of what they said they were doing—an order that blows big holes in discrimination policies in order to protect religious freedom. Prior to the White House’s announcement on Tuesday that it would be maintaining the order, some media outlets had gotten their hands on something titled “Executive Order—Establishing a Government-Wide Initiative to Respect Religious Freedom.”

Even after the White House announcement, civil liberties and LGBT groups expressed concerns about the possibility that despite what Trump declared, something was coming down the line that was going to harm their interests. Representatives of the American Civil Liberties Union, the Human Rights Campaign, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and others even had a media teleconference Wednesday to express concerns about the contents of this semi-mysterious order.

Wednesday evening The Nation finally published the executive order that had been circulated within the beltway, along with some analysis by legal and civil rights experts. It’s a four-page, broadly-written, and pretty complicated order, both in what it attempts to accomplish and what its hidden consequences may be.

There are parts of the executive order fans of religious freedom and freedom of association would support—it spells out that religious organizations (and individuals) cannot be forced comply with mandates to fund birth control or abortions, for example. But it also has some deep constitutional and rule-of-law issues. The order establishes that federal employees (and contractors) must be “reasonably accommodated” for acting or refusing to act in accordance to a set of beliefs outlined within the order. The very particular beliefs protected: Marriage should be reserved to heterosexual couples; biological sex is immutable (in other words, transgenderism isn’t real); and life begins at birth and abortion is bad.

This whole part of the order, then, establishes a particular set of beliefs that are protected by government order. It’s not a “religious freedom” order at all. It’s saying that the government will recognize and protect a particular set of religious beliefs, which is a violation of the Establishment Clause. It literally establishes a set of religious beliefs the government will give special preference to. Mississippi passed a law with similar carveouts last year. Its implementation has been blocked by a federal judge, for now.

So after all that explanation, what is the real story here? Is this order legitimate? Is Trump going to sign it? The answers so far are that yes, the executive order appears to be legitimate and was circulating within federal agencies, but no, the Trump administration is not considering it. At least for now. A White House official told ABC News Trump has no plans to “sign anything at this time.” The vague possibility hangs in the air, and so apparently gay and civil rights groups are continuing activism against an the executive order anyway and treating it though it’s a Sword of Damocles about to fall at any moment.

If these opening weeks of the Trump administration are an indicator, we are going to see a very, very leaky government. In most ways, this is great. It’s awesome. Trump certainly doesn’t appear to be a fan of transparency (at least not when it’s about him, anyway). But internal resistance and conflict between parts of his administration is going to result in information about its operations and planning to make it out into the wild for the public to evaluate and even push back against at a point where it’s still possible to influence the outcome.

It comes with one big challenge though, and that’s trying to discern what is and isn’t real and what’s just somebody’s agenda. This is not a new challenge. Agenda-driven political leaks have been around forever. But these leaks have ramped up, big-league, and “media literacy” in this era is going to involve trying to navigate this nebulous space between what is being discussed, what is actually being considered, and what somebody with access simply wishes were on the agenda.

Adding to the challenge is the simple truth that under Trump—a man who will say literally anything being advised by the deliberately outrageous Steve Bannon—it’s impossible to look at any report coming out of the White House and say, “That doesn’t seem likely.” Did Trump threaten to send the military into Mexico to ramp up the drug war? That was the story last night, then for a while it seemed like it wasn’t true, and then ultimately it appears as though he said it, but he was kidding. Any of those three possibilities is fully believable.

The rush to get for the media to get out information combined with an administration that appears as unpredictable as critics feared is leading to confusing and contradictory reporting. This will obviously help feed Trump and Trump supporters’ tendency to blame the media and scream “fake news” at anything that makes them look bad. Though note they avoided doing so in the example of the executive order we’re talking about.

The Libertarian Party, and fellow plaintiffs, won a victory in federal court this week in the case of Level the Playing Field v. FEC. (The full background of the case can be read from reporting here when it was first assigned its day in court and when the oral arguments occurred.)

To quote from my previous reporting summing up what was at issue in the lawsuit, which while technically against the Federal Election Commission (FEC) is ultimately targeting the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD) for locking out third parties while pretending to be nonpartisan, the L.P. and its co-plaintiffs claim that:

the CPD has always been a deliberate duopoly for the two major parties and has “been violating FECA and FEC regulations limiting debate-sponsoring organizations’ ability to use corporate funds to finance their activities” since its efforts are not truly “nonpartisan.”

The suit accuses the FEC of “refus[ing] to enforce the law and ignored virtually all of this evidence in conclusorily dismissing the complaints even though there is plainly reason to believe that the CPD is violating FECA….”…

“The Court should…direct the FEC to do its job, which is to enforce the law and put an end to the CPD’s biased, anti-democratic, and fundamentally corrupt and exclusionary polling rule.”

Judge Tayna Chutkan in U.S. District Court for D.C. agreed with the L.P. and others that the FEC was derelict in its duties when it blithely refused to act on the those complaints about the CPD.

Plaintiffs allege that the Federal Election Commission (“FEC”) has violated the Administrative Procedure Act (“APA”)…. in dismissing two administrative complaints regarding the CPD and in denying a petition to engage in rulemaking to change the FEC’s regulations regarding debate staging organizations.

Judge Chutkan explains how CPD’s operations should be affected by the FEC and its enforcement of election finance law:

The debate staging regulation…acts as an exemption to the general ban on corporate contributions to or expenditures on behalf of political campaigns or candidates. To prevent debate staging organizations such as the CPD from operating as conduits for corporate contributions made to benefit only one or two candidates from the Democratic and Republican parties—via the much-watched prime-time debates—the regulations require these organizations to (1) be nonpartisan, (2) not endorse, support, or oppose candidates or campaigns, and (3) use pre-established, objective criteria.

If a debate staging organization fails to comply with the regulations, such as failing to use objective criteria in determining which candidates participate in its debates, then the value of the debate is actually a contribution or expenditure made to the participating political campaigns in violation of the Act.

The Act provides that any person who believes a violation of the Act has occurred may file an administrative complaint with the FEC…

The L.P. and its co-plaintiffs filed such a complaint in September 2014, as well as “a Petition for Rulemaking with the FEC [that] asked the FEC…to specifically bar debate staging organizations from using a polling threshold as the sole criterion for accessing general election presidential and vice-presidential debates.”

They were not satisfied with the FEC’s reaction, leading to the current lawsuit “challenging the dismissal of their administrative complaint…and the agency’s decision not to engage in rulemaking” about the debate threshold.

Judge Chutkan agrees that the FEC did a shoddy and careless job in actually considering and reacting to the arguments and evidence the L.P. and others presented about the potential partisanship of CPD, and thus:

the court cannot defer to the FEC’s analysis and further concludes that the FEC acted arbitrarily and capriciously and contrary to law when it determined that the CPD did not endorse, support, or oppose political parties in the 2012 election….On remand, the FEC is ORDERED to articulate its analysis in determining whether the CPD endorsed, supported, or opposed political parties or candidates….

….the FEC must demonstrate how it considered the evidence, particularly, but not necessarily limited to, the newly-submitted evidence of partisanship and political donations and the expert analyses regarding fundraising and polling.

As for the argument that the CPD’s 15 percent polling requirement for third party access is not properly objective and is in fact clearly designed to privilege major parties, Judge Chutkan:

GRANTS Plaintiffs’ motion….as to whether the FEC’s analysis of the criterion’s objectivity was arbitrary and capricious and contrary to law. While the court cannot and does not mandate that the FEC reach a different conclusion on remand, the court notes that the weight of Plaintiffs’ evidence is substantial, and the FEC must demonstrate that it actually considered the full scope of this evidence, including the CPD chairmen’s and directors’ partisan political activity and the expert reports, as well as explain how and why it rejected this evidence in deciding that the CPD’s polling requirement is an objective criterion

Judge Chutkan spells out that the L.P. and its co-plaintiffs:

clearly argued, and attempts to establish with significant evidence, that in presidential elections CPD’s polling threshold is being used subjectively to exclude independent and third-party candidates, which has the effect of allowing corporations to channel money to the CPD’s expenditures to the C campaigns they would be prohibited from giving the campaigns directly.

It further argued and presented evidence that polling thresholds are particularly unreliable and susceptible to this type of subjective use at the presidential level, undermining the FEC’s stated goal of using “objective criteria to avoid the real or apparent potential for a quid pro quo, and to ensure the integrity and fairness of the process.” In its Notice, the FEC brushed these arguments aside….

Judge Chutkan is thus demanding the FEC do a better job actually grappling with those arguments. This does not mean that the CPD is on the ropes or will somehow instantly be required to either give up its firewall against third parties or stop taking in the corporate bucks.

But it does mean the FEC is going to have to come up with convincing reasons why the CPD isn’t bipartisan rather than nonpartisan and why the CPD’s debate inclusion criteria are fair and objective and not partisan. It will be interesting to see what they come up with.

Via the always indispensable Ballot Access News.

Premature death rates for young white Americans and American Indians and Alaska Natives increased between 1999 and 2014, reports a new study in The Lancet. These disturbing results were reported by a team led by researchers from the National Cancer Institute that parsed data from National Center for Health Statistics. Death rates are supposed to be falling in modern prosperous societies like ours. From the study:

Increases [in death rates] were highest in women and those aged 25–30 years. Among 30-year-olds, annual mortality increases were 2·3% (95% CI 2·1–2·4) for white women, 0·6% (0·5–0·7) for white men, and 4·3% (3·5–5·0) and 1·9% (1·3–2·5), respectively, for American Indian and Alaska Native women and men. These increases were mainly attributable to accidental deaths (primarily drug poisonings), chronic liver disease and cirrhosis, and suicide. Among individuals aged 25–49 years, an estimated 111 000 excess premature deaths occurred in white individuals and 6600 in American Indians and Alaska Natives during 2000–14.

Largely as a result of these trends, U.S. life expectancy actually fell this past year for the first time since 1993. The good news is that the trajectory of death rates among Hispanics, blacks, and Asians and Pacific Islanders in the United States continues downward. I reported on rising death rates among young and mid-life white Americans

The researchers conclude that rising death rates are …

…primarily because of potentially avoidable causes such as drug poisonings, suicide, and chronic liver disease and cirrhosis. The magnitude of annual mortality increases in the USA is extremely unusual in high-income countries, and a rapid public health response is needed to avert further premature deaths.

I have been reporting on rising death rates among young and mid-life white Americans for a while now. I speculate that death rates are rising because many poor white Americans have come to believe that the modern world is leaving them behind and are seeking solace in mind-numbing substances and suicide. For more background see my January 2017 article “Stuck” about my visit to McDowell County, West Virginia whence my paternal grandparents and father hail.

*Hat tip to Alex Berezow over at the superb American Council on Science and Health.