MORNING MESSAGE

Iowa Farmers Need A Green New Deal

Nick Schutt

I’m a third-generation farmer from Hardin County, Iowa, and here’s why I support the Green New Deal. Factory farms and corporate agribusiness are bad for our planet, bad for our climate, bad for farmers, bad for rural communities, bad for all of all of us! We need a Just Transition away from the greedy, polluting, corrupting corporate agriculture system to independent, sustainable family farms. This Monday, Earth Day, I’ll stand up to share my story at the Green New Deal tour stop in Des Moines, Iowa. There will be people like me from rural areas, as well as indigenous people, and youth leaders. We’ll stand up together and challenge everyone to join us as we demand a better future. We know we can’t count on politicians to make change for us – we have to organize a movement of people to demand massive changes. We need to stand up and fight for a Green New that will protect the planet, create tens of thousands of new independent, sustainable family farms, and rebuild rural communities in Iowa and across the country. Let’s win a Green New Deal now!

AOC's Message From The Future On The Green New Deal

We can be whatever we have the courage to see. The Intercept: "The biggest obstacle to the kind of transformative change the Green New Deal envisions is overcoming the skepticism that humanity could ever pull off something at this scale and speed. That’s the message we’ve been hearing from the 'serious' center for four months straight: that it’s too big, too ambitious, that our Twitter-addled brains are incapable of it, and that we are destined to just watch walruses fall to their deaths on Netflix until it’s too late. This skepticism is understandable. The idea that societies could collectively decide to embrace rapid foundational changes to transportation, housing, energy, agriculture, forestry, and more — precisely what is needed to avert climate breakdown — is not something for which most of us have any living reference. We have grown up bombarded with the message that there is no alternative to the crappy system that is destabilizing the planet and hoarding vast wealth at the top. But the future isn’t cast into one inevitable course. On the contrary, we could cause the sixth great mass extinction event in Earth’s history, or we could create a prosperous civilization, sustainable over the long haul. Either is possible, starting from now."

Breaking News: Humans Cause Climate Change

99.9999% chance humans are causing global warming, and other science-based facts on climate change for Earth Day. USA Today: "Climate change is real and increasingly a part of our daily lives. New research and studies out in just the past six months highlight the latest facts about the human-caused shift to our global weather systems and its effects on our planet. First among them, there's no longer any question that rising temperatures and increasingly chaotic weather are the work of humanity. There's a 99.9999% chance that humans are the cause of global warming, a February study reported. That means we've reached the "gold standard" for certainty, a statistical measure typically used in particle physics. The mechanism is well understood and has been for decades. Humans burn fossil fuels such as oil, coal and gas, which release carbon dioxide (CO2), methane and other gases into the Earth's atmosphere and oceans. CO2 is the greenhouse gas that's most responsible for warming. If the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere isn't lowered, temperatures will continue to increase. That means that by 2080, New York City could have the climate of Arkansas. Minneapolis could be more like Kansas and San Francisco could have weather closer to Los Angeles than its current foggy climate. Other cities further south could experience climates with no modern equivalent in North America. 'The children alive today, like my daughter who is 12, they’re going to see a dramatic transformation of climate. It’s already underway,' said study lead author Matt Fitzpatrick of the University of Maryland’s Center for Environmental Science."

Stephen Miller's Dark Shadow Over Immigration Policy

How Stephen Miller made immigration personal. Politico: "The one-time Senate aide is a key architect of Trump’s tough immigration policies — a controversial role affirmed when he helped engineer a recent purge of Department of Homeland Security officials deemed too soft on border security. Miller has helped shape several explosive Trump actions, including an early 2017 executive order banning travel from several Muslim-majority nations and Trump’s crusade for a Mexican border wall. Most recently, he has backed an idea to relocate undocumented immigrants to “sanctuary cities” within the U.S., a scheme that has been described as political retribution by Democratic opponents. While Miller’s influence over immigration policy is well-known by now, less understood is his granular interest in the people crossing the U.S. border, and the seemingly unprecedented steps he has taken to reveal information about their personal backgrounds. Soon after Trump took office, for instance, Miller began calling U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials to insist that they include more details — such as full names and pending criminal charges — in press releases about immigrants they had apprehended, detained or planned to deport, according to three current and former DHS officials. 'At one point, he wanted us to be releasing press releases every day about the people we had detained and their criminal status. We were constantly doing a dance just to remain in a legal place,' recalled a former DHS official. U.S. officials say that such a thing had never been done. Unless the individuals had been convicted or charged, releasing such information could constitute a breach of privacy and possibly deprive them of a fair hearing, according to Leon Fresco, an immigration attorney and senior Justice Department official under President Barack Obama."

FBI Arrests Armed Militia Leader At Border

FBI arrests leader of militia group that detained hundreds of migrants at gunpoint. ThinkProgress: "The FBI on Saturday arrested the leader of the heavily-armed vigilante group that had illegally detained over 300 migrants trying to cross the border from Mexico and into New Mexico. Larry Hopkins (AKA Johnny Horton Jr., Scott Alan Curtiss, and code name “Striker”) is the leader of the United Constitutional Patriots (UCP), a group that has been accused of impersonating law enforcement at the border. He was arrested in Oregon in 2006 on suspicion of impersonating law enforcement and for being a felon in possession of firearms. According to the FBI, Hopkins was once again charged this weekend with being a felon possessing firearms and ammunition. His arrest comes two days after New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham called for an investigation into the group’s activities and Attorney General Hector Balderas made clear that the the group ought 'not attempt to exercise authority reserved for law enforcement.'"