Las Vegas Review-Journal (Sunday)
Editorial Roundup
Recent editorials in newspapers in the United States and abroad:
Los Angeles Times on the Thanksgiving turkey (Nov. 22):
Observing an annual pre-Thanksgiving rite, President Donald Trump pardoned two big white fluffy turkeys Tuesday in a photo op at the White House. (Named Drumstick and Wishbone, the birds will end up at an enclosure on the campus of Virginia Tech.) That leaves 46 million other turkeys that won’t get pardoned. Instead, they’ll wind up on someone’s dinner table during this holiday season, a fate that is expected to befall about 245 million gobblers all told this year. And none of them will make the journey from farm to table via the Willard InterContinental Hotel, where Drumstick and Wishbone hung out before Drumstick was ceremoniously presented to Trump.
No animals raised on factory farms are kept and killed under worse conditions than turkeys and chickens, which make up most of the animals raised for food in the U.S. Nearly 9 billion chickens are slaughtered each year for food. And because poultry is exempt from the federal Humane Methods of Slaughter Act, which the U.S. Department of Agriculture enforces, there are not even minimum federal standards governing how they live or die.
Turkeys and so-called broiler chickens are genetically bred to grow fast (to satisfy our love for breast meat) and, typically, grow so big that they can barely walk by the time they are killed. As a result, they can suffer from painful skeletal disorders and leg deformities. The vast majority spend their short lives (about 47 days for chickens) in artificially lit, windowless, barren warehouse barns. So that turkeys won’t peck one another in these crowded barns, their beaks are painfully trimmed.
When it’s time to slaughter them, the live birds are shackled upside down on a conveyor belt, paralyzed by electrified water and then dragged over mechanical throat-cutting blades. The birds are supposed to be stunned unconscious by the electrified water, but that doesn’t always happen. Sometimes the birds miss the blades and end up tumbling into the tanks of scalding water, where they drown. These methods are so cruel that they would be prohibited by federal welfare laws — if the animals in question were cows or pigs.
These are the grim realities behind Americans’ traditional Thanksgiving meal. But there are ways to make life and death somewhat better for the turkeys that wind up on your table. Of course, we could all just eat less turkey and chicken, which would reduce the demand for these animals. But to make a bigger impact, the major buyers of chicken and turkey meat need to push their suppliers to adopt less grisly practices.
The Humane Society of the U.S. has launched a campaign to get producers to pledge to raise healthier, less bloated birds, to provide them with better living conditions — more space, more stimulating environments and more sunlight — and, perhaps most important, to render the birds unconscious before they are shackled and slaughtered. The campaign also seeks to persuade buyers to obtain meat only from producers that honor this pledge. Meanwhile, Temple Grandin, the animal science professor known for designing more humane procedures for slaughtering beef cattle, has called for “controlled atmosphere stunning,” a process of using gas to make the birds unconscious before they get shackled for slaughter.
Just as pressure from animal welfare advocates, consumers and California voters led poultry farmers to free egg-laying hens from tiny cages, industry is now responding to similar pressure to implement more humane conditions for turkeys and broiler chickens. Whole Foods announced last year that it would begin to replace meat from fast-growing chickens with products from slower-growing breeds that are given more space. Perdue Farms Inc., a major chicken producer, has changed some of its plants and has incorporated gas stunning at its turkey plant in Indiana. And nearly 70 companies have signed on to the Humane Society’s campaign, including Burger King, Subway, Aramark and Panera. Many of these companies have put out new policy statements of commitment to obtaining poultry only from producers that raise smaller chickens and render them unconscious before shackling them.
Installing new procedures takes time and money. All the buyers and producers that have signed on to the Humane Society campaign have agreed to fully convert to a new system by 2024. Companies should be held to that time frame, and more should be encouraged to take that pledge. If enough consumers demand it, companies will do it. That’s not too much to ask for the sake of the bird you’ll be carving up on Thanksgiving.
The Washington Post on the possible naming of Thomas Brunell to be deputy director of the Census Bureau (Nov. 21):
One of the most important functions the federal government performs is the decennial census, which not only provides a demographic snapshot of the country but also determines how much representation each state gets in Congress. It has been a thankfully nonpartisan effort in past years, run by experienced professionals who offered critics little basis on which to accuse them of tilting the count. The Trump administration might soon break that tradition.
The latest reason for concern came into view Tuesday, in a Politico report revealing that President Donald Trump might name Thomas Brunell, a professor at the University of Texas at Dallas, to be deputy director of the Census Bureau. He would be a poor choice.
Though he is a serious academic, there is nothing in Mr. Brunell’s background suggesting he is qualified to run a large government bureaucracy in general or the Census Bureau in particular. Previous Census Bureau leaders generally served extensively in government roles directly related to the bureau’s work. Mr. Brunell has not.
These facts have led many to wonder why Trump administration officials might want Mr. Brunell running the bureau. The answer may lie in his past work helping Republicans in electoral map cases, or in some of his views on voting issues. Mr. Brunell has criticized partisan gerrymandering — but also early voting and nonpartisan redistricting commissions. Something of an iconoclast in his field, he is most notable among political scientists for arguing that electoral districts should be drawn to maximize the proportion of like-minded voters in each, limiting the number of competitive seats on electoral maps.
None of this proves that Mr. Brunell would run a partisan Census Bureau. But his political affiliations and previous work would nevertheless harm perceptions of the bureau’s integrity, an institution in which Americans must have complete faith. His possible appointment has inflamed preexisting worries that the Trump administration will meddle with the count. Of particular concern is the possibility that the president would order that census forms ask about immigration status, which would result in low response rates and, potentially, massive undercounts in minority communities.
Republicans in Congress have badly underfunded the census the past several years, leading the bureau to cancel or put off important programs, which could harm the quality of the 2020 count. This fact alone argues for picking Census Bureau leaders seasoned in government operations and ready to take on a huge management challenge.
Mr. Brunell, Politico reported, was considered for the Census Bureau’s top job, but opposition in Congress nixed that plan. Unlike candidates for the director’s job, those picked to be deputy director do not need Senate confirmation. If tapped, Mr. Brunell could start immediately, even while the bureau lacks a confirmed director. That would be damaging to an enterprise already at risk. Mr. Trump should find someone else.
Sun Sentinel of Fort Lauderdale, Florida on Trump administration’s plans to end Temporary Protective Status for roughly 59,000 Haitians in the U.S. (Nov. 20):
The Trump administration’s mind is made up. It plans to end Temporary Protective Status for about 59,000 Haitians living in the U.S. It says these immigrants must leave the United States by July 2019 or face deportation.
The deadline is 18 months longer than what the administration had proposed earlier this year. And it’s going to take that long, or longer, to prepare Haiti for the return of so many people, to prepare our region for their departure and to prepare families for the heartbreaking choices ahead.
These Haitians had the good fortune to be in the United States when a massive earthquake struck their impoverished island nation in 2010. In a humanitarian gesture, the Department of Homeland Security invited them to apply for Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, in the department’s jargon. The program was invented to help people in precisely this set of circumstances, 18 months at a time.
Their 18-month reprieve has been extended several times over the past seven years, each time because conditions on the island had barely improved. Such is the case today. The earthquake woes have been compounded by the wind and rain of Hurricane Matthew. And all has been capped off by a cholera epidemic.
But support for extensions wore thin under the Trump administration. And Monday evening, an unsympathetic White House announced the ax is going to fall.
Haiti is ill-equipped to handle the return of 50,000 countrymen looking for work, places to live, food and all the basics of life. And the loss of money earned in the U.S. and sent home to help struggling relatives is going to compound the problem.
The entire South Florida congressional delegation had supported extending their protected status, but lawmakers elsewhere showed little concern for poor people forced to return to terrible conditions. So lacking congressional cover, the White House now expects everyone to pick up and leave or be rounded up and deported.
We fully understand the position of those who argue that repeated extension of the waiver has become a de facto grant of permanent status. For it is true, the TPS Haitians have become deeply rooted in our country.
Plus, they’ve had children who are American citizens who can’t be deported.
Now these parents face a “Sophie’s Choice” dilemma. Do they leave the children behind in the care of who knows who, or take them back to Haiti to live as strangers in a country they barely know?
As we have noted before, the TPS program is another piece in a complicated immigration puzzle that Congress refuses to solve.
Some kind of temporary protection status is needed to keep people from being forced back to countries in chaos. But we also need a mechanism to reduce the possibility of extended stays that morph into permanency.
Fixing the TPS program is but one step in the multi-step immigration reform process that should begin soon.
The Trump White House leans toward a more-restrictive policy that would move away from one that now favors family reunion. Advocates of a more open-door policy argue that, on balance, the U.S. fares better when immigration policy is more welcoming. Immigration is good for the economy, they argue.
Thrashing out the differences between those two approaches is essential. We can ignore the 10 to 12 million undocumented immigrants for only so long. We must deal with the Dreamers — undocumented children brought here as youngsters — before they become embittered. But it’s an election year, so as always, expect nothing to happen.
In the end, rather than address the consequences of inaction — families who’ve become Americanized while escaping disaster and disease back home — President Donald Trump wants to round them up and send them back to join the misery.
China Daily on President Donald Trump putting North Korea back on the U.S. terrorism blacklist (Nov. 22):
Despite his war of words with the leader of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea Kim Jong-un, U.S. President Donald Trump expressed his preference for a diplomatic solution to the Korean Peninsula nuclear crisis during his recent trip to Asia.
Yet in a move that seems to go directly against this professed intention, Trump put North Korea back on the United States’ terrorism blacklist on Monday.
The designation of North Korea as a state sponsor of terrorism will only further alienate the country. It makes the prospects for talks much dimmer, and may even eliminate the possibility of any talks.
The move comes at a time when the Korean Peninsula had become calmer. For more than two months, Pyongyang has refrained from conducting any missile and nuclear tests.
The designation of North Korea as a state sponsor of terrorism could lay waste to the efforts of China and Russia to bring North Korea back to the negotiation table. Instead, it could be used by Pyongyang as a pretext to renew its weapons tests, thus restarting the vicious circle of escalating tensions on the peninsula that had seemed in danger of spiraling out of control.
Besides whether North Korea meets the legal requirements for being relisted as a state sponsor of terrorism is questionable, even at the U.S. State Department. Trump has based the designation on the alleged killing of Kim’s half-brother Kim Jongnam by North Korean agents at Kuala Lumpur airport in February. But even if this proves to be the case, lawyers say there has to be more than one terrorist incident to substantiate the claim.
The designation seems more like an excuse for the U.S. to seek the highest level of sanctions against Pyongyang as part of its proclaimed “maximum pressure campaign”.
But North Korea has already been under crushing sanctions imposed by the United Nations and other countries, which restrict its oil imports and ban most of its exports, aimed at depriving it of funds for its nuclear and missile programs. It takes time for such sanctions to bite; there is no evidence that further sanctions will achieve more immediate results in constraining Pyongyang’s nuclear ambitions. Even US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson admitted the designation is a “very symbolic move” and their “practical effects may be limited”.
North Korea has justified its pursuit of nuclear weapons with its existential concerns, insisting the weapons will help it better defend itself from the threat of a U.S. invasion. The latest U.S. move only serves to fan that fear — given what happened to Iraq and Libya — and does a disservice to easing the already tense situation on the peninsula. Instead, as China said on Tuesday, “more should be done” to resolve the crisis through dialogue.