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Congress is not happy about Trump’s budget taking away environmental protections.

A lot of climate hawks spent late 2016 and early 2017 in reassessment or mourning. Meanwhile, Anthony Torres was busy channeling his fellow engaged millennials into direct action, including coordinated sit-ins at the offices of New York’s Chuck Schumer, the new Senate Minority Leader, and Sen. Tom Carper of Delaware. The message: Do not play ball with the polluter-in-chief.

The son of a Nicaraguan immigrant father and a working-class New Yorker mother, Torres grew up with sea-level rise on his Long Island doorstep, and he understands how poverty, climate, and other social challenges are all knitted together. He’s proven especially adept at rallying peers to his side, both in an official capacity at the Sierra Club (where he helped coordinate communications and direct actions that aided in a defeat of the Trans-Pacific Partnership) and in extracurricular work with groups like #AllOfUs, a progressive collective aimed at organizing young people around threatened communities.

His advice on connecting different constituencies: “Activists need to create a story that is accessible to people who are not necessarily in our movements but who are in need of a bold and inspiring vision,” Torres says. “To me, it’s telling a story of America that intersects with race, gender, and class” and turning what might seem like differences into “a weapon in our arsenal that creates an America that never has happened before — a country for all of us.”


Meet all the fixers on this year’s Grist 50.

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Congress is not happy about Trump’s budget taking away environmental protections.

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Donald Trump Just Made the Case for Campaign Finance Reform

Mother Jones

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Donald Trump tore up the stage at the first GOP debate, and he threw his fellow candidates into a frenzy when Fox News moderator tried to challenge him on his extensive donations to Hillary Clinton and Democratic House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi.

“Most of the people on this stage I’ve given to, a lot of money,” Trump responded.

Several of his opponents were quick to deny that they had taken money from Trump, but apparently not all of them could stand the idea of leaving money on the table.

“You’re welcome to give me a check, Donald, if you’d like,” former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee pitched.

Ohio Gov. John Kasich said, “I hope you will give to me.”

“Good, sounds good to me Governor,” Trump said.

But he wasn’t done.

“I will tell you that our system is broken. I give to many people,” he said. “I give to everybody, when they call I give, and you know what? When I need something from them, two years, three years later, I call, they are there for me.”

Asked what he got from Hillary Clinton for his donations to her 2007 Senate campaign, Trump bragged, “Well, I’ll tell you, with Hillary Clinton, I said come to my wedding and she came to my wedding, she had no choice, because I gave.”

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Donald Trump Just Made the Case for Campaign Finance Reform

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The Financial Industry Doesn’t Want You To Know About Its Lack of Diversity

Mother Jones

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It’s not unusual for the banking industry to challenge a new government rule. Ever since Congress passed the Dodd-Frank Act in 2010, the banks have sent forth their army of lobbyists any time federal regulators try to enforce a new restriction, often resorting to the courts if they don’t get their way. But their latest objection is particularly galling: they don’t want the government or public to know about the diversity—or lack thereof—within their industry.

When Congress went about reforming the banking industry in 2010, Democrats made a specific point to encourage the financial industry to diversify its workforce. It has long needed a fix. The financial trade is controlled by old, rich white dudes, a cohort that doesn’t accurately reflect the country’s shifting demographics. The problem only gets worse when you look higher up the chain of command. Overall management in the financial services industry is 81 percent white as of 2011. African-Americans only account for 2.7 percent of senior-level staff in the financial industry, while women hold just 28.4 percent of upper management jobs.

Dodd-Frank, the Democrats’ bill to reform Wall Street following the crash, included a provision that creates Offices of Minority and Women Inclusion in each branch of the federal regulatory regime, such as the Department of Treasury and the Securities and Exchange Commission. (The provision doesn’t touch sexual orientation.) These new offices are tasked with boosting diversity within their own ranks and analyzing hiring practices of the businesses in their purview. Late last year, regulators from six of these offices wrote a rule, still in the proposal stage, to enforce the second half of that mandate. It’s a modest measure—a simple request that the banks conduct self-assessments based on a few best-practice guidelines, but it was enough to rile up the banks.

Complaint letters sent from the main lobbying arms of the financial industry to regulators show a concerted effort to avoid changing their hiring practices and to dissuade regulators from revealing the lack of diversity in the banking sector. “In an otherwise good-faith effort to utilize the joint standards and meet certain standards or metrics relating to ‘diversity,’” the Chamber of Commerce wrote in its letter, “regulated entities may inadvertently run afoul of federal workplace requirements by, for example, engaging in ‘reverse’ discrimination.” Smaller regional banks shared those concerns. The Missouri Bankers Association likened the agencies’ proposal to a “government mandated affirmative action program.”

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The Financial Industry Doesn’t Want You To Know About Its Lack of Diversity

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