Protesters of President Donald Trump's Muslim travel ban gather at San Francisco City Hall for a peaceful demonstration on Feb. 4, 2017 (Photo by Yichuan Cao/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
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Muslim ban on hold, for now –> Late Friday, a federal judge in Seattle suspended Trump’s Muslim immigration ban and over the weekend an appeals court in San Francisco refused to put an immediate stay on that suspension — meaning, essentially, that for the time being, airports are operating as they were before the ban was issued. Legal battles will play out this week to determine the ban’s future, Dustin Volz reports for Reuters: “The government has until 3 p.m. PST (2300 GMT) on Monday to submit additional legal briefs to the appeals court justifying Trump’s executive order. Following that the court is expected to act quickly, and a decision either way may ultimately result in the case reaching the US Supreme Court.”
Silicon Valley steps up opposition –> Mark Bergen and Sarah Frier report for Bloomberg Technology that late Sunday night, 97 companies, including tech giants Airbnb, Facebook, Google, Netflix and Uber, and some non-tech companies, such as Chobani yogurt and Levi-Straus, filed an amicus brief against Trump’s Muslim immigration ban. They write: “America has long recognized the importance of protecting ourselves against those who would do us harm. But it has done so while maintaining our fundamental commitment to welcoming immigrants — through increased background checks and other controls on people seeking to enter our country.”
Meanwhile, Business Insider’s Kate Taylor lists 33 brands facing boycotts because they do business with Trump and his companies or were outspoken in support for his candidacy. During last night’s Super Bowl, a few companies aired ads with overtly anti-Trump political overtones, including Airbnb, Budweiser and 84 Lumber.
Unions split –> Public-facing companies might be feeling the pressure to take stands against Trump’s policies, but unions, increasingly, are split over whether or not to support the new president. Erik Loomis reports for The New Republic that building trades unions are especially supportive of Trump because of his pledge to create working-class jobs. “The building trades have a singular obsession with jobs at any cost,” Loomis writes. “That is understandable given the lack of union work in this country. But it also ignores the other concerns of their members — the civil rights of their black and Latino members, the need of their female members to have access to birth control and health care, and the universal need for a livable planet. Environmentalists have failed to reach out to the building trades by not demanding that our green energy infrastructure be union-made.”
Financial deregulation rolls forward –> Following on Trump’s Friday executive order to review the Dodd-Frank financial reforms, we can expect a rollback of the protections put in place after the 2008 financial crisis in the months ahead. The push will be lead by Gary Cohn, Trump’s chief economic adviser and former Goldman Sachs president. At The New York Times, Roosevelt Institute’s Mike Konczal writes: “People hoping Mr. Trump would upset, rather than restore, global financial capitalism are in for a rude awakening.”
Over at Rolling Stone, Matt Taibbi — who once called Cohn’s former employer “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity” — writes: “The two primary disasters in American history this century (if we’re not counting Trump’s election) have been 9/11 and the 2008 financial crisis, which cost 8.7 million people their jobs and may have destroyed as much as 45 percent of the world’s wealth. The response to 9/11 we know: major military actions all over the world, plus a radical reshaping of our legal structure, with voters embracing warrantless surveillance, a suspension of habeas corpus, even torture. But the crisis response? Basically, we gave trillions of dollars to bail out the very actors who caused the mess. Now, with Trump’s election, we’ve triumphantly put those same actors back in charge of non-policing themselves.”
DAPL Divestment –> Seattle City Council will vote today on whether to divest $3 billion from Wells Fargo, one of the banks funding the Dakota Access Pipeline. Lynda Mapes reports for The Seattle Times that the move is meant to deal a blow against the pipeline as Donald Trump pledges to restart construction. “Crews are on standby in hotel rooms,” she writes, “waiting for the final easement to be released, and could finish the job within two weeks if they work around the clock.”
Morning Reads was compiled by John Light and edited by Theresa Riley.
We produce this news digest every weekday. You can to receive these updates as an email newsletter each morning.
