Roaming Charges: Xenophobia With a Human Face
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BY
+ As the Biden administration announced its intention to leave in place Trump’s border rules “for now,” it might be worth recalling when Biden’s campaign manager derisively quipped that they didn’t see Hispanics as part of their “path to victory.”
+ 5500 children were separated at the border in the last four years, at least 628 of them still in custody. How many of them has Biden reunited with their families?
+ Biden immigration Executive Order says don’t separate families “except … where a separation is clearly necessary for the safety and well-being of the child or is required by law.” How many children will be caged based on that EXCEPT….?
+ According to CNN, the Biden admin is reopening an overflow facility [ie., concentration camp] in Texas for unaccompanied migrant children apprehended [arrested] at the US-Mexico border. It comes amid an increase in apprehensions [arrests] and reduced capacity limits at other facilities due to [the failure to decarcerate or vaccinate against] Covid-19.
+ They’re already building kinder and gentler concentration camps for kids…But relax, they’re only temporary!
+ Xenophobia with a human face…
+ 380,000: the number of immigrants awaiting a decision on their status to enter the United States.
+ There have been four ICE deportation flights to Haiti alone this week with least two more expected on Friday and Saturday. In coming weeks, the number migrants returned to Haiti is expected to reach 1,800. (Dozens more Haitian asylum-seekers have been abruptly expelled by the Biden administration into Mexico.) ICE is expected to deport another 1200 asylum seekers to Africa in the next 10 days, where many, especially Cameroonians, face prison and torture.
+ The Democrats: a party so eager to compromise that if the Republicans won’t show up, they’ll compromise with themselves: “Some senior Dems are looking at lowering threshold on stimulus payments so they start phasing out above $50K for single taxpayers; $75K for heads of households; & $100K for married couples…”
+ Do I hear $1400? How about $600? (Restrictions may apply to this limited time offer.)
+ Just to reset: the Democrats went from $2,000 recurring checks to $2,000 checks “immediately” to $1,400 checks to $1,400 checks but only if your 2019 income was under $50,000 as an individual or $100,000 as a married couple.
+ Two of Biden’s top advisers, Heather Boushey and David Kamin, reportedly think even the $1400 checks are too generous, while Larry Summers continues trolling from the sidelines.
+ Speaking of bipartisan xenophobia, 8 Democratic senators voted to prohibit undocumented immigrants from getting stimulus checks (if there are stimulus checks):
Hassan (NH)
Hickenlooper (CO)
Kelly (AZ)
Manchin (WV)
Peters (MI)
Sinema (AZ)
Stabenow (MI)
Tester (MT)
+ A Brookings Study predicts that Biden’s stimulus package has a shot at returning the US economy to pre-pandemic conditions–the same conditions that sucked for most Americans.
+ A federal judge in Oregon has ordered the state to begin giving COVID-19 vaccines to prison inmates immediately. To date, at least 42 inmates have died and more than 3000 have tested positive for COVID. The ruling came days after the most lethal month Oregon’s prison system since the start of the pandemic. “From the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, it was clear that our country’s prisons were uniquely vulnerable to the transmission and spread of the virus,” Judge Stacie Beckerman wrote. “Oregon prisons have not been spared from this reality.”
+ That’s not the case in Texas, where the state has begun vaccinating prison guards and health care workers but not prisoners.
+ Yet, even the pandemic hasn’t slowed the pace of incarceration in the US, where jail and prison populations continue to swell. In New York City, for example, jail population was 3,800 in April 2020. Now it’s surged to 5,300.
+ One in every 475 Native Americans has died since the Covid pandemic began. Indigenous people are dying from Covid at twice the rate of white Americans.
+ In Chicago, residents in the heavily polluted Little Village’s 60623 and 60608 ZIP codes are up to 15 times more likely to die from the coronavirus compared to their Near North Side and downtown counterparts. Yet these poor, largely black neighborhoods have received 20 percent fewer vaccinations than the city’s more affluent downtown communities.
+ The CDC issued a report this week confirming what many of us have long suspected: LGBTQ people are at greater risk of contracting severe COVID than the rest of the population.
+ 37% of LGBTQ adult smokers smoke every day compared to 27% of non-LGBTQ people.
+ 21% of LGBTQ adults have had asthma, compared to 14% of non-LGBTQ people.
+ One in five LGBTQ adults aged 50 and above have diabetes.
+ 17% of LGBTQ adults do not have any kind of health insurance coverage, compared to 12% of non-LGBTQ adults.
+ 4,000: the estimated number of COVID variants and mutations currently circulating in the global population.
+ Back to school safely? Perhaps somewhere, but not here in Oregon, where a total of 94 students and 78 staff with active COVID-19 cases and ongoing outbreaks at at least 69 different schools.
+ The deadliest outbreak of polio in the US occurred in 1952, when it killed 3,200 people in a year–roughly the number of people who died every day from COVID in the month of January.
+ People tend to think of restaurant closures, restrictions on indoor dining or takeout as protecting the consumer, when it’s the food workers who are at the most risk: “Line cooks had a 60% increase in mortality associated with the pandemic” regardless of whether customers eat inside, outside or take it home….
+ At the current rates of vaccination, only about 10% of the world would be inoculated by the end of the year and 21% by the close of 2022, according to estimates by UBS. Just 10 countries are on track to vaccinate more than one-third of their population this year.
+ It sure looks like there was something much more malign than negligence or incompetence going on here: Even after Trump the administration steered billions of federal tax dollars to drug makers for the development Covid-19 vaccines, it rebuffed states’ concerns about distributing the vaccine and sedulously undermined their efforts to get funding for the rollout from Congress.
+ The anti-vaxxers are getting more and more like the homophobic religious zealots (Westboro Church, et al.) who show up at gay funerals to insult grieving families.
+ Trumpism lives…in the New York Governor’s mansion. “Cuomo threw out two decades of work & planning by health officials and instead created a totally new vaccine plan, relying on consultants, lobbyists, and donors.”
+ Politically, there’s not much breathing space between Vladimir Putin and Alexie Navalny. Both are committed neoliberals and Islamophobes. One currently has a police force at his command, the other doesn’t…
+ The heavy hand of Modi should be getting at least as much attention as Putin’s crackdown on the Navalny protests…
+ Are there governments that aren’t arresting thousands of their own citizens this week?
+ Alabama plans to execute Willie B. Smith III — a brain-damaged Black man suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (related to childhood trauma)–on February 11th, even though Smith “hasn’t had an in-person visit with any lawyer or been assessed by any expert witness needed to properly support his clemency petition since last March.”
+ 1,389: the number of people Virginia has put to death since 1608. Hopefully, that grim toll ends today.
+ Milwaukee cops left a 4-year-old girl in a freezing car overnight after arresting her mother, then charged the mom with child neglect….
+ The US now incarcerates Black people at 6 times the maximum rate of apartheid-era South Africa.
+ At least half of the people shot by Vancouver (WA) police in the last decade suffered from mental health issues….
+ When your protocols allow you to slam a 9-year-old girl’s face in the snow and pepper spray her in the back of your police car, there’s something seriously wrong with your protocols…“The head of Rochester’s police union says protocols were not broken by the officers during the incident in question.”
+ At one point, a cop said, “You’re acting like a child.” The 9-year-old girl replied, “I am a child!”
+ Since Antifa came to town look what’s happened to the violent crime rate in Portland.
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Now that’s what I call community policing.
+ As the disparate strains of the MAGAgruppen converged for their riotous denouement on Capitol Hill, federal prosecutors and FBI agents had been directed to engage in a nationwide snipe hunt for the chimerical forces of Antifa. It’s hard to find and infiltrate something which isn’t there…unless you have a few undercover operatives create it.
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