IMMIGR 3 REFUGEE
see climate refugees (aka refugee immigr 4) 1219
519
mofo stephen miller war on brown ppl getting benefits; 1019 must buy health care 90 days; 1119 racist email cache
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koch Group Pushing for Employer Immunity Takes $3.5M From Company with COVID-19 Outbreaks
By David Armiak | July 27th, 2020 at 11:55 AM (CDT)
Owner of Mountaire Farms, one of the nation’s largest poultry processors with multiple COVID-19 outbreaks, gives millions to American for Prosperity’s PAC, which is advocating for state and federal legislation to protect employers with workplace coronavirus cases
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/how-the-birth-tourist-became-trumps-latest-bogeyman/
https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/donald-trumps-war-on-food/
bno lnx
Donald Trump’s war on food
Written by Ali Noorani / Washington Monthly March 6, 2020
President Donald Trump’s approach to immigration policy—particularly to legal immigration–stands in between you and your favorite burger.
Last year, the administration announced the United States would resettle a maximum of 18,000 refugees over the course of fiscal year 2020, the lowest limit since the program started four decades ago and a 40 percent drop from 2019. Then, in January, the administration expanded the travel ban to suspend immigrant visas for people from Eritrea, Myanmar, Kyrgyzstan, and Nigeria, and to restrict diversity visas for citizens of Sudan and Tanzania.
These actions—coupled with myriad other moves to build a “virtual wall” that keeps newcomers out of the country — will intensify an already significant drop in legal immigration: 940,877 people obtained lawful permanent residence in fiscal year 2018, compared to 1,063,280 in fiscal year 2016, an 11.5 percent decrease.
So, what do hamburgers have to do with this? A lot, it turns out.
More often than not, immigrants are the conduit between the lettuce in the field, the cow in the pasture, and that burger on your plate.They are crucial contributors on farms in California and Idaho, and in beef-processing factories in Nebraska. In many cases, they’re the ones picking, processing, and preparing your food, and ultimately delivering it to your table. In fact, almost three-quarters of farmworkers are foreign-born. Half of the workers on dairy farms are immigrants—another important consideration if you like cheese on your patty.
Earlier this year, I was in Storm Lake, Iowa—population 13,000. I had the opportunity to sit with staff at the Tyson plant that processes pigs for markets around the world. One of the workers, Abel Saengchanpheng, came there as a Laotian refugee and was born in a camp in Thailand. Along with his Hispanic, Asian, African, and white co-workers, Abel makes Storm Lake—a town where 29 percent of residents are foreign-born—a stronger community. Downtown Storm Lake thrives because of Latino-owned stores like the Better Day Café and, as a result, local leadership addresses the best of all problems facing rural America: growth. If you take immigrants and their families out of the equation, the town starts to suffer.
Case in point: Look at the Tyson Fresh Meats plant in Perry, Iowa—population 7,500. Once a thriving workplace, it might not meet demand now due to a shortage of available workers, according to local press reports. Refugees from Eritrea and Myanmar—two countries included in Trump’s new entry ban—are frequent hires at Tyson’s Perry plant. Of the 1,368 workers Tyson employs there, 800 arrived as refugees.
In essence, we see a tale of two towns in rural America, putting food on our tables: One is thriving because of a diversity of foreign-born labor. The other town is worried about its future because its pipeline of foreign-born talent has been shut down by the Trump administration.
In Iowa alone, refugee- and immigrant-owned businesses contribute $4 billion to the state every year, and immigrant households pay nearly $522 million in local and state taxes. These hardworking people in the meatpacking, agricultural, manufacturing, and other industries stem the tide of population loss, keeping communities afloat, and add to the cultural vitality of Iowa and other states.
That matters right now, as cities attract more and more people from the heartland—hastening a demographic crisis in rural America. For instance, in Mount Pleasant, Iowa, where Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested dozens of undocumented immigrants in 2018, companies are struggling to hire. Two states away, in Indiana, immigrants are responsible for 25 percent of the state’s population growth since 2000.
In short, the strength and dynamism that immigrants and refugees bring to rural America—and our agricultural sector—is at risk.
Which brings us back to your hamburger.
A new MSNBC Show, “What’s Eating America”—executive produced by chef and humanitarian José Andrés—explores “immigration, the food industry, and more by examining the stories of people working to raise, process, and harvest what we eat.” As Andrés explains, many Americans, including our president, don’t seem to understand that immigrants and refugees are integral to our food system.
Every time Trump takes action to limit immigration or makes a derogatory comment about immigrants, farm owners and CEOs at food processing plants hear the message. They prepare for a shrinking workforce, lowered production targets, and slimmer profits.
The reality, however, is what President Trump’s acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, recently admitted: Our country is “desperate” for immigrants to “fuel economic growth.” When it comes to the food we eat, immigrants aren’t a part of the equation in the United States—they are the equation.
Ali Noorani is the Executive Director of the National Immigration Forum, host of the Only In America podcast, and author of There Goes the Neighborhood: How Communities Overcome Prejudice and Meet the Challenge of American Immigration.
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hope/ win
https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/this-gruesome-logic-is-profoundly-disturbing-judge-reverses-convictions-of-border-humanitarians/
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an 220
deported to death: US sent 138 Salvadorans home to be killed
by Mneesha Gellman, Emerson College At least 138 people deported from the United States to El Salvador since 2013 have been killed, according to a new report by Human Right
Supreme Court allows public charge clause that kept Nazi-era refugees from the US
During the Nazi era, roughly 300,000 additional Jewish refugees could have gained entry to the U.S. without exceeding the nation’s existing quotas. The primary mechanism that kept them out: the…
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an 120
https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/supreme-court-allows-trumps-shameful-public-charge-rule-to-take-effect/
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Some asylum-seekers who will be forced to wait out their cases in Mexico will now have to figure out on their own how to travel hundreds of miles to their…
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1219 an
Not a single governor so far has taken up Trump’s offer to block refugees from their states
Impeached president Donald Trump has given governors the unprecedented power to block refugees from their states—and none so far have taken him up on the offer.
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https://www.democracynow.org/2019/12/13/climate_refugees_climate_fueled_drought_sea
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chris farrell red dir judicial watch
...Bates: Our borders, particularly the Southern border, have been very porous, long before the Obama Administration. However there has been news that it is not just illegal migrants seeking economic opportunity in America that they can't find in Mexico. Is there a concern now that some of these migrants are actually not Mexican or Latin American at all? And, in fact they might possibly be Islamic terrorists?
Farrell: It is not a concern, it's a fact. The illustration of this is the case of Tampico, Mexico, a large commercial port on the Gulf of Mexico with a huge amount of freighter traffic and commercial shipping. On those vessels arrive persons from the Middle East, North Africa, and Southwest Asia, many of them are Islamists. They arrive in the Port of Tampico for $1,500 a head. Mohammad becomes Manuel. $1,500 later that person has authentic, legitimate Mexican identity papers, birth certificates, and drivers’ licenses. This would be all of the documentation they would need to establish their identity and take on a new life in Mexico. They are then moved through a series of camps. We know locations of three camps. We have heard from various sources that there are upwards of seven camps in the interior of Mexico where these folks receive language training, clothing, cultural history and mannerisms to help them integrate and appear Mexican. To live, breathe, walk, talk, and act as though they are natives of Mexico. From there they move north to our Southern border and into the United States. The example I use is one raindrop in an ocean of humanity washing up on our Southern shore. However, what is concerning is that this happens with some regularity and frequency. It is organized, deliberate and poses an enormous security threat to our country.
Bates:Does the Administration know this is happening? Clearly if Judicial Watch knows the Administration must know.
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climate, not conflict, drove many Syrian refugees to Lebanon
Hussein A. Amery, Colorado School of Mines
Both drought and violence drove many Syrians out of their homes; even if the war ends, the continuing difficulty of farming will make it hard for them to return.
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the Trump administration knows that its new rule sending asylum-seekers from El Salvador and Honduras to Guatemala is deadly. It has stated as much in guidance reportedly distributed to asylum officers tasked…
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Attempt to ‘criminalize basic human kindness’ fails as activist Scott Warren found not guilty on all charges
https://www.alternet.org/2019/11/simply-barbaric-trump-administration-proposes-charging-asylum-fee-for-refugees-fleeing-violence/
racism new problem? ProEnglish tanton
The Southern Poverty Law Center reported on the group’s statement about the January 2018 meeting and also noted the July 2019 meeting in a piece about Tanton’s death.
On its 25th anniversary last month, the organization wrote that it “is very proud to have been able to have several meetings directly in the White House with a variety of aides to both President Trump and Vice President Pence.” Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK)
mma 1119
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According to a report published by The New York Times, Donald Trump once suggested during a meeting in the Oval Office that soldiers at the U.S. southern border should shoot migrants.
This is not the first time Trump has suggested shooting unarmed immigrants at the border. Last November, Trump had said U.S. troops on the border should shoot immigrants who throw rocks. At a Florida rally this past May, Trump laughed when a crowd member said the U.S. can stop migrants from approaching the border by shooting them, saying, "That's only in the panhandle could you get away with that statement."
Shooting unarmed migrants at the border is an idea that has been circulating in the right-wing media landscapefor a long time -- it’s part of the dehumanizing anti-immigrant narratives that have thrived among right-wing outlets and on social media for years.
In 2015, Fox’s Laura Ingraham suggested the U.S. threaten to shoot deported immigrants who approached the border.
Racist right-wing columnist Ann Coulter called for migrants to be shot on Twitter, arguing that the National Guard should “shoot the illegals” at the border because “just standing there doesn’t do a thing.”
Fox Nation host Tomi Lahren suggested that U.S. citizens may need to shoot immigrants to “defend” themselves. Lahren stated that guns are necessary to protect “the people in Texas, the people in South Dakota, the people in the middle of this country” from immigrants.
On right-wing Facebook pages, memes asking if the U.S. military should shoot migrants at the southern border have frequently gone viral. These memes, published by vehemently anti-immigrant pages, pose loaded questions to their pro-Trump audiences, such as asking if users are OK with shooting immigrants “to kill.” Some users also justify violence at the border by echoing a right-wing talking point about immigrants using government resources and repeating white supremacist dog whistles about a migrant " invasion" of the United States.
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medical daca, congress testimony nil blamed on pending case, but would not even answer basic questions (// that's judic appt)
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ew 919
another sign of the climate crisis, a record seven million people were displaced from their homes by extreme weather events during the first half of 2019, The New York Times reported Thursday.
Read More
919 AN
Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote a forceful dissent issued Wednesday as…
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/how-climate-change-is-driving-emigration-from-central-america/
no lnx
How climate change is driving emigration from Central America
Written by The Conversation September 6, 2019
Miranda Cady Hallett, University of Dayton
Clouds of dust rose behind the wheels of the pickup truck as we hurtled over the back road in Palo Verde, El Salvador. When we got to the stone-paved part of the road, the driver slowed as the truck heaved up and down with the uneven terrain. Riding in the back bed of the truck, Ruben (not his real name) and I talked while we held on tight, sitting on sacks of dried beans that he was taking to market.
“It doesn’t come out right,” he said, “it just doesn’t pay anymore to work the land. I take out a loan for seed, and then I can’t count on making it back to pay off my debt.”
Ruben told me then, for the first time, that he planned to save up his money to migrate out of El Salvador. His story is playing out across Central America among many migrants and would-be migrants.
When I spoke with Ruben, it was 2017, nearly 20 years after I had first spent time in his community, a coffee cooperative in El Salvador’s central highlands founded in the 1990s. Over those two decades, the cooperative’s hopes and dreams of a sustainable livelihood producing coffee for a global market have been dashed.
Rising global temperatures, the spread of crop disease and extreme weather events have made coffee harvests unreliable in places like El Salvador. On top of that, market prices are unpredictable.
In the back of the pickup truck that day, we talked about gangs too. There was increasing criminal activity in the town nearby, and some young people in the town were being harassed and recruited. But this was a relatively new issue for the community, layered on top of the persistent problem of the ecological crisis.
As a cultural anthropologist who studies factors of displacement in El Salvador, I see how Ruben’s situation is reflective of a much broader global phenomenon of people leaving their homes, directly or indirectly due to climate change and the degradation of their local ecosystem. And as environmental conditions are projected to get worse under current trends, this raises unresolved legal questions on the status and security of people like Ruben and his family.
Land and livelihood
Migration from Central America has gotten a lot of attention these days, including the famous migrant caravans. But much of it focuses on the way migrants from this region – especially El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua and Honduras – are driven out by gang violence, corruption and political upheaval.
These factors are important and require a response from the international community. But displacement driven by climate change is significant too.
The migrant exodus from Central America includes many people impacted by climate change, although other factors play a part as well.
The link between environmental instability and emigration from the region became apparent in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Earthquakes and hurricanes, especially Hurricane Mitch in 1998 and its aftermath, were ravaging parts of Honduras, Nicaragua and El Salvador.
Many people from El Salvador and Honduras lived in the U.S. at the time, and the Bush administration granted them Temporary Protected Status. In this way, the government of the United States recognized the inhumanity of sending people back to places struggling with ecological disaster.
In the years since those events, both rapid-onset and long-term environmental crises continue to displace people from their homes worldwide. Studies show that displacement often happens indirectly through the impact of climate change on agricultural livelihoods, with some areas pressured more than others. But some are more dramatic: Both Honduras and Nicaragua are among the top 10 countries most impacted by extreme weather events between 1998 and 2017.
Since 2014, a serious drought has decimated crops in Central America’s so-called dry corridor along the Pacific Coast. By impacting smallholder farmers in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, this drought helps to drive higher levels of migration from the region.
Coffee production, a critical support for these countries’ economies, is especially vulnerable and sensitive to weather variations. A recent outbreak of coffee leaf rust in the region was likely exacerbated by climate change.
The fallout from that plague combines with the recent collapse in global coffee prices to spur desperate farmers to give up.
Compounding factor
These trends have led experts at the World Bank to claim that around 2 million people are likely to be displaced from Central America by the year 2050 due to factors related to climate change. Of course, it’s hard to tease out the “push factor” of climate change from all of the other reasons that people need to leave. And unfortunately, these phenomena interact and tend to exacerbate each other.
Scholars are working hard to assess the scale of the problem and study ways people can adapt. But the problem is challenging. The number of displaced could be even higher – up to almost 4 million – if regional development does not shift to more climate-friendly and inclusive models of agriculture.
People who emigrate from Central America may not always fully realize the role climate change plays in their movement, or think of it as the final trigger given all the other reasons they have to flee. But they know that the crops fail too often, and it’s harder to get clean water than it used to be.
Environmental factors are playing more and more of a role in Central Americans’ decisions to leave home.
Seeking a protected status
Ruben recently contacted me to ask for a reference to a good immigration lawyer. He and his daughter are now in the United States and have an upcoming hearing to determine their status.
Just as he predicted a few years ago, Ruben couldn’t make a living in El Salvador. But he may find it hard to live in the U.S. too, given the mismatch between refugee law and current factors causing displacement.
For several years now, scholars and legal advocates have been asking how to respond to people displaced by environmental conditions. Do existing models of humanitarian response and resettlement work for this new population? Could such persons be recognized as in need of protection under international law, similar to political refugees?
Among the most complicated political questions is who should step up to deal with the harms of climate change, considering that wealthier countries pollute more but are often shielded from the worst effects. How can responsibility be assigned, and more importantly, what is to be done?
In the absence of coordinated action on the part of the global community to mitigate ecological instability and recognize the plight of displaced people, there’s a risk of what some have called “climate apartheid.” In this scenario – climate change combined with closed borders and few migration pathways – millions of people would be forced to choose between increasingly insecure livelihoods and the perils of unauthorized migration.
]The Conversation
Miranda Cady Hallett, Associate Professor of Anthropology and Human Rights Center Research Fellow, University of Dayton
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/a-death-sentence-trump-reportedly-moving-to-deport-kids-with-cancer-hiv-and-other-deadly-illnesses/
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public charge scam part of network of efforts, racist at bottom
https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/its-an-attempt-to-impose-a-white-nationalist-vision-of-what-america-is/
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Trump administration revives public charge clause that barred Nazi-era refugees from the US
Laurel Leff, The Conversation August 22, 2019
During the Nazi era, roughly 300,000 additional Jewish refugees could have gained entry to the U.S. But the immigration law’s “likely to become a public charge” clause kept them out.
// Jews by nazi, incrementally rolls back rights/access
https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/trump-white-house-tried-to-stop-immigrant-kids-from-attending-public-schools-their-racist-anti-immigration-crusade-knows-no-bounds/
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700 ppl arrested 1st day school, several plants had tried to unionize
day of el paso hosp visit thumbs up w/ orphan baby
patents died shielding
cooch evil b/c aid weaponized
note lang god term self-sufficiency
snap or other help lose green card/path to citizen? 8/13/19
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8/12/19 cooch trump cut aid for immigrants (legal ones, trying to shift to high skill vs family reunification) kpfa
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https://theconversation.com/the-long-bipartisan-history-of-dealing-with-immigrants-harshly-119523
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pro pub series:
ZERO TOLERANCE
Trump’s Immigration Policy at the Border
https://www.propublica.org/article/immigration-officials-use-secretive-gang-databases-to-deny-migrant-asylum-claims
With scant public notice, federal immigration officials are relying on databases run by foreign police and militaries to check whether migrants crossing the United States border have gang affiliations, which would allow officials to detain and eventually deport them.
The information is being provided through a new “fusion” intelligence-gathering center in El Salvador that is funded by the State Department and works in tandem with the Department of Homeland Security.
But legal experts and human rights advocates say the government has kept the use of databases at the border largely secret, subverting potential challenges to the reliability of the information in them. An attorney in Texas recently discovered that her Salvadoran client had been falsely accused of being in the MS-13 gang based on intelligence from the center. The man was jailed in a maximum-security facility for violent criminals for six months, and his two children were taken away.
Government attorneys, pressed repeatedly in court to provide evidence, eventually dropped the allegation of gang membership against him without explanation.
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Why would politicians fix our immigration problems when they can campaign off the mess?
Ross Ramsey / The Texas Tribune
Look at the immigration problem, at the issues on the border, at what lawmakers are doing in response and at the polling of what voters think. It looks like the fight might be more beneficial to the politicians than a solution would be.
Trump’s acting citizenship and immigration director says he’s ready to deport ‘approximately one million people’
Image via Screengrab.
written by Matthew Rozsa / Salon July 8, 2019
President Donald Trump’s acting citizenship and immigration services director, Ken Cuccinelli, announced on Sunday that the president is planning roughly 1 million deportations of undocumented immigrants in the near future
“Well, essentially at this point it’s beenput in Matt Albence’s hand, the acting director at ICE,” Cuccinelli told Margaret Brennan of “Face the Nation” about Trump’s plan for undocumented immigrants after Congress failed to overhaul asylum laws after a two week deadline. “He’s a career ICE officer, came up through the ranks and they’re ready to just perform their mission which is to go and find and detain and then deport the approximately one million people who have final removal orders. They’ve been all the way through the due process and have final removal orders. Who among those will be targeted for this particular effort, or not, is really just information kept within ICE at this point.”
After Brennan suggested that this meant the removals would be much larger than previously indicated, when the number suggested was merely “in the thousands,” Cuccinelli insisted that he was simply drawing from a larger pool of people.
“No, no I’m just pointing out that the pool of those with final removal orders is enormous,” Cuccinelli explained. “And, you know, it’s important to note, here we are talking about ICE doing its job as if it’s special.And really this should be going on on a rolling basis for ICE and they’ve been interfered with effectively and held up by the politics of Washington to a certain extent they’re looking forward to just getting back to doing their job.”
Cuccinelli also answered a question by Brennan about whether census data is being used for political purposes.
“The census is intended to gather an awful lot of information the way it’s used now,” Cuccinelli told Brennan. “However, if your question is, ‘Will my agency or other agencies see a person who says, ‘no I’m not a citizen and their name and address and so forth,” that’s taken on an aggregated basis. That’s not individualized data that comes to us.”
During an interview with Dana Perino on “Fox News Sunday,”Cuccinelli also blamed Congress for not doing enough to “fix the problem” of undocumented immigration in the United States.
“People in the House come down and complain about them while not helping fix the problem. It’s the height of hypocrisy,” Cuccinelli told Perino.
He later added, “It was being run well, it was run safely, and so forth, but once you’re over those capacity points, you encounter problems.” After insisting that Congress change asylum laws in order to limit how people can enter the United States, Cuccinelli struck a pessimistic note, telling Perino that Democrats in Congress “just want to politicize it. They don’t actually want to solve the problem.”
He also explained that the reason ICE will have to conduct operations to remove roughly 1 million undocumented immigrants who were ordered to leave the United States by the courts proves that “we’ve fallen to the point where we’re talking about it like it’s news.” He added that this demonstrates “how far that we have fallen in the enforcement side. It is the most violated federal court order in America.”
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/how-democratic-proposals-on-immigration-are-being-distorted/
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2 mil migrant workers in san joachin vly
RR did immigration reform that included acctability for hiring illlegals, never implemented b/c big ag did not want it
UN study drought --> hunger centr am 1 tortilla/day! 2.1 mill hungry
bath riots texas ft carmelita louse bath every day, naked pix posted in bars. latx rosa parks
hunter sr got border wall built san diego, forced ppl in desert who died; bro rocket sci studied routes and started water stations
history pete w behind 20 pts kathleen brown, prop 187 boosted polls
https://kpfa.org/episode/letters-and-politics-june-25-2019/
john carlos frey sp bk sand and blood
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ew spike?
Tens of Thousands Flee Extreme Heatwave in India as Temperatures Topping 120°F Kill Dozens Across Country
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2 big SYS fails uncorrected led to djt: gt recess and gulf war 2, brexit
...curry salon
After the Iraq war, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown appointed a commission to investigate how exactly his country stumbled into such a tragic fiasco.The Chilcot Report (for Lord John Chilcot, who led the commission) was an account of political bungling and deception as thorough and damning as the Pentagon Papers. Its 2016 release made former Prime Minister Tony Blair, chief accomplice to George W. Bush in that disastrous undertaking, into a social leper. Unlike Robert Mueller, Chilcot had an absolute right to interview any witness and compel production of any document he felt he needed; nearly all his interviews were done in public, and he delivered his report direct to the people of the United Kingdom.
The war was hatched in America by ideologues bent on exporting democracy via bribery and force of arms. In the eyes of many, it surpasses Vietnam as the worst foreign policy blunder in our nation’s history. In a speech to the nation summarizing the case for it, Bush leaned heavily on the only possible rationale for an unprovoked attack on a sovereign nation:
Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised.
For months, his vice president and national security adviser peddled “evidence” of nuclear and chemical weapons. Before his speech, Bush was told by experts at the Department of Energy that the evidence was false, but he kept the news to himself. To this day it remains unproven who was lying, and who was only lied to.
The Congressional Budget Office says the war cost the U.S. $2 trillion. Nobel Prize-winning economist Joe Stiglitz puts it at $3 trillion. Nearly 4,500 U.S. military personnel died there, and tens of thousands more suffered disabling physical and psychic wounds. Iraqi casualties remain in dispute — as Gen. Tommy Franks informed reporters, “We don’t do body counts” — but estimates range from 180,000 to more than a million deaths. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees counted 3.7 million refugees. Americans think the war’s over. Last month, it took 166 Iraqi lives.
In 2009, as Gordon Brown was launching the Chilcot Inquiry, Barack Obama was being pressured to take a similar look back at how America was lured or lied into war. Obama took a different tack. Rather than appoint a commission with plenipotentiary powers, he did nothing. Aides said he thought retracing Bush’s path to war would make it hard to forge bipartisan alliances with Republicans.
Similar concerns colored his take on the other huge crisis he inherited, the 2008 Wall Street meltdown that leveled the global economy. No one knows its true cost, only that the number exceeds most human minds’ ability to conceptualize. A Government Accountability Office study put the U.S. cost at $22 trillion.
Social and political costs were even higher. Post-meltdown austerity measures, following ondecades of stagnant wages just as millions of Middle East refugees flooded Europe, rocking center-left coalitions that had ruled the West since World War II. Far-right political parties the old order was too polite to label fascist began to metastasize. Britain got Brexit. America got Trump.[NOTE CONFLUENCE OF 2 FAILS]
When the crisis broke, Obama was running for president. His closing stump speech was a litany of vows to curb corruption; above all, to punish Wall Street fraud. His administration never brought a case. Three years later, he went on “60 Minutes” to explain that the worst behavior wasn’t actually illegal. Given his dazzling intellect and access to wise counsel, one assumes he knew that what he said wasn’t true.
Privately, Obama revealed his thinking. He worried that prosecutions would hurt banks. He worried he’d lose personal support in the business community. (A major culprit, Goldman Sachs, was also his biggest donor.) And he worried he’d lose business backing vital to building bipartisan coalitions in Congress.
Lying was as much a cause of the Great Recession as it was of the Iraq war. Loan originators lied about applicants’ creditworthiness. Investment bankers lied about the toxicity of mortgage portfolios. Standard and Poor’s and Moody’s and Fitch all lied. So did Obama and most of Congress, which meant major reforms, excepting only Elizabeth Warren’s Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, were designed to curb “irrational exuberance,” not the immorality at the root of what befell us.
Instead of going to prison, bankers got bailed out, while homeowners got betrayed. Like the meltdown itself, the government’s response helped incite a populist revolt. Obama and Clinton Democrats were deaf to it, but Trump’s final 2016 TV ad began “Our movement is about replacing a failed and corrupt political establishment.” In the last week, it replaced nearly every other ad he had up in the industrial Midwest.
These failures — to investigate the origins of the Iraq war and the Great Recession and punish the culprits — were not anomalies. After 9/11, no one had the stomach to hold George W. Bush to account for ignoring intelligence reports on his desk, so the bipartisanship crowd invented a structural failure and wasted years rearranging intelligence and homeland security bureaucracies, resulted in a new Cabinet-level post, the Director of National Intelligence, who lacks the authority to direct anyone to do anything.
It happened after the 2000 election: Media barons set out to fix the exit polls, Congress set out to rid the world of hanging chads via nifty paperless ballots and the Democratic Party set out to rid the world of Ralph Nader.Thus, a pioneering GOP foray into voter suppression went nearly unremarked. Despite butterfly ballots, staged riots, a chief election official doing double duty as a Bush campaign chair and a Supreme Court concocting phony equal protection claims to rob Al Gore of real due process, Bush was clothed in legitimacy, leaving millions of Americans to conclude that the system was indeed rigged.
I doubt we’d be saddled with Trump had we not come to resemble him: way too materialistic, more than a bit narcissistic, unfocused, unlettered, infantile, even amoral. Our responses to these crises suggest that we also share a high tolerance for lying, a limited capacity for self-examination and an unspoken belief that the rich and powerful are above the law. Which brings us to the latest in our recent line of failures to look either evil or ourselves in the eye, the Mueller Report....
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booktv history
https://www.c-span.org/video/?460614-1/against-deportation-terror
Against the Deportation Terror
MAY 18, 2019
Against the Deportation Terror
The American Committee for Protection of Foreign Born was established in the 1930s to protect European immigrants escaping fascism from…
https://www.alternet.org/2019/05/the-trump-administrations-insidious-plan-to-cut-social-security-benefits/
Trump administration, continuing its assaults on the most vulnerable Americans, is now going after disabled people with limited English proficiency. Dependent children of people who become disabled are among those likely to be hurt by the new rule.
The rule, not yet in effect, would deny Social Security disability benefits to people whose language difficulty makes them unemployable in the market, but who Team Trump thinks should be able to find jobs where an inability to speak or understand instructions is only a minor problem, citing among other examples cook and gardener.
The justification makes no mention of whether people have the stamina, agility and muscle power to do such work, especially if they are disabled. Most recipients of Social Security Disability Insurance payments receive between $800 and $1,800 per month (the average for 2019 is $1,234).
The proposed rule contradicts another Trump rule change. Both rules are squarely aimed at immigrants.
The proposed Social Security rule change is the latest example showing that to Team Trump no one is too poor, too powerless or too far down the economic ladder to escape their malicious attention.
People with difficulty speaking in any language could be denied benefits, opponents argue.
"We’re very concerned at how this administration is chipping away” at benefits for people, said Jenna McDavid of the Diverse Elders Coalition.
Hidden Intention
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/05/a-new-trump-administration-rule-could-force-tens-of-thousands-of-kids-into-homelessness-report/
Trump Administration has proposed a rule designed to purge undocumented immigrants from public housing. But according to analysis from the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), the rule could have the effect of displacing more than 55,000 children who are all legal citizens or residents of the United States.
HUD Secretary Ben Carson has described the proposed rule, which is beingaggressively pushed by White House Senior Policy Adviser Stephen Miller,as a way to “make certain our scarce public resources help those who are legally entitled to it.” However, HUD’s analysis indicates that about half of the people in households that are facing possible eviction or homelessness are children who are legally qualified for help.
In the U.S., current rules forbid undocumented immigrants from directly receiving federal housing assistance. But families that have mixed immigration status are eligible.
An undocumented single man or single woman is not eligible for housing assistance under current rules, but a family is eligible if at least one person in that household is eligible. For example, a man who is undocumented would not be eligible by himself, but his family could apply if his wife is a U.S. citizen or if he has a child who was born in the U.S. (that U.S.-born child enjoys birthright citizenship). And the benefits the family is entitled to receive are prorated accordingly.
But the new rule would require everyone in that household to have “eligible immigration status,” the Washington Post reports. According to HUD, roughly 25,000 households in the U.S. representing about 108,000 people presently living in subsidized housing have at least one ineligible member—and about 70% of these households with mixed immigration status (around 76,000 people) legally qualify for benefits. About 55,000 are children.
According to its analysis, “HUD expects that fear of the family being separated would lead to prompt evacuation by most mixed households. Temporary homelessness could arise for a household if they are unable to find alternative housing."
Diane Yentel, president and chief executive of the National Low Income Housing Coalition, is highly critical of the proposed rule, and the Washington Post quotes her as saying, “Tens of thousands of deeply poor kids, mostly U.S. citizens, could be evicted and made homeless because of this rule. And by HUD’s own admission, there would be no benefit to families on the waiting list.”