I don't understand why RBG would be such a hated figure. I think it might be the same problem as the AOC thing and Nancy Pelosi: if the other side has a powerful or respected figure, you have to destroy it.
I wouldn't call myself an environmentalist per se. I don't really place much value in the environment itself; I just view environmental issues as important in the sense that we live in the environment. I don't grieve for endangered species (let the pandas and tigers die already), nor do I seek to protect unspoiled lands. I am pretty much the polar opposite of a druid--I view nature as a thing to be conquered and controlled rather than preserved and respected.
But we need rainfall to be stable to grow our crops. We need sea levels to be stable to maintain our coastal communities. We need the air to be clean so we can breathe it, and the water to be clean so we can drink it and use it. We need trees to prevent erosion to maintain soil nutrients so we can use the land for practical purposes. We can't catch fish in exhausted waters, and we can't live in houses if hurricanes turn them to splinters. Climate change threatens all of those interests, and we can't really afford to take the hit when we're talking about something that threatens every human being on the planet; not just a few polar bears in the Arctic.
I care not at all if the rest of the animal kingdom dies out. But we still need our environment to be healthy so we can grow our food and build our stuff. There's definitely a valid role for environmental regulations, and we definitely do need the EPA to preserve the interests of humankind as a whole from the narrower interests of individual industries who stand to benefit from short-sighted cost-cutting measures.
If we could realistically insulate ourselves from the effects of global warming and pollution, I would advocate it. But until genetics research progresses to the point where we can rapidly engineer new crops to adjust to quick changes in temperature and rainfall, and until we can design cities that can withstand hurricanes, and until we can build communities that can float when sea levels rise, and until we have ready solutions for every little problem that arises in a more chaotic environment, climate change stands to hurt us in concrete, material ways.
I don't want to ruin the Earth. I still live here.
As for the Green New Deal, I will be especially happy if it involves cranking out a lot of nuclear reactors. Per unit of energy, they're some of the cleanest and most cost-effective sources of energy we've got.
@WarChiefZeke: I wouldn't have assumed you'd view the Green New Deal as a step in the right direction.
Regarding the "brown people" thing, let's not stereotype the conservative argument as if it's all based on the fear of brown people. We've got a fringe group that definitely has some of those fears, but conservatism as a collection of ideologies isn't based on fear of brown people any more than liberalism is based on the fear of white people.
I wasn't satirizing conservatives, I was satirizing the Trump Republican party. My bad for not making that clear.
I figure when Trump meets with him, he is talking about tourism and how North Korea needs a Trump Hotel to woo higher end people on visiting. That's the opportunity Trump is seeing when dealing with North Korea.
After the Virginia Governor's little fiasco came out, the Lt. Governor was hit with several rape allegations and was claimed to have said "f--k that b---h" when asked about it in private. Multiple demands for him to resign as well now. What's going on in Virginia!
Man. I dont even know to be honest - and I live here.
If you held my feet to the fire, I'd guess that all of this is sort of indirectly related to how Virginia has so suddenly swung from red to purple to blue over the last 15 years. I think that the Democratic party in Virginia was probably thrust into being in charge of the state too quickly, without a more gradual transition to of party structure and influence. The result is that we've not done a particularly good job of building a bench of quality candidates, and what candidates we have, we havent vetted/evaluated to make sure they reflect our current ideals.
To say it another way: The Democratic Party in Virginia feels more (Bill) Clinton, and less like Obama-Sanders.
But I dont know. Just my 2 cents. It's a total shitshow here.
@semiticgod I 'liked' your post on the environment, but based on the presentation and clarity of the argument rather than because I liked the message. I took the message as meaning the environment is only important to humanity in relation to the way it affects us physically. However, I think the social and cultural implications are just as important.
I could go on about the attraction of the wilderness and the quasi-religious value of that - you can see that very clearly in many indigenous peoples, but I think it's a more general thing. I won't expand on that now though. Instead I'll just ask a question about empathy. If people have no respect for any living things except humanity, is it likely that most of them will have respect for other human beings?
He praises dictators, authoritarians, and genocidal types such as Putin, Ergodan, and Kim Jong Un. He attacks our allies in the UK, Canada, France, Germany, and Nato.
He's an assbag occupying the office of the President.
He's not American in spirit. He's a con-man and a liar.
Fox News just has the rug cut under them when they ran a poll from "Fox News poll" showing that 70% people support Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez's 70% top marginal rate.
So they blamed the idea that schools have promoted "Fairness over All" and that kids have believed that right into adulthood. ::Shaking my head:: Because somehow that's wrong?!
Conservatives are claiming that Trump's State of the Union speech was "Bipartisan" and "uniting", unless, of course, you listened to the way he trashed the Democrats at the media brunch beforehand. Mr. Trump dismissed former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. as “dumb,” called Senator Chuck Schumer of New York a “nasty son of a bitch” and mocked Gov. Ralph Northam of Virginia for “choking like a dog” at a news conference where he tried to explain a racist yearbook photo, according to multiple people in the room. Not only them, but John McCain as well. Pure class, President Trump. Pure class!
Nancy Pelosi said that on MLK Jr Day, one of the kitchen workers at the breakfast said to her, "If Trump says this investigation is going on too long, just tell him, 'Not as long as your tax audit, Mr. President.'." Ooh, sick burn!
Meanwhile, Mitch McConnell made a tweet that made the entire world do a spit take.
'As I’ve said time and time again: Mindless obstruction is unacceptable.
The only way this divided Congress will be able to choose greatness and deliver significant legislation is by focusing on -- as President Trump put it -- “cooperation, compromise, and the common good.”.'
Said the same guy who said, "One of my proudest moments was when I looked Barack Obama in the eye and I said, 'Mr. President, you will not fill the Supreme Court vacancy.'"
Trump claimed in his speech, “The border city of El Paso, Tex., used to have extremely high rates of violent crime — one of the highest in the entire country, and considered one of our nation’s most dangerous cities. Now, immediately upon its building, with a powerful barrier in place, El Paso is one of the safest cities in our country.”
This is, on Trump's part, gibberish. El Paso has never had "one of the highest" violent crime rates in the country, according to the fact checkers. And while El Paso's crime rate indeed dropped (as did crime nationwide) during the same period, it did not drop because of the construction of a "powerful" new border wall. The drop in crime rate happened before that wall was ever built. (If anything, it ticked slightly upward in the years surrounding the new fence's construction.)
So Trump and his administration are just outright lying on this one. It's gaslighting, through and through. Among those particularly peeved about that is El Paso Sheriff Richard Wiles.
"It is sad to hear President Trump state falsehoods about El Paso, Texas in an attempt to justify the building of a 2,000 mile wall.
The facts are clear. While it is true that El Paso is one of the safest cities in the nation, it has never been "...considered one of our Nation's most dangerous cities". And, El Paso was a safe city long before any wall was built.
President Trump continues to give a false narrative about a great city that truly represents what this great Nation is all about."
Cindy McCain, John McCain's wife, saw a woman with a child who she didn't match in color, so she reported the woman for Child Trafficking. she said, “I came in from a trip I’d been on and I spotted—it looked odd—it was a woman of a different ethnicity than the child, this little toddler she had, and something didn’t click with me,” McCain told a radio interviewer. “I went over to the police and told them what I saw, and they went over and questioned her, and, by God, she was trafficking that kid.”
According to McCain, the existence of a woman and child of different ethnicities traveling together didn’t just “look odd,” but officially panned out as trafficking, with the child in imminent harm. Police, though, said that they investigated and “there was no evidence of criminal conduct or child endangerment.” McCain has subsequently tweeted that “I apologize if anything else I have said on this matter distracts from ‘if you see something, say something.’”
Seriously, Mrs. McCain? You and your husband have a child you adopted from Bangladesh. Would you like someone to report you if they see you and her together?
Baltimore's State Attorney General is no longer going to prosecute people for Marijuana posession and is going to vacate convictions from the last 8 years. Possession with intent to sell or distribute is still a crime, but has to be backed up with something more than just possession, and if you do get covicted of such for the first time, you get diversion instead of jail. Prosecutors will also be able to not go for a conviction "in the name of justice."
Joe Ricketts, a wealthy Republican Donor, who founded TD Ameritrade copped to sending racist and anti-Islamic Emails, what's (maybe) surprising is that it seems to have raised no big outcry, considering how close he is with the Republican Party and the Trumps as well.
Speaking of the Tax Returns, they are down 8.4%.
And as much as people seem to hate Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, she pointed out the flaws in our American political finance laws in just 5 minutes. https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x723h82
@semiticgod I 'liked' your post on the environment, but based on the presentation and clarity of the argument rather than because I liked the message. I took the message as meaning the environment is only important to humanity in relation to the way it affects us physically. However, I think the social and cultural implications are just as important.
I could go on about the attraction of the wilderness and the quasi-religious value of that - you can see that very clearly in many indigenous peoples, but I think it's a more general thing. I won't expand on that now though. Instead I'll just ask a question about empathy. If people have no respect for any living things except humanity, is it likely that most of them will have respect for other human beings?
I don't think respect for humankind is necessarily that strongly linked with respect for the animal kingdom at large, or vice versa. You don't need to be a vegan to be good to human beings, and there are common arguments that certain forms of life don't have the same moral weight as that of a human being's--in which case you could legitimize treating humans as more important than other critters.
For me, my one overriding moral imperative is the happiness of organic life. From what I can tell, most organisms experience a lot more suffering than they do pleasure. The forces of evolution select for critters that feel pain faster than they feel pleasure. Based on that, I draw the conclusion that most life on Earth is not worth living--the exceptions are the more successful creatures that have managed to escape from evolutionary pressures or are in a period of expansion. Unless there are some other lucky species I don't know about, that boils down to humans, dolphins, and some of our domesticated critters. We're the animals whose lives don't suck as much.
On top of that, it's my estimation that the quality of human life has been going up exponentially for tens of thousands of years, and that there is no sign of it stopping. People have been predicting societal collapse for centuries, and yet the amount of resources per human is increasing faster than our population does--even poor, overpopulated countries like India are getting richer faster than they are getting more densely populated. If this is true, then even if human life is composed of more pain than pleasure at the present time, we're at least on the way to an existence worth living, sometime in the future.
Based on those assumptions, I draw the conclusion that the best way to maximize the happiness of organic life is concentrate on the interests of humans. The rest of the animal kingdom generally lives in misery, so preserving their current existence would be either a waste or actively counterproductive. Humans are the one species that has a chance of achieving a stable utopia at some point in the future.
I don't value animal life less than human life because I deem non-sentient or non-intelligent critters to be less capable of feeling pain, or because I don't think they have souls. I place more value on human life because we actually have a shot at escaping the cycle of suffering that's plagued organic life over the past couple billion years, whereas other animals are essentially doomed to fight over scarce resources until humankind inevitably devours their land and drives them into extinction.
Given the success of humans and our still-exponential growth in power and knowledge, I think we're going to essentially wipe out the rest of the animal kingdom and replace much of the plant kingdom with genetically engineered variants that better serve our needs.
It looks like the apparent increase in taxes for some middle-class folks is an unintended side effect of how the Trump tax change reorganized how withholdings were handled. Ordinarily, the government prefers to periodically issue refunds to people who pay more than they needed to, rather than try to extract more money from those who pay less than they need to. Thus, the tax code is designed so that the former group is larger than the latter. The new tax bill changed multiple things about how taxes were calculated, and the net result is that, rather than being a blanket tax cut as one might expect, taxes can go up for some people and down for others.
So, due to early reports about the problems with Tax returns (people owing money to the IRS instead of getting a refund), it seems like the rump/Ryan tax cuts are going to be a big bust for the Republican party. People are complaining (very vocally) about Trump *raising* their taxes after promising to lower them. In reality, Trump asked the IRS to reduce withholding more so that people would see more oomph in their paychecks. And because of that, people are getting less money on their returns. So Trump just shot himself and the GOP in both feet, because you know how EVERYONE hates paying more taxes!
(Image conflation from Twitter)
(From the webpage of "Direct Action Bronson")
It looks like the apparent increase in taxes for some middle-class folks is an unintended side effect of how the Trump tax change reorganized how withholdings were handled. Ordinarily, the government prefers to periodically issue refunds to people who pay more than they needed to, rather than try to extract more money from those who pay less than they need to. Thus, the tax code is designed so that the former group is larger than the latter. The new tax bill changed multiple things about how taxes were calculated, and the net result is that, rather than being a blanket tax cut as one might expect, taxes can go up for some people and down for others.
The fact is, most people aren't going to notice 3 or 4 extra dollars in their direct deposit every two weeks (27 times a year). They ARE going to notice they aren't getting a refund or are paying $200-400 more in taxes because their withholding didn't get changed. There is a very low percentage of people in this country who are actually going to FEEL the benefit of that tax cut even now, and in every subsequent year that number is going to drop even lower.
So the Green New Deal provided economic security for those unwilling to work, NPR and others published it, it got widely criticized, AOC's advisers went to Twitter and on FOX News to call it a lie and a doctored document, and the rest of the media is just gonna shrug their shoulders about it and move on. Well okay then. Long as we know who is untouchable and who isn't.
Even though this Washington Post writer admits he has the evidence that this is an untrue statement and that their explanation doesn't make sense, he can't help but parrot their narrative that this is a "mystery FAQ" and not taken directly from their website.
Yup. You know it. Well, yesterday the Deputy AG got grilled to a finely blackened hue, especially by Veronica Escobar (Democrat from Texas), who got him to admit he'd seen pardon paperwork from Donald Trump, Pramila Jayapal (Democrat of Washington State), who excoriated him about the "zero-tolerance" policy on immigration of the Trump Administration, and Rhode Island Democrat David Cicilline, who blew Whittaker's hair off with his rapid-fire questions. And Rep. Sheila Jackson-Lee (also from Texas) shut him down when he tried to be insulting. It was honestly, stunning.
And since he waffled on whether he was going to show up at all, they already had a subpoena ready to go if he decided not to show up. And in the Trump White House, if someone refuses to answer a question, the answer usually means, "Yes, I just don't want to admit it."
Meanwhile Vanity Fair came out with an article on how everyone in the White House hates Trump (with the possible exception of his kids), and according to another article (not from Vanity Fair), he is likely to fold instead of start another Shutdown. And if he tries to declare a national emergency, Republicans face the prospect of a Democratic President using the same to get her or his way in the future. (I'll post the article in question in my thread.)
"Unwilling to work" is not a justifiable lifestyle, unless you've already earned enough to sustain your intended lifestyle. "Unable to work" or (temporarily) unable to find work would warrant some public support, but lacking the will to work should not entitle one to extra money, unless other people are entitled to at least the same amount.
Is this supposed to be some "universal basic income" thing? It was my impression that this proposal was exclusively environmental in its scope. At any rate, a universal basic income proposal should still apply to people who are willing to work; the willfully unemployed would not be the only ones to receive public support in a universal basic income plan.
A first draft? Okay, this Green New Deal isn't going to pass the Senate anyway, but we still shouldn't have a flaw this silly even in a first draft.
I'm unwilling for the rich to get bigger tax breaks but nobody seems outraged about that. That's an actual policy that Republican passed - practically the only thing they passed when they controlled all branches of government.
Get outraged about that real world thing, not some flub on a website of a draft of a policy that isn't actually going to be voted on anytime soon.
An Amazon worker earning the Amazon $15 minimum wage would need to work about 298,325 hours, or 24 hours a day for about 34 years, to earn what Bezos makes in one hour. Amazon paid $0 in 2017 in taxes. They didn't need another tax break. They didn't need republicans to cut the corporate tax rate in half and not close any of their loopholes.
Well now, let's take a poll shall we?? What is worse. Elizabeth Warren's slightly controversial use of a low percentage of Native American heritage on some forms 30 years ago, or the fact that the President of the United States is joking about the Trail of Tears, which was, you know, an honest to god GENOCIDE. I suppose this is what we should expect from a guy who honored Native American Code Talkers under a portrait of Andrew Jackson, which is sort of like honoring a group of Jewish Americans under a portrait of Adolf Eichmann, since they both ordered a forced migration/deportation that ended in slaughter.
Is this supposed to be some "universal basic income" thing? It was my impression that this proposal was exclusively environmental in its scope. At any rate, a universal basic income proposal should still apply to people who are willing to work; the willfully unemployed would not be the only ones to receive public support in a universal basic income plan.
A first draft? Okay, this Green New Deal isn't going to pass the Senate anyway, but we still shouldn't have a flaw this silly even in a first draft.
My understanding of the Green New Deal was that it combined economic and environmental reforms. As per the name. It combines environmentalism with something evocative of FDR's New Deal.
Also - Universal Basic Income isnt some super fringe idea. It's hardly mainstream, but it's something a lot of people are looking at. A lot of economists seem to think that some kind of universal basic income may be the only reasonable answer to an economy where artificial intelligence is capable of displacing a significant number of jobs.
Is it feasible? I dont know. Is it something worth evaluating in light of an economy that will be changing dramatically in the next 20 years? Definitely.
We live in a country where people die because they can't afford insulin and asthma medication. If the choice is between that and a universal basic income and universal healthcare, I don't have to hesitate to choose which one to pick. Do people have ANY idea how much money gets wasted on corporate welfare and military boondoggles in this country?? The ONLY things that tax dollars go to that are ever questioned are the ones aimed at the poor and indigent. I didn't hear alot of wailing and gnashing of teeth from fiscal conservatives when we just handed out checks to farmers to NOT sell their soybeans. No, that can't be questioned at all. But god forbid we stop people from literally falling over dead from lack of medications.
We live in a country where people die because they can't afford insulin and asthma medication. If the choice is between that and a universal basic income and universal healthcare, I don't have to hesitate to choose which one to pick. Do people have ANY idea how much money gets wasted on corporate welfare and military boondoggles in this country?? The ONLY things that tax dollars go to that are ever questioned are the ones aimed at the poor and indigent. I didn't hear alot of wailing and gnashing of teeth from fiscal conservatives when we just handed out checks to farmers to NOT sell their soybeans. No, that can't be questioned at all. But god forbid we stop people from literally falling over dead from lack of medications.
Totally. I saw a comment somewhere on a discussion board about government controlled healthcare, I think the guy was from Canada or Australia or something, he said that one of the responsibilities of the government that you get for your tax dollars is making sure you don't die due to lack of healthcare.
Seems reasonable to me. The least the government could do is provide healthcare back to people since you are funding the government.
The government should take care of Americans first. Not corporations, not Israel or whatever concerns outside our borders.
Apparently student loan forgiveness programs are being horrifically mismanaged. Only 2% of applications were approved last year; people with student loans are repeatedly given false information by untrained customer service people, including flat-out telling them that they're being approved for loan forgiveness when they are not. You can make regular payments for years while working at an approved job, then find out years later that you've made no progress on the loan forgiveness program--not because you haven't done what you were asked to do, but entirely because of clerical errors, misinformation, and loan forgiveness employees who simply didn't process the work they were supposed to.
The government outsourced loan forgiveness programs to private corporations. These corporations have no instructions or guidelines for how to process the very job they're paid to do, which means they have no incentive to actually do the work. They train their customer service people to not help people qualify for loan forgiveness. The net result is that people lose thousands of dollars because they did what they were supposed to and yet were sabotaged by the very contractors who were supposed to help them.
This comes at a time when student loans are higher than they've ever been in the past due to tuition costs rising 313% over the past 30 years. The burden is four times as high as it used to be, yet the job opportunities have only shrunk due to the recession.
The impact on college graduates is crushing, and not just in the terms of a reduced paycheck. The burden is so heavy that you simply don't have the money to live a normal life; you've been dedicating every spare penny you can afford just to keep the interest on your loan from building up.
“I am so far in debt that will never go away,” she told me, “and all those things people do in life — marriage, travel, homes, a career, not living with your elderly mom who you don’t get along with in a one-bedroom apartment, not being scared all the time — will never come my way. I miss insurance. I have been to the dentist once in 15 years. I’m pretty sure that if I ever get diagnosed with cancer, I’ll just let it take me. What could I do? I couldn’t afford to fight it.”
Kathryn’s despair is visceral, but that doesn’t mean that it’s rare, or atypical. “I don’t think about my debt without also thinking of suicide,” a 30-year-old with $43,000 in debt, told me. “At first I felt a great a deal of anxiety about my debt, and a sense of shame about being a failure and a parasite for being unable to afford the loans. I still feel shame and anxiety, but the sense of failure has been replaced with anger. Anger about being lied to, pressured, and exploited. We were told that we were making an essential, basically non-optional investment in our futures. Instead we are now indentured servants.”
We have an entire generation that worked hard, went to college, took on multiple jobs, and yet ended up poorer than any of their predecessors because of a predatory loan system, a financial crisis that crowded them out of the job market just as they graduated, and a massively incompetent loan forgiveness program that actually made things worse by intentionally feeding misinformation to applicants.
You can't even escape student loans from bankruptcy. Your children can even inherit your debt.
I fail to understand how this could possibly be a justified situation, and the solution is obvious: we need a true forgiveness program that pays for these debts.
Is that a radical idea? No. In fact, it's something we've already done before. The government already pushed countless people through college without putting them in debt by spending taxpayer dollars in the massively popular GI Bill.
The result was one of the most financially successful generations in the United States. Countless Americans benefited from this program, and yet we see no evidence that the GI Bill broke the budget. It was a massively valuable program that virtually no one today opposes. Military service members can get higher education completely free due to government assistance, and I have yet to hear a single person complain that we shouldn't invest in people who served the country.
Why are we not doing the exact same thing today?
“I feel so scammed and betrayed by the government, which is honestly so naive,” Kathryn told me. “How did I ever trust they would do the right thing? I never should have dreamt about meaningful work. I should’ve settled for clerical work and been happy with it. I feel stupid for reaching for anything in life."
The government put countless WHITE people through college through the GI Bill. The nearly complete phasing out of African-Americans in regards to the social programs that created the middle-class is THE biggest ignored story of US race relations:
I posted about this in my news thread, but this still really makes me burn with anger. My belly is churning.
A group of Sikh men from Punjab, India, have been imprisoned in the El Paso detention center. Since no one there speaks Punjabi, these men can't be told about their immigration status. So, after being there for months, they went on a hunger strike. Now, they are so weak and frail that they can't be sent back to India because they could die in transit, but they still refuse to eat. So a judge mandated that they be force fed, sometimes multiple times per day, through nasal hoses.
Because the men don't want to eat, they struggle, so to feed them, they are tied down to a bed. When they resist force-feeding, they are threatened with immediate deportation- even though they are too weak, medically, to be sent home. The pressure of the force feeding is so intense that the men end up vomiting it out. Some vomit blood as well as the liquid diet they are being force-fed. Nasal bleeding is common. And because the men resist being force-fed, they were put into solitary confinement as well. The attorney who is trying to get them free was not allowed to see them.
Ruby Kaur, is one of their attorneys, and represents two of the men. Kaur also claims ICE officials told the men earlier this week that they would be deported Friday morning, a threat she says was repeated again after the Thursday confrontation. She says the men were examined by a doctor, who cleared them for travel to India. Kaur disagreed that they were in any condition to fly: “They are experiencing rectal bleeding, nasal bleeding, wounds in their throats; they cannot talk, they feel weak, and they are really stressed out and depressed,” she notes, adding that many of them have lost 40 or 50 pounds, have scars on their arms from the IVs, and have experienced blood in their vomit.
This violates the UN conventions against torture, and the US could be in tons of trouble for this.
As of Saturday, they were still detained in El Paso, Kaul says. ICE did not respond to a question about whether it had threatened them with deportation.
Judges in the past have allowed ICE to force-feed detainees on hunger strike, though the International Committee of the Red Cross and the American Medical Association have expressed ethical concerns about the practice. A spokesman for the United Nations human rights office said Thursday the treatment of the asylum-seekers in El Paso could violate the UN Convention Against Torture.
This isn’t the first time South Asians have gone on hunger strike at the El Paso facility. In 2014, a group of 37 Sikh Indian men stopped eating to protest their detention. The next year, more than 50 Bangladeshi, Pakistani, and Afghan asylum-seekers did the same and reportedly ended up in isolation. Many of those detainees were deported to Bangladesh, where some of them were killed after their arrival, claims Sridaran, citing a New York-based group called DRUM that was in touch with their family members. DRUM did not reply to a request for comment.
One reason for these protests is that South Asians are denied bond hearings at higher rates than other asylum-seekers, according to Sridaran. In 2016, BuzzFeed obtained documents in a Freedom of Information Act request that highlighted this trend: The documents showed that 83 percent of Indians facing deportation from the country were incarcerated in 2013—a rate much greater than for people from other countries, including Mexico. “Because they are languishing in the facility for months at a time, and in some previous cases for more than a year, they will launch a hunger strike to draw attention to their situation,” Sridaran says, noting that many of them have been denied language interpreters and religious accommodations during their detention.
Outside Texas, four immigration detainees are on hunger strike at facilities in or near Miami, Phoenix, San Diego, and San Francisco, an agency spokeswoman confirmed to the Associated Press in late January. Since May 2015, nearly 1,400 people have gone on hunger strike at 18 immigrant detention facilities, according to the advocacy group Freedom for Immigrants.
Honestly, this makes me sick, that our government is doing this.
I posted about this in my news thread, but this still really makes me burn with anger. My belly is churning.
A group of Sikh men from Punjab, India, have been imprisoned in the El Paso detention center. Since no one there speaks Punjabi, these men can't be told about their immigration status. So, after being there for months, they went on a hunger strike. Now, they are so weak and frail that they can't be sent back to India because they could die in transit, but they still refuse to eat. So a judge mandated that they be force fed, sometimes multiple times per day, through nasal hoses.
Because the men don't want to eat, they struggle, so to feed them, they are tied down to a bed. When they resist force-feeding, they are threatened with immediate deportation- even though they are too weak, medically, to be sent home. The pressure of the force feeding is so intense that the men end up vomiting it out. Some vomit blood as well as the liquid diet they are being force-fed. Nasal bleeding is common. And because the men resist being force-fed, they were put into solitary confinement as well. The attorney who is trying to get them free was not allowed to see them.
Ruby Kaur, is one of their attorneys, and represents two of the men. Kaur also claims ICE officials told the men earlier this week that they would be deported Friday morning, a threat she says was repeated again after the Thursday confrontation. She says the men were examined by a doctor, who cleared them for travel to India. Kaur disagreed that they were in any condition to fly: “They are experiencing rectal bleeding, nasal bleeding, wounds in their throats; they cannot talk, they feel weak, and they are really stressed out and depressed,” she notes, adding that many of them have lost 40 or 50 pounds, have scars on their arms from the IVs, and have experienced blood in their vomit.
This violates the UN conventions against torture, and the US could be in tons of trouble for this.
As of Saturday, they were still detained in El Paso, Kaul says. ICE did not respond to a question about whether it had threatened them with deportation.
Judges in the past have allowed ICE to force-feed detainees on hunger strike, though the International Committee of the Red Cross and the American Medical Association have expressed ethical concerns about the practice. A spokesman for the United Nations human rights office said Thursday the treatment of the asylum-seekers in El Paso could violate the UN Convention Against Torture.
This isn’t the first time South Asians have gone on hunger strike at the El Paso facility. In 2014, a group of 37 Sikh Indian men stopped eating to protest their detention. The next year, more than 50 Bangladeshi, Pakistani, and Afghan asylum-seekers did the same and reportedly ended up in isolation. Many of those detainees were deported to Bangladesh, where some of them were killed after their arrival, claims Sridaran, citing a New York-based group called DRUM that was in touch with their family members. DRUM did not reply to a request for comment.
One reason for these protests is that South Asians are denied bond hearings at higher rates than other asylum-seekers, according to Sridaran. In 2016, BuzzFeed obtained documents in a Freedom of Information Act request that highlighted this trend: The documents showed that 83 percent of Indians facing deportation from the country were incarcerated in 2013—a rate much greater than for people from other countries, including Mexico. “Because they are languishing in the facility for months at a time, and in some previous cases for more than a year, they will launch a hunger strike to draw attention to their situation,” Sridaran says, noting that many of them have been denied language interpreters and religious accommodations during their detention.
Outside Texas, four immigration detainees are on hunger strike at facilities in or near Miami, Phoenix, San Diego, and San Francisco, an agency spokeswoman confirmed to the Associated Press in late January. Since May 2015, nearly 1,400 people have gone on hunger strike at 18 immigrant detention facilities, according to the advocacy group Freedom for Immigrants.
Honestly, this makes me sick, that our government is doing this.
Our government didn't force them to stop eating. They chose to...
I posted about this in my news thread, but this still really makes me burn with anger. My belly is churning.
A group of Sikh men from Punjab, India, have been imprisoned in the El Paso detention center. Since no one there speaks Punjabi, these men can't be told about their immigration status. So, after being there for months, they went on a hunger strike. Now, they are so weak and frail that they can't be sent back to India because they could die in transit, but they still refuse to eat. So a judge mandated that they be force fed, sometimes multiple times per day, through nasal hoses.
Because the men don't want to eat, they struggle, so to feed them, they are tied down to a bed. When they resist force-feeding, they are threatened with immediate deportation- even though they are too weak, medically, to be sent home. The pressure of the force feeding is so intense that the men end up vomiting it out. Some vomit blood as well as the liquid diet they are being force-fed. Nasal bleeding is common. And because the men resist being force-fed, they were put into solitary confinement as well. The attorney who is trying to get them free was not allowed to see them.
Ruby Kaur, is one of their attorneys, and represents two of the men. Kaur also claims ICE officials told the men earlier this week that they would be deported Friday morning, a threat she says was repeated again after the Thursday confrontation. She says the men were examined by a doctor, who cleared them for travel to India. Kaur disagreed that they were in any condition to fly: “They are experiencing rectal bleeding, nasal bleeding, wounds in their throats; they cannot talk, they feel weak, and they are really stressed out and depressed,” she notes, adding that many of them have lost 40 or 50 pounds, have scars on their arms from the IVs, and have experienced blood in their vomit.
This violates the UN conventions against torture, and the US could be in tons of trouble for this.
As of Saturday, they were still detained in El Paso, Kaul says. ICE did not respond to a question about whether it had threatened them with deportation.
Judges in the past have allowed ICE to force-feed detainees on hunger strike, though the International Committee of the Red Cross and the American Medical Association have expressed ethical concerns about the practice. A spokesman for the United Nations human rights office said Thursday the treatment of the asylum-seekers in El Paso could violate the UN Convention Against Torture.
This isn’t the first time South Asians have gone on hunger strike at the El Paso facility. In 2014, a group of 37 Sikh Indian men stopped eating to protest their detention. The next year, more than 50 Bangladeshi, Pakistani, and Afghan asylum-seekers did the same and reportedly ended up in isolation. Many of those detainees were deported to Bangladesh, where some of them were killed after their arrival, claims Sridaran, citing a New York-based group called DRUM that was in touch with their family members. DRUM did not reply to a request for comment.
One reason for these protests is that South Asians are denied bond hearings at higher rates than other asylum-seekers, according to Sridaran. In 2016, BuzzFeed obtained documents in a Freedom of Information Act request that highlighted this trend: The documents showed that 83 percent of Indians facing deportation from the country were incarcerated in 2013—a rate much greater than for people from other countries, including Mexico. “Because they are languishing in the facility for months at a time, and in some previous cases for more than a year, they will launch a hunger strike to draw attention to their situation,” Sridaran says, noting that many of them have been denied language interpreters and religious accommodations during their detention.
Outside Texas, four immigration detainees are on hunger strike at facilities in or near Miami, Phoenix, San Diego, and San Francisco, an agency spokeswoman confirmed to the Associated Press in late January. Since May 2015, nearly 1,400 people have gone on hunger strike at 18 immigrant detention facilities, according to the advocacy group Freedom for Immigrants.
Honestly, this makes me sick, that our government is doing this.
Our government didn't force them to stop eating. They chose to...
Of course, this could have been entirely prevented by just getting someone who speaks Punjabi to speak with them about their cases. But no... that would have been too easy!
I posted about this in my news thread, but this still really makes me burn with anger. My belly is churning.
A group of Sikh men from Punjab, India, have been imprisoned in the El Paso detention center. Since no one there speaks Punjabi, these men can't be told about their immigration status. So, after being there for months, they went on a hunger strike. Now, they are so weak and frail that they can't be sent back to India because they could die in transit, but they still refuse to eat. So a judge mandated that they be force fed, sometimes multiple times per day, through nasal hoses.
Because the men don't want to eat, they struggle, so to feed them, they are tied down to a bed. When they resist force-feeding, they are threatened with immediate deportation- even though they are too weak, medically, to be sent home. The pressure of the force feeding is so intense that the men end up vomiting it out. Some vomit blood as well as the liquid diet they are being force-fed. Nasal bleeding is common. And because the men resist being force-fed, they were put into solitary confinement as well. The attorney who is trying to get them free was not allowed to see them.
Ruby Kaur, is one of their attorneys, and represents two of the men. Kaur also claims ICE officials told the men earlier this week that they would be deported Friday morning, a threat she says was repeated again after the Thursday confrontation. She says the men were examined by a doctor, who cleared them for travel to India. Kaur disagreed that they were in any condition to fly: “They are experiencing rectal bleeding, nasal bleeding, wounds in their throats; they cannot talk, they feel weak, and they are really stressed out and depressed,” she notes, adding that many of them have lost 40 or 50 pounds, have scars on their arms from the IVs, and have experienced blood in their vomit.
This violates the UN conventions against torture, and the US could be in tons of trouble for this.
As of Saturday, they were still detained in El Paso, Kaul says. ICE did not respond to a question about whether it had threatened them with deportation.
Judges in the past have allowed ICE to force-feed detainees on hunger strike, though the International Committee of the Red Cross and the American Medical Association have expressed ethical concerns about the practice. A spokesman for the United Nations human rights office said Thursday the treatment of the asylum-seekers in El Paso could violate the UN Convention Against Torture.
This isn’t the first time South Asians have gone on hunger strike at the El Paso facility. In 2014, a group of 37 Sikh Indian men stopped eating to protest their detention. The next year, more than 50 Bangladeshi, Pakistani, and Afghan asylum-seekers did the same and reportedly ended up in isolation. Many of those detainees were deported to Bangladesh, where some of them were killed after their arrival, claims Sridaran, citing a New York-based group called DRUM that was in touch with their family members. DRUM did not reply to a request for comment.
One reason for these protests is that South Asians are denied bond hearings at higher rates than other asylum-seekers, according to Sridaran. In 2016, BuzzFeed obtained documents in a Freedom of Information Act request that highlighted this trend: The documents showed that 83 percent of Indians facing deportation from the country were incarcerated in 2013—a rate much greater than for people from other countries, including Mexico. “Because they are languishing in the facility for months at a time, and in some previous cases for more than a year, they will launch a hunger strike to draw attention to their situation,” Sridaran says, noting that many of them have been denied language interpreters and religious accommodations during their detention.
Outside Texas, four immigration detainees are on hunger strike at facilities in or near Miami, Phoenix, San Diego, and San Francisco, an agency spokeswoman confirmed to the Associated Press in late January. Since May 2015, nearly 1,400 people have gone on hunger strike at 18 immigrant detention facilities, according to the advocacy group Freedom for Immigrants.
Honestly, this makes me sick, that our government is doing this.
Our government didn't force them to stop eating. They chose to...
Our government could have found someone who speaks Punjabi to communicate with them. It chose not to...
There are 100 million native speakers of Punjabi, and given how frequently English is used in India, it should not be difficult to find someone who could translate for these detainees, even via video call, for far less than $100. Failing to do even these most basic measures can't possibly be attributed to mere incompetence; this is knowingly torturing detainees.
What is this indefinite detainment supposed to accomplish? If they're allowed to enter the country, then set them free. If they're not allowed to enter the country, then deport them.
How much time did these officials have to spend not doing their jobs before these detainees were so unhealthy and so starved that sending them home would be life-threatening?
Months, at least. See, this is the thing: How did the US become so cruel and callous? How long have people decided not to give a Shizz? I thought my country was better than this.
And FOX News' Chris Wallace is mocking the Republicans whining about all the investigations by telling them "Like Barrack Obama said, 'Elections have consequences.'." I mean, I kind of expect that from FOX news, who seem to love kicking people who are already upset. (source: Raw Story Fox News’ Chris Wallace mocks GOP for whining about investigations: ‘Elections have consequences’)
But it's not just that. It's the Trump Administration not caring if children separated from their parents at the border ever get back to their real parents and just shrugging it of like, "there's nothing we can do, boohoo, cry cry, too bad, so sad. NOT."
I'm angry at my government and I want to bring it down for what it's done and is still doing.
There are 100 million native speakers of Punjabi, and given how frequently English is used in India, it should not be difficult to find someone who could translate for these detainees, even via video call, for far less than $100. Failing to do even these most basic measures can't possibly be attributed to mere incompetence; this is knowingly torturing detainees.
What is this indefinite detainment supposed to accomplish? If they're allowed to enter the country, then set them free. If they're not allowed to enter the country, then deport them.
How much time did these officials have to spend not doing their jobs before these detainees were so unhealthy and so starved that sending them home would be life-threatening?
How are they even supposed to know if their detainment is justified or lawful if no one has communicated it to them?? If they have no way of knowing why they are in indefinite custody, a hunger strike might be the only option to get some results.
And for the record, at work, I can get someone on the phone who can speak nearly any language on Earth in less than 5 minutes in most cases. The idea a federal agency can't is an absurdity.
What are the indefinite detentions accomplishing?? Again, the cruelty isn't a bug, it's a feature. It's not an accident or incidental side-effect. It's the main purpose of the policy.
Comments
I wouldn't call myself an environmentalist per se. I don't really place much value in the environment itself; I just view environmental issues as important in the sense that we live in the environment. I don't grieve for endangered species (let the pandas and tigers die already), nor do I seek to protect unspoiled lands. I am pretty much the polar opposite of a druid--I view nature as a thing to be conquered and controlled rather than preserved and respected.
But we need rainfall to be stable to grow our crops. We need sea levels to be stable to maintain our coastal communities. We need the air to be clean so we can breathe it, and the water to be clean so we can drink it and use it. We need trees to prevent erosion to maintain soil nutrients so we can use the land for practical purposes. We can't catch fish in exhausted waters, and we can't live in houses if hurricanes turn them to splinters. Climate change threatens all of those interests, and we can't really afford to take the hit when we're talking about something that threatens every human being on the planet; not just a few polar bears in the Arctic.
I care not at all if the rest of the animal kingdom dies out. But we still need our environment to be healthy so we can grow our food and build our stuff. There's definitely a valid role for environmental regulations, and we definitely do need the EPA to preserve the interests of humankind as a whole from the narrower interests of individual industries who stand to benefit from short-sighted cost-cutting measures.
If we could realistically insulate ourselves from the effects of global warming and pollution, I would advocate it. But until genetics research progresses to the point where we can rapidly engineer new crops to adjust to quick changes in temperature and rainfall, and until we can design cities that can withstand hurricanes, and until we can build communities that can float when sea levels rise, and until we have ready solutions for every little problem that arises in a more chaotic environment, climate change stands to hurt us in concrete, material ways.
I don't want to ruin the Earth. I still live here.
As for the Green New Deal, I will be especially happy if it involves cranking out a lot of nuclear reactors. Per unit of energy, they're some of the cleanest and most cost-effective sources of energy we've got.
I wasn't satirizing conservatives, I was satirizing the Trump Republican party. My bad for not making that clear.
I figure when Trump meets with him, he is talking about tourism and how North Korea needs a Trump Hotel to woo higher end people on visiting. That's the opportunity Trump is seeing when dealing with North Korea.
Man. I dont even know to be honest - and I live here.
If you held my feet to the fire, I'd guess that all of this is sort of indirectly related to how Virginia has so suddenly swung from red to purple to blue over the last 15 years. I think that the Democratic party in Virginia was probably thrust into being in charge of the state too quickly, without a more gradual transition to of party structure and influence. The result is that we've not done a particularly good job of building a bench of quality candidates, and what candidates we have, we havent vetted/evaluated to make sure they reflect our current ideals.
To say it another way: The Democratic Party in Virginia feels more (Bill) Clinton, and less like Obama-Sanders.
But I dont know. Just my 2 cents. It's a total shitshow here.
I could go on about the attraction of the wilderness and the quasi-religious value of that - you can see that very clearly in many indigenous peoples, but I think it's a more general thing. I won't expand on that now though. Instead I'll just ask a question about empathy. If people have no respect for any living things except humanity, is it likely that most of them will have respect for other human beings?
Hey, people.
Trump doesn't represent American values.
He praises dictators, authoritarians, and genocidal types such as Putin, Ergodan, and Kim Jong Un. He attacks our allies in the UK, Canada, France, Germany, and Nato.
He's an assbag occupying the office of the President.
He's not American in spirit. He's a con-man and a liar.
So they blamed the idea that schools have promoted "Fairness over All" and that kids have believed that right into adulthood. ::Shaking my head:: Because somehow that's wrong?!
Conservatives are claiming that Trump's State of the Union speech was "Bipartisan" and "uniting", unless, of course, you listened to the way he trashed the Democrats at the media brunch beforehand. Mr. Trump dismissed former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. as “dumb,” called Senator Chuck Schumer of New York a “nasty son of a bitch” and mocked Gov. Ralph Northam of Virginia for “choking like a dog” at a news conference where he tried to explain a racist yearbook photo, according to multiple people in the room. Not only them, but John McCain as well. Pure class, President Trump. Pure class!
Nancy Pelosi said that on MLK Jr Day, one of the kitchen workers at the breakfast said to her, "If Trump says this investigation is going on too long, just tell him, 'Not as long as your tax audit, Mr. President.'." Ooh, sick burn!
Meanwhile, Mitch McConnell made a tweet that made the entire world do a spit take.
'As I’ve said time and time again: Mindless obstruction is unacceptable.
The only way this divided Congress will be able to choose greatness and deliver significant legislation is by focusing on -- as President Trump put it -- “cooperation, compromise, and the common good.”.'
Said the same guy who said, "One of my proudest moments was when I looked Barack Obama in the eye and I said, 'Mr. President, you will not fill the Supreme Court vacancy.'"
Trump claimed in his speech, “The border city of El Paso, Tex., used to have extremely high rates of violent crime — one of the highest in the entire country, and considered one of our nation’s most dangerous cities. Now, immediately upon its building, with a powerful barrier in place, El Paso is one of the safest cities in our country.”
This is, on Trump's part, gibberish. El Paso has never had "one of the highest" violent crime rates in the country, according to the fact checkers. And while El Paso's crime rate indeed dropped (as did crime nationwide) during the same period, it did not drop because of the construction of a "powerful" new border wall. The drop in crime rate happened before that wall was ever built. (If anything, it ticked slightly upward in the years surrounding the new fence's construction.)
So Trump and his administration are just outright lying on this one. It's gaslighting, through and through. Among those particularly peeved about that is El Paso Sheriff Richard Wiles.
"It is sad to hear President Trump state falsehoods about El Paso, Texas in an attempt to justify the building of a 2,000 mile wall.
The facts are clear. While it is true that El Paso is one of the safest cities in the nation, it has never been "...considered one of our Nation's most dangerous cities". And, El Paso was a safe city long before any wall was built.
President Trump continues to give a false narrative about a great city that truly represents what this great Nation is all about."
Cindy McCain, John McCain's wife, saw a woman with a child who she didn't match in color, so she reported the woman for Child Trafficking. she said, “I came in from a trip I’d been on and I spotted—it looked odd—it was a woman of a different ethnicity than the child, this little toddler she had, and something didn’t click with me,” McCain told a radio interviewer. “I went over to the police and told them what I saw, and they went over and questioned her, and, by God, she was trafficking that kid.”
According to McCain, the existence of a woman and child of different ethnicities traveling together didn’t just “look odd,” but officially panned out as trafficking, with the child in imminent harm. Police, though, said that they investigated and “there was no evidence of criminal conduct or child endangerment.” McCain has subsequently tweeted that “I apologize if anything else I have said on this matter distracts from ‘if you see something, say something.’”
Seriously, Mrs. McCain? You and your husband have a child you adopted from Bangladesh. Would you like someone to report you if they see you and her together?
Baltimore's State Attorney General is no longer going to prosecute people for Marijuana posession and is going to vacate convictions from the last 8 years. Possession with intent to sell or distribute is still a crime, but has to be backed up with something more than just possession, and if you do get covicted of such for the first time, you get diversion instead of jail. Prosecutors will also be able to not go for a conviction "in the name of justice."
Joe Ricketts, a wealthy Republican Donor, who founded TD Ameritrade copped to sending racist and anti-Islamic Emails, what's (maybe) surprising is that it seems to have raised no big outcry, considering how close he is with the Republican Party and the Trumps as well.
Speaking of the Tax Returns, they are down 8.4%.
And as much as people seem to hate Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, she pointed out the flaws in our American political finance laws in just 5 minutes.
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x723h82
It's Sheldon Adelson
For me, my one overriding moral imperative is the happiness of organic life. From what I can tell, most organisms experience a lot more suffering than they do pleasure. The forces of evolution select for critters that feel pain faster than they feel pleasure. Based on that, I draw the conclusion that most life on Earth is not worth living--the exceptions are the more successful creatures that have managed to escape from evolutionary pressures or are in a period of expansion. Unless there are some other lucky species I don't know about, that boils down to humans, dolphins, and some of our domesticated critters. We're the animals whose lives don't suck as much.
On top of that, it's my estimation that the quality of human life has been going up exponentially for tens of thousands of years, and that there is no sign of it stopping. People have been predicting societal collapse for centuries, and yet the amount of resources per human is increasing faster than our population does--even poor, overpopulated countries like India are getting richer faster than they are getting more densely populated. If this is true, then even if human life is composed of more pain than pleasure at the present time, we're at least on the way to an existence worth living, sometime in the future.
Based on those assumptions, I draw the conclusion that the best way to maximize the happiness of organic life is concentrate on the interests of humans. The rest of the animal kingdom generally lives in misery, so preserving their current existence would be either a waste or actively counterproductive. Humans are the one species that has a chance of achieving a stable utopia at some point in the future.
I don't value animal life less than human life because I deem non-sentient or non-intelligent critters to be less capable of feeling pain, or because I don't think they have souls. I place more value on human life because we actually have a shot at escaping the cycle of suffering that's plagued organic life over the past couple billion years, whereas other animals are essentially doomed to fight over scarce resources until humankind inevitably devours their land and drives them into extinction.
Given the success of humans and our still-exponential growth in power and knowledge, I think we're going to essentially wipe out the rest of the animal kingdom and replace much of the plant kingdom with genetically engineered variants that better serve our needs.
(Image conflation from Twitter)
(From the webpage of "Direct Action Bronson")
The fact is, most people aren't going to notice 3 or 4 extra dollars in their direct deposit every two weeks (27 times a year). They ARE going to notice they aren't getting a refund or are paying $200-400 more in taxes because their withholding didn't get changed. There is a very low percentage of people in this country who are actually going to FEEL the benefit of that tax cut even now, and in every subsequent year that number is going to drop even lower.
https://web.archive.org/web/20190207191119/https:/ocasio-cortez.house.gov/media/blog-posts/green-new-deal-faq
Even though this Washington Post writer admits he has the evidence that this is an untrue statement and that their explanation doesn't make sense, he can't help but parrot their narrative that this is a "mystery FAQ" and not taken directly from their website.
So now the explanation is that it was an early draft, it only took us several lies to get to plausible deniability land, but now we're here.
I can't believe anyone takes the media in 2019 seriously.
And since he waffled on whether he was going to show up at all, they already had a subpoena ready to go if he decided not to show up. And in the Trump White House, if someone refuses to answer a question, the answer usually means, "Yes, I just don't want to admit it."
Meanwhile Vanity Fair came out with an article on how everyone in the White House hates Trump (with the possible exception of his kids), and according to another article (not from Vanity Fair), he is likely to fold instead of start another Shutdown. And if he tries to declare a national emergency, Republicans face the prospect of a Democratic President using the same to get her or his way in the future. (I'll post the article in question in my thread.)
Is this supposed to be some "universal basic income" thing? It was my impression that this proposal was exclusively environmental in its scope. At any rate, a universal basic income proposal should still apply to people who are willing to work; the willfully unemployed would not be the only ones to receive public support in a universal basic income plan.
A first draft? Okay, this Green New Deal isn't going to pass the Senate anyway, but we still shouldn't have a flaw this silly even in a first draft.
Get outraged about that real world thing, not some flub on a website of a draft of a policy that isn't actually going to be voted on anytime soon.
An Amazon worker earning the Amazon $15 minimum wage would need to work about 298,325 hours, or 24 hours a day for about 34 years, to earn what Bezos makes in one hour. Amazon paid $0 in 2017 in taxes. They didn't need another tax break. They didn't need republicans to cut the corporate tax rate in half and not close any of their loopholes.
Well now, let's take a poll shall we?? What is worse. Elizabeth Warren's slightly controversial use of a low percentage of Native American heritage on some forms 30 years ago, or the fact that the President of the United States is joking about the Trail of Tears, which was, you know, an honest to god GENOCIDE. I suppose this is what we should expect from a guy who honored Native American Code Talkers under a portrait of Andrew Jackson, which is sort of like honoring a group of Jewish Americans under a portrait of Adolf Eichmann, since they both ordered a forced migration/deportation that ended in slaughter.
My understanding of the Green New Deal was that it combined economic and environmental reforms. As per the name. It combines environmentalism with something evocative of FDR's New Deal.
Also - Universal Basic Income isnt some super fringe idea. It's hardly mainstream, but it's something a lot of people are looking at. A lot of economists seem to think that some kind of universal basic income may be the only reasonable answer to an economy where artificial intelligence is capable of displacing a significant number of jobs.
Is it feasible? I dont know. Is it something worth evaluating in light of an economy that will be changing dramatically in the next 20 years? Definitely.
Totally. I saw a comment somewhere on a discussion board about government controlled healthcare, I think the guy was from Canada or Australia or something, he said that one of the responsibilities of the government that you get for your tax dollars is making sure you don't die due to lack of healthcare.
Seems reasonable to me. The least the government could do is provide healthcare back to people since you are funding the government.
The government should take care of Americans first. Not corporations, not Israel or whatever concerns outside our borders.
The government outsourced loan forgiveness programs to private corporations. These corporations have no instructions or guidelines for how to process the very job they're paid to do, which means they have no incentive to actually do the work. They train their customer service people to not help people qualify for loan forgiveness. The net result is that people lose thousands of dollars because they did what they were supposed to and yet were sabotaged by the very contractors who were supposed to help them.
This comes at a time when student loans are higher than they've ever been in the past due to tuition costs rising 313% over the past 30 years. The burden is four times as high as it used to be, yet the job opportunities have only shrunk due to the recession.
The impact on college graduates is crushing, and not just in the terms of a reduced paycheck. The burden is so heavy that you simply don't have the money to live a normal life; you've been dedicating every spare penny you can afford just to keep the interest on your loan from building up. We have an entire generation that worked hard, went to college, took on multiple jobs, and yet ended up poorer than any of their predecessors because of a predatory loan system, a financial crisis that crowded them out of the job market just as they graduated, and a massively incompetent loan forgiveness program that actually made things worse by intentionally feeding misinformation to applicants.
You can't even escape student loans from bankruptcy. Your children can even inherit your debt.
I fail to understand how this could possibly be a justified situation, and the solution is obvious: we need a true forgiveness program that pays for these debts.
Is that a radical idea? No. In fact, it's something we've already done before. The government already pushed countless people through college without putting them in debt by spending taxpayer dollars in the massively popular GI Bill.
The result was one of the most financially successful generations in the United States. Countless Americans benefited from this program, and yet we see no evidence that the GI Bill broke the budget. It was a massively valuable program that virtually no one today opposes. Military service members can get higher education completely free due to government assistance, and I have yet to hear a single person complain that we shouldn't invest in people who served the country.
Why are we not doing the exact same thing today?
https://progressive.org/dispatches/how-african-american-wwii-veterans-were-scorned-by-the-g-i-b/
A group of Sikh men from Punjab, India, have been imprisoned in the El Paso detention center. Since no one there speaks Punjabi, these men can't be told about their immigration status. So, after being there for months, they went on a hunger strike. Now, they are so weak and frail that they can't be sent back to India because they could die in transit, but they still refuse to eat. So a judge mandated that they be force fed, sometimes multiple times per day, through nasal hoses.
Because the men don't want to eat, they struggle, so to feed them, they are tied down to a bed. When they resist force-feeding, they are threatened with immediate deportation- even though they are too weak, medically, to be sent home. The pressure of the force feeding is so intense that the men end up vomiting it out. Some vomit blood as well as the liquid diet they are being force-fed. Nasal bleeding is common. And because the men resist being force-fed, they were put into solitary confinement as well. The attorney who is trying to get them free was not allowed to see them.
Ruby Kaur, is one of their attorneys, and represents two of the men. Kaur also claims ICE officials told the men earlier this week that they would be deported Friday morning, a threat she says was repeated again after the Thursday confrontation. She says the men were examined by a doctor, who cleared them for travel to India. Kaur disagreed that they were in any condition to fly: “They are experiencing rectal bleeding, nasal bleeding, wounds in their throats; they cannot talk, they feel weak, and they are really stressed out and depressed,” she notes, adding that many of them have lost 40 or 50 pounds, have scars on their arms from the IVs, and have experienced blood in their vomit.
This violates the UN conventions against torture, and the US could be in tons of trouble for this.
As of Saturday, they were still detained in El Paso, Kaul says. ICE did not respond to a question about whether it had threatened them with deportation.
Judges in the past have allowed ICE to force-feed detainees on hunger strike, though the International Committee of the Red Cross and the American Medical Association have expressed ethical concerns about the practice. A spokesman for the United Nations human rights office said Thursday the treatment of the asylum-seekers in El Paso could violate the UN Convention Against Torture.
This isn’t the first time South Asians have gone on hunger strike at the El Paso facility. In 2014, a group of 37 Sikh Indian men stopped eating to protest their detention. The next year, more than 50 Bangladeshi, Pakistani, and Afghan asylum-seekers did the same and reportedly ended up in isolation. Many of those detainees were deported to Bangladesh, where some of them were killed after their arrival, claims Sridaran, citing a New York-based group called DRUM that was in touch with their family members. DRUM did not reply to a request for comment.
One reason for these protests is that South Asians are denied bond hearings at higher rates than other asylum-seekers, according to Sridaran. In 2016, BuzzFeed obtained documents in a Freedom of Information Act request that highlighted this trend: The documents showed that 83 percent of Indians facing deportation from the country were incarcerated in 2013—a rate much greater than for people from other countries, including Mexico. “Because they are languishing in the facility for months at a time, and in some previous cases for more than a year, they will launch a hunger strike to draw attention to their situation,” Sridaran says, noting that many of them have been denied language interpreters and religious accommodations during their detention.
Outside Texas, four immigration detainees are on hunger strike at facilities in or near Miami, Phoenix, San Diego, and San Francisco, an agency spokeswoman confirmed to the Associated Press in late January. Since May 2015, nearly 1,400 people have gone on hunger strike at 18 immigrant detention facilities, according to the advocacy group Freedom for Immigrants.
Honestly, this makes me sick, that our government is doing this.
Our government didn't force them to stop eating. They chose to...
Of course, this could have been entirely prevented by just getting someone who speaks Punjabi to speak with them about their cases. But no... that would have been too easy!
Our government could have found someone who speaks Punjabi to communicate with them. It chose not to...
What is this indefinite detainment supposed to accomplish? If they're allowed to enter the country, then set them free. If they're not allowed to enter the country, then deport them.
How much time did these officials have to spend not doing their jobs before these detainees were so unhealthy and so starved that sending them home would be life-threatening?
And FOX News' Chris Wallace is mocking the Republicans whining about all the investigations by telling them "Like Barrack Obama said, 'Elections have consequences.'." I mean, I kind of expect that from FOX news, who seem to love kicking people who are already upset. (source: Raw Story Fox News’ Chris Wallace mocks GOP for whining about investigations: ‘Elections have consequences’)
But it's not just that. It's the Trump Administration not caring if children separated from their parents at the border ever get back to their real parents and just shrugging it of like, "there's nothing we can do, boohoo, cry cry, too bad, so sad. NOT."
I'm angry at my government and I want to bring it down for what it's done and is still doing.
How are they even supposed to know if their detainment is justified or lawful if no one has communicated it to them?? If they have no way of knowing why they are in indefinite custody, a hunger strike might be the only option to get some results.
And for the record, at work, I can get someone on the phone who can speak nearly any language on Earth in less than 5 minutes in most cases. The idea a federal agency can't is an absurdity.
What are the indefinite detentions accomplishing?? Again, the cruelty isn't a bug, it's a feature. It's not an accident or incidental side-effect. It's the main purpose of the policy.