😎👍🏼🗽🇺🇸BIDEN, DEMS GET THE JOB DONE FOR AMERICA ON INFRASTRUCTURE, WITH SOME BIPARTISAN SUPPORT FROM GOP!

President Joe Biden
President Joseph R.Biden
46th President of The United States
(Official portrait of Vice President Joe Biden in his West Wing Office at the White House, Jan. 10, 2013. (Official White House Photo by David Lienemann)..This official White House photograph is being made available only for publication by news organizations and/or for personal use printing by the subject(s) of the photograph. The photograph may not be manipulated in any way and may not be used in commercial or political materials, advertisements, emails, products, promotions that in any way suggests approval or endorsement of the President, the First Family, or the White House.)

😎👍🏼🗽🇺🇸BIDEN, DEMS GET THE JOB DONE FOR AMERICA ON INFRASTRUCTURE, WITH SOME BIPARTISAN SUPPORT FROM GOP!

By Paul Wickham Schmidt

Courtside Exclusive

Nov. 7, 2021

After a long series of very public squabbles and false starts, President Biden this week delivered on one of his key campaign promises with a $1 trillion investment in America’s infrastructure. With a rebounding economy, it’s hard to think of any higher priority than rebuilding and modernizing America’s often crumbling roads and bridges, among other things. Directly or indirectly, that effort also should create lots of good jobs across the country.

Whether they are prepared to admit it or not, every American will benefit from this historic investment in our country. It remains to be seen however, whether the Dems will be able to reap any political capital from spearheading this achievement (with some bipartisan help). In the past, “messaging” about their substantial, positive achievements for all Americans has not been a Dem strongpoint. 

PWS

11-07-21

🛡🗽PROTECTING THE WORKERS WHO PROTECT US: Immigrants, Documented & Undocumented, Are The Core Of Our “Essential Workforce” That Has Carried Us Through The Pandemic — We Should Help Those Who Have Helped Us!

https://apple.news/A2LsyASukRaOXDQDOABC9cA

Jeremy Robbins writes in The Hill:

Before the inauguration, President Biden pledged a $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief bill. Then, hours after he entered the Oval Office, he introduced an immigration bill, The U.S. Citizenship Act of 2021, which aims to put millions of undocumented immigrants on a pathway to citizenship. At first glance, these initiatives seem unrelated; in fact, they are deeply connected. Combining them is the best way to help us battle the COVID-19 pandemic and recover from the recession. Here’s why.

In the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, the United States and the world over learned a lesson about who was truly essential to the economy: the home health aides and nurses who care for the sick, the grocery and delivery workers who keep our stores and kitchens stocked, and the workers at our farms and food processing plants who keep our food supply chain from collapsing. These and so many other overlooked jobs — classified as “essential and critical” by the Department of Homeland Security — hold our society together, protect us, and make our economy work.

Large numbers of these essential workers are also undocumented immigrants. Over 78 percent of immigrants without legal status work in these fields, according to a report by UCLA’s Latino Policy and Politics Initiative. They’re not just risking their lives to keep American citizens safe and help rebuild our economy, but they do so without legal protections and under the constant fear of deportation. That’s inhumane. But it’s also dangerous for Americans. With hospitalizations of COVID-19 patients surpassing 52,000, Congress must follow the lead of countries like France and give these essential workers a fast track to the citizenship they deserve.

It’s no secret that immigrants are helping to keep us all afloat. Despite being just 13 percent of the population, immigrants make up 37 percent of all home health aides and almost one third of all physicians and psychiatrists. With a very real threat of meat and poultry shortages at the beginning of the pandemic, immigrants filled more than a third of the tough food processing jobs and nearly half of all farm jobs picking our fruits and vegetables. And as parents across the country are placed in the impossible situation of balancing full-time work and parenting during a pandemic, once again immigrants help shoulder the burden, making up more than 20 percent of all childcare workers in day care centers.

And yet, despite all of this, our federal government acted as though we didn’t need these workers. As the pandemic raged, millions of immigrants were explicitly left out of the CARES Act relief efforts, as were millions of their U.S. born children and spouses who were penalized for having an unauthorized immigrant in the family. Meanwhile, the Trump Administration sought to shut the border to immigrant workers and students, all but stopped processing citizenship applications and ended asylum for people fleeing horrific violence. It also fought unsuccessfully all the way to the Supreme Court for the right to end protections for Dreamers, tens of thousands of whom are essential health care workers.

So what would an effective federal response look like?

. . . .

***************

Read the rest of Jeremy’s article at the link for his ideas on how to join immigration reform with economic expansion. 

Makes sense to me!

PWS

02-28-21

GETTING BEYOND THE RACIST MYTH OF THE “ZERO SUM GAME ECONOMY” — Heather  C. McGhee @ NYT

Heather C. McGhee
Heather C. McGhee speaks at TEDWomen 2019: Bold + Brilliant, December 4-6, 2019, Palm Springs, California. Photo: Stacie McChesney / TED, Creative Commons License

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/13/opinion/race-economy-inequality-civil-rights.html

Ms. McGhee is the author of “The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together,” from which this essay is adapted.

Over a two-decade career in the white-collar think tank world, I’ve continually wondered: Why can’t we have nice things?

By “we,” I mean America at-large. As for “nice things,” I don’t picture self-driving cars, hovercraft backpacks or laundry that does itself. Instead, I mean the basic aspects of a high-functioning society: well-funded schools, reliable infrastructure, wages that keep workers out of poverty, or a comprehensive public health system equipped to handle pandemics — things that equally developed but less wealthy nations seem to have.

In 2010, eight years into my time as an economic policy wonk at Demos, a progressive policy research group, budget deficits were on the rise. The Great Recession had decimated tax revenue, requiring more public spending to restart the economy.

But both the Tea Party and many in President Barack Obama’s inner circle were calling for a “grand bargain” to shrink the size of government by capping future public outlays and slashing Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare. Despite the still-fragile recovery and evidence that corporations were already paring back retirement benefits and ratcheting down real wages, the idea gained steam.

On a call with a group of all-white economist colleagues, we discussed how to advise leaders in Washington against this disastrous retrenchment. I cleared my throat and asked: “So where should we make the point that all these programs were created without concern for their cost when the goal was to build a white middle class, and they paid for themselves in economic growth? Now these guys are trying to fundamentally renege on the deal for a future middle class that would be majority people of color?”

Nobody answered. I checked to see if I was muted.

Finally, one of the economists breached the awkward silence. “Well, sure, Heather. We know that — and you know that — but let’s not lead with our chin here,” he said. “We are trying to be persuasive.”

The sad truth is that he was probably right. Soon, the Tea Party movement, harnessing the language of fiscal responsibility and the subtext of white grievance, would shut down the federal government, win across-the-board cuts to public programs and essentially halt the legislative function of the federal government for the next six years. The result: A jobless recovery followed by a slow, unequal economic expansion that hurt Americans of all backgrounds.

The anti-government stinginess of traditional conservatism, along with the fear of losing social status held by many white people, now broadly associated with Trumpism, have long been connected. Both have sapped American society’s strength for generations, causing a majority of white Americans to rally behind the draining of public resources and investments. Those very investments would provide white Americans — the largest group of the impoverished and uninsured — greater security, too: A new Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco study calculated that in 2019, the country’s output would have been $2.6 trillion greater if the gap between white men and everyone else were closed. And a 2020 report from analysts at Citigroup calculated that if America had adopted policies to close the Black-white economic gap 20 years ago, U.S. G.D.P would be an estimated $16 trillion higher.

. . . .

I’ll never forget Bridget, a white woman I met in Kansas City who had worked in fast food for over a decade. When a co-worker at Wendy’s first approached her about joining a local Fight for $15 group pushing for a livable minimum wage, she was skeptical. “I didn’t think that things in my life would ever change,” she told me. “They weren’t going to give $15 to a fast food worker. That was just insane to me.”

But Bridget attended the first organizing meeting anyway. And when a Latina woman rose and described her life — three children in a two-bedroom apartment with bad plumbing, the feeling of being “trapped in a life where she didn’t have any opportunity to do anything better” — Bridget, also a mother of three, said she was struck by how “I was really able to see myself in her.”

“I had been fed this whole line of, ‘These immigrant workers are coming over here and stealing our jobs — not paying taxes, committing crimes and causing problems,’” Bridget admitted. “You know, us against them.”

Soon after she began organizing, the cross-racial movement had won a convert. “In order for all of us to come up, it’s not a matter of me coming up and them staying down,” she said. “It’s the matter of: In order for me to come up, they have to come up too. Because honestly, as long as we’re divided, we’re conquered.”

*******************

Read the complete article at the link.

Inability to think beyond racist myths and false narratives is holding America back from realizing our full potential. 

“Dividing and conquering” is the strategy of the modern GOP. If one could get behind the racist stereotypes and white resentment, rural America probably has far more in common with hard-working undocumented immigrants, African Americans, and Latinos than with elitist GOP politicos and corporate moguls — certainly more than with the notoriously lazy, dull, corrupt grifter Trump! But, the key seems to be to promote minority rule by sowing hate and distrust, thereby preventing the common good of the majority from prevailing.

While much of the “beggar thy neighbor” fear mongering comes right out of the current GOP playbook, Dems, including many in the Obama Administration, have also been guilty, as Heather points out. Just read some the alarmist stuff being put out by former Obama economic honcho Larry Summers.   

And, contrary to White Nationalist myths about “job stealing,” much of American economic growth and innovation can be traced directly to immigrants, both documented and undocumented. 

PWS

02-15-21

POLITICS: AS GOP GOES “ALL IN” ON WHITE SUPREMACY, BIDEN MOVES FORWARD TO SOLVE AMERICA’S PRESSING PROBLEMS — “This political void is allowing Biden and the Democrats, who control the White House and both houses of Congress, to respond boldly to the largest social and economic crisis since the Great Depression,” says Robert Reich!

 

Robert Reich
Robert Reich
Former US Secretary of Labor
Professor of Public Policy
CAL Berkeley
Creative Commons License

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/feb/14/trump-impeachment-biden-american-rescue-plan-robert-reich?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

While most of official Washington has been focused on the Senate impeachment trial, another part of Washington is preparing the most far-ranging changes in American social policy in a generation.

The Capitol attack film was brutal. That’s why it must be watched | Francine Prose

Congress is moving ahead with Joe Biden’s American Rescue Plan, which expands healthcare and unemployment benefits and contains one of the most ambitious efforts to reduce child poverty since the New Deal. Right behind it is Biden’s plan for infrastructure and jobs.

The juxtaposition of Trump’s impeachment trial and Biden’s ambitious plans is no coincidence.

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Trump has left Republicans badly fractured and on the defensive. The party is imploding. Since the Capitol attack on 6 January, growing numbers of voters have deserted it. State and county committees are becoming wackier by the day. Big business no longer has a home in the crackpot GOP.

This political void is allowing Biden and the Democrats, who control the White House and both houses of Congress, to respond boldly to the largest social and economic crisis since the Great Depression.

Tens of millions are hurting. A record number of American children are impoverished

Importantly, they are now free to disregard conservative canards that have hobbled America’s ability to respond to public needs ever since Ronald Reagan convinced the nation big government was the problem.

The first is the supposed omnipresent danger of inflation and the accompanying worry that public spending can easily overheat the economy.

Rubbish. Inflation hasn’t reared its head in years, not even during the roaring job market of 2018 and 2019. “Overheating” may no longer even be a problem for globalized, high-tech economies whose goods and services are so easily replaceable.

Biden’s ambitious plans are worth the small risk, in any event. If you hadn’t noticed, the American economy is becoming more unequal by the day. Bringing it to a boil may be the only way to lift the wages of the bottom half. The hope is that record low interest rates and vast public spending generate enough demand that employers will need to raise wages to find the workers they need.

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A few Democratic economists who should know better are sounding the false alarm about inflation, but Biden is wisely ignoring them. So should Democrats in Congress.

. . . .

****************

Read the full article at the link. 

Seems like what Democrats need to do here is follow President Biden’s lead and “keep their eyes on the ball.” 

The minority of “non-Trumpist” Republicans, on the other hand, are going to have to decide where they fit in a party without values that has effectively “disowned” them in its embrace of racism, violence, insurrection, conspiracy theories, and corruption.

PWS

02-14-21

🇺🇸LOOKING FORWARD TO JAN 20: How The Biden Administration Can Reach Out To Rural America & Bring Our Nation Back Together! — Rural & Urban Areas Need Each Other To Maximize Growth & Prosper In The Future!

Rob Riley
Rob Riley
President, Northern Forest Center
Co-Founder, Rural Development Innovation Group
Picture: Aspen Group Website

https://www.pressherald.com/2020/12/30/commentary-how-to-make-federal-policy-work-for-maine-and-other-rural-places/

Rob Riley in the Portland (ME) Press Herald:

. . . .

President-elect Joe Biden, who pledged to serve all Americans, can respond boldly to address the needs of large swaths of rural America where people feel left behind. In the first 100 days of his administration, he can prove that he wants to see real change and will act to secure broader prosperity.

Drawing on more than 20 years of working in communities across four rural states, we see actionable, specific opportunities for Biden to make federal policy work for rural places. Here’s what we recommend:

• Engage in genuine conversations in rural places about the role of the federal government. The pandemic aside, fundamental economic changes, limited career pathways and crumbling (or non-existent) infrastructure plague many rural places. These challenges require public-private partnerships, directed by local needs and leadership. Many of the federal programs designed to address the underlying issues in rural places fail because they were designed for the rural reality of 1960, not of today. Let’s get current, understand why programs aren’t working and make them better.

• Elevate rural to the level it deserves in the president’s Cabinet. Rural places are currently served through a web of programs spread across numerous federal agencies. One might think this approach would help address policy deficiencies, but in fact, when everyone is in charge, no one is. The Biden administration can send a strong message that it means business by putting someone clearly in charge of its rural agenda and creating a new Department of Rural Development dedicated to improving, centralizing, and deploying the support and services necessary for rural people and places to thrive.

• Invest in doing economic development differently in rural places. Federal employees work diligently on their mission, providing grants and other services to constituents as directed by statute. And yet, the available tools for solving complicated, systemic and immediate issues are limited. To do economic development differently – and better – we need to eliminate programs that have limited utility, expand others that focus on building capacity in rural places, increase the flexible application of federal dollars and move the measurement of economic development outcomes beyond one-dimensional (and fleeting) metrics like job creation.

• Focus on and communicate about rural-urban connections rather than the divide. Rural places don’t benefit from being talked about as a monolith, a backwater or fly-over country. Rather, we as a nation need to raise up narratives and policies that recognize differences in rural places across the country, and that celebrate and support the natural, community, and economic assets that define those communities and their relationship to nearby urban areas. The stereotype of the American dream is changing. We now have a tapestry of rural, suburban and urban, and an opportunity to focus on collective prosperity rather than competition, exclusion and negative trade-offs.

The first hundred days will show how the Biden presidency will serve all Americans. Yes, there is a pandemic raging, but the widening gulf between rural and urban, rich and poor, red and blue requires a new tone, a new path and new solutions. Let’s get to it.

Rob Riley is president of the Northern Forest Center, a regional innovation and investment partner that creates rural vibrancy across Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont and New York. The center co-founded the national Rural Development Innovation Group with the Aspen Institute and the U.S. Endowment for Forestry & Communities.

**************************

Read Rob’s full article at the link.

These are great, and timely ideas. They also present an outstanding opportunity to use the power of immigration to make our country a better place for everyone.

  • Immigrant entrepreneurs, small businesspeople, and investors can pool their ideas, skills, and resources with rural communities. Innovative rural Americans can help redesign and tailor methods that have worked in other countries for the American situation.
  • Immigrants with experience in agriculture and product marketing can help alleviate some of the labor shortages in rural areas.
  • Immigrants with tech skills can partner with rural Americans to help insure that, rather than sometimes being left behind, rural areas are on the cutting edge of accessible, high speed, state of the art technology that will integrate many educational and commercial activities with those now centered in “urban hubs.” (For example, why couldn’t a high tech area in rural America where land and housing are cheaper and a skilled (or highly motivated and trainable) workforce is eager for work be just as effective as Crystal City, VA as the next big tech hub?)
  • Immigrants with health service backgrounds can assist even more rural communities in insuring that first-class healthcare (and the jobs and economic opportunities it creates) is available everywhere in America.
  • My experience is that immigrants of all types, like rural Americans, highly value education, particularly for future generations. Innovative educational programs can be developed to meet the common needs of immigrant and rural communities. 

There are just a few of the opportunities that come to mind. Obviously, I’m not a labor economist. But, I’m sure that if immigrant advocates concentrate on ways to actively engage and integrate immigrants into solving problems and improving the quality of life in rural and small-town America there are many other great opportunities for success out there just waiting to be tapped.

Immigrants have always been “part of the solution” rather than “part of the problem” in America. After four years of counterproductive unrestrained bigotry, false narratives, and hate-driven lies, its time for “truth, justice, and the American way” to come to the forefront again.

🇺🇸⚖️🗽Due Process Forever!

 

PWS

01-02-21

🤮GRIFTER GOLFS⛳️, TWEETS 🐥WAY THROUGH CHRISTMAS DAY, AS AMERICANS CONTINUE TO SUFFER🤮, DIE⚰️, DESPAIR😰 UNDER HIS CRUEL, STUPID, CORRUPT MISRULE🏴‍☠️!

 

Trump Clown
Donald J. Trump
Famous American Clown
(Officially titled “Ass Clown”)
Artist: Scott Scheidly
Orlando, FL
Reproduced by permission
Trump Regime Emoji
Trump Regime

http://enewspaper.latimes.com/infinity/article_share.aspx?guid=76ac9ea9-44ee-42d2-8687-9a29216e9507

AP reports:

. . . .

The bipartisan compromise was considered a done deal and won sweeping approval in the House and Senate after the White House assured GOP leaders that Trump supported it.

If he refuses to sign the deal, which is attached to a $1.4-trillion government funding bill, it will force a federal government shutdown, in addition to delaying aid checks and halting unemployment benefits and eviction protections in the most dire stretch of the pandemic.

“Made many calls and had meetings at Trump International in Palm Beach, Florida. Why would politicians not want to give people $2000, rather than only $600?” he tweeted after leaving the golf course Friday afternoon. “It wasn’t their fault, it was China. Give our people the money!”

Trump’s attack on the bill has been seen, at least in part, as punishment for what he considers insufficient backing by congressional Republicans for his push to overturn the Nov. 3 election results with unfounded claims of fraud.

*************

Read the full article at the link.

Of course it’s not about China; it’s about the worst President in history and his totally worthless party of sycophants, bigots, and anti-American “situational skinflints.” 

Plenty of public funding for tax breaks, unneeded walls, environmental destruction, and abusive “law enforcement.” Not so much for American workers, small businesses, essential workers, teachers, civil servants, and others struggling to survive during the crisis unnecessarily deepened by the “malicious incompetence” of the “Evil Clown Prez”🤡🦹🏿‍♂️ and his anti-democracy party.

BTW, is Lindsay “Scumbag” Graham 🤮going for the title of “third worst human on the public dole” — right behind the “ECP”🤡🦹🏿‍♂️ & the Grauleiter☠️? 

26 days and counting to the end of the kakistocracy🏴‍☠️!

PWS

12-26-20

“TORTURE” UNDER U.N. DEFINITION! ☠️— “GOVERNMENT-SANCTIONED CHILD ABUSE!” — WHAT HAVE WE BECOME AS A PEOPLE & A NATION? — AMERICA HAS PUT NOTORIOUS CHILD ABUSERS AND SHAMELESS “PERPS” OF “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” IN CHARGE — We Now Have A Chance To Throw Them Out & Start The Return To Human Decency As An Overriding National Value! 🗽

 

Here’s an array of reports on how America under the Trump regime has joined the ranks of dictatorships, torturers, child abusers, persecutors, and human rights criminals!

Eugene Robinson
Eugene Robinson
Opinion Columnist
Washington Post
Source: WashPost Website

Eugene Robinson @ WashPost:

What kind of people are we? As a society, are we so decadent and insecure that we show “toughness” by deliberately being cruel to innocent children? Is this what our nation has come to? Or are we better than that?

This election demands we answer those questions. The choice between President Trump and Joe Biden is not just political. It is also moral. And perhaps nothing more starkly illustrates the moral dimension of that decision than the Trump administration’s policy of kidnapping children at the southern U.S. border, ripping them away from their families — and doing so for no reason other than to demonstrate Trump’s warped vision of American strength.

We learned this week that some of those separations will probably be permanent. As NBC News first reported, 545 boys and girls taken as many as three years ago — the children of would-be immigrants and asylum seekers, mostly from Central America — have not been reunited with their parents and may never see their families again.

These are not among the nearly 3,000 families separated at the border in 2018, when children were kept in cages like animals or shipped away to facilities across the country, hundreds or thousands of miles from the border. We now know, thanks to the American Civil Liberties Union and other pro bono lawyers, that an additional 1,500 children were torn away from their families beginning in 2017, when the Trump administration conducted a trial run of the separation policy.

Please think about that. The shocking scenes we saw two years ago did not result from a sudden spasm of presidential anger. They didn’t stem from a Fox News segment Trump might have seen one evening. Rather, the administration rehearsed this form of cruelty.

What the administration did not plan for was how to reunite the children taken in 2017 with their families. Many of the parents were deported, and their children were placed in shelters around the country, then ostensibly released to parents or guardians, placements that the ACLU is still trying to confirm.

[Our Democracy in Peril: A series on the damage Trump has caused — and the danger he would pose in a second term]

The ACLU and other organizations have sent investigators to towns and villages in Central America in an attempt to find the kidnapped children’s families — an effort complicated not just by time and distance, but also by the covid-19 pandemic. Parents of 545 children have not been found, the ACLU reported this week.

Disturbingly, the Department of Homeland Security suggested that some of the parents declined to get their children back so they could remain in the United States. Keep in mind that most of these families were seeking asylum from deadly violence in their home countries. The Trump administration changed immigration guidelines to make it unlikely that the families would ultimately be allowed to stay in the United States, but federal law gives them the right to apply for asylum and to have their cases heard. They did nothing wrong. They should never have been asked to choose between parenting their children and getting them to safety — not by their home countries, and not by the United States.

Trump’s racism and xenophobia have been hallmarks of his presidency from the beginning, so perhaps it should be no surprise that he would preside over such an outrage. But he didn’t do this by himself. He had plenty of help.

Former attorney general Jeff Sessions seized an opportunity to make his rabid antipathy toward Hispanic immigration into policy. White House senior adviser Stephen Miller, a former Sessions aide in the Senate, was the architect of Trump’s “zero tolerance” immigration policy. Then-White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly said in 2018 that the children taken would be “taken care of — put into foster care or whatever.” Former homeland security secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said last year that she regretted that “information flow and coordination to quickly reunite the families was clearly not in place” — but not the separations themselves.

. . . .

Read the rest of Eugene’s article here:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/do-we-tolerate-the-kidnapping-of-children-this-election-is-our-chance-to-answer/2020/10/22/0f60d17c-1496-11eb-ad6f-36c93e6e94fb

***********************

Elise Foley
Elise Foley
Deputy Enterprise Editor
HuffPost
Photo Source: HuffPost.com

Elise Foley @ HuffPost:

President Donald Trump’s administration started and carried out a policy that took more than 4,000 children from their parents, at least 545 of whom are still split apart years later. But at Thursday’s debate, the president insisted that he did nothing wrong at all ― blaming his Democratic predecessors and even insisting the kids are doing fine.

“They are so well taken care of,” Trump said of the children taken from their parents by his administration. “They’re in facilities that were so clean.”

Trump’s first term was marked by a full-out assault on immigration, both legal and unauthorized. The most dramatic was his “zero tolerance” policy on unauthorized border-crossing, used in a 2017 pilot program and expanded more broadly in 2018, that led to criminal prosecution of parents and locking up their kids separately. Splitting up families was intentional and calculated, according to multiple reports.

Thanks to mass public outrage and a court order, Trump was forced to stop his family separation policy. Most families were reunited, but the American Civil Liberties Union, which was part of the lawsuit against the government that stopped the policy, said this week that at least 545 kids are still away from their parents.

“Their kids were ripped from their arms and separated,” Democratic nominee Joe Biden said during the debate. “And now they cannot find over 500 sets of those parents and those kids are alone. Nowhere to go. Nowhere to go. It’s criminal.”

. . . .

Read the rest of Elise’s article here:

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-debate-family-separation_n_5f924368c5b62333b2439d2b

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Ruth Marcus
Washington Post Columnist Ruth Marcus, moderates a panel discussion about chronic poverty with Education Secretary John B. King and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, during the National Association of Counties at the Washington Marriott Wardman Park, in Washington, DC, on Tuesday, Feb. 23, 2016. U.S. Department of Agriculture photo by Lance Cheung.

Ruth Marcus @ WashPost:

545.

That is the number of children still separated from their families by the Trump administration — separated deliberately, cruelly and recklessly. They might never be reunited with their parents again. Even if they are, the damage is unimaginable and irreparable.

545.

Even one would be too many. Each one represents a unique tragedy. Imagine being ripped from your parents, or having your child taken from you. Imagine the desperation that the parents feel, the trauma inflicted on their children.

545.

That number represents an indelible stain on President Trump and every individual in his administration who implemented this policy, flawed at the conception and typically, gruesomely incompetent in the execution. It is, perhaps in the technical sense but surely in the broader one, a crime against humanity. It is torture.

545.

That number — I will stop repeating it, yet it cannot be repeated enough — represents a moral challenge and responsibility for the next administration. If Joe Biden is elected president, he must devote the maximum resources of the federal government to fixing this disaster. The United States broke these families; it must do whatever it takes to help them heal.

Nothing like that would happen in a second Trump term, because Trump himself doesn’t care. He doesn’t grasp the horror that he oversaw. He doesn’t comprehend the policy, and he is incapable of feeling the pain it inflicted.

Those truths could not have been clearer cut than during Thursday night’s debate.

Moderator Kristen Welker of NBC News asked the president a simple question: “How will these families ever be reunited?”

First, Trump misstated the situation: “Their children are brought here by coyotes and lots of bad people, cartels, and they’re brought here, and they used to use them to get into our country.”

No. These are children separated from their families, not separated from smugglers. They are children brought by their parents in desperate search of a better life, desperate enough that they would take the risk of the dangerous journey.

Then Trump pivoted to the irrelevant: “We now have as strong a border as we’ve ever had. We’re over 400 miles of brand new wall. You see the numbers. And we let people in, but they have to come in legally.”

Welker persisted: “But how will you reunite these kids with their families, Mr. President?”

Trump responded by pointing his finger at his predecessor: “Let me just tell you, they built cages. You know, they used to say I built the cages, and then they had a picture in a certain newspaper and it was a picture of these horrible cages and they said look at these cages, President Trump built them, and then it was determined they were built in 2014. That was him.”

This is typical Trumpian deflection, bluster undergirded by ignorance. The “cages” are ugly but irrelevant to the topic at hand: the deliberately cruel plan to deter border-crossing by separating children from parents. That was a Trump administration special, implemented with callous sloppiness and so extreme that even the Trump administration abandoned it.

Welker, for the third time: “Do you have a plan to reunite the kids with their families?”

At which point Trump made clear that he did not: “We’re trying very hard, but a lot of these kids come out without the parents, they come over through cartels and through coyotes and through gangs.” The children, he added later, “are so well taken care of, they’re in facilities that were so clean.”

. . . .

Read the rest of Ruth’s op-ed here:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/545-children-are-still-separated-from-their-families-what-if-one-of-them-were-yours/2020/10/23/63d3be04-154f-11eb-ba42-ec6a580836ed_story.html

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Bess Levin
Bess Levin
Politics & Finance Writer
Vanity Fair


Bess Levin
@ Vanity Fair:

The third and final presidential debate gave Donald Trump and Joe Biden the opportunity to make their final pitch to the American people before the 2020 election. For the Democratic nominee, that meant driving home the point that he believes in science, that he’ll take the COVID-19 pandemic seriously, that climate change is real, and that systemic racism must be dealt with. For Trump, it meant making it clear that in addition to being a science-denying, QAnon-promoting dimwit, he’s also an actual monster who thinks separating small children from their parents, in some cases permanently, is absolutely fine.

Asked by moderated Kristen Welker about the news that parents of 545 children separated at the border—60 of whom are under the age of five—cannot be located, Trump defended the policy and gave no explanation for how the government plans to find these people and reunite their families. “Children are brought here by coyotes and lots of bad people, cartels, and they’re brought here and they used to use them to get into our country,” Trump said, which is objectively false, as they are brought here by their parents, which is why it’s called the family separation policy. “We now have as strong a border as we’ve ever had. We’re over 400 miles of brand new wall. You see the numbers and we let people in but they have to come in legally.”

pastedGraphic.png

Noting that Trump hadn’t answered the question, Welker pressed: “But how will you unite these kids with their families?”

“They built cages, they used to say I built cages…that was him,” Trump said, pointing to Biden and referring to the fact that the Obama administration did build temporary enclosures but failing, naturally, to mention that his predecessor did not separate families.

“Do you have a plan to reunite the kids with their parents?” Welker asked a third time. Again, Trump responded by claiming that the children “come without the parents, they come over through cartels and through coyotes and through gangs.”

At this point, Joe Biden was given a chance to weigh in and used his time to describe the policy implemented by Trump as the horror show all non-sociopaths know it to be. “Parents, their kids were ripped from their arms and they were separated and now they cannot find over 500 sets of those parents and those kids are alone, nowhere to go. It’s criminal.”

Then Trump interjected with what he apparently believed was an important point that would cast his administration in a much more favorable light and perhaps might even win it some awards or sainthood by the Catholic church. “Kristen, I will say this,” he told the moderator, of the children stolen from their parents. “They’re so well taken care of. They’re in facilities that are so clean.

pastedGraphic_1.png

With regard to that claim, NBC News reporter Jacob Soboroff weighed in on that after the debate, telling Rachel Maddow: “I was one of the reporters I guess the president mentioned, they invited me to go to the epicenter of this policy…what I saw was little children sitting on concrete floors, covered by mylar blankets, supervised by security contractors in a watchtower, it makes me sick every time I recall it. And Physicians for Human Rights…called this torture…the American Academy of Pediatrics called this state-sanctioned child abuse, and the president of the United States I guess interprets that as children being well taken care of.”

pastedGraphic_2.png

Read the rest of The Levin Report here:

https://mailchi.mp/c4319dce073e/levin-report-trumps-heart-bursting-with-sympathy-for-his-buddy-bob-kraft-2882762?e=adce5e3390

********************

Jacob Soboroff
Jacob Soboroff
NBC Correspondent
Jacob Soboroff at the ABC News Democratic Debate
National Constitution Center. Philadelphia, PA.
Creative Commons License

Here’s a video from NBC New’s  Jacob Soboroff, who has actually been inside “Trump’s Kiddie Gulag.” Surprise spoiler: It’s not “nice.” More like “torture” and “child abuse.”

https://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/watch/soboroff-the-conditions-of-migrant-children-trump-described-as-well-taken-care-of-made-me-sick-94450757764

*********************

Julia Edwards Ainsley

And, here’s another video from NBC News’s always incisive and articulate Julia Edwards Ainsley:

https://www.cnbc.com/video/2020/10/21/lawyers-cant-find-parents-of-545-migrant-children-separated-by-the-trump-administration.html

*******************

There is neither moral nor legal justification for what the Trump regime has done to asylum seekers and other migrants over the past four years as part of their racist, White Nationalist, nativist agenda. But, we can show that we’re a better country than his horrible vision by voting him and all of his enablers out of office! Vote ‘Em out, vote ‘Em out!

PWS

10-25-20

🏴‍☠️THE TRUTH ABOUT THE “TRUMP ECONOMY” — Good For Trump Family & Other “Fat Cats” — Not So Much For Most Working Folks — Contempt For Workers Runs Deep In Today’s Elitist GOP & The Trump Kakistocracy! — PLUS BONUS COVERAGE: IMMIGRANTS & THEIR ADVOCATES NEED TO MAKE THEIR VOICES HEARD, NOW! (A “PWS Mini-Essay”)

Tara Golshan
Tara Golshan
Politics Reporter
HuffPost
UW- Madison Grad

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-american-dream-economy-pandemic_n_5f494aebc5b64f17e13d6e4d

Unemployment is in double-digits, renters are scared of eviction notices, aid is stuck, and economic recovery seems to have slowed.

By Tara Golshan

For HuffPost

Republicans want Americans to believe that Joe Biden would “demolish” the American dream.

“This election will decide whether we save the American dream,” Trump said while accepting the Republican nomination for president on the final night of the Republican National Convention. “Or whether we allow a socialist agenda to demolish our cherished destiny.”

Speaker after speaker repeated the same message: Trump is the only candidate who can save the American dream, Democrats’ insistence on expanding the social safety net will stymie individuals’ opportunities, and Republicans are the party of dreaming big.

“Let me assure you, socialism doesn’t offer opportunity. Socialism deprives,” Florida Lt. Gov. Jeanette Nuñez said on the second night of the convention. “We can go down a dark road of chaos and government control, or we can choose the path of freedom and opportunity that was paved by those who sacrificed everything to preserve the American dream for future generations.”

But for many working Americans, policies under the Trump administration and Trump’s response to the pandemic have put the American dream further out of reach.

Trump’s message that he’s the savior of the American dream comes as the nation is in the middle of a widespread coronavirus outbreak, which public health experts and a vast majority of Americans say was worsened by Trump’s slow response. Unemployment sits at 10 percent, and the economy’s recovery has slowed over the summer months. Federal aid, which economists say kept upwards of 10 million people out of poverty, has been slashed or cut completely, as Republicans remain reluctant to continue unemployment benefits at the same levels.

Even before the pandemic hit and the economy appeared to be doing fine, Americans were dubious that there was an equality of opportunity afforded to everyone under Trump’s leadership.

In a January Pew Research Center survey, 70% of Americans said the economy was rigged in favor of the wealthy. There are partisan divides in the poll, with Republicans generally seeing the economy under Trump as fairer than Democrats do. But notably, 79% of lower-income Republicans said the wealthy had too much power today, and Democrats and Republicans agreed that small businesses were being overtaken by major corporations.

. . . .

***************

Thanks, Tara! Read Tara’s complete article at the link. Tara is a UW-Madison grad!

IMMIGRANTS & THEIR ADVOCATES NEED TO MAKE THEIR VOICES HEARD, NOW!

By Paul Wickham Schmidt
Courtside Exclusive
Aug. 29, 2020

Truth is, Trump has no plan for reviving the American economy and is firmly opposed to equality. He hopes that the virus will go away or that he can shift the blame for his abject failure to deal with it to someone else (a false narrative already well underway). He has no clue on how to deal with businesses that will never reopen, jobs that no longer exist, industries (e.g., travel, hospitality, education) whose “traditional models” no longer will be economically viable, and workers whose ability to return to former jobs is limited by the long-term effects of COVID. 

What’s the regime’s plan to deal with mental health issues arising from unemployment or loss of loved ones? Beyond berating them for being sick or out of work, Trump and the GOP have no plan! Cut their unemployment, take away their health insurance, promote unsafe and exploitative working conditions, and immunize careless or negligent employers from liability — that’s the Trump/Moscow Mitch plan.

While I’m not a labor economist, I see evidence that the Trump regime’s gross mishandling of the pandemic, it’s glorification of myth over science, its open disdain for workers and their health and safety, and its nativist immigration restrictions will eventually cause a long term shortage of healthcare workers and teachers — essential workers whose lives and expertise are almost daily demeaned and devalued by the Trump regime and the GOP.

What’s Trump’s plan for African-American, Latino, and low-income communities that have been disproportionately affected by COVID and its collateral effects? More police brutality? Terrorism by DHS agents? Forced labor? Starvation? Disenfranchisement? Public assistance cuts? Lousy education? Slash Social Security? Tax cuts for the rich? Dirty air? Polluted water? How will folks living “paycheck to paycheck” (at best) save for retirement? Work till they drop dead to support the Trumps and McConnells of the world and finance more tax breaks for the rich and powerful?

Biden and Harris have an established record of concern for all workers and all communities. They are certainly American worker’s best chance for a better life and a better future!

My observation is that the immigrant and particularly refugee and asylee communities have a disproportionate number of entrepreneurs, businesspeople, innovators, risk takers, and practical problem solvers who have been able to reinvent and often retrain themselves under the most difficult circumstances imaginable with minimal outside assistance. This community, their colleagues, and immigration and human rights advocates need to be working at the highest levels with the Biden/Harris campaign on a plan to reestablish legal immigration (including refugee and asylum programs) as an essential part of the overall plan to create jobs, develop new or improved industries and businesses, and get all Americans back to work in jobs that will be both satisfying and economically viable.

This plan that would include rebuilding, strengthening, and creating new opportunities within our healthcare, safety net, educational, and vocational programs rather than destroying and looting them as Trump and his cronies have done. It’s called “teamwork, innovation, and best practices,” and it’s an anathema to Trump and the GOP —  the party that promotes systemic economic inequality and despises and ridicules expertise and cooperative efforts.

Immigrants of all types and statuses have helped all of us get through the pandemic, notwithstanding the racist abuse heaped on them by Trump, Miller, Wolf, and the GOP. Robust legal immigration is, as it always has been, part of the solution, not (as the Trump/Miller false narrative would have it) part of the problem. 

And, to state the obvious, most of the so-called “undocumented population” in the US, residing (many with families including U.S. citizens or green card holders) working, paying taxes, and otherwise contributing to our society, mindlessly targeted by Trump and GOP nativists, could and should long ago have been integrated into our legal immigration system at some level. 

But, it’s up to the immigration and human rights experts to get into the “inner circles” of the Biden/Harris campaign now, and to place immigration in its rightful place as one of the keys to American equality and prosperity, rather than that being “left on the sidelines” as happened with Obama. 

In many ways, Trump and his fundamentally anti-America policies, as masterminded by neo-Nazi Stephen Miller, are the price we have paid for the Obama Administration’s negligent failure to harness the positive power of immigration and of the notable absence of true immigration/human rights policy experts and advocates from the key positions in his Administration. 

Immigrants and their advocates can’t let history repeat itself! Policy, legislation, administration, and indeed judging are just variants of “advocacy.” In this case “advocacy” of due process, fundamental fairness, human rights, practical problem-solving, and human dignity. That’s something that the GOP right wrecking crew “gets” but to which Dems and liberals sometimes seem willfully oblivious! 

We can’t afford to get it wrong again. And, neither can the Biden/Harris campaign or the American people! The stakes are simply too high!

This November, vote like your life depends on it! Because it does!

Also, immigration and human rights advocates need to make their voices heard by Biden/Harris campaign! Now!

PWS

08-29-20

🇺🇸👍🏼🗽😇THE FUTURE WILL BELONG TO NATIONS THAT WELCOME IMMIGRANTS: Getting Rid of Trump, Miller, Cotton, & The Other GOP Racist Restrictionists Is A Key First Step To A Better America For All!

https://apple.news/ApxPyJV3cSBOtEU7c4Xlk4A

Frida Ghitis @ CNN:

The only way the United States can remain the world’s most prosperous, powerful country is by embracing immigration. That’s the inescapable conclusion from a new study published on Tuesday in the Lancet that predicts the world’s population will peak far sooner than anticipated, and start shrinking before the end of this century.

There is, however, no guarantee that the US will embrace immigration, even to save itself. Domestic politics, currently inflamed by divisive nativist leaders, have turned immigration into a contested topic. A country that rose to historic heights of influence and prosperity by welcoming immigrants, is now led by a President who has weaponized the issue with unfathomable cruelty.

One example: At this moment, hundreds of migrant families held in detention facilities face the wrenching choice of whether to let their children be released to third parties, or stay together in detention. This awful decision comes as the result of court order last month that called for the children’s release in light of the coronavirus pandemic — and it is essentially a new version of the family separation policy that tore apart thousands of children from their parents earlier in the Trump administration.

Such heartless political measures flout America’s founding principles — but are also out of step with public opinion on immigration: an overwhelming majority of Americans — 77%, according to a recent 2020 Gallup poll- say it is good for the country. The prospect of falling birth rates predicted by study — from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington’s School of Medicine — may be a thumb on the scale in favor of more immigration. After all, businesses will need workers. Even the military will likely feel the pressure of contracting numbers of people of military age.

The new study shows how far off the mark earlier assumptions about exploding population growth fell. Some among you, my dear readers, may remember when intellectuals were gripped by the fear of a “Malthusian catastrophe,” fear that population growth would outpace our ability to feed ourselves. But it turns out that Thomas Robert Malthus, the 18th century economist and demographer, got it all wrong.

Not only did agricultural advances undercut his thesis, it turns out the world’s population will start contracting before long, with powerful economic, geopolitical and environmental implications.

. . . .

The result will be increased friction over immigration, with the arguments of immigration advocates bolstered by demographers, economists and a business community anxious to see consumption increase and workers available.

The present may be blazing with the demagogues’ sturm und drang about keeping immigrants out. But the future belongs to the country that welcomes them.

*********************

Read the complete article at the link.

Immigration is both an unstoppable human force and good for America. The sooner we end the current regime’s cruel and stupid White Nationalist policies and develop a robust, thoughtful, inclusive, realistic approach to legal immigration (including refugees), the better off we will be as a nation.

An immediate benefit would be a sharp reduction in the amount of resources and goodwill wasted on counterproductive and often both illegal and immoral restrictionist enforcement gimmicks. That would actually align immigration enforcement with the national interest, rather than undermining it as is now the case with many of the misguided enforcement efforts, particularly “civil” imprisonment and deportations of refugees and long time residents.

This November, vote like your life depends on it! Because it does!

PWS

07-17-20

Ananya Bhattacharya @ QUARTZ: Yes, Trump’s B.S. White Nationalist Attack on Immigrants, Using COVID-19 as a Pretext, Will Harm U.S. Workers & the U.S. Economy, Says New Study by U.C. San Diego Profs!

Ananya Bhattacharya
Ananya Bhattacharya
Tech Reporter
QUARTZ

 

https://apple.news/ATn0lgkBSTay-a1C2lMlh4A

 

Ananya writes in QUARTZ:

GOOD FOR YOU

A new study shows Trump’s anti-immigration policies will end up hurting the US

The Donald Trump administration’s planned measures to help American graduates find jobs during the Covid-19 pandemic may backfire in the long term.

Over the past couple of months, the US government has proposed several restrictions on foreign skilled workers, which it believes will open up opportunities for locals. However, a recent University of California San Diego immigrant rights study (pdf) has said immigrant rights enhance the lives and livelihoods of native workers in many ways such as improvement in incomes, sparking innovation, reducing crime and increasing tax revenues.

“We find there are several areas where strengthening migrant worker rights benefits native-born workers, outweighing any costs borne by them,” researchers Gaurav Khanna and Anna Brown found.

The research comes after Trump hit pause on immigration into the US via employment and family routes in April, affecting more than 20,000 people each month. A May 7 letter from a group of four Republican senators urged Trump to suspend the Optional Practical Training programme (OPT), which allows international students to work in the US for up to three years. Six days later, the New York Times reported Trump is considering barring the issuance of new visas in certain employment-based categories, including H-1B.

Here’s a break-down of how hurting immigrant sentiment is tied to the welfare of the US economy:

Entrepreneurship and innovation

Any change to immigrant laws could hurt the US’s long-term plans around innovation and new ventures because giving immigrants legal permanence and a sense of stability incentivises local investments.

“These new businesses may lead to an increase in jobs and a larger tax base,” the researchers said. “While much of the literature has focused on the potential of H-1B visa-holders to develop new patents and technologies, there is strong evidence suggesting that this relationship between immigration and innovation holds more broadly.”

Around 45% of Fortune 500 companies have been founded by immigrants or children of immigrants. These companies amass more than $6 trillion in revenue per year and include tech giants like Google-Alphabet, Microsoft, Tesla, and Apple. A previous study by Khanna revealed that hiring H-1B workers was strongly associated with firms introducing newer products.

Threat of reverse brain drain

The report also says America’s talent crunch could worsen if foreign professionals are not retained.

“When the US crisis abates, there may be a scarcity of high-skill professionals, which could stall a robust recovery,” Khanna, co-author and assistant professor of economics at the school of Global Policy and Strategy (GPS), said in a June 4 press release.

Silicon Valley’s gaping tech skills gap has long been plugged by foreign talent.

Back in 1994, the number of computer scientists in the US who were born abroad was less than one in 10. By 2012, the share was up to a quarter.

Most tech workers are employed under the H-1B programme, which is only renewable for up to six years. Workers who are not on track for a green card have to return home. “Such forces, set into motion by the six-year H-1B limit, have shifted production from the United States to India,” the research states. Extending the H-1B limit or making the green card process easier would allow employers to retain this high-skill talent.

And it’s not just about Silicon Valley. The IT sector has downstream effects on other industries that use software, such as banking and manufacturing.

Higher wages, more jobs for locals

The presence of immigrants had a more favourable effect on incomes, the researchers found. A study conducted by the US Department of Labor showed that granting legal status to migrant workers resulted in their wages rising by 15.1%.

Restrictions on the H-1B will have an outsize effect on Indians, who receive three-quarters of the visa, but they wouldn’t be the first group to fall prey. Historically, Chinese, European, and Mexican labour flow into the US has been limited or stopped altogether based on unsubstantiated evidence about these workers depressing wages.

“Often, such policies have been motivated by resentment against foreign workers; however, this fear may be based on false perceptions and lack of evidence,” the authors of the paper write. “This resentment may also be driven by racial prejudices and xenophobia.”

However, the reality is that protecting migrant workers from exploitation eventually levels the playing field between immigrants and non-immigrants. “Migrant workers, who are not legally protected, face much lower wages compared with their native counterparts,” according to Khanna. “This is detrimental to US-born workers, who are less likely to be hired. Ensuring migrant workers have substantial rights inadvertently helps US-born workers as well.”

A better tomorrow for America

Less crime: Trump has often tried to draw a link between immigrants and rising crime rates. But there is little truth in these claims. Between 1970 and 2010, increases in immigration in US metropolitan areas were correlated with decreases in both violent (homicides, assaults, etc) and property crimes (burglary, motor vehicle theft, etc), past research shows. Then, a 2007 studyfound that incarceration rates are lower for immigrants and far lower for newly arrived immigrants.

More taxes: Contrary to popular belief, undocumented migrant workers pay taxes, mostly income taxes, which are estimated to be at $11.7 billion. This number would rise by $2.2 billion if undocumented migrants were granted legal status. For a country with $804 billion in fiscal debt, every penny counts.

Future workforce: Children of currently undocumented individuals who are born in the US can join the country’s workforce, adding to productivity and expanding the tax base.

Quartz Daily Brief

Subscribe to the Daily Brief, our morning email with news and insights you need to understand our changing world.

 

********************************* 

I’ve featured this particular study in prior posts. https://immigrationcourtside.com/2020/06/06/debunking-the-trump-regimes-white-nationalist-myths%EF%B8%8F-furthering-protecting-immigrants-rights-benefits-society-bogus-covid-19-visa-rest/

 But, Ananya’s summary is so highly relevant and beautifully written that it deserves its own post. One of her most important points: “[T]he reality is that protecting migrant workers from exploitation eventually levels the playing field between immigrants and non-immigrants.”

I’ve pointed out to my students that bigger investments by the Feds in Wage & Hour and OSHA enforcement, as an alternative to expensive, inhumane, wasteful, and often counterproductive civil immigration detention and enforcement, is something that a wiser and more intellectually honest Administration should consider in the future, in combination with a more robust and realistic legal immigration system.

 

PWS

 

06-09-20

GEORGE PACKER @ THE ATLANTIC: With Failed Institutions & Lousy Leaders, Including a President Leading the Charge to the Bottom, America Faces An Uncertain Future — “A responsible establishment doesn’t exist. Our president is one of the rioters.” — Joe Biden & The Dems Could Be The Last, Best Hope For American Democracy & Real Progress Toward “Equal Justice For All!”

George Packer
George Packer
American Journalist, Author, Playwright

https://apple.news/A-6795FCPQU6LRBMW1_nzvw

Packer writes in The Atlantic:

IDEAS

Shouting Into the Institutional Void

Demonstrators are hammering on a hollowed-out structure, and it very well may collapse.

The urban unrest of the mid-to-late 1960s was more intense than the days and nights of protest since George Floyd was murdered by a Minneapolis policeman. More people died then, more buildings were gutted, more businesses were ransacked. But those years had one advantage over the present. America was coming apart at the seams, but it still had seams. The streets were filled with demonstrators raging against the “system,” but there was still a system to tear down. Its institutions were basically intact. A few leaders, in and outside government, even exercised some moral authority.

In July 1967, immediately after the riots in Newark and Detroit, President Lyndon B. Johnson created a commission to study the causes and prevention of urban unrest. The Kerner Commission—named for its chairman, Governor Otto Kerner Jr. of Illinois—was an emblem of its moment. It didn’t look the way it would today. Just two of the 11 members were black (Roy Wilkins, the leader of the NAACP, and Edward Brooke, a Republican senator from Massachusetts); only one was a woman. The commission was also bipartisan, including a couple of liberal Republicans, a conservative congressman from Ohio with a strong commitment to civil rights, and representatives from business and labor. It reflected a society that was deeply unjust but still in possession of the tools of self-correction.

The commission’s report, written by the executive director, David Ginsburg, an establishment liberal lawyer of New Deal vintage, appeared at the end of February 1968. It became an instant million-copy best seller. Its language is bracing by the standards of any era: “What white Americans have never fully understood—but what the Negro can never forget—is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.” The report called for far-reaching policy reforms in housing, employment, education, and policing, to stop the country from becoming “two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.”

[Anne Applebaum: History will judge the complicit]

It was too much for Johnson, who resented not being credited for his efforts to achieve civil rights and eradicate poverty, and whose presidency had just been engulfed by the Tet Offensive in South Vietnam. He shelved the report. A few weeks later, on the evening of April 4, Martin Luther King Jr. was killed in Memphis. The next night, Johnson—who had just announced that he wouldn’t run for reelection—spoke to a country whose cities were burning from coast to coast. “It is the fiber and the fabric of the republic that’s being tested,” he said. “If we are to have the America that we mean to have, all men of all races, all regions, all religions must stand their ground to deny violence its victory in this sorrowful time, and in all times to come. Last evening, after receiving the terrible news of Dr. King’s death, my heart went out to his family and to his people, especially to the young Americans who I know must sometimes wonder if they are to be denied a fullness of life because of the color of their skin.” To an aide, he was more blunt in assessing the uprising: “What did you expect? I don’t know why we’re surprised. When you put your foot on a man’s neck and hold him down for 300 years, and then you let him up, what’s he going to do? He’s going to knock your block off.”

King’s murder and the riots it sparked propelled Congress to pass, by an overwhelming and bipartisan margin, the decade’s last major piece of civil-rights legislation, the Civil Rights Act of 1968, which enforced fair standards in housing. Johnson signed it on April 11. It was too late. The very best reports, laws, and presidential speeches couldn’t contain the anger in the streets. That year, 1968, was when reform was overwhelmed by radicalization on the left and reaction on the right. We still live in the aftermath. The language and ideas of the Kerner Report have haunted the years since—a reminder of a missed chance.

The difference between 1968 and 2020 is the difference between a society that failed to solve its biggest problem and a society that no longer has the means to try. A year before his death, King, still insisting on nonviolent resistance, called riots “the language of the unheard.” The phrase implies that someone could be made to hear, and possibly answer. What’s happening today doesn’t feel the same. The protesters aren’t speaking to leaders who might listen, or to a power structure that might yield, except perhaps the structure of white power, which is too vast and diffuse to respond. Congress isn’t preparing a bill to address root causes; Congress no longer even tries to solve problems. No president, least of all this one, could assemble a commission of respected figures from different sectors and parties to study the problem of police brutality and produce a best-selling report with a consensus for fundamental change. A responsible establishment doesn’t exist. Our president is one of the rioters.

After half a century of social dissolution, of polarization by class and race and region and politics, there are no functioning institutions or leaders to fail us with their inadequate response to the moment’s urgency. Levers of influence no longer connect to sources of power. Democratic protections—the eyes of a free press, the impartiality of the law, elected officials acting out of conscience or self-interest—have lost public trust. The protesters are railing against a society that isn’t cohesive enough to summon a response. They’re hammering on a hollowed-out structure, and it very well may collapse.

[James Fallows: Is this the worst year in modern American history?]

If 2020 were at all like 1968, the president would go on national television and speak as the leader of all Americans to try to calm a rattled country in a tumultuous time. But the Trump administration hasn’t answered the unrest like an embattled democracy trying to reestablish legitimacy. Its reflex is that of an autocracy—a display of strength that actually reveals weakness, emptiness. Trump’s short walk from the White House to St. John’s Episcopal Church had all the trappings of a strongman trying to show that he was still master of the country amid reports that he’d taken refuge in a bunker: the phalanx of armored guards surrounding him as he strutted out of the presidential palace; the tear gas and beatings that cleared his path of demonstrators and journalists; the presence of his daughter, who had come up with the idea, and his top general, wearing combat fatigues as if to signal that the army would defend the regime against the people, and his top justice official, who had given the order to raid the square.

William Barr has reacted to the killing of George Floyd like the head of a secret-police force rather than the attorney general of a democratic republic. His first act was not to order a federal investigation into the Minneapolis Police Department, but—as he’s done before—to rush out ahead of the facts and try to control public opinion, by announcing that the violence following Floyd’s death was the work of left-wing agitators. Streets of the nation’s capital are now blocked by security forces from Barr’s Department of Justice—many from the Federal Bureau of Prisons—wearing uniforms that make them impossible to identify, like paramilitary troops with unknown commanders.

The protests have to be understood in the context of this institutional void. They resemble the spontaneous mass cry of a people suffering under dictatorship more than the organized projection of public opinion aimed at an accountable government. They signify that democratic politics has stopped working. They are both utopian and desperate.

[Read: The double standard of the American riot]

Some public figures—politicians, policy experts, civic leaders—have come forward with proposals for changing the mindset and tactics of the police. Terrence Floyd, the brother of the murdered man, urged protesters to educate themselves and vote. But the overwhelming message of the protests is simply “end racism,” which would be a large step toward ending evil itself. The protesters are demanding an absolute, as if they’ve stopped expecting the state to produce anything that falls a little short. For white protesters—who are joining demonstrations on behalf of black freedom and equality in large numbers for the first time since Selma, Alabama, 55 years ago—this demand means ending an evil that lies within themselves. It would be another sign of a hollow democracy if the main energy in the afterglow of the protests goes into small-group sessions on white privilege rather than a hard push for police reform.

. . . .

This is where we are. Trust is missing everywhere—between black Americans and police, between experts and ordinary people, between the government and the governed, between citizens of different identities and beliefs. There’s an election coming in five months. It won’t end racism or the pandemic, or repair our social bonds, or restore our democracy to health. But it could give us a chance to try, if we get that far.

**********************

Read the rest of Packer’s article at the above link. 

Well said! The only thing missing is specific reference to the toxic failure of the U.S. Supreme Court. 

We once had a Court with the legal experience, ethics, vision, and moral courage to lead America forward toward a more just and equal society. That’s been totally dissipated by years of GOP erosion of the Court’s legal expertise, practical problem-solving ability, humanity, courage, vision of a better future for all in America, and integrity.

The “journey downward and march backward” from Brown v. Board of Education to legal travesties like Trump v. Hawaii and Wolf v. Innovation Law Lab (to name just two glaring examples of the Court’s disgraceful and illegal “Dred Scottification” of the other in our society) is certainly one of the most outrageous, disturbing, and disgusting tales in post-Plessy v. Ferguson American jurisprudence.

The Court’s abject failure to move forward and make voting rights and equal justice for all a reality is in no small measure linked to the death of George Floyd and other Americans of color and the nationwide protests of injustice. Failure of judicial integrity, vision, and leadership — in other words failures of both legal and moral justice —  imperils our nation and many of its inhabitants. 

America already faces long-term threats to our justice system and those it supposedly serves from the irresponsible and poorly-qualified life-tenured judicial appointments of Trump and the Mitch-led GOP. To them, things like “equal justice for all,” “voting rights,” “due process for all,” “women’s rights,” and “human rights” are just cruel hoaxes — things to be privately mocked, publicly “lip-serviced,” then buried forever beneath an avalanche of disingenuous and opaque legal gobbledygook intended to hide their true anti-democratic, White Nationalist enabling intent. The appointment of any more Justices along the lines of the “J.R. Five” likely would be the final “nail in the coffin” for our democratic republic! 🏴‍☠️👎🏻🥵

This November, vote like your life depends on it! Because it does!

PWS

06-06-20

DEBUNKING THE TRUMP REGIME’S WHITE NATIONALIST MYTHS☠️: Furthering & Protecting Immigrants’ Rights Benefits Society — Bogus “COVID-19” Visa Restrictions & Other Nativist Nonsense Enabled By Feckless Congress & Failing Courts Hurts America!

Gaurav Khanna
Gaurav Khanna
Assistant Professor of Economics
U.S. San Diego

https://apple.news/AtzkkrgAGThCSMutjCZCjAg

 From SCIENMAG:

New Visa restrictions will make the US economic downturn worse

New research shows legal protections for immigrants improve lives and livelihoods of citizen workers

The Trump administration is expected to set limits on a popular program that allows international students to work in the U.S. after graduation while remaining on their student visas. The restrictions on the Optional Practical Training (OPT) program are designed to help American graduates seeking jobs during the pandemic-fueled economic downturn; however, the move is likely to further hurt the economy, according to new University of California San Diego research on immigrant rights.

In a new research paper, economists find that immigrant rights enhance the lives and livelihoods of native-born workers in many ways. Drawing from a sweeping collection of studies on the U.S. labor market over the past century, the paper is the first of its kind to look at how legal protections for immigrants affect domestic workers of immigrant-receiving countries in terms of generating income, innovation, reducing crime and increasing tax revenues.

One in eight persons living in the United States was born in a different country. Therefore understanding the impact of migrant worker rights on receiving economies is crucial to immigration policymaking, especially with the White House’s immigration policies growing more exclusionary during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“This time the political restrictions seem to be on high-skill foreign-born, like students, OPTs and those with H1B visas,” said Gaurav Khanna, co-author and assistant professor of economics at the UC San Diego’s School of Global Policy and Strategy (GPS). “Many high-skill workers have lost their jobs, which means many will have to leave the country soon. When the U.S. crisis abates, there may be a scarcity of high-skill professionals, which could stall a robust recovery.”

Legal protections for immigrants aid entrepreneurship and innovation

About 45 percent of Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants or children of immigrants. These companies amass more than $6 trillion in revenue per year and include tech-giants like Google-Alphabet, Microsoft, Tesla and Apple. With one in four of computer scientists born in a different country, the U.S. immigrant workforce comprises of many of Silicon Valley’s top entrepreneurs, current CEOs or company founders.

As entrepreneurs know, starting a business requires a lot of money up front while the return on investment may take years, but the benefits to the local populations prove to be very positive from the start.

With the economy contracting at unprecedented levels, the White House’s decision to impose more visa restrictions is expected make economic recovery more difficult because the less confidence immigrants have in their status, the less likely they are to seed innovation and create businesses.

Providing legal permanence and stability to immigrants may help incentivize long-term local investments like businesses which lead to an increase in jobs and a larger tax base, Khanna and co-author Anna Brown, a graduate of GPS’s Master of Public Policy program write.

H1-B under fire, despite its well-documented economic benefits

Most technology workers enter the U.S. on H-1B visas, which are temporary work visas that are valid for three years and renewable up to another three years. At the end of the six-year period, these highly-skilled workers must either leave the country or apply for a costly green card that has a long waitlist, particularly for citizens of India and China.

“Extending the H-1B limit or making the green card process easier would provide immigrants with a longer legal work status in the U.S. and allow employers to retain high-skill talent, which could have downstream effects on other industries that use software, like banking, manufacturing and other sectors,” the authors write.

Since the H-1B visa was in introduced in 1990, it has yielded many economic benefits. For example, U.S.-born workers gained $431 million in 2010 as a result of the H-1B, according to previous research from Khanna. Moreover, another study of his revealed that hiring H-1B workers was strongly associated with firms introducing newer products.

However, new restrictions to the H-1B, the same type of visa the founder of SpaceX, Elon Musk, used to begin working in the U.S., could be released soon as the White House recently indicated it is reevaluating the program. This could yield another roadblock for the legalization of immigrants with entrepreneurial ambition.

“Unless immigrants are certain they will be allowed to remain within a country, they may not invest in developing a business in that country,” Khanna and Brown write. “This highlights a problem faced by many migrants who have ambitions to start businesses but will not because they know they may not be able to stay in the country for long.”

More protections for immigrants increases the likelihoods of jobs going to native born-workers, over immigrants

In addition to analyzing how immigrant rights aid entrepreneurship, Khanna and Brown also looked at how these policies impact the competition between native-born and immigrant workers. Immigrant worker rights protect migrant workers from employer exploitation; an indirect benefit of these laws is that they even the playing field between immigrants and non-immigrants.

“Migrant workers, who are not legally protected, face much lower wages compared with their native counterparts,” according to Khanna. “This is detrimental to U.S. born workers, who are less likely to be hired. Ensuring migrant workers have substantial rights inadvertently helps U.S. born workers as well.”

The study points to exclusionary immigration policies over the course of U.S. history, from the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, to the Kennedy and Johnson administrations’ policies targeted at farmworkers, all of which were driven by fear of low-skill laborers from other countries depressing wages of native-born workers in the U.S.

However, economist all over the world have been unable to find evidence that proves these theories. Rather, in each of these cases throughout U.S. history, employers adjusted to the missing workers in ways other than substantially bidding up wages, such as by shifting to production technologies that use less labor.

“Often, such policies have been motivated by resentment against foreign workers; however, this fear may be based on false perceptions and lack of evidence,” the authors of the paper, which appeared in the UCLA Journal of International Law & Foreign Affairs, write. “This resentment may also be driven by racial prejudices and xenophobia.”

Rights for immigrants also lower crimes in receiving countries

Even as the discussion on the impact of immigration has predominantly focused on wages and employment, the current U.S. President has strongly alluded to a link between immigrants and crime, propelling growing discourse on the subject.

Between 2001 and 2017, Gallup polls consistently reflected that roughly half (45 percent to 58 percent) of American respondents believe immigrants make the crime situation worse. These assumptions are false. The authors cite ample research that sheds light on incarceration rates being lower for immigrants, and far lower for newly arrived immigrants, revealing the baseline for criminal activity among immigrants is lower than native-born workers.

In addition, the authors point to previous studies that revealed a correlation between immigrant rights with decreased crime over the course of four decades (1970 to 2010).

“This is because the less protection and work opportunities immigrants have, the more likely they are to turn to criminal activity, as an act of desperation,” said Khanna. “Criminal behavior is widely understood to be a result of necessity and when given legal employment opportunities at livable wages, crime is reduced.”

For example, after the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) of was implemented in 1986, which gave legal status to three million immigrants in the U.S., it led to a marked decrease in crime up to 5 percent.

Legal protections lower the fiscal burden and reduce deficits

Contrary to popular belief, undocumented migrant workers pay taxes, mostly income taxes, which are estimated to at $11.7 billion. Yet the number would be higher (by $2.2 billion) if undocumented migrants were granted legal status, an important consideration as the national deficit mounts in the wake of COVID-19.

Additional ways more protections for migrants would help domestic populous could be lower health care costs. Undocumented migrants may not be eligible for insurance, adding to healthcare costs in times of emergency.

“We find that the fiscal burden can be greatly reduced if immigrants are given working status and allowed to contribute to the tax base,” the authors wrote. “In conclusion, we find there are several areas where strengthening migrant worker rights benefits native-born workers, outweighing any costs borne by them.”

To read the full paper, go to the UCLA Journal of International Law & Foreign Affairs website.

Media Contact
Christine Clark
ceclark@ucsd.edu
https://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/pressrelease/new-visa-restrictions-will-make-the-u.s-economic-downturn-worse

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The fear mongering, racist lies, anti-scientific BS, and White Nationalist false narratives pushed by the Trump regime and enabled by a feckless Congress and complicit Article III Courts that refuse to give meaning to our Constitution and statutes while failing to require honesty and candor from the Administration are destroying America.

No, everything can’t be changed overnight. Sadly, the damage inflicted by Trump, his corrupt cronies, and his supporters on America and on our democratic institutions is huge; it will take years if not decades to repair. That’s what makes the exceptionally poor performance of Congress and the Federal Judiciary as a whole under the defective leadership of the Supremes so reprehensible. Far, far too many of the wrong people in the wrong jobs at the worst time in our history for fecklessness, lack of courage, and absence of integrity, not to mention empathy and compassion for “the other.” Disgraceful!

But regime change and appointing Federal Judges who demonstrate “community creds,” a commitment to due process, fundamental fairness, equal justice under law, human rights, and human decency would be an important necessary step to making social justice in America a reality rather than just a slogan. It would also help protect us against any future “Trump-style, neo-fascist regime.” 

This November, vote like your life depends on it. Because it does!

 PWS

06-06-20

ESSENTIAL AMERICAN WORKERS PUT FOOD ON OUR TABLES EVEN IN TIMES OF CRISIS: So, Why Do Trump & His White Nationalist Buddies Dump On Hard Working Members of Our Society Performing Necessary Services? — It’s All About Racism, Bigotry, & Weaponizing the “Fear of the Other” For Perceived Political Gain! — “We are the people who are feeding the country. No one else is going to be able to do this. We are the only ones who know how.”

Gabriel Thompson
Gabriel Thompson
Author & Journalist
Photo by Pandora Young

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/may/28/undocumented-farmworker-us-immigration-california?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Gabriel Thompson reports for The Guardian:

For more than two decades, Roberto Valdez has harvested crops in California’s eastern Coachella Valley, a scorching region dotted with impoverished communities that are surrounded by bountiful fields of grapes, bell peppers, broccoli, watermelon and more. In 2005, after his son nearly died from heatstroke while picking grapes, Valdez advocated for improved safety measures for farm workers, which culminated in new state regulations that protect workers from heat stress. An undocumented immigrant, he is not eligible for federal relief during the Covid-19 pandemic, but while millions of people shelter in place, he continues to work in the fields with his wife. Here he tells Gabriel Thompson about his life as an essential worker.

•••

Right now I’m harvesting eggplant for $13 an hour. The company gives the crew a 50 cent bonus for each box we fill, so in eight hours we can earn an extra $15 or so. The plants are about 4ft tall and the eggplants grow low, so we usually work on our knees in the dirt. You cut off the eggplants with scissors and fill up buckets that weigh between 40 and 50 pounds, carry them to a large tub where they are washed and packed, and dump them in.

California’s farm workers pick America’s essential produce – unprotected from coronavirus

It tires you out, especially when it’s hot. It was 105 degrees today. By 10 in the morning your clothes are completely soaked with sweat and it’s hard to make it through the eight hours. In fact, some days there are people who leave, who can’t make it.

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Because of the coronavirus we always cover our faces now, no matter what the temperature is. The company has given us disposable blue masks, but we mostly use bandannas. The masks don’t stay clean for very long and they start to smell. When they’re dirty, it’s very hard to breathe. The sun is hot, the ground is hot, you’re working fast, and you can’t breathe. A bandanna you can wash and use again. I bring three bandannas every day: one that goes over my head to protect my neck, and two that I use as masks. We have breaks every four hours, and I use that time to wash the old one out with water and soap and put on a new one. My wife and I work together on the crew, and I bought 16 bandannas that we use.

We leave two rows between each person now, a distance of about 8ft. Before, we ate lunch together around portable tables in the shade. We’d share food. “Hey, grab a taco!” That’s all over. Now we eat apart, mostly in our cars. I also can’t greet people like I used to do, either. I’m the kind of person who likes to shake hands, pat people on the back. “How’s it going? How’re you doing this morning?” Among us Latinos, that’s very common. That’s over, too.

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Farm workers wear protective equipment and work behind plastic dividers in the field. Photograph: Brent Stirton/Getty Images

But we still joke and talk, even though we’re separated. There are about 30 people in the crew, and some of us have worked together for years. There are people who are tired, and we’ll tell them a story, just so they’ll be able to get through the day – that’s how we make the work more bearable. Some people have had to stop working because of the coronavirus. There’s a young woman, a single mother with two kids, and she couldn’t keep working because the schools and daycares have shut down. It’s very hard right now – so many mothers have had to stay home.

You have to respect this disease. My brother-in-law died eight days ago, in Mexicali. He was in his 40s and worked at a plant that makes glass. He had high blood pressure and kidney problems, and they had to operate on his kidneys in March. While he was in the hospital he had a hard time breathing, and they suspected he had the coronavirus. They isolated him and put him in an area where the Covid-19 patients were. They didn’t give my sister any information about how he was doing. The government said he died of the coronavirus, but we’re still waiting for the official cause of death. It hurt us a lot, because he was a very good person and no one could visit him.

I saw a news report from New York, where doctors were saying that people weren’t keeping quarantine – going out even when they were supposed to be at home, and more people got infected. That’s something we think a lot about. We stay very clean at work, because we know innocent people are buying the food we harvest, with money they have earned, so that their families will be healthy. And the majority of farm workers, we’re happy to work, we do so with love, and the coronavirus won’t stop us. It’s not going to stop us. Because we know that our work supports the whole nation.

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Right now, Governor Gavin Newsom has proposed giving undocumented immigrants $500 each. There are people who have sued to try and stop this, a woman named Jessica Martinez and a man from El Salvador, Ricardo Benitez. I’d like these people to come out and meet us. I’d like them to see us working. There are people out here who really need this $500, especially people who have lost their jobs. We are the people who are feeding the country. No one else is going to be able to do this. We are the only ones who know how.

We are people who’ve lived in the country 10 and 20 years, and we don’t have a social security number. From my point of view – I say this from my heart – we are like chess pieces that politicians move around. They haven’t done anything, since Barack Obama, since Bill Clinton, since 9/11. I remember I was picking grapes in Arvin when they attacked the twin towers. Back then there was talk of immigration reform for workers. We’ve had hope for a long time, and nothing has happened. We pay taxes. We go to stores and we buy things. Our kids are studying in school. My daughter is about to graduate high school. It’s hard for me to understand why they aren’t letting us become legal residents.

In the media, they’re now calling us “essential workers”. But that’s what we’ve always been. We think of doctors, firefighters and police as important. People who never saw us before now see that we also have value. The coronavirus has brought us both good and bad opportunities. It has hurt us, and it has also made many people realize something they didn’t realize before: that they need us.

Last Monday I arrived home from work and there was a box at my door. The box was filled with milk, bags of lettuce, cabbage, onions and potatoes. I don’t know who brought us the food. I asked the person who manages the trailer park, and he just said some people came to drop off food for everyone. It made me want to cry. It meant that someone was thinking about us, that someone was worrying about us. This was a gesture of kindness toward us. Nothing like that had happened before.

Roberto’s name has been changed to protect his identity.

  • This is an excerpt from the Unheard Voices of the Pandemic series from Voice of Witness. Thompson is editor of Chasing the Harvest: Migrant Workers in California Agriculture.

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It’s time to stop the disgraceful waste of taxpayer resources by the Trump regime’s cruel, wasteful, and just plain dumb efforts to penalize, dehumanize, and deport productive members of our society whom we have failed to offer a path to full membership. 

The Trump Family, Steven Miller, Chad Wolf, Billy Barr, Cooch Cooch, and the rest of the White Nationalist restrictionists wouldn’t last a day picking fruits and vegetables in the hot sun, and I guarantee they wouldn’t do a very good job at it.

The pandemic is teaching us lots about who’s really essential; and who’s not!

This November, vote like you life depends on it! Because it does!

PWS

05-29-20

NICOLE NAREA @ VOX: Sen. Booker Introduces Bill to Aid Migrant Health Care

Nicole Narea
Nicole Narea
Immigration Reporter
Vox.com

 

https://apple.news/A-RCQm3FvRseAEFDQaZ6_Ug

 

Nicole writes:

New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker said he is planning to introduce legislation on Wednesday that would expand legal immigrants’ access to health care subsidy programs and allow unauthorized immigrants to buy health plans from federal insurance marketplaces.

The bill, known as the HEAL for Immigrant Women and Families Act, would permit legal immigrants to enroll in Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), provided that they meet the programs’ income requirements. Rep. Pramila Jayapal introduced the bill in the House in October 2019, but it would be the first time that the Senate would consider the legislation.

The bill isn’t likely to advance in a Republican-controlled Senate, where Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has already rejected relief for unauthorized immigrants. But it’s the latest effort by Democrats to rectify inequalities in access to health care laid bare by the coronavirus pandemic.

Only a fraction of immigrants is eligible for Medicaid and CHIP: naturalized citizens, green card holders who have lived in the US for at least five years, immigrants who come to the US on humanitarian grounds (such as receiving asylum), members of the military and their families, and, in certain states, children and pregnant women with lawful immigration status. But many other categories of immigrants — including temporary visa holders and young immigrants who have been allowed to live and work in the US under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program — would become eligible under Booker’s bill.

“Covid-19 has shined a punishing light on the unjust health care inequities that exist for communities of color broadly, and immigrant communities in particular,” Booker told Vox. “While we should always be working to expand access to health care for everyone, the dire current situation highlights the urgency of addressing these gaps in health care coverage. Health care is a right, and it shouldn’t depend on immigration status. We’re never going to be able to slow and stop the spread of the virus be if we continue to deny entire communities access to testing, treatment, or care.”

The bill also contains provisions expanding health care options for unauthorized immigrants, who are often uninsured and have so far been largely left out of Congress’s coronavirus relief efforts. Booker’s bill would allow them to buy health insurance on the Affordable Care Act marketplace, from which they’re currently barred. It would also allow unauthorized immigrants to become eligible for health care subsidies if they have purchased such an insurance plan and meet other criteria, including minimum income requirements.

. . . .

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Read the rest of Nicole’s always outstanding and accessible analysis at the above link.

Good luck with getting this through the Senate with Moscow Mitch and the GOP in charge! Not going to happen. And, Booker knows it!

Few groups in America have been as screwed over as migrants, regardless of status, in this pandemic. They perform some of the most difficult and essential jobs that have kept us going through this crisis. But, when it comes to safety, stimulus, health care, unemployment and pretty much anything else they are left out in the cold by the GOP nativists.

Get back to work: no PPE, social distancing, hazard pay, testing, unemployment benefits, home computers, or health care for you! This isn’t the “GOP playing Soup Nazi” – it’s the real deal, the 21st Century version of completely expendable workers and intentional “dehumanization” of the “other.”  Already, xenophobic GOP nativists are whining about the very modest economic emergency money that the State of California has provided to their migrant residents, many “essential workers,” regardless of status.

But, Booker’s HEAL bill is a significant “ready for prime-time marker” if we get regime change! Health care and immigration are huge issues in the Hispanic community. Biden needs to get out the Hispanic vote and having legislation like this “ready to roll” on “Day 1” will be key in energizing voters to “work through the obstacles” and vote Trump & the GOP Senators out in the key states to finally get some much needed aid out to the American Hispanic community and others, including folks in rural areas of so-called “Red States,” and disproportionately adversely affected African-American communities in need who are excluded from “Trump’s America” (except, of course, when the chips are down and we need workers for thankless jobs or when Trump needs votes). You can also add in Asian Americans who have been working hard for America but face a barrage of racist-inspired incidents. There’s a “community of interest” there that the Dems’ should be able to attract and build upon with “good government” that furthers the common interests.

This November, vote like your life depends on it. Because it does!

PWS

05-20-20

 

🏴‍☠️BRING IT ON! – “Moscow Mitch” 🇷🇺 Throws Down The Gauntlet, Challenges Trump For “Vilest Pol In America” 🤮☠️ — Can He Beat A Guy Who Uses The “Bully’s Pulpit” To Encourage Americans To Drink & Inject Poison? ☠️☠️☠️☠️☠️ — Nobel Prize 🏆 Winning Economist Paul Krugman @ NY Times Tells Us How “MM” Can Go Even Lower: “So yes, McConnell’s position is stupid. But it’s also vile.”

Paul Krugman
Paul Krugman
American Economist, Columnist, & Nobel Prize Winner

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/23/opinion/mcconnell-coronavirus-states.html

 

Krugman writes, in part, in the NYT:

.  .  .  .

So yes, McConnell’s position is stupid. But it’s also vile.

Think of who would be hurt if state and local governments are forced to make drastic cuts. A lot of state money goes to Medicaid, a program that should be expanding, not shrinking, as millions of Americans are losing their health insurance along with their jobs.

As for the state and local government workers who may be either losing their jobs or facing pay cuts, most are employed in education, policing, firefighting and highways. So if McConnell gets his way, America’s de facto policy will be one of bailing out the owners of giant restaurant chains while firing schoolteachers and police officers.

Last but not least, let’s talk about McConnell’s hypocrisy, which like his stupidity comes on multiple levels.

At one level, it’s really something to see a man who helped ram through a giant tax cut for corporations — which they mainly used to buy back their own stock — now pretend to be deeply concerned about borrowing money to help states facing a fiscal crisis that isn’t their fault.

At another level, it’s also really something to see McConnell, whose state is heavily subsidized by the federal government, give lectures on self-reliance to states like New York that pay much more in federal taxes than they get back.

We’re not talking about small numbers here. According to estimates by the Rockefeller Institute, from 2015 to 2018 Kentucky — which pays relatively little in federal taxes, because it’s fairly poor, but gets major benefits from programs like Medicare and Social Security — received net transfers from Washington averaging more than $33,000 per person. That was 18.6 percent of the state’s G.D.P.

True, relatively rich states like New York, New Jersey and Connecticut probably should be helping out their poorer neighbors — but those neighbors don’t then get the right to complain about “blue state bailouts” in the face of a national disaster.

Of course, McConnell has an agenda here: He’s hoping to use the pandemic to force afflicted states to shrink their governments. We can only hope both that this shameless exploitation of tragedy fails and that McConnell and his allies pay a heavy political price.

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Read the rest of  Krugman’s article at the link.

Have we all just been transported to “Jonestown 1978” ☠︎⚰️☠️⚰️?” Is our “Clown Prince” 🤡 actually the reincarnation of Rev. Jim Jones 🏴‍☠️?

Tired of being in the “Blue Majority” supporting “Red America” while excluded from control of our National Government? Tired of a Government of self-centered grifters — incapable of governing responsibly and in the public interest, but great at lining their pockets and those of their fat cat backers? Tired of an “Amateur Night at the Bijou” foreign policy that diminishes our nation and makes us the laughingstock the world? Tired of dealing with dirty water, polluted air, and crumbling bridges while the “Chief Clown” 🤡 sharpens his golf game? Tired of a kakistocracy that’s also a kelptocracy 💸 and practices nepotism? Tired of expensive health care that too often doesn’t improve the health of our nation? Tired of wages stagnating and benefits disappearing while the stock market goes bonkers and execs and shareholders get big payouts? Tired of lousy, anti-democracy judges 👨‍⚖️ who advance the interests of corporations, guns, and the GOP over the rights and dignity of individuals under our laws? Tired of paying the salaries of Neo-Nazi bigots like Stephen Miller? Tired of funding the “Afternoon Clown Show” 🤡 from the White House every day and dealing with its never-ending stream of dangerous ☠️ lies, misrepresentations, and fabrications?

Vote ‘Em Out, Vote ‘Em Out!

This November, send the “Clown Prince” 🤡, MM 🤮, and the rest of their anti-American party of disunity, incompetence, disorder, cruelty, stupidity, racism, and grift packing!  Vote like your life depends on it! Because, it does!

PWS

04-24-20