This morning, I’ve learned that a gas station in Colorado was previously selling ‘humorous’ licenses to murder undocumented immigrants. I was stunned and shocked, but then I learned that it’s not the first time that such ‘licenses’ have been printed. This sort of thing is key in the normalization of oppression. We are witnessing the creation of a new class of exploitable citizen that has almost no recourse for violence or hate. You can contact the company that prints this nonsense at this link.
Tumble DC 25
Marginally better than silence
URGENT: Alfredo Can Be Deported at Any Time! Let Him Go!!
Alfredo Carrillo (A# 089-826-103), father of 3 US citizen children who has lived in the U.S. for 17 years was pulled over and detained for driving without a license in Arapaho County, Colorado. Currently Alfredo is being held in Otoro County Processing Center, NM. Although Alfredo was previously deported in 2008, due to the economic hardships his family was facing he returned in 2010. He is low priority and should be released.
Make a Phone Call:
Call ICE Director John Morton (202) 732-3000
Sample Script: “ I am calling to urge ICE to release Alfredo Carrillo (A# 089-826-103), who is currently being held in Otero County Processing Center. Alfredo has been in the U.S. for over 16 years and has 3 U.S. citizen children that need the financial and emotional support of their father. Alfredo is low priority case that shouldn’t be detained. Let Alfredo Go!”
(via neoliberalismkills)
Sex trafficking and the Super Bowl
February 3, 2013On the Catholic liturgical calendar, February 5 is the Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time. In the U.S., where professional football is sometimes referred to as a “religion,” February 5th is the highest holy day of the sporting year: Super Bowl Sunday.
The Super Bowl attracts tens of thousands of fans to the host city, and millions of television viewers, making it the most watched broadcast each year. But it also attracts a sector of violent, organized criminal activity that operates in plain sight without notice: human sex trafficking.
Human trafficking is defined by the United Nations as the “recruitment, transportation, transfer, harboring or receipt of persons, by means of threat, use of force or other forms of coercion, for the purpose of exploitation.” Sex trafficking is particularly heinous: Young women are abducted and sold into an underworld network where they are forced to engage in sexual activity for no pay, and from which it is extremely difficult to escape.
There is evidence that human trafficking increases where major sporting events are held.
Exact numbers are hard to come by, as trafficking is an underreported crime, but host cities, law enforcement, and civil society are becoming increasingly more aware of it. They are promoting educational campaigns and strengthening laws against trafficking to send a strong message to traffickers: You are not welcome here. If we find you, you will be prosecuted. There is a message for trafficking victims as well: If we find you, you will not be arrested; you will be rescued.
In preparation for Super Bowl LXVI in Indianapolis, 11 congregations of Catholic women joined the fight against human trafficking in a unique way: They decided to use their investments as a means to address human trafficking with Indianapolis area hotels. These 11 congregations belong to CCRIM, the Coalition for Corporate Responsibility in Indiana and Michigan.
CCRIM members bought shares of stock in major hotel chains in order to address the issue of trafficking as shareholders with hotel corporate management, as well as with the local franchises in the Indianapolis area. As shareholders they have a stake in how the business is run, and they decided to work with the hotels to help them recognize and report any incidents of human trafficking.
The sisters set up a database of 220 hotels within a 50-mile radius of Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis. On January 5, the managers of these hotels received a fax from CCRIM that said, your shareholders want to know: Have your staff members been trained to recognize the signs of human trafficking? Do you have plans in place so your staff members can safely report any trafficking incidents? Do you know who to contact in the Indianapolis area in order to protect the victims and prosecute the traffickers? Would you be willing to make educational materials on trafficking available to your staff and your guests?
For the next 10 days, 40 sisters called the managers to get answers to those questions. Although 20 managers were reluctant or refused to speak to them, they did speak with 200 hotel managers. The results? Seven hotels requested help in setting up a training session, and the sisters linked them to trainers.
Forty-five hotels already had conducted training for their staff members. Ninety-nine hotels asked for the local contact list, which includes the Attorney General’s Office, the Indianapolis police department’s Anti-Trafficking Division, safe houses for victims and 24-hour hotline numbers.
They also asked for informational brochures, provided by the Polaris Project (an initiative of the Department of Health and Human Services) to help their staff and guests recognize the signs of human trafficking. The sisters delivered this information to each manager personally and thanked them for their cooperation in stemming the tide of trafficking at this year’s Super Bowl.
(via occupyingyourpolitics)
Eight men have already been arrested as part of a sex trafficking ring exposed today in New Orleans. This case supports advocacy agencies’ claims that the Super Bowl is the “single largest human trafficking incident in the United States.” When you combine beer, testosterone, and cold hard cash with hundreds of thousands of people in a major metropolitan area, you know sex trafficking is going to become a reality for a number of women and men on the ground, but the question is, what’s being done to fix it? In January 2011, Christian advocacy organizations united to expose trafficking occurring in the shadows of the Dallas Cowboys’ stadium, and Texas attorney general Greg Abbott “beefed up a [police] unit that was assigned to investigate and arrest those who trade in child prostitutes.” As a result, there were a routine 113 arrests for prostitution at the 2011 Super Bowl—but none for trafficking.
In the past, attempted crackdowns by law enforcement have misfired by treating prostitutes as criminals to be locked up rather than victims to be rescued. According to Nevada District Judge William Voy, providing former prostitutes and sexually exploited girls with restoration services is crucial—he’s seen more than his fair share of girls appearing before him shackled at the hands and feet, “as though they were criminals instead of victims:”
(via trotskitty)
Bradley Manning denied chance to make whistleblower defence
The judge, Colonel Denise Lind, ruled that general issues of motive were not relevant to the trial stage of the court martial, and must be held back until Manning either entered a plea or was found guilty, at which point it could be used in mitigation to lessen the sentence. The ruling is a blow to the defence as it will make it harder for the soldier’s legal team to argue he was acting as a whistleblower and not as someone who knowingly damaged US interests at a time of war.
“This is another effort to attack the whistleblower defence,” said Nathan Fuller, a spokesman for the Bradley Manning support network, after the hearing.
The judge also blocked the defence from presenting evidence designed to show that WikiLeaks caused little or no damage to US national security. Coombs has devoted considerable time and energy trying to extract from US government agencies their official assessments of the impact of WikiLeaks around the world, only to find that he is now prevented from using any of the information he has obtained.
The purpose of this trial is not justice: it is to publicly punish and excoriate Bradley Manning, in the hopes that it will dissuade any future whistle blowing.
(Source: boohooboo.biz, via mochente)
Tom the Dancing Bug
“If you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.” - Malcolm X
(Source: theycallmegomer, via ani-u)
I was asked if it was fair to say I liked to have a drink. That’s all I need to say on the matter.
-SWP member
The SWP recently had an allegation of rape. Their dispute committee conducted an ‘investigation’ in which questions about personal relationships and non-sequiturs like alcohol were asked. You can read more about the dispute and the SWP’s disgusting reaction to it in the transcript for disputes committee report.
Bhaskar Sunkara on the media's CTU strike coverage
Bhaskar Sunkara gives his take on Ryan as all show and no substance, but this piece really shines when he begins to analyze similar distractions in debate about public sector unions:
Just look at the recent Chicago Teachers Union strike, which prompted a quick editorial from the New York Times. Called “Chicago Teachers’ Folly,” it claimed that “Teachers’ strikes, because they hurt children and their families, are never a good idea” and then placed much of the blame for the strike on a “personality clash between the blunt mayor, Rahm Emanuel, and the tough Chicago Teachers Union president, Karen Lewis.”
What’s politics and the battle of ideas when we have personalities to dissect?
TheTimeswasn’t alone. Slate’s Matt Yglesias and frequent Klein collaborator Dylan Matthews also tried to find the middle-ground in a conflict between a “blunt” neoliberal Democratic mayor and a “tough” public sector union. Even theNation’s Melissa Harris-Perry pitied the children stuck “between the leaders and teachers who are supposed to have their best interests at heart but who seem willing to allow this generation to be lost.”
Empirically, the pundits’ dismissal of the CTU, which had widespread support in Chicago, were unjustified and misleading. Wage and benefit issues were never at the center of the strike. It was a response to a “reform” movement that blamed failing schools solely on bad teachers rather than poverty or other structural issues. The CTU offered a compelling countervision—functioning, well-funded schools with smaller classes and less standardized tests. It was a vision that could’ve been debated on its own terms, but it wasn’t: these “ideas” weren’t discussed by the ostensibly idea-loving commentariat; big-shot blowhards and their egos were…
[I]nstead of countering this argument by asserting that public employees also produce goods and services, and should have a say about the conditions under which they work, Beltway liberals like Matt Yglesias drew the ever-so-reasonable conclusion that:
CTU members get what they want, that’s not coming out of the pocket of “the bosses” it’s coming out of the pocket of the people who work at charter schools or the people who pay taxes in Chicago.
In other words: union members, according to Yglesias, enjoy whatever privileges they’ve earned at the expense of the middle-class taxpayers of Chicago. It’s a subtly nefarious move: Yglesias, the “liberal,” is pitting one largely Democratic group (the CTU) against another (the vast majority of tax payers and charter school employees in Chicago), in a way that right-wingers couldn’t do better themselves.
This sort of red herring argument always comes up when laborers agitate for better conditions (or in this case, better conditions for the students); even the ‘liberals’ in the discussion frame the course of events as the conflict originated as a dispute between two headstrong personalities, and that concessions to labor are at the expense of the middle class. It’s a complete distraction from the arguments that are being presented and their specific merits, in favor of a side show that’s tightly controlled by corporate media.
