UN rapporteur reports
extreme poverty “unseen in the first world” in Alabama
By
Shelley Connor
13 December 2017
A United Nation team’s tour of Alabama last week exposed what many
Alabama residents have known for decades: residents of the state’s Black Belt
region are suffering in social conditions most frequently encountered in
Sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia. Notably, Lowndes County, the home of Attorney
General Jeff Sessions, suffers from poor sewage disposal and resultant hookworm
infection otherwise unknown in the United States.
Phillip Alston, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and
human rights, witnessed communities where raw sewage flows into open pits or
into surrounding creeks and streams.
“I think it’s very uncommon in the First World,” Alston said to
reporters as he toured Butler County in South Alabama. “This is not a sight
that one normally sees. I’d have to say that I haven’t seen this.”
Alston visited communities in Lowndes and Butler Counties last
Thursday, accompanied by local activists. These counties are located in the
so-called Black Belt, named for the rich loam that stretches throughout the
Deep South States.
The region’s fertile soil, along with its steamy, subtropical
climate, made it the epicenter of the Antebellum South’s cotton-growing
industry. Today, it is known for its entrenched poverty and appalling social
conditions. The lack of sewage disposal and the related occurrence of
gastrointestinal pathogens in the Black Belt are but two startling indicators
of those conditions.
In Lowndes and Butler Counties, residents frequently struggle with
gastrointestinal diseases such as E.
coli. Many of those who are not diagnosed have reported in the past
to health officials that they suffer from frequent or protracted bouts of
vomiting, stomach pain and diarrhea.
Lowndes County activist Aaron Thigpen took Alston and his team to
a property inhabited by members of Thigpen’s extended family. The house had no
functioning septic system; the family, which includes two minor children,
relies upon PVC pipes to direct the household sewage into an open-air,
aboveground pool.
As Thigpen pointed out, the main water line lies in close
proximity to the improvised sewage system. Should the water main become open,
everyone in the house “gets sick all at once,” as Thigpen told Alston.
He also took Alston to a community in Butler County, where he
showed the UN team an entire community where man-made ditches carry effluent
into a nearby creek.
“It’s really bad when you’ve got a lot of kids around like there
are here,” Thigpen told AL.com. “They’re playing ball and the ball goes into
the raw sewage, and they don’t know the importance of not handling sewage.”
Another Butler County resident showed Alston where his outdated
septic system leaches raw sewage into the soil and bubbles up into his yard. A
significant flood would send this raw sewage into the house, exposing all
residents therein to coliform bacteria and parasites.
In September, the National School of Tropical Medicine (NSTM) at
Baylor University published a study that revealed serious sanitation deficits
in Lowndes County. Three-quarters of study participants reported that raw
sewage had managed to reenter their houses, either because of heavy rainfall or
clogs in improvised sewage disposal systems.
The problem is not entirely unknown: in 2011, the Alabama
Department of Public Health reported that the number of households with no
sewage disposal or inadequate sewage disposal ranged from 40 to 90 percent. The
ADPH further reported that 50 percent of homes with on-site sewage containment
systems had systems that were failing or expected to fail within the near
future.
The loamy soil and hot, humid weather that made cotton farming
such a profitable endeavor in the Deep South provides a perfect breeding
environment for Necator
americanus, a species of hookworm that lays its eggs in the
intestines of those it infects. In a place like Lowndes or Butler County, where
raw sewage seeps into poorly draining soil, the eggs deposited through sewage
have a warm and hospitable locale to incubate, hatch and reproduce. A person
unwittingly walking through a soil where hookworms have incubated can become
infected when one or more worm enters their body, usually through bare feet and
exposed ankles.
According to the NSTM study, 19 of 55 participants tested positive
for the parasite, which causes stomach pain, vomiting and diarrhea. As
infection progresses, severe anemia frequently leads to fatigue and cognitive
disabilities; in some cases, particularly among the very young, the very old,
and the immune-compromised, it leads to death.
Hookworm infections were largely eradicated from the United States
between the 1950s and the 1980s due to social programs that addressed both
sanitation infrastructure and community health. The parasite is mainly associated
with extreme poverty in South America, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Southeast Asia,
and many infectious disease researchers had assumed that it no longer existed
in the US at all.
The Baylor study would not have occurred had Catherine Flowers,
the founder of the Alabama Center for Rural Enterprise in Montgomery, Alabama,
not prevailed upon the NSTM to investigate the situation in Lowndes County.
“Hookworm is a 19th-century disease that should have by now been
addressed,” Flowers told the Guardian in
September, “yet we are still struggling with it in the United States in the
21st Century.” As NSTM researchers pointed out to the Guardian, the discovery of
hookworms in Lowndes County highlights the need for further research throughout
the United States.
The incidence of hookworm is clearly tied both to poverty and to
blatant malfeasance on the part of local, state and federal governments. In
Lowndes County, the annual median household makes a mere $30,225 yearly.
According to the 2010 US Census, over 25 percent of county residents live below
the poverty line. For a family that earns less than $2000 a month, the cost of
a new septic system—which can cost up to $15,000 to install—is prohibitively
high.
Speaking to the Guardian in
September, Aaron Thigpen pointed out that, while people are “disgusted” by
having to live near raw sewage, “there’s no public help for them and if you’re
earning $700 a month there’s no way you can afford your own private
sanitation.”
Thigpen also pointed out that between 2002 and 2008, the State of
Alabama prosecuted many residents who could not afford to install septic
systems. Thigpen recounted the case of an elderly woman who was jailed for a
weekend after she was unable to install a new septic tank; the installation
would have cost more than her annual income.
“People...don’t like to speak out as they’re worried the Health
Department will come round [sic] and cause trouble,” Thigpen stated.
Flowers reported that 80 percent of Lowndes County is without
municipal sewer systems. In the absence of such systems, people are required to
install and maintain their own septic tanks. In a location such as Lowndes
County, however, very few people can afford to install any septic system—much
less one sophisticated enough to deal with the water retention of the area
soil.
The poverty and lack of infrastructure in Lowndes County is
neither incidental nor accidental, and the urgent state of its sewage disposal
issue is not the only evidence for that.
Lowndes County was known as “Bloody Lowndes” during the Civil
Rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s, home to a large proportion of
disenfranchised African Americans whose demand for voting rights was met with
police violence and the state’s intentional destruction of roads, ferries, and
public transit that might allow poor residents to make it to the voting polls.
Older residents recount how the homes of black residents were shot up or set on
fire to dissuade them from voting; law enforcement either turned a blind eye or
actively encouraged such acts.
Voting rights remain an issue in Lowndes County. Philip Alston and
his team made their final stop in Alabama at the home of Pattie Mae Ansley in
Fort Deposit. The 96-year-old Ansley told Alston how her house was “shot up” in
1965, after the Voting Rights Act was ratified. Her children spoke to Alston
privately about their experiences with obtaining a voter ID card and the
difficulty of getting to the polls.
Flowers pointed out that access to the polls is not the only
issue. “People are frustrated because people are getting into office who aren’t
doing what the people elected them to do,” she told AL.com.
Alston rightly points out that access to decent sanitation, like
voting rights, is a human rights issue. However, the Republican Party stands
poised to pass a tax bill that will overwhelmingly place the country’s tax
burden onto the backs of the poor while subsidizing the wealthiest,
exacerbating the social problems seen in Alabama.
Moreover, the budget proposed by President Donald Trump
drastically cuts spending for creating new infrastructure or for upgrading
outdated infrastructure; to the contrary, it places social infrastructure at
the mercy of private entrepreneurs. Lowndes County and its abominable lack of
sewage disposal stands as an example of how such a system, which Alabama’s
government has faithfully embraced since the 1960s, utterly fails to addresses
even dire social issues.
As this article was being written, Alabamians were waiting for the
results of a special election to determine whether Republican Roy Moore or
Democrat Doug Jones would take the hotly contested US Senate seat vacated by
Attorney General Sessions. Moore is an openly fascistic, antidemocratic
candidate, well-known as a highly partial judge who supports restricting voting
rights.
Nevertheless, the Jones campaign refused to mount an attack upon
either Moore’s viciously antidemocratic positions or the failure of the
Republican Party’s history within the State of Alabama, which has orchestrated
massive cuts to public programs.
The NSTM released its study in September. Jones’ campaign has had
ample time to answer to the damning report on social conditions in Lowndes and
Butler Counties. Nevertheless, the Democrats persisted in running a right-wing
pro-business campaign against Moore focused solely on allegations of sexual
misconduct, ignoring the poverty that will only continue to fester in the Black
Belt along with hookworm and E.
c oli infections.
The reason for such an abject lack of concern for the conditions
of workers in the Democrats’ campaign in Alabama is clear; it does not concern
them, and they cannot offer an answer to it. Neither party represents the
interest of Alabama’s working-class residents. To resolve the social problems
they confront, workers in Alabama and throughout the US must reject both
parties of big business just as surely as those parties have rejected them, and
stand united with their counterparts worldwide in fighting for a socialist
program.
National Public Radio’s This American Life promotes
By
Eric London
13 December 2017
On December 8, National Public Radio (NPR) ran an episode of This American Life titled “Our
Town,” which legitimized workplace raids against immigrants and justified
tougher sanctions for employing undocumented workers.
The program’s host, Ira Glass, is not a far-right talk show host,
but a favorite of affluent Democrats. His show has 2.2 million listeners.
The episode titled “Our Town” could very well have been aired
on Breitbart Radio. Couched in the language of
nationalist populism, the episode advanced an anti-immigrant agenda by blaming
corporations for giving jobs to immigrants instead of US citizens.
In the episode, Glass describes Albertville, Alabama, a small town
that is home to poultry processing plants, as having been overrun by
immigrants. It “got a flood of outsiders,” Glass says, using the language of
nativists to describe the influx of Latino workers seeking employment in the
poultry plants as “immigrants pouring in,” “a ton of immigrants” and “tons of
Mexican workers.”
Toward the beginning of the episode, Glass gives airspace to Roy
Beck, the founder of NumbersUSA, which the Southern Poverty Law Center has
denounced as part of the “nativist lobby.” Beck has spoken before the white
supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens and is the protégé of the fascist
anti-immigrant advocate John Tanton. Glass uncritically quotes Beck while
introducing him simply as “the founder of a group called NumbersUSA.”
Glass then
references the massive “SouthPAW” workplace immigration raids during which
hundreds of agents descended on small southern towns in 1995 and deported 4,000
workers. PAW stands for “Protecting American Workers.”
During the raids, immigration police dragged people out of their workplaces,
split them from their families and summarily deported them to violent, war-torn
Central American countries.
“The goal was to create job openings for American workers by
arresting lots of people at work sites,” Glass says. “At the Gold Kist plant
outside of town, workers cheered when [immigration agents] arrived.”
This reactionary effort to present deportations as “pro-worker”
echoes the line of Bernie Sanders and the trade union bureaucracy. During the
Democratic primary election campaign, in an interview with Vox ’s Ezra Klein, Sanders
attacked open borders and free migration as “a right-wing proposal, which says
essentially there is no United States.” He added, “It would make everybody in
America poorer.”
This American Life’s producer, Miki
Meek, then interviews the immigration agent responsible for leading the
SouthPAW raids, Bart Szafnicki. This American Life uncritically repeats his claim that the raids did not go far
enough.
Meek says: “Bart
pointed out, there’s never been a serious crackdown on employers. These raids
were short-lived. The fines were low. The chances of getting caught were small.
Bart found it frustrating. Congress never had the political will to go after
the companies that hire undocumented workers. There are congressmen who talk
tough on immigration, but when INS went after worksites in their districts,
they told them to back off.”
Meek and Glass criticize the corporations for being insufficiently
tough on hiring immigrants, citing a 1986 immigration reform law that
prohibited companies from interrogating their employees to discover their
nationality.
Glass says these laws were too lax on employers who hire
immigrants: “In 1995, Congress, in a very practical, bipartisan way that we
almost never see any more, decided that it had to fix the problem and come up
with a simple way for employers to tell who is legal to work in the United
States and who isn’t, to figure out who they could hire… Senator Dianne Feinstein warned, at the time, they had to solve this
crisis now—of immigrants coming in illegally and getting these jobs.” BLOG: FEINSTEIN IS AN
ADVOCATE OF AMNESTY, OPEN BORDERS AND NO E-VERIFY TO KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED.
THERE ARE 15 MILLION LOOTING MEXICANS IN HER STATE OF CA.
But these efforts, Glass says, did not go far enough. “Obviously,
they didn’t solve it. And here we are today. A bipartisan commission called the
Jordan commission considered a bunch of solutions. One of the things they ended up proposing was a national computerized
system to check people’s IDs, and make sure they were valid, and their social
security numbers are real. This is the system we’ve come to know as E-Verify.”
The reference to the Jordan Commission, led by Texas Democratic
Representative Barbara Jordan, is significant. The commission’s findings are
well known among immigrant rights advocates as the wish list of the extreme
right. Breitbart praised Jordan in an August 2017 article as “one of the few Democratic politicians that
believed in a pro-American legal immigration system that ceased on inundating
working class neighborhoods with low-skilled immigrants.” The same article
noted that the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant program, including calls
for expanding E-Verify, “has the same tenets as Jordan’s recommendations.”
The Jordan commission called for militarizing the border,
massively increasing the size of the border patrol, and blocking immigrants
from receiving benefits and work permits in the US. It is frequently cited by
NumbersUSA and white supremacy groups like the Federation for American
Immigration Reform and the Center for Immigration Studies as a model for mass
deportation.
This American Life criticizes
E-Verify as insufficiently strict in stopping undocumented people from seeking
employment. Miki Meek says, “A study commissioned by the
government in 2009 found that over half of undocumented workers with fake
papers—people E-Verify should have caught—got a clean bill of health… So by the
early 2000s, you have all these undocumented workers not getting caught by
E-Verify working in the Albertville plants, which raises the central question
you come to when we talk about immigration—did Americans end up out of work
because of it?”
NPR then gives space to bureaucrats from the United Food and
Commercial Workers Union to air their dirty xenophobic laundry. One shop steward, Martha, denounces
immigrants for poisoning the atmosphere at the plant:
ZOGBY
“In Mexico, a recent Zogby poll declared that
the vast majority of Mexican citizens hate Americans. [22.2] Mexico is a
country saturated with racism, yet in denial, having never endured
the social development of a Civil Rights movement like in the US--Blacks
are harshly treated while foreign Whites are often seen as the enemy.
[22.3] In fact, racism as workplace discrimination can be seen across the US
anywhere the illegal alien Latino works--the vast majority of the
workforce is usually strictly Latino, excluding Blacks, Whites, Asians,
and others.”
“[A]fter they’d [the immigrant workers] been there a while, they
kind of thought they owned it. And there was more of them. You know, they kind
of stay with their group, the family, you know, like aunts and cousins. And
just about all of them’s kin somehow, you know? They started changing their
attitude… You know, and it started causing problems. We had quite a few fights
in the break rooms. Then we had them carried out to the parking lot, you know.”
NPR also interviews the UFCW local president at the time, Joe
Ellis. Ellis blames the immigrant workers for reducing the bargaining power of
the union because of their unwillingness to pay union dues:
“And then when the Latinos come in, that changed. And when that
changed, then the bargaining unit changed. Because we didn’t have any
bargaining power.”
Though NPR presents
this as legitimate, in actual fact the unions’ bargaining power was reduced not
because of immigrants, but because the unions are rotten, corrupt institutions
that police the workforce in collusion with the corporations. A 2004 press release from Kroger supermarkets cites Ellis as
praising a deal that the company boasted “will provide wages and benefits that
will allow Kroger to compete with other retailers in the market.” Ellis praised
the sellout as the product of the union and the company “working together.”
Glass says there are many factors behind the decline of wages for
US-born workers, including shareholder wealth, automation, lower unionization
rates and trade with China. While Glass
concludes that immigration is not the biggest factor overall, he claims that
immigration is to blame for declining wages for undereducated workers in the
region. He cites an economist who “found that after 20 years of immigrants
pouring into the area around Albertville,” wages dropped “up to $1,200 per
year, per worker. So it’s real money.”
Meek then confronts a white worker with these figures, telling her
that she would be thousands of dollars richer if it weren’t for the immigrants.
This American Life concludes the
show by referencing Trump Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who, Glass says, is
“always talking about working people” when he “explains what he’s trying to
achieve by limitation.”
Implicitly backing the fascistic propaganda portraying attacks on
immigrants as a struggle against the corporations in defense of American
workers, Glass adds, “He barely sounds like a Republican… says our system’s too
biased toward corporations.” He includes a sound bite of Sessions defending his
mass deportation plans with arguments about benefiting native-born workers.
On this final note, Glass previews part two:
“Next week on our show, we go into town to see what 6,000
newcomers cost taxpayers, and what it was like to have all these immigrants
who’d never driven cars before suddenly on the roads not understanding what a
stop sign is, and why a Latino business owner told his friend to run for mayor
on the platform of kicking out all the immigrants.”
Corporate Democrat Doug Jones defeats far-right
evangelical Roy Moore in Alabama Senate race
By Barry Grey
13 December 2017
In a special election Tuesday to fill the US Senate seat from
Alabama vacated by President Trump’s attorney general Jeff Sessions,
conservative Democrat Doug Jones defeated ultra-right former state Supreme
Court chief judge Roy Moore.
It was the first time a Democrat won a US Senate election in
Alabama since the election in 1992 of Richard Shelby, who subsequently became a
Republican and remains today the state’s senior senator.
The vote count as of this writing was 49.9 percent for Jones to
48.4 percent for Moore, a narrow but comfortable margin. Despite the fact that
state law triggers an automatic recount only if the margin of difference is 0.5
percent or below, Moore refused to concede the election following Jones’
victory speech and indicated that he would contest the outcome.
The Democratic victory was the result of a higher-than expected
turnout of more than 40 percent, with turnout particularly high, compared to
previous elections, among African Americans and young people. Voter turnout was
especially heavy in the major urban centers of Birmingham, Mobile, Huntsville
and Montgomery. Moore won, as expected, in the rural largely white parts of the
state, but he lost in the black rural areas, where turnout was much higher.
Jones had a big advantage among younger voters and won
overwhelming majorities among African Americans. He also won the independent
vote by 9 points, an indication that Moore was abandoned by sections of
affluent white voters who traditionally vote Republican. Some 22,000 voters
cast write-in ballots, a higher number than Jones’ margin of victory. On
Sunday, Senator Shelby had told CNN that he would not vote for Moore and he
urged Alabama Republicans to write in the names of other Republicans.
The result is a serious blow to Trump, who intervened strongly in
favor of Moore after the Senate Republican leadership withdrew its support
following allegations that the 70-year-old former judge had made improper
sexual advances to teenage girls when he was a deputy district attorney in his
30s.
Jones’ admission to the Senate will cut the Republicans’ majority
to one, 51 to 49.
The election campaign itself was a spectacle of political reaction
and mud-slinging. Moore is a fascistic evangelical who advocates the
establishment of a theocracy in the United States. He supports making
homosexuality a crime, glorifies the pre-Civil War South, has called for the
deployment of US troops on the border with Mexico and promotes xenophobia as
part of a pseudo-populist crusade against the “Eastern establishment.”
He was twice removed from the state Supreme Court for defying
federal court rulings against his agenda of religious bigotry. The first
occasion was his refusal to abide by a ruling that he take down a three-ton
monument to the Ten Commandments which he had installed outside the Supreme
Court building. The second was his issuing of instructions to probate court
judges to continue enforcing a state law banning same-sex marriage that had
been overturned by the federal courts.
In one campaign appearance, Moore was asked when he believed
America was last “great.” He said one would have to go back to the period
before the Civil War, i.e., during the period of slavery in the South. In 2011,
he told a right-wing talk show host that getting rid of every amendment to the
US Constitution after the 10th would “eliminate many problems.” That would mean
overturning the amendments that freed the slaves, guaranteed the democratic
rights of freedmen and granted them the right to vote.
In 2009 and 2010, Moore’s Foundation for Moral law hosted
pro-Confederate Alabama “Secession Day” celebrations.
Jones and the Democratic Party virtually ignored Moore’s
ultra-right policies and instead based their campaign almost entirely on
playing up accusations of sexual misconduct against the Republican candidate.
As Election Day approached, the national Democratic Party and its allied media
sought to leverage the Moore allegations to revive charges of sexual harassment
against Donald Trump that had first been raised by the media and the Hillary
Clinton presidential campaign in 2016. This will undoubtedly be intensified
following Jones’ victory.
Indeed, USA
Today published an editorial Tuesday night that cited a Trump
tweet with sexual innuendos directed against Democratic Senator Kirsten Gillibrand,
who had called for his resignation over sexual allegations against him. The
newspaper declared that Trump was unfit to remain president.
Apart from this sexual mud-slinging, Jones stressed his
independence from the national Democratic Party, his support for increased
military spending, his commitment to fiscal austerity and his backing for tax
cuts to improve the business climate for corporations wishing to exploit the
deeply impoverished working class in Alabama. He combined an appeal to black voters
with an effort to win over disaffected Republicans.
Jones made no class appeal whatsoever in a state that is a byword
for crushing poverty and exploitation, and offered no serious proposals to
address unemployment, poverty wages or lack of decent education, housing and
health care.
Nevertheless, he benefited from growing opposition to Trump and
his administration’s attacks on health care and democratic rights, its push for
a $1.5 trillion tax windfall for the rich and threats to unleash a nuclear war
against North Korea. According to exit polls, Trump’s disapproval rating of 48
percent equaled his approval rating. This is in a state that he won last year
by a margin of 63 percent to 35 percent.
In his victory speech, Jones reiterated his campaign themes of
“unity” and bipartisan cooperation with the Republicans, declaring, “We tried
to make sure this campaign was about finding common ground.” He said nothing
about the pervasive poverty in Alabama, the fourth poorest state in the
country, where household median income is nearly $11,000 less than the national
figure. Nor did he mention, let alone criticize, Moore’s fascistic politics.
The Democratic victory, which clearly came as a shock to Jones
himself, revealed the fragility of the hold of right-wing populist and nativist
politics on states that have long been conceded by the Democrats to the
Republicans. Alabama itself has undergone a significant development in recent
years, with the entry of major firms such as Airbus, Mercedes Benz, Honda and
Hyundai and the rapid growth of an industrial working class.
Manufacturing workers made up between 13 and 16 percent of the
total workforce in 2015. That is the fifth highest concentration of all states,
according to the National Association of Manufacturers, and a substantial
increase from a decade ago.
Neither of the right-wing parties of US big business offers any
policies to defend the interests of workers in Alabama or any other state. Nor
was Tuesday’s election an indication of a surge in support for the Democrats.
Exit polls showed that the majority of voters disapproved of both parties, and
by similar margins.
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