Wednesday, December 13, 2017

DOUG JONES (ALABAMA) DECLARES THAT ALABAMA WILL BE THE NEXT MEXIFORNIA WITH BILLIONS PAID OUT TO ILLEGALS TO JUMP THE BORDERS, BRED ANCHOR BABIES AND WORK CHEAP FOR HIS CRONIES

THE MOVE TO MAKE AG JEFF SESSIONS PRESIDENT is denounced by the Narco state of Mexico which relies on the wholesale looting of America.


STAGNANT WAGES and the Dem Party’s obsession with open borders, amnesty and no damned legal need apply!


THE LA RAZA SUPREMACY PARTY for OPEN BORDERS, AMNESTY, NON-ENFORCEMENT, NO E-VERIFY and no Legal need apply!!!

The Democratic Party used to be the party of blue collar America- supporting laws and policies that benefited that segment of the U.S. population.  Their leaders may still claim to be advocates for American working families, however their duplicitous actions that betray American workers and their families, while undermining national security and public safety, provide clear and incontrovertible evidence of their lies…. MICHAEL CUTLER …FRONTPAGE mag



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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