This may shock you, but #Trump is lying when he says that #undocumented#immigrants will "destroy" #SocialSecurity. The undocumented can't collect Social Security but often pay into it.
Proud of my sister who created the innovative Vermont Language Justice Project which works to deliver critical health information via informational videos to immigrants in 18 languages.
Today in Labor History March 12, 1912: The IWW won their Bread and Roses textile strike in Lawrence, MA. This was the first strike to use the moving picket line, implemented to avoid arrest for loitering. The workers came from 51 different nationalities and spoke 22 different languages. The mainstream unions, including the American Federation of Labor, all believed it was impossible to organize such a diverse workforce. However, the IWW organized workers by linguistic group and trained organizers who could speak each of the languages. Each language group got a delegate on the strike committee and had complete autonomy. Big Bill Haywood and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn masterminded the strategy of sending hundreds of the strikers' hungry children to sympathetic families in New York, New Jersey, and Vermont, drawing widespread sympathy, especially after police violently stopped a further exodus. 3 workers were killed by police during the strike. Nearly 300 were arrested.
The 1911 verse, by Poet James Oppenheim, has been associated with the strike, particularly after Upton Sinclair made the connection in his 1915 labor anthology, “The Cry for Justice: An Anthology of the Literature of Social Protest”
As we come marching, marching, we battle too for men,
For they are women's children, and we mother them again.
Our lives shall not be sweated from birth until life closes;
Hearts starve as well as bodies; give us bread, but give us roses!
In Thursday night's State of The Union, the murder of 22-year-old Laken Riley took center stage. The suspect is a migrant. Republicans say immigration leads to crime, but there's no evidence of that.
At Seattle’s #Boeing Field, Real-Time #Video Offers a Rare Glimpse of America’s Troubled #Deportation Flights
Key details about what happens inside ICE Air would still be hidden if not for a group of #Washington activists and researchers, who are now using a live video feed from the tarmac to document the flights.
This is just a reminder that the jobs migrant workers are taking are jobs that you don't want to do. Like hand-picking the fruit that ends up in your grocery store. YOUR jobs were taken by corporate boards so that they could send them overseas to countries where labor costs were lower, so that they could take the money they used to pay you and put most of it into their own pockets, so that they could increase their salaries by 1,500% while you got nothing.
These corporations overwhelmingly support the Republican politicians who keep telling you that it's migrants who are taking your jobs, but who refuse to cooperate to "fix the border problem".
Activists can then use the data to assemble lists of #voters to challenge. The program also tracks the outcome of the challenge & whether a voter later tries to #vote, info that could be shared w/ #election officials or #law enforcement….
Disgraced "lawyer" #AlinaHabba is frantic with worry that #JoeBiden is going let 10 million undocumented #immigrants into the country so they can vote for him! It sounds so scary until you think about what she's saying for 9 seconds, and realize that there's no mechanism in American law for non-citizens to vote. What she's claiming is a literal impossibility. And she's knows it. This is another pathetic lie to keep the #MAGAts angry and misinformed.
As Noah Berlatsky notes, Republicans intended to base their 2024 campaign on "the economy." Then Biden put the kibosh on that possibility with his stellar economic recovery.
So it's back to hate — specifically, hating on immigrants and the non-existent "crime" they commit. This turnabout is a sign of GOP weakness, he maintains, but it's still harmful, because hate elicits hate, elicits violence.
Kareem Abdul-Jabar looks at the forced removal of 125,000 Japanese Americans, 2/3 of whom were citizens, from their homes in WWII and their incarceration in concentration camps and asks about Trump's plan to lock up and deport mass numbers of people:
"If we were capable of locking up 125,000 men, women, and children for being of one ethnicity, it’s easier to justify doing so again to another group."
"This is especially important with the recent news that if Trump is elected, he intends to build more detention camps for migrants ('Trump and allies planning militarized mass deportations, detention camps') which 'current and former officials warn could be impractical and dangerous.'”
#Trump & allies planning militarized #MassDeportations, detention #camps
As president, Trump sought to use #military planes & bases for #deportation. Now, he and his allies are talking about a new effort that current & fmr ofcls warn could be impractical & dangerous.
“Americans can expect that immediately upon President Trump’s return…, he will restore all of his prior policies, implement brand new crackdowns that will send shock waves to all the world’s criminal smugglers, & marshal every federal & state power necessary to institute the largest #deportation operation in American history,” said #Trump campaign spox Karoline Leavitt in a stmnt. She added that undocumented #immigrants “should not get comfortable because very soon they will be going home.”
Rebecca Solnit wrote: “I don’t know whether these #billionaires know what a city is, but I do know that they have laid their hands on the city that’s been my home since 1980 & used their wealth to undermine its diversity & affordability, demonise its poor, turn its politicians into puppets & push its politics to the right. They have produced many kinds of dystopia without ever deviating from the line that they are bringing us all to a glorious utopia for which they deserve our admiration.
By producing such extremes of wealth, tech is returning us to a kind of feudalism, with a few powerful figures accountable to no one. Here’s #ElonMusk, the world’s richest person, who invited in misinformation, disinformation & hate, providing a platform for extreme right-wingers, racists & #conspiracy theorists, while also using his #Starlink#satellite technology first for & then against the Ukrainian military in their conflict with #Russia. ” #SanFrancisco#SiliconValley
2/ (snip) "Here’s Peter Thiel, founder of #PayPal, who put $10 million into the lawsuit that in 2016 bankrupted Gawker, which had outed him as #gay. This might make you think he cared about #privacy, but he also founded Palantir, which surveils #immigrants for the Department of Homeland Security, assisted in #CambridgeAnalytica’s weaponisation of #Facebook user data on #Trump’s behalf &, according to the Intercept, ‘has helped expand & accelerate the NSA’s global spy network, which is jointly administered with allied foreign agencies around the world’. Big tech is ferociously protective of its own privacy while abusing ours. Frank Wilhoit’s claim that ‘conservatism consists of One Proposition: there must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect’ applies precisely to the industry & its captains."
Today in Labor History February 15, 1910: The ILGWU declared the Uprising of Twenty Thousand shirtwaist strike officially over. The garment workers strike began September 27, 1909, in response to abysmal wages and safety conditions. The majority of striking workers were immigrant women, mostly Yiddish-speaking Jews (75%) and Italians (10%), and mostly under the age of 20. Five women died in the strike, which the union won, signing contracts with 339 manufacturing firms. However, 13 firms, including Triangle Shirtwaist Company, never settled. One of the demands had been for adequate fire escapes and for open doors to the streets for emergencies. In 1911, 146 girls and women were killed in the Triangle Shirtwaist fire.
After failing in their first try last week, Republicans pushed through the charges over solid Democratic opposition, making the homeland security secretary the first sitting cabinet member to be impeached.
Immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than U.S.-born Americans, studies find (www.npr.org)
In Thursday night's State of The Union, the murder of 22-year-old Laken Riley took center stage. The suspect is a migrant. Republicans say immigration leads to crime, but there's no evidence of that.
House Republicans Impeach Mayorkas Over Border Policies (www.nytimes.com)
After failing in their first try last week, Republicans pushed through the charges over solid Democratic opposition, making the homeland security secretary the first sitting cabinet member to be impeached.