keren
A 15-year-old girl hoes cotton in Texas. Unauthorized migrant farmworker women and girls are exceptionally vulnerable to sexual abuse. Geographic isolation, language barriers, fear of deportation, and the desperate need for work make it very difficult for them to report abuse, much less get help.
© 2009 Robert Romano
According to data from the Social Security Administration and the CBO, passing Comprehensive Immigration Reform would be a great benefit to our economy, increasing GDP growth by almost 1/3 by 2021.
The economy with immigration reform vs. without.
Ka’Nard Allen, 10, does not want to talk about what must be the longest and hardest year of his life. He doesn’t want to talk about Mother’s Day, when he was grazed by a bullet at a second line parade in New Orleans’ 7th Ward, one of 19 people injured in amass shooting.
He doesn’t want to talk about October, when his father, 38-year-old Bernard Washington, was fatally stabbed in eastern New Orleans by his stepmother after Washington allegedly choked and beat her. She has been charged with manslaughter.
And he really doesn’t want to talk about his 10th birthday party last May 29, when his 5-year-old cousin, Briana Allen, was fatally shot and a bullet hit Ka’Nard in the neck. The man accused of shooting Briana was arrested last month and, last week, was among 15 people indicted on gang racketeering charges in that incident and many others.
Standing on the Simon Bolivar Avenue neutral ground Monday evening, across from his grandmother’s house where Briana was killed, Ka’Nard just wants to ride his shiny black four-wheeler, a gift from his mom after his dad’s death.
He wants an adult to start peeling an orange for him because he can’t get it started himself. He wants to dunk an empty juice bottle into a garbage can and launch high, elegant roundhouse kicks at the pail. He wants to get on that black four-wheeler and drive it off the grass speckled with broken glass, watching for traffic, circling on Simon Bolivar — fast. He’ll even give you a ride on the back.
Rush-hour traffic raced by the skinny boy, dressed all in red with a Band-Aid on his right cheek. Maybe when one has endured two of the most shocking shootings in the city in less than a year, and come within a hair’s breadth of serious harm or even death each time, there are bigger worries than traffic.
When the adults started shouting over his head about whether his mother was doing enough to protect him, he shared a grin and started giggling. He slouched on his chair and pulled out his phone — new that day, a gift from his mom — and pressed its buttons, even though it doesn’t do much.
“I’ve been trying to keep him out of a lot of stuff, so I’ve been giving him what he wants and what he needs,” mom Tynia Allen said of the four-wheeler and the phone. She has Angry Bird tattoos on each shoulder marked “Bri,” one with the girl’s birthdate and the other with her death date.
Some people told her she shouldn’t have taken Ka’Nard to the second line. But he’s been going to parades “since the mutt was knee-high to a pup,” she said. They have friends who march. Besides, “It was Mother’s Day! No one expected that! We went to church first. I cooked breakfast.”
Despite it all, Ka’Nard has been pressing forward. He’s getting counseling, Tynia said. He’s an usher at Greater Mount Rose Baptist Church. He’s been playing the drums, once pounding so hard they broke.
He’s a student at Pride College Prep in eastern New Orleans, in, well — he didn’t want the other kids nearby to know which grade, so he typed the number into his new cellphone. He figured he would be back in class Tuesday.
In the fall, he’s switching to the James Singleton school at the Dryades YMCA, he said, because he wants to be on the drill team. He wants to march with the “fake rifles, the wood rifles and the flag,” he said, swishing imaginary equipment in the air.
And in about two weeks, Ka’Nard will celebrate his 11th birthday. Not where he had the party last year, on Simon Bolivar. This time he wants to go to a hotel, swim in the pool and stay overnight. His mother said she couldn’t afford it.
The sun was drawing low. Ka’Nard wanted to go home. He asked his mom what was for dinner. Crawfish or pizza? Probably pizza.
But there was a small crisis: He could not find his brand-new phone. The neutral ground and his grandmother’s porch — 10 minutes passed, and still it was nowhere to be found. He slumped back on the chair.
“Am I punished?” he asked his mom.
She said, “No.”
Source
(Source: tsotchke)
"I’ve told the kids in the ghettos that violence won’t solve their problems, but then they ask me, and rightly so; “Why does the government use massive doses of violence to bring about the change it wants in the world?” After this I knew that I could no longer speak against the violence in the ghettos without also speaking against the violence of my government"
-Martin Luther King Jr. (via loveinfamine)
The Martin Luther King Jr. White people never quote
(via youngblackandvegan)
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After the Supreme Court’s notorious Citizens United decision in 2010 that opened the way for corporations and unions to spend unlimited amounts of money in political campaigns, all that new funding needed someplace to go where it would not be easily tracked. In response, the number of groups seeking 501(c)(4) status – which, in addition to the tax break, allows donors to remain anonymous – shot up to 3,400 in 2012.
The flood of applications overloaded the IRS processing system. It may be wrong that, in order to deal with the mountain of paperwork, the IRS functionaries began culling the applicants by looking for keywords such as “tea party” and “patriot,” but I suspect it had far less to do with political bias than it did with the fact that the majority of new groups were conservative. If someone were running a bogus political operation and wanted to attract corporate cash, they would probably pretend to be some kind of grass-roots tea party group. It is entirely understandable that an overwhelmed IRS bureaucrat would choose to look for questionable applicants in the most obvious places.
The fact is that none of the right-wing applicants were turned down, even though they are probably as engaged in partisan campaigning as Karl Rove or Jim Messina. A 501(c)(4) group is, by law, supposed to be a social welfare organization whose primary activity is not politics. Can anyone honestly say that about Rove or Messina or any of the many tea party organizations?
Sadly, after this so-called scandal has blown over and enough heads have rolled, the cowed IRS will be even more timid in denying tax-exempt designation to any front organization run by partisan political operatives and funded by corporate moneymen who want to keep their names out of the news.
" -DAVID HORSEY, writing in the Los Angeles Times, “The Real Scandal: IRS Gives Tax Exemptions to Political Partisans.”
Yep.
(via inothernews)Google: “Zyklon B” and “Mexican farm workers” and you will see that the United States Department of Immigration was using Zyklon B to fumigate and delouse immigrant farm laborers back in the 1920’s and 1930’s.
Produced by the German company pest control DEGESCH, the infamous “Zyklon” (hydrocyanic acid) was sold in four versions with different power. Zyklon E was recommended to clear environments weeds die hard, like cockroaches. Zyklon D was prepared most widely used free environments (the holds of ships, concrete buildings with furniture in the rooms) with lice, mice and rats.
Apparently, it was enough for humans the less powerful version, the Zyklon B. But on humans was not used for the first time in Germany.
Zyklon B was used since 1929 in the United States by the health (U.S. Public Healt Service) on the border with Mexico, to comb and trim Mexican migrants transiting from Juarez to El Paso.Before Zyklon B was even introduced the US government was stripping Mexicans alongside the border and drenching them in various insecticides such as DDT but also “bathed” them in sulfuric acid, kerosene and gasoline. All for a supposed typhus epidemic that never existed/was exaggerated.
Check this book out: Ringside Seat to a Revolution: An Underground Cultural History of El Paso and Juarez, 1893-1923. It touches on the “baths” and physical “screenings” that immigrants had to painfully undergo through during that time.
