Aargh!

Sometimes, I hate reading the news. Between President Obama's willingness to cut Social Security and Medicare, cuts "which would affect veterans, the poor and the older Americans," and the state of Tennessee's foolishness:

"A Tennessee bill that would cut welfare benefits of parents with children performing poorly in school cleared committees of both the House and Senate last week."

and

Twice a year, Tennessee holds a “health care lottery” that gives some hope to the uninsured residents in the state who can’t afford health coverage. Tennesseans who meet certain requirements — in addition to falling below a certain income threshold, they must be elderly, blind, disabled, or a caretaker of a child who qualifies for Medicaid — may call to request an application for the state’s public health insurance program, known as TennCare.

[snip]

State residents who have high medical bills but would not normally qualify for Medicaid, the government health care program for the poor, can call a state phone line and request an application. But the window is tight — the line shuts down after 2,500 calls, typically within an hour — and the demand is so high that it is difficult to get through. [...]

[snip]

If Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslan (R) opted to expand Medicaid under Obamacare, more than 180,000 people would be able to be added to the TennCare rolls by 2019... Haslan has not yet decided whether Tennessee will accept Obamacare’s optional expansion of the Medicaid program, although he has indicated that he may make his decision sometime this week [week of 25 March 2013].

I despair of our ever having a truly effective safety net.

Also, it must be nice to have the luxury of time to decide if 180,000 people who need healthcare can get it. Uh-oh, Governor, your privilege is showing!

Concentration

From the Florida AP/Miami Herald:

A candidate for the Florida House of Representatives says "camps" should be built to house illegal immigrants in Florida until they can be deported.

Yeah, let that sink in. Said candidate seems woefully unaware of how similar ideas have worked in U.S. history. Or, you know, maybe she is.

As if that isn't enough:

Marg Baker, who is seeking the Republican nomination for House District 48, says officials could "collect enough illegal aliens until you have enough to ship them back."

The dehumanization in that sentence--as if referring to people as "illegal aliens" is not a clear indicator of her mindset, she actually makes the suggestion that the government "collect" them and "ship" them as if they are cargo.

Baker even threw in a little classism* for good measure:

Baker added the housing would be "regular homes like a lot of poor people live in."

Then, just to be sure the us vs. them sentiment came through (minus words like "undesirable" and "dangerous"), Baker warned:

"We need to have camps because there are a lot of these people roaming among us."

Emphasis mine.

Ignorance hers.

H/T Quaker Dave He found video (that I just saw this morning and as I am on my way out for a while, I can't transcribe right now). Scratch my idea that maybe she doesn't know about historical precedent. She actually says:

We can follow what happened back in the 40s and 50s. I was just a little girl in Miami and they built camps for the people that snuck into the country because they were illegal. They put them in the camps and shipped them back... we must stop them.

Ms. Baker... while you're reminiscing about history, please remember someone else used camps in the 40s.
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*Of course, much of the anti-immigrant rhetoric, particularly anti-Latino immigrant rhetoric, is classist already.

Oh, Look, Fellow Louisianans!

We finally found something in which we can be number one:

"Louisiana's rate of women murdered by men is marked number one in the country."*

Shortly after that line, the article (from a Shreveport television station) reports: "This news hits us at a time when a local shelter for battered women is struggling to stay afloat."

Some other areas in which we are "notably" ranked (just a select few):


We have the "highest number of deaths of infants per 1,000 births and total infant mortality."

In overall child well-being, we are the second lowest.

We have the second highest rate of child poverty. We are number 49 in the nation, behind only Mississippi. Considering the facts that 1)we were "just" number 48 a few years ago and 2) "analysts see harder times ahead thanks to the still-lurching economy," Mississippi might oughta be worried--we're coming for your position, baby!

But, you know, at least we ain't supporting no crazy shit like shelters and centers for survivors of "domestic" violence**, education and better healthcare!

That would be the real drain on the citizens of Louisiana.

I mean, even if it's unclear what Louisianans are for, we do know what they're against. Trying to maintain political, economic, and racial hierarchies is much more important than the fate of Louisiana's children.

We all understand the un-avoidability of "collateral damage," right?
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*This deserves a much more serious post of its own.

**That page lists centers, advocates, and support networks in 26 Louisiana parishes. Louisiana has 64 parishes.

Where Is Aniysah?

From Document the Silence:

On March 3rd, 2009 six year old Aniysah was taken from her mother’s arms and thrown into a legal shuffle of unaccountability, instability and discrimination. There were no records verifying that she would be taken to a safe living environment or that she was enrolled in school. Questions about her health and well-being went unanswered. That was 150 days ago. To date, Aniysah remains lost in the legal system. A system where black and brown children go missing everyday. A system where black mothers like Aniysah’s are often left to fend for themselves in a brutal, dogged battle just to make sure their children are safe.



It’s time to hold the legal system accountable. Document the Silence asks that you join them in the “Where’s Aniysah?” campaign by posting information about this case on your blogs, online social networks and throughout your community. You can find out more about this campaign to stand against injustices against our children in the legal system by visiting the Document the Silence website .

Where’s Aniysah? What you can do!

* Show up! – Are you going to be in the NYcity area August 24th? Come to Aniysah’s court date and show the judge and the law guardian you care! Even if you can’t make it, invite your friends who can! The deets:The next court date is August 24th, 2009 at 11AM and the address is :IDV PartCourtroom E-123, Annex BuildingJustice Fernando M. CamachoQueens County IDV Court,Queens County Supreme CourtCriminal Term 125-01 Queens BlvdKew Gardens, New York 11415

* Spread the word!- send this website out to everyone you know. tell them why this is important. post to your facebook account. forward on your many list serves. post Aniysah’s mom youtube clip on your facebook page. write a blog about her story. email everyone you know and don’t know.

* Speak up! – do you know of other children of color who have been lost in the legal shuffle? Let’s document the silence of court sanctioned kidnapping that is happening to black and brown women and children across the country! email us at beboldbered@gmail.com and we will add your story to the website.

H/T Lex, format copied from VivirLatino

Officer Jack Sparrow?

**Updated**

Do the police in Tenaha, TX, "shake down" drivers, particularly drivers of color, in what one attorney calls "a piracy operation?"

Roderick Daniels was traveling through East Texas in October 2007 when, he says, he was the victim of a highway robbery.

The Tennessee man says he was ordered to pull his car over and surrender his jewelry and $8,500 in cash that he had with him to buy a new car.

But Daniels couldn't go to the police to report the incident.

The men who stopped him were the police.

This story caught my attention because my family and I routinely travel through Tenaha on our way to and from Louisiana. I have my own stories about East Texas police:

My experiences with the police have included:

My father and I being pulled over while I was an undergraduate, separated, and questioned. We were in Texas, our car had Louisiana plates, and the cops admitted they suspected drug trafficking.

Similarly, I was tailed closely by a cop for a while in a small East Texas town who didn't turn on his lights, initially. He was following me so closely that I put on my signal and got into the next lane. Then he turned on his lights--said I was supposed to wait until I'd traveled at least so many feet after turning on my signal to switch lanes. The problem, again, was my Louisiana plates in a Texas town. He wanted to know where I lived currently, where I was traveling to, and why. I answered, simply because I didn't know if I was allowed not to answer and I had no intention of disappearing in East Texas.

More recently (several weeks ago), my sister and her fiance were pulled over in East Texas after meeting me in Houston. Her description:

The cop pulled out behind us and trailed us for five minutes before turning on his lights. He made [my fiance] get out and come to the back of the car and made me stay in. He shined the light directly in my baby's face, woke him up, and wouldn't move the light. Of course, he started crying and I was digging for the insurance papers and wanted to cry myself.

He kept asking the same questions over and over, trying to find inconsistencies. Then he asked for permission to search the car. I told him yes because he wouldn't find anything and offered to show him all my prescription medicines. When he realized we were telling the same story, he didn't want to search the car anymore. I'll be honest, I definitely felt like it was racial profiling--he saw a black man who didn't live there, driving through town late at night. But, I threw him off by agreeing to let him search the car.

My sister's experience and one of mine occurred in Diboll, TX, 70 miles from Tenaha.

There seems to be some element of racial-profiling in the Tenaha cases, as well.

[Attorney David] Guillory, who practices in nearby Nacogdoches, Texas, estimates authorities in Tenaha seized $3 million between 2006 and 2008, and in about 150 cases -- virtually all of which involved African-American or Latino motorists -- the seizures were improper.

Emphasis mine.

You might wonder, if the stops seem suspect, why people sign waivers forfeiting their property. There is of course the very immediate fear of what can happen to you, particularly as a person of color being pulled over in a rural town by the police. Then there are the threats. According to the article, the officers routinely threaten people with jail time and the loss of their children.*

Of course, town officials deny all wrongdoing. I scoffed while reading that. Stops like this are often the result of the so-called war on drugs. You know, the "war" that disproportionately targets people of color and takes away their liberty, property, and rights. It feeds into racial-profiling which 1) encourages cops to conduct searches of people of color and their vehicles more often when they are stopped (and treat them more harshly) 2) perpetuates the stereotype that all African Americans and Latin@s with large sums of cash must be drug dealers or doing something illegal 3)justifies the intense focus on communities of color which contributes to the disproportionate numer of arrests and convictions.**

I also scoffed because the racial disparities in arrests and convictions, and the concurrent violation of PoC's rights, have been particularly well-documented in small Texas towns.

We'll see how this plays out, though I can already here the faint cries of the coming, "It's the damn outsiders trying to make something racial outta this!"

H/T Bint via Twitter

(cross-posted)
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*This is a particularly salient threat--the state intervenes disproportionately in families of color, a fact partially attributable to both racism and classism--as Dorothy Roberts said in Shattered Bonds, "the public child welfare system equates poverty with neglect," (p 25).

**For statistics about the claims I made in this paragraph, I referred to a fact sheet I put together for my class's discussion of the prison industrial complex. The fact sheet was culled from these sources.