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U.N. Breastfeeding Resolution Opposed by Trump Administration’s Corporate Shills

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“What happened was tantamount to blackmail, with the U.S. holding the world hostage and trying to overturn nearly 40 years of consensus on the best way to protect infant and young child health.”

By Julia Conley / Common Dreams

International delegates to the United Nation’s World Health Assembly looked on at the group’s recent meeting, as U.S. representatives appeared to put the interests of the $70 billion baby food industry ahead of those of parents and children—and pressured other countries to do the same.

The New York Times reported Sunday that American officials, led by Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, attempted to strongarm Ecuadorean delegates out of introducing a resolution to encourage and support breastfeeding and urge governments to restrict misleading marketing claims about baby formula.   [Read more…]

Ex-SDPD Chief Zimmerman’s Fake News on Marijuana Takes on a Life of Its Own

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By Jessica Sutherland / Daily Kos

Ever since the term “Fake News” entered the popular lexicon, almost everyone knows to check their news sources closely, and roll their eyes at Trump. But what’s a responsible citizen to do when “Fake News” and “alternative facts” originate with reliable, trusted sources?

Recently retired San Diego Police Chief Shelley Zimmerman should, in theory, have been one of those reliable, trusted sources, assuming you trust law enforcement. Unfortunately, a recent investigation by Voice of San Diego’s Jesse Marx reveals that the former chief manufactured crime statistics in an apparent effort to block expansion of the cannabis industry within America’s Finest City. Worse, her fake facts are now being used to justify and shape cannabis attitudes and policy in other municipalities.

This is how it begins.   [Read more…]

‘He was full of dirt and lice’: Court Documents Describe Cruel Treatment of Migrant Kids, Families

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By Gabe Ortiz / Daily Kos

Hundreds of pages of sworn affidavits and court documents from forcibly separated migrant parents, immigration attorneys, immigrant rights groups and others reveal intentional cruelty, neglect, and chaos behind the Trump administration’s barbaric “zero tolerance” policy that has torn thousands of children from families at the U.S./Mexico border.

Over the past several weeks, officials have made it increasingly difficult for elected leaders and media to access both detention facilities and detained families. U.S. Jeff Merkley of Oregon, among the first to attempt to access a children’s detention facility in Texas, was asked to leave the property. Scanning the pages of court documents, some tweeted by reporter Adam Klasfeld, gives an insight into why.   [Read more…]

What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?

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“Had I the ability, and could I reach the nation’s ear, I would today pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake.” –Frederick Douglass

Editors Note: Back in the days before tweets and excerpts long-form oratory was considered a high art form. And the occasion of Independence Day was considered the ultimate forum for such speeches. In 1852 –on the day after all the patriotic celebrations–  fugitive slave Frederick Douglass delivered the following speech to the Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society in Rochester, N.Y. It’s ten thousand words long, a massive tome by today’s standards. I hope you’ll consider taking a few minutes out from your holiday to read what historian Andrew S. Bibby calls a  “tribute to national independence, to political freedom, and to the coming into being of a nation.” 
  [Read more…]

Declaration of Independence, a Transcription

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Time for a review of those self-evident truths that Trump and his administration have run roughshod over. Perhaps less well known is the List of Grievances that shows all the ways that King George III failed to respect the rights of the colonists. Do any of them sound familiar?
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Border Patrol and ICE, What Will We Call Them Next? Trump’s Troopers?

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By focusing on tearing apart families on the southern border, [Border Patrol] make interrogations at a checkpoint far from any border seem downright neighborly in contrast.

By Susan Grigsby / Daily Kos

Perhaps it is because I have only lived in Maine for a year and a half, and everything is still new to me, that I hadn’t really noticed the massive influx of Canadians trying to escape from their homeland by illegally crossing our northern border. True, it is a little warmer down here during the winter. And Maine has legalized recreational marijuana, so perhaps these undocumented immigrants were too impatient to wait for October and Canadian legalization.

Or, they have simply tired of life in a country that provides health care to its citizens, that has civilized laws and whose citizens welcome their neighbors in times of trouble. I mean, who doesn’t want to pay higher prices for medications?

Whatever their reasons, apparently this flood of undocumented immigrants has our Department of Homeland Security (DHS) deeply concerned. Border Patrol agents have been sent here to Maine to protect us from the invading horde that is for some unknown reason crossing our border without authorization. Checkpoints have been set-up on 1-95 north of Bangor, Maine, and on I-93 in New Hampshire to counter this apparent threat.   [Read more…]

Annapolis Newsroom Massacre: “Toxic Masculinity” Mixed With Guns. Again

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By John Queally / Common Dreams

As the nation mourned yet another senseless mass shooting—this time at a local newspaper in Annapolis, Maryland on Thursday in which five people were murdered—details of the alleged gunman expose yet another perpetrator with a history of misogynistic and threatening behavior towards women.

On Friday it was reported that the man arrested by police at the scene of the massacre inside The Capital Gazette’s offices, Jarrod Warren Ramos—who had a “bitter history” with the newspaper going back years—had been charged by local prosecutors with five counts of first-degree murder.   [Read more…]

Authoritarianism Thrives on Demoralization: How to Fight Trump and Stay Psychologically Healthy

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My daughter was a newborn when Donald Trump was elected. On Election Day, I dressed her in a pantsuit, covered her in feminist stickers, and ensured she saw me voting. We took lots of pictures. I wanted her to know she was part of the moment in history when the first woman president was elected. So waking up to a Trump president hit me hard. I feared for my daughter’s future, and for my own.

Like all traumas, eventually this one began to feel normal. Trump has changed our sense of what we can expect little by little, horror by horror. But this week was especially bad. This was the first week that I felt as horrible as I did following the election. This month was the first time I thought that my fears about the end of democracy might really come to fruition. I envisioned a world without abortion rights. I thought about what might happen to my daughter if a pregnancy ever threatens her life. I wondered if my OB might be willing to write me a “just in case” abortion pill prescription.

My friends who have always lived in fear—black mothers who worry if their sons will come home, trans folx who wonder if their mere existence will get them killed, immigrants who worry they too might one day be ripped from their children—repeatedly emphasize to me how enraging it is to see white privileged liberals only now becoming worried about democracy.   [Read more…]

Supreme Court’s Janus Decision: Anti-worker Billionaires Win Big

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By Laura Clawson / Daily Kos

The anti-worker right, bankrolled by conservative billionaires, has finally gotten the victory it’s been looking for through years and repeated well-funded Supreme Court challenges to a 40-year-old precedent. 

Janus v. AFSCME once again challenged the requirement that people represented by public sector unions who choose not to join the union still have to pay a fair share fee to cover the direct costs for representing them. That is, they’re paying the costs of collective bargaining and other things from which they personally benefit, not for any union political activity.   [Read more…]

Text of Senator Kamala Harris’ Speech Outside Core Civic Otay Mesa Detention Center

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Following is a speech given by U.S. Senator Kamala Harris on Friday.

So let’s shout for the children and families. Let’s shout for them. So, first of all, I want to thank everyone for coming out and for all the work that everyone has been doing to give voice to these families, to these children, and to this issue.

I was just in there, I got a tour of that detention facility and then I sat down and spoke for some time and visited with the mothers who are there. And my heart is broken. These mothers, these mothers have given testimony, if you will, have given the stories, have shared their stories, their personal stories that are a story of a human rights abuse being committed by the United States government.

And we are so much better than this and what we have got to do is fight against this. This is contrary to all of the principles that we hold dear and that give us a sense of who we are when we are proud to be Americans, but we have no reason to be proud of this. We have no reason to be proud of this.

This is a situation where the United States government and this administration brought upon itself and the reputation of the American public, brought upon us, without a request, shame. Shame.

  [Read more…]

Behind the Criminal Immigration Law: Eugenics and White Supremacy

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The history of the statute that can make it a felony to illegally enter the country involves some dark corners of U.S. history.

By Ian MacDougall / ProPublica

Amid a bipartisan backlash, President Trump has tried repeatedly to shift blame to Democrats for his own administration’s “zero-tolerance” immigration policy, which has resulted in more than 2,300 migrant children being taken from their families along the U.S.–Mexico border. “The Democrats have to change their law — that’s their law,” Trump told reporters on Friday.

The president didn’t specify which law he was talking about. But the statute at the center of his administration’s policy is the work of Republicans — with origins dating back all the way to World War I — albeit with substantial Democratic support along the way. Known originally as the “Undesirable Aliens Act,” the statute would not exist without support from, respectively, a eugenicist and a white supremacist.

The law in question was the foundation of a memo Attorney General Jeff Sessions issued in early April that laid out the administration’s new, zero-tolerance policy. In the memo, Sessions instructed federal prosecutors in the southwestern United States to file criminal charges against any adults caught entering the country illegally. His order stripped officials of discretion over whether to place migrant families seeking asylum into civil proceedings, which allow families to stay together. (Court rulings limit how long the government can detain migrants in civil proceedings. There’s also no guarantee they’ll return for future hearing dates once they’re let out, a phenomenon that has prompted the president’s complaints about “catch and release.”)

On Monday, ProPublica published audio recorded at a U.S. Customs and Border Protection detention facility in which a Border Patrol agent mocks the   [Read more…]

After Tax Cuts for Richest, House GOP Unveils $5.4 Trillion Attack on Nation’s Safety Net

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With the nation’s attention rightly fixated on President Donald Trump’s horrific treatment of immigrant children, House Republicans on Tuesday quietly unveiled their 2019 budget proposal that calls for $537 billion in cuts to Medicare, $1.5 trillion in cuts to Medicaid, and four billion in cuts to Social Security over the next decade in an effort to pay for their deficit-exploding tax cuts for the wealthy.

“It’s morally bankrupt, patently absurd, and grossly un-American,” the advocacy group Patriotic Millionaires said of the GOP’s budget proposal, which calls for $5.4 trillion in spending cuts from major domestic programs.

Robert Greenstein, president of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), argued in a statement that the Republican proposal demonstrates clearly shows the “House majority’s fiscal priorities haven’t changed.”   [Read more…]

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