Aren’t you glad that the taxes you pay, out of the meager earnings you make in exchange for your hard work, are making Trump wealthy while he spends one out of every three work days vacationing at his own resorts? American taxpayers are footing the bill for a corrupt and lawless, fraudulent buffoon to spend 1/3 of his time golfing instead of working, and the rest of his time watching tv & using social media. It’s long past time for this lying jerk to go!
Anyone who even THOUGHT to criticize President Obama for golfing on his earned vacation time, and who doesn’t feel absolutely enraged by Trump’s unprecedented laziness & unConstitutional emoluments violations at taxpayer expense, is a blatant hypocrite who should be hanging his/her head in deep, deep shame. You should have one of the Sisters of the High Sparrow from Game of Thrones walking behind behind you, ringing her bell and yelling out “SHAME!” on every 3rd ring. Seriously.
To solve the problem of refugees flooding across the US border, one must understand how the US caused the problem. There's a great article below that for the sake of brevity omits many omits many details. The impact of Iran/Contra in which the CIA flooded the US streets with drugs to fund illegal WARS remains to be told. For a limited time, full access is available to this article: Death and Displacement: A USAID Export Victoria McKenzie and Steven Cohen, NACLA Excerpt: "In April 2013, the northeastern department of La Guajira, Colombia was suffering its worst drought in three decades. The streams that flow down from the Sierra Nevada and Serrania del Perija had reduced to a trickle, and the scattered wells on the already arid Caribbean peninsula were running dry. In the previous three years, thousands of Indigenous Wayuu children had died of thirst, hunger, and disease." READ MORE
Central American migrants – particularly unaccompanied minors – are again crossing the U.S.-Mexico boundary in large numbers.
In 2014, more than 68,000 unaccompanied Central American childrenwere apprehended at the U.S.-Mexico boundary. This year so far there have been close to 60,000.
The mainstream narrative often reduces the causes of migration to factors unfolding in migrants’ home countries. In reality, migration is often a manifestation of a profoundly unequal and exploitative relationship between migrant-sending countries and countries of destination. Understanding this is vital to making immigration policy more effective and ethical.
Through my research on immigration and border policing, I have learned a lot about these dynamics. One example involves relations between Honduras and the United States.
U.S. roots of Honduran emigration
I first visited Honduras in 1987 to do research. As I walked around the city of Comayagua, many thought that I, a white male with short hair in his early 20’s, was a U.S. soldier. This was because hundreds of U.S. soldiers were stationed at the nearby Palmerola Air Base at the time. Until shortly before my arrival, many of them would frequent Comayagua, particularly its “red zone” of female sex workers.
U.S. military presence in Honduras and the roots of Honduran migration to the United States are closely linked. It began in the late 1890s, when U.S.-based banana companies first became active there. As historian Walter LaFeber writes in “Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America,” American companies “built railroads, established their own banking systems, and bribed government officials at a dizzying pace.” As a result, the Caribbean coast “became a foreign-controlled enclave that systematically swung the whole of Honduras into a one-crop economy whose wealth was carried off to New Orleans, New York, and later Boston.”
By 1914, U.S. banana interests owned almost 1 million acres of Honduras’ best land. These holdings grew through the 1920s to such an extent that, as LaFeber asserts, Honduran peasants “had no hope of access to their nation’s good soil.” Over a few decades, U.S. capital also came to dominate the country’s banking and mining sectors, a process facilitated by the weak state of Honduras’ domestic business sector. This was coupled with direct U.S. political and military interventions to protect U.S. interests in 1907 and 1911.
Such developments made Honduras’ ruling class dependent on Washington for support. A central component of this ruling class was and remains the Honduran military. By the mid-1960s it had become, in LaFeber’s words, the country’s “most developed political institution,” – one that Washington played a key role in shaping.
The Reagan era
A U.S. military advisor instructs Honduran troopers in Puerto Castilla, Honduras, in 1983.AP Photo
This was especially the case during the presidency of Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. At that time, U.S. political and military policy was so influential that many referred to the Central American country as the “U.S.S. Honduras” and the Pentagon Republic.
As part of its effort to overthrow the Sandinista government in neighboring Nicaragua and “roll back” the region’s leftist movements, the Reagan administration “temporarily” stationed several hundred U.S. soldiers in Honduras. Moreover, it trained and sustained Nicaragua’s “contra” rebels on Honduran soil, while greatly increasing military aid and arm sales to the country.
The Reagan years also saw the construction of numerous joint Honduran-U.S. military bases and installations. Such moves greatly strengthened the militarization of Honduran society. In turn, political repression rose. There was a dramatic increase in the number of political assassinations, “disappearances” and illegal detentions.
The Reagan administration also played a big role in restructuring the Honduran economy. It did so by strongly pushing for internal economic reforms, with a focus on exporting manufactured goods. It also helped deregulate and destabilize the global coffee trade, upon which Honduras heavily depended. These changes made Honduras more amenable to the interests of global capital. They disrupted traditional forms of agriculture and undermined an already weak social safety net.
These decades of U.S. involvement in Honduras set the stage for Honduran emigration to the United States, which began to markedly increase in the 1990s.
In the post-Reagan era, Honduras remained a country scarred by a heavy-handed military, significant human rights abuses and pervasive poverty. Still, liberalizing tendencies of successive governments and grassroots pressure provided openings for democratic forces.
They contributed, for example, to the election of Manuel Zelaya, a liberal reformist, as president in 2006. He led on progressive measures such as raising the minimum wage. He also tried to organize a plebiscite to allow for a constituent assembly to replace the country’s constitution, which had been written during a military government. However, these efforts incurred the ire of the country’s oligarchy, leading to his overthrow by the military in June 2009.
Post-coup Honduras
The 2009 coup, more than any other development, explains the increase in Honduran migration across the southern U.S. border in the last few years. The Obama administration has played an important role in these developments. Although it officially decried Zelaya’s ouster, it equivocated on whether or not it constituted a coup, which would have required the U.S. to stop sending most aid to the country.
Then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton meets with Honduran foreign minister in 2010.AP Photo/Evan Vucci
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in particular, sent conflicting messages, and worked to ensure that Zelaya did not return to power. This was contrary to the wishes of the Organization of American States, the leading hemispheric political forum composed of the 35 member-countries of the Americas, including the Caribbean. Several months after the coup, Clinton supported a highly questionable election aimed at legitimating the post-coup government.
Strong military ties between the U.S. and Honduras persist: several hundred U.S. troops are stationed at Soto Cano Air Base (formerly Palmerola) in the name of fighting the drug war and providing humanitarian aid.
Since the coup, writes historian Dana Frank, “a series of corrupt administrations has unleashed open criminal control of Honduras, from top to bottom of the government.”
Organized crime, drug traffickers and the country’s police heavily overlap. Impunity reigns in a country with frequent politically-motivated killings. It is the world’s most dangerous country for environmental activists, according to Global Witness, an international nongovernmental organization.
Although its once sky-high murder rate has declined, the continuing exodus of many youth demonstrates that violent gangs still plague urban neighborhoods.
Meanwhile, post-coup governments have intensified an increasingly unregulated, “free market” form of capitalism that makes life unworkable for many. Government spending on health and education, for example, has declined in Honduras. Meanwhile, the country’s poverty rate has risen markedly. These contribute to the growing pressures that push many people to migrate.
While the next U.S. president will deliberate about what to do about unwanted immigration from “south of the border,” this history provides lessons as to the roots of migration. It also raises ethical questions as to the responsibility of the United States toward those now fleeing from the ravages U.S. policy has helped to produce.
Ugh. Mitch McConnell is taking another swing at the Clean Power Plan, this time saying that if states want to work together under the Clean Air Act, they have to go through him first. That’s right, if any states want to tackle climate change and clean up their air, they have to go through Big Polluter-backed McConnell.
Enough is enough. Join LCV in sending a message to Mitch McConnell today telling him to STOP attacking our environment:http://bit.ly/1CK3yGW
DIRTY COAL is cheap because it doesn't have to cleanup its environmental destruction.
[FYI - NC Governor Pat McCrory previously worked for DUKE ENERGY!]
In February, a DUKE ENERGY'S COAL ASH POND spewed About 82,000 tons of coal ash mixed with 27 million gallons of contaminated water.
When you support DEREGULATION candidates because of the phony propaganda they present, this is a disaster that COULD HAVE BEEN PREVENTED!
While MASSACHUSETTS pretends Environmental Leadership, Beacon Hill has ignored this issue! Beacon Hill can't even pass the EXPANDED BOTTLE BILL because of Pig Headed Leadership beholden to Lobbyists and Industry.
Unless and until voters inform themselves....this will continue.
82,000 Tons Of Coal Ash Spill From Plant Into North Carolina River
By Alexander Smith
About 82,000 tons of coal ash mixed with 27 million gallons of contaminated water — enough to fill more than 40 Olympic swimming pools — has leaked from a North Carolina power plant and is threatening water supplies across state lines.
Duke Energy, the U.S.'s largest electricity provider, which runs the plant, said Wednesday that hundreds of people using heavy equipment were working day and night to solve the situation.
But the company's statement did not provided a timetable for when the leak will be fixed. And regulators are still trying to work out whether the ash, which can contain toxic chemicals — including lead, arsenic, mercury and radioactive uranium — is a hazard to people or wildlife, The Associated Press reported Thursday.
Duke Energy’s coal ash pond in Eden, N.C., which dumped 39,000 tons of poisonous sludge and slurry into the Dan River on Feb. 2 — the third-largest such spill in U.S. history — has refocused national attention on the environmental damage these holding ponds can render.
But the damage isn’t just confined to when the sludge leaks into busted storm-water drainage pipes that never should have been running under the ponds to begin with, like the situation in Eden. It’s quite possible the damage from coal ash ponds is ongoing even in the absence of accidental spills.
“These coal ash ponds are unlined, and people don’t realize that,” said Dean Naujoks, the Yadkin Riverkeeper who has been monitoring the Dan River spill. “They are continuously leaching arsenic, chromium, cadmium, mercury, all kinds of toxic heavy metals, into the ground and eventually into groundwater. Duke Energy has 32 of these ponds on 14 sites around the state, and every one of them is unlined. Every one of them is a threat to groundwater.”
Naujoks points out that municipal landfills, where we send our garbage, are lined and capped when full. It would not be legal to build a landfill adjacent to a river.
“Yet all over the state, we have toxic waste stored in giant farm ponds on the banks of our rivers,” he said. “The state knows this, but it hasn’t done one darn thing to address the problem. The state is afraid of Duke Energy and afraid to take the action necessary to protect the public and the environment.”
Given the public outrage and outcry, not to mention the regular and intense local and national media scrutiny of the state’s response to the Dan River coal ash spill, the less-than-aggressive position of the N.C. Department of Environmental Resources (DENR) might be starting to budge.
Last Friday, DENR announced it would cite Duke Energy for violations of environmental standards in regards to the spill in Eden. And on Monday, DENR cited five power plants owned by Duke Energy for violating water pollution laws. The citations charge that Duke Energy failed to obtain storm-water permits under federal law for the plants. UPDATE: Significant’y, a state judge in Raleigh now wants DENR to takes a closer look at the unlined coal-ash ponds that environmentalists like Naujoks have been raising red flags over for years. According to news reports late Thursday, “Duke Energy must take ‘immediate action’ to stop toxins leaking from coal ash ponds at its North Carolina power plants and develop a plan to clean up contaminated groundwater at the sites, a Superior Court judge ruled Thursday. Environmental groups hailed the ruling as a first step toward possibly cleaning up the 31 ash ponds at Duke’s 14 current or retired coal-fired power plants across the state.”
Meanwhile, one environmental group, the Dan River Basin Association, isn’t waiting for the state to assess the damage on the Dan. It’s moving ahead with its own independent testing.
Using proceeds from a recent fundraiser, Jenny Edwards, a program manager for the Dan River Basin Association in Rockingham County, said the group will establish testing sites of river-bottom aquatic life — so-called macroinvertebrates — up and downstream from the spill. Life on the river bottom A bottom-dwelling stonefly coated by the Duke Energy coal ash spill on the Dan River in Eden, N.C. (Photo courtesy of the Dan River Basin Association).On the Dan, determining the health of low-lying river creatures such as mussels, clams, crawfish and dragonflies will determine the health of the fish in the river, and later, the birds and animals that feed on those fish. The fear, said Brian Williams, also a Dan River Basin Association program manager, is that the entire food chain along the upper Dan could be imperiled by the presence of coal ash and its poisonous heavy metals. (The Dan River stretches some 200 miles; about 70 miles is affected by the spill.)
“We are now picking 20 sites for this testing,” Williams said. “We want to get some data quickly to establish baselines above and below the spill. But it’s going to take a couple of years before we see some trends and can start to tell the impact on that part of the river.”
Already, though, Williams described the river bottom on the Dan a mile or two below the spill as a virtual “kill zone” for macroinvertebrates because of the amount of toxic sludge that’s settled. At the spill site, there is a coal ash bar some five feet thick and 75 feet long. Coal ash has been detected along the river bottom some 70 miles eastward downstream — all the way to the John Kerr Reservoir north of Raleigh.
Because of that hazard, the N.C. Department of Health and Human Resources has posted warnings for everyone to stay off the Dan River downstream from the spill and not to eat fish or crustaceans pulled for the waters.
Dean Naujoks, the Yadkin Riverkeeper, cautioned that people should not grow complacent if they hear that water skimmed from the surface of the Dan is barely polluted as it nears Danville, Va., some 20 miles downstream from the spill site.
“You can treat that water for drinking, as the City of Danville is doing, and it will be OK,” said Naujoks, holding up a clear container filled with coal-ash sludge. “But at lower levels and on the bottom, the toxins will be accumulating in the aquatic system. It’s very likely that this is an environmental problem that will get worse over time.”
He added that the potential impact on agriculture — where farmers pull water from the Dan for irrigation — is also concern that needs to be monitored..
Justin Catanoso is a journalist based in Greensboro, N.C. He is director of journalism at Wake Forest University.
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