Saturday, July 6, 2019

Son of Immigrants Towers on Immigrants


DJT’s Duplicity

On the winks and nods of politicians and partners, the acquiescence of unmovable bi-partisans; on loopholes and laws legislated, signed, and adjudicated down through the years; on the backs of and earnings stolen from workers (old and new immigrants, documented and undocumented) — a man gets rich and super- towers beyond-reach rich, out of touch with the masses, walled off in a rarefied air of lies, lackeys and leisured billionaires.

And despite walls of protection, the rich man’s duplicity in the immigrant matter oozes out.

The Hill January 2, 2019

A
ttorney for “five immigrant women who had “worked at President Trump’s New Jersey golf club” said his clients reported ‘a very high number of (undocumented) employees at the golf club who … (had) also (been) brought in to work there and who may share similar stories.’”

Axios April 30, 2019

C
andidate Trump then U.S. President Donald Trump “has made fighting illegal immigration a core part of his presidency and 2020 re-election campaign, but multiple reports over the past year have revealed that his businesses likely benefited from cheap, undocumented labor.”

The Hill July 6, 2019

The Trump Organization has fires “close to 20 undocumented workers from its golf clubs in recent months, the result of an audit conducted by the Trump Organization after The New York Times reported in December on undocumented people working as housekeepers at the organization’s Bedminster (Somerset County, New Jersey) property.”

Treasury funding Predatory Capitalists

T
he federal government (as of June 30, 2019)
“… has spent nearly $3.8 billion on ongoing grants and contracts initiated (during the Donald Trump presidency) related to ‘unaccompanied alien children’ (UACs), or undocumented immigrant kids who crossed into the U.S. alone or were separated from adults — family or otherwise — after entering the country.…”
Biggest takers include: “… top nonprofit [i.e., profit-taking] shelter companies … Texas-based Southwest Key Programs ($1.5 billion)”; “New York-based Cayuga Home for Children ($114 million)”; “for-profit businesses … (security firm) MVM ($213 million)”; and … “subsidiary of the company” on whose board is “former Trump DHS Secretary John Kelly…, shelter operator Comprehensive Health Services ($292 million).”
Biggest looters of U.S. Treasury: Trump’s departments of Health and Human Services (HHS) and Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
New York Times July 5, 2019
Everybody does it. Why pick on me for hiring my undocumented immigrants 

R
esponding to his golf clubs and other properties’ immigrant question, U.S. President Donald Trump says
“‘I don’t know because I don’t run it’ … But … probably every club in the United States has that because it seems to be, from what I understand, a way that people did business.’”
The times continues: “Many undocumented workers … at Trump properties including resorts in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Westchester County, New York, and Jupiter, Florida, have come forward … and said they were also employed (by the Trump organization) using phony Social Security numbers and green cards.”

Appeal to Humanity
Immigrants break through Duplicity
 
L
etter from President Trump from his undocumented workers

Dear President Trump:
All of us signing this letter have worked as undocumented workers at one of your golf clubs; some for more than ten years.
We are writing to respectfully request a meeting with you. We are modest people who represent the dreams of the one million undocumented men, women and children who live and work in this country. We love America and want to talk to you about helping to give us a chance to become legal.
We know you and your family; we worked very hard to make your clubs a success and to keep your members and visitors happy. You know many of us and will recall how hard we worked for you, your family and your golf clubs. We all took great pride in our hard work and years of service to make your clubs successful.
You know we are hard workers and that we are not criminals or seeking a free ride in America. We all pay our taxes, love our faith and our family, and simply want to find a place for ourselves to make America even better.
We want to wake up every day next to our spouse, give our children kisses before they go off to school, and as mothers and fathers, we want to work hard so that our children will follow our example so that their future is part of the destiny of the United States of America. However, in order for this to happen in harmony, we need the opportunity to legalize our immigration status.
We believe you have a heart and will do the right thing to find a home for us here in America so that we can step out of the shadows and not deport us and our friends and family.
Thank you for considering our request.

Humbly yours,
[Handwritten signatures followed]




Sources

Axios “Trump Organization under investigation for not paying undocumented workers” Rashaan Ayesh April 30, 2019 https://www.axios.com/trump-organization-undocumented-workers-new-york-investigation-e26d7239-ef1b-4439-8be0-fc569524ed80.html

The Hill “Attorney says more undocumented workers are employed at Trump golf course” January 2, 2019 https://thehill.com/hilltv/rising/423465-attorney-says-more-undocumented-workers-are-employed-at-trump-golf-course

The Hill “Undocumented immigrant workers fired from Trump golf clubs seeking White House meeting” by Jessica Campisi July 6, 2019 https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/451818-undocumented-immigrant-workers-fired-from-trumps-golf-clubs-seeking

Truthout “The Nonprofits and Businesses Making Millions From Detaining Migrant Children” June 30, 2019 (article produced by Sludge, an independent, ad-free investigative news site covering money in politics) https://truthout.org/articles/the-nonprofits-and-businesses-making-millions-from-detaining-migrant-children/

New York Times “‘I Don’t Run It’: Trump Responds to Reports of Undocumented Workers at His Properties” by Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs and Miriam Jordan July 5, 2019 https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/05/us/trump-golf-course-undocumented-immigrants.html

Washington Post “Letter from undocumented workers to Trump” July 3, 2019 https://www.washingtonpost.com/context/letter-from-undocumented-workers-to-trump/6914d6ac-a7ca-43ec-b7db-f6d002cf6b9a/?utm_term=.725f5cfcc196
Business Insider (excerpts) Lauren Frias July 4, 2019 https://www.businessinsider.com/undocumented-workers-at-trump-golf-club-write-letter-to-president-2019-7

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Friday, July 5, 2019

Amidst Wasteful Rich, Human Beings Discarded to “Community of Grace”


Not grace, greatness, nor goodness—America’s disgraceful inhumanity

The discard of human beings is callousness and carelessness. It reflects the failure of U.S. leadership up and down the spectrum of governance, public work and service, and the failure of concern of the public at large.

Mass homelessness should not be happening in the United States or in ANY Western “developed” country.


I

t is not a question of “can” discarded people subsist sickened and in sickened conditions; or
“Can” they endure or be resourceful in ghettos of squalor, prey to whatever wind or whim, to anyone and anything; or 
“Can” they survive neglect.
It is not a question of people’s “choosing” to be homeless or discarded (this is a ridiculous notion!).
H
omelessness is America’s inhumanity to its people. It cannot be fixed by and should not be a job opportunity for journalists or nonprofits, not-for-profits, or non-governmental organizations; not a charity chance or hand-out opportunity for carving a notch in a brand or claiming a place in a Christendom's “heaven.” 

In a KPFA lead-in for Lucy Kang's documentary “The Community of Grace” is this (italics added):

Just about everywhere in this country — especially in California and especially in the Bay Area — homelessness is on the rise. The most visible signs of this are the clusters of tents and RVs that seem to spring up everywhere there’s a little stretch of unclaimed land.

They get covered a lot. Usually only when there’s a fire, or an eviction – some kind of crisis that throws the people who live there into conflict with city officials.

But there are a lot of people living their day to day lives in those tents and RVs. There are a lot of people trying to figure out how to get their needs met, under very trying circumstances.
This is the face of nation of misplaced priorities—better to manufacture bombs that make endless wars, better to buy, sell and drop bombs, leave samples for endless conflict, destruction, death and injury. Violence everywhere all the time is more important than monitoring and ensuring forever the rights of human being AS human beings!

H

omelessness is not (should not be) a way of life. These conditions are the consequences of a
U.S. culture and character of criminal callousness
Failure of moral and able leadership
Failure of permanent accessible and affordable and professionally-staffed systems and institutions of support, work, shelter, educational and training, mental and physical care;
Failure of a populace (a body politic) to care for all people and therefore for society at large.
From “sea to shining sea,” “crown … good with brotherhood”— one of America’s many empty slogans sung between shopping sprees.


Make America great again” is sloganized by a man so removed from reality that he wouldn’t know “greatness” if it stared him in the face.

The measure of a nation and people is not in sloganized “greatness” or in the pompously pious preaching “treatment of the least of these.” 
There is no “least of these” or “least of us.”
These are condescending notions conjured up be self-righteous, delusional people.
The measure of a nation and people is its embrace of equality one with the other. The measure of a nation and people is not in “greatness” but in goodness.
Conditions covered in the Kang documentary reflect conditions all across the United States of (exceptionalism) America. Far from grace, these conditions reflect America's wilful (wealth over want) disgrace. To any sane person, the conditions are unquestionably, in every respect, unacceptable.



Source/peg
KPFA “The Community of Grace by Lucy Kang May 3, 2019; rebroadcast Wednesday July 4, 2019 https://kpfa.org/featured-episode/grace/
“Just about everywhere in this country, and especially in California, and especially in the Bay Area, homelessness is on the rise. The most visible signs of this are the clusters of tents and RVs that seem to spring up everywhere there’s a little stretch of unclaimed land.
They get covered a lot, but usually only when there’s a fire, or an eviction – some kind of crisis that throws the people who live there into conflict with city officials.
But there are a lot of people living their day to day lives in those tents and RVs. There are a lot of people trying to figure out how to get their needs met, under very trying circumstances.
Long-form reporter Lucy Kang spent more than two months visiting, recording interviews, and learning the rhythms of daily life at one place called the Community of Grace: the rules they live by, how it enforces them, how people wound up there, and where they hope to get to in the future.”

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Thursday, July 4, 2019

… Sea to Shining Sea

Homelessness: Gavin Christopher, meet Donald John and six U.S. presidencies  

Pandering, Neglect, Misplaced Priorities

H
omelessness in the United States has deepened, accelerated and languished under government leadership’s neglect going back at least to the 1980s.

Why? Because of
  • Economic shifts
  • Disestablishment of effective government
  • Failed leadership: failure in planning, new ideas, innovation
  • Inaccessible industry or substantive work offering living wages causing a widening inequality gap
  • Rise of AIDS and untreated mental health issues including drug addiction and corresponding rise in capitalists’ (supply-demand) drug trafficking and unaffordable drugs, not unrelated to public officials’ (pandering) unplanned emptying of mental and other care institutions and handing over the public health system to capitalists, thus feeding fraud and rendering care unaffordable or out of reach for the masses
  • Endless U.S.-perpetrated wars whose direct consequences (ignored and lied about) are endless refugees and mentally and physically wounded people (including veterans), both problems band aided and/or generally left to languish without long-term care or solution.

The United States through a cadre of leaders has lost or never cared to take hold of and uphold the responsibility of “providing for the ‘common defense’” and “promoting the ‘general welfare’” (words in the U.S. Constitution); and thus contributing to the overall fabric and quality of society.

T
he mode, character and method in governance, manifest in U.S. leaders, public officials and their partners, has been infighting and blame, distraction and divisiveness, show and chaos, and pandering to narrower and narrower nonsensical and/or moneyed interests.

Sea to shining sea …
As homeless people line the streets, byways and under passages of California, the governor of this state pathetically panders to and prioritizes “hair.” Were it not to serious in consequences, it would be funny.
Though people have been homeless on the streets of the nation’s capital for 40 years or more, the current U.S. president, in one of his many outbursts, seems to suggest that homeless people have taken to the streets only since his two-year tenure in office and are therefore a personal affront to him.
Seeming ignorant or dismissive of the fact that successive failures, ineptitude and carelessness, in U.S. leadership have contributed to the crisis in homelessness, the president maintains that Washington’s homeless people are an attack on him and an “embarrassment” to the United States—whenever he (the “King”) takes a break from his many immigrant-served-U.S. secret-serviced cloistered towers and golf courses to play host to “dignitaries.
… And crown thy good with brotherhood from sea to shining sea …” America, America Independence Day 2019



News pegs

Associated Press “Trump’s claim about DC homeless raises eyebrows” by Jill Colvin July 3, 2019, https://www.apnews.com/36eba40cbcd64d93921e1d75aa7e751a

WJLA (AP) “Trump says he purged homeless from DC streets so foreign dignitaries wouldn't see them” by Jill Colvin Associated Press|, July 3, 2019, https://wjla.com/news/local/trump-purged-homeless-dc-streets

ABC7 “Crown Act: Newsom signs law that protects against hair discrimination” July 3, 2019  
https://abc7.com/governor-signs-law-that-protects-against-hair-discrimination/5376987/

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Long Way from Madison—Time to Rethink, Revise

Qualifications Standards Enforcement  Prerequisites for Public Office We are a long way—carelessly and arrogantly distanced— from Madison, ...