This is how the system of white supremacy operates. The media is used 2 create stereotypes like blk on blk crime.They need black men to fill jail cells for the Prison Indstrial complex
You know what? I’m tired of this. I do not know what exactly they are waiting for. I mean our government comes up with “reasons” to invade other countries, such as Syria, like their government is allegedly violating human rights or something like that. but… I mean for other countries, they do not even have to go deep to bomb the fuck out of this place, they can just look at our media. And this has been happening to people of color since the media has existed.
Pittsburgh police shot a black 13 year old running away from them to death on Juneteenth
Pittsburgh police shot a black 13 year old running away from them to death on Juneteenth
Pittsburgh police shot a black 13 year old running away from them to death on Juneteenth.
If it is not clear from the text, they shot him in the back at a distance and was no threat to the officers
I saw a blurb on the news this morning about an individual shot by police and I just assumed the rest of the details. How fucking sad is that. I’m ashamed of my town right now.
I feel like the police violence is escalating here. They beat Jordan Miles (also a teenager at the time
And finally murdered this child. His name was Antwan.
if you are in the pittsburgh area there’s a march at the courthouse downtown tomorrow at 12 pm. here’s a link to the event
to summarize:
-police were following the car antwon was a passenger in because it matched a description (note: antwon was 17 yrs old, not 13 like many of the reports say. There was a 13 yr old on scene, however).
-police eventually stopped the car & ordered the driver out/onto the ground. antwon & another passenger bolted
-police fired 3 rounds into his back. Although 2 guns were found in the car later, Rose was unarmed when he was killed
-the driver was later released without being arrested
-the name of the officer who killed antwon rose has not been released. What we do know is that he has been put on administrative leave, and he was involved in other local departments 7 years prior. However, he was sworn in the same night as he killed Antwon.
-there were no dash/body cams, but a witness took a video. Be warned, it is graphic by nature.
–here is the statement that the family of the victim released
The fact they feel it’s necessary to shoot when we run away instead of chasing us proves there’s a problem. And it’s not the in the training received before being sworn in it’s their character in general. They are literally giving badges to demons out here. Breaks my fucking heart.
He was 17
His 13 year old brother was in the car as well. Initial reports said he was 13. I’m sure you can understand how that could happen in the chaos that transpired right?
Jitneys were the precursor to Uber or Lyft. Imagine you and your brother get a Lyft home and the cops pull the driver over. Then shoot at you as you run away.
He was a poet, an avid skateboarder, and volunteer at local charities. Loved by family and friends.
There have been at least three protests. Currently one is shutting down a major highway. Pictures above are from earlier today
There will be another protest tomorrow. There are also several recordings and live feeds of the protests on FB
So for anyone who thinks the claims of child trafficking with kids separated from their families at the border are melodramatic and baseless, here’s some stuff you should look at.
For an example, let’s take a look at one of the places a number of these children were sent to: Bethany Christian Services, a global nonprofit organization based out of Michigan, who have federal contracts with the government for finding placement for refugee and immigrant children, which is why they were one of the first places these children were sent. Per their own website, they’re a faith-based organization that provides foster care, adoption, resettlement services and other assistance, and their only priority is the well-being of the children they care for.
Sounds good, right? Defenders of this organization have claimed that BCS is against the separation policy and have called for an end to it, but despite searching, I haven’t actually been able to find any such comments from any official spokesperson for the agency.
However, I did find this:
“Right now, we have 99 foster care beds at Bethany across the country, and we’re at capacity,” Dona Abbott, branch director of refugee services at Bethany Christian Services, said. “We’re now recruiting new homes and we’re approaching our government with the offer to provide more beds.”
Now, here’s where some eyebrows should start to be raised.
BCS is not simply a nonprofit charity organization that looks after children in need as best they can in accordance with existing laws. They also are extremely aggressive lobbyists who push for legislation in accordance with their personal religious views….views which most people would consider Christian fundamentalist.
As previously reported by PRA, this past summer Michigan passed a statewide religious exemption law that gives adoption agencies the right to claim a religious exemption from having to serve LGBTQ couples. The DeVos family donated $300,000 in 2013 alone to Bethany Christian Services, Michigan’s leading adoption agency and the main group that lobbied for the religious exemption bill.
So to make sure we’re still on the same page here, let’s be clear about that…..one of the first agencies the government relocated these children to due to existing federal contracts just so happens to be a primary beneficiary of a member of the Trump administration’s charitable givings….and also just so happens to be in the habit of using said funds in the lobbying of religious fundamentalist based laws that have successfully barred potential parents in at least one state from adopting children if they happen to be of a demographic that Bethany Christian Services (and the DeVos family) deem unfit to parent children.
But remember….these people are still clearly, definitely JUST in it to help kids in need.
Now keep going back further. Here’s a book that was written in 2013, called
When Jessie Hawkins’ adopted daughter told her she had another mom back in Ethiopia, Jessie didn’t, at first, know what to think. She’d wanted her adoption to be great story about a child who needed a home and got one, and a family led by God to adopt. Instead, she felt like she’d done something wrong.
Adoption has long been enmeshed in the politics of reproductive rights, pitched as a “win-win” compromise in the never-ending abortion debate. But as Kathryn Joyce makes clear in The Child Catchers, adoption has lately become even more entangled in the conservative Christian agenda.
So this book apparently is an investigative look into Evangelical missionary adoption and the links to illegal adoptions and literal human trafficking. Crimes committed by faith-based adoption and foster care agencies and parents who believe its their mission to ‘save’ children from third-world countries by taking them away from parents who they deem unable to properly care for them (and who are unlikely to raise them according to the Christian fundamentalist views these organizations and parents view it as their mission to spread, just like missionaries of past centuries).
I haven’t had a chance to read the book in full myself yet, so I can’t attest to everything in it, just various excerpts I’ve found online. Yes, it is biased – the author takes a clear stance against these groups and their views and actions, but she does not claim to be impartial, nor is she trying to be. The book is her research into proving why her beliefs these people have committed criminal acts are not unfounded. I mention this because this unapologetic bias is what the 20% of reviews on this book that gave it 1-star have focused on to discredit the author and her conclusions here, in the name of defending these various organizations. However, the 48% of reviews that gave it 5-stars frequently express how regardless of any conclusions made within the book, one thing that stood out for most of them is how exhaustively researched and detailed the book was.
And why did I come across this book specifically, and link it here?
Because Bethany Christian Services is one of the organizations the author investigated based on suspicions of child trafficking and illegal adoptions.
Please note….even if you personally do not draw the same conclusions as the author from her research into them, it should at the very least be deemed significant that this organization, one of those that the Trump administration has prioritized sending these children to due to previously established contracts, is
a) Ready and looking to recruit more homes and supply more beds for children the administration sends them, despite already being stretched to the capacity of their ability to care for the children they’re already responsible for.
b) Has an existing relationship with The DeVos family, many of whom (not just Betsy) are part of the administration’s inner circle, and this existing relationship includes lobbying for the advancement of legislation born of their religious fundamentalist views and the prioritization of child care that’s in accordance to what they think a good conservative upbringing should look like
c) has been under scrutiny due to rumors of child trafficking, illegal adoptions and crimes against children in the name of their personal religious convictions stretching back at least five years before these current events
And this is just ONE of the places where we KNOW some of these kids taken from their parents have ended up. It doesn’t even address the hundreds, potentially thousands of kids who’ve already mysteriously ‘slipped through the cracks’ with no official accounting of their whereabouts.
Also something to consider is what happens AFTER these ‘good Christian families’ open up their homes to these poor, disenfranchised refugee children who are just so desperately in need of their enlightened priorities when raising children to be good conservatives.
It shouldn’t shock anyone but people who don’t actually have the well-being of children in mind when they adopt, but rather are just playing into self-serving white savior bullshit and some religious fervor to replicate the missionary work they feel its a Christian mandate to spread……shockingly, many of these people end up ‘regretting’ these adoptions when the children traumatized by being ripped away from families who actually do love them and want them aren’t appropriately grateful. Who have attitude problems or behavioral issues or just aren’t receptive to the ideas and values these people try and drill into them.
That’s a link to a Reuters investigative article that delved into the practice of ‘rehoming’. Or when fucking pieces of shit who adopt children from other countries through legal or illegal means change their minds once the novelty of the living human being they vowed to guard and protect but really just view as a shiny new toy wears off…..literally just….give these kids away to whomever will take them.
Warning, the article can be triggering as hell not just because of what it describes, but how it describes it, frequently referencing these parents in much more generous language than what I just used and acting like there’s something worth empathizing with in their behavior. I think it’s worth the read if you can stomach it, however, because of the facts it does lay down about this downright EVIL practice.
An excerpt from the article:
Part 1: When a Liberian girl proves too much for her parents, they advertise her online and give her to a couple they’ve never met. Days later, she goes missing.
KIEL, Wisconsin – Todd and Melissa Puchalla struggled for more than two years to raise Quita, the troubled teenager they’d adopted from Liberia. When they decided to give her up, they found new parents to take her in less than two days – by posting an ad on the Internet.
Also….three guesses what kind of people go looking online for ads about troubled kids people are looking to unload without any kind of paper trail.
Go ahead. Guess what kind of people those kids end up with.
So in conclusion…..fuck Bethany Christian Services, fuck the DeVos family, fuck the Trump administration, and fuck whomever defends any of this vile, despicable shit by harping on about how people are just being melodramatic and exaggerating and that nobody’s actually trafficking immigrant children here.
So y’all need a reminder on what the word “agenda” is?
Putting even more police officers in schools will only feed the school-to-prison pipeline. And needlessly endanger, arrest and criminalize innocent black and brown students, destroy their futures in the process, and in essence, help to maintain a permanent underclass.
“Today it is perfectly legal to discriminate against criminals in nearly all the ways in which it was once legal to discriminate against African Americans. Once you’re labeled a felon, the old forms of discrimination – employment discrimination, housing discrimination, denial of the right to vote, exclusion from jury service – are suddenly legal.“ – Michelle Alexander
Make no mistake: The true agenda here is not “school safety.” The real goals are to, 1. Keep the for-profit, prison industrial complex supplied with cheap prison laborers, and, 2. Disenfranchise the next generation of black and non-white voters, who will face additional hurdles to finding employment, rental housing, home loans, student loans, public food assistance, and most importantly, voting — all because they will now have a ~criminal~ record for minor school infractions.
The cover of the next Stern, a German news magazine.
The title Sein Kampf (transl. his struggle) is a play on the title of Hitler’s autobiography Mein Kampf (transl. my struggle).
The full translation of the cover would be
HIS STRUGGLE
Neonazis, Ku-Klux-Klan, Racism:
How Donald Trump is stirring up hatred in America
When Germans call you a Nazi….
I see so much commentary in the tags about how Trump can’t be a Nazi because he’s pro-Israel, and I’m sitting here like, guys. Children. Nazi doesn’t mean “kills Jews.” That was the horrible outcome. The ideology itself was putting one’s own nation above all else (ring a bell?) while undermining democratic values (RING A BELL?) and being blatantly racist (RING A… you know what, forget it, you’re not listening to me anyway).
Instead of anti-communism you now have fierce pro-capitalism and instead of Jewish people being called animals you now have immigrants facing the same hatred. You already have the denunciations and people walking from door to door trying to root out “illegals.”
Current US politics may not involve any gas chambers, but Hitler didn’t burst on the political scene with “Let’s kill all the Jews!” either. If you honestly think US policies won’t escalate further, especially if Trump gets a second term, you’re standing chin-deep in denial.
As Jewish people have consistently pointed out: Trump also DOES surround himself with a lot of prominent antisemites.
Which is consistent with his support of the state of Israel because supporting antisemitism and supporting Israel are compatible. If you want your own country to not have any Jewish people without having to plan all the messy ‘genocide’ stuff, it’s useful to have a country to push them towards. (a country which conveniently makes a good military base for US imperialism). No surprise there.
If anyone thinks all this shit isn’t going to also harm Jewish Americans, they’re either fooling themselves or is deliberately ignoring antisemitism.
(Trigger warning: descriptions of murder methods, Holocaust)
Jup, people think of the Holocaust as this pre-made plan that was thought out from start to finish, but that’s not true. Hitler dreamed of a ‘Jewish-free’ Germany from day one, but how that could be achieved was never sure.
After his rise to power in 1933, the first concentration camps were filled mainly with political opponents, (of course quite a few political opponents were Jewish, since Jewish Germans had very good reasons not to like Hitler).
The Nazi regime started out banning Jewish people from jobs, banning interracial marriages, trying to isolate Jewish people socially, using street violence and pushing Jewish people to leave Germany. The Nazis didn’t really care where the Jewish people went as long as they left.
At this point in history,
extermination
camps for mass murder were most definitely not on the agenda. No one had invented them yet and the isolating of Jewish people was not a deliberate step towards mass murder. Pushing immigration effective enough.
By 1939, around 250,000 of Germany’s 437,000 Jews had emigrated to places like the US, Argentina, the United Kingdom, Palestine, and other
countries.
But a lot of countries closed their borders to Jewish refugees and there were very few places left to go to by 1938. Then Germany invaded Poland in 1939 and suddenly it had a loooooot more Jewish people and no place left to push them to. So it began rounding up Jewish people in ghettos, without really knowing what to do with them next. Mass deportation was considered. It was in this period that they started thinking about pushing all Jewish Poles to move to Madagascar or some other colony.
Pushing all Jewish Poles into the Soviet Union was also considered and when the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union in june 1941, they started mass murdering Jewish populations through mass shootings. When that proved too nauseating for the soldiers, gas vans were brought in to gas people to death on site.
When the war in the west and the war in the east both dragged on, it became clear that there was no way to send Jewish people out of the Third Reich through battlefields. Only then, at the start of 1942, was the idea of pushing Jewish people out of the Reich abandoned completely and only then was the decision made to kill all Jewish people within their territory and only then were extermination camps conceived.
TL;DR: For the majority of the history of the Third Reich, violently pushing Jewish people to immigrate was an important part of Nazi policy and possible locations for a ‘Jewish state’ were considered to achieve that goal. Genocide became a nazi policy slowly over the course of 9 years.
Other cartoons that the publisher refused to print before firing Rogers:
A political cartoonist who had satirized every President during his 25 years at the paper is fired for drawing Trump cartoons.
“This is precisely the time,” Pittsburgh mayor Bill Peduto (often the target of Rogers’ cartoons) said, “when the constitutionally protected free press – including critics like Rob Rogers – should be celebrated and supported, and not fired for doing their jobs. This decision, just one day after Trump labeledthe news media is ‘our country’s biggest enemy.’“
Y’know, like dictators always do under fascist regimes.
Hey so… just a friendly reminder: Trump is going to pull the US off the Human Rights Council because the US got called out for Human Rights violations due to it’s policy of separating families at the border.
Let me repeat that:
THE US WAS ACCUSED BY THE HUMAN RIGHTS COUNCIL OF HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATIONS AND INSTEAD OF ADDRESSING THE CONCERNS/STOPPING THE VIOLATIONS, THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION DECIDED TO JUST LEAVE THE COUNCIL ALL TOGETHER.
While outraged Americans across the country are calling their elected representatives and taking to the streets to protest the Trump administration’s forcible separation of parents and children at the U.S.-Mexico border, intelligence and defense contractors are raking in millions thanks to the cruel practice.
According to reporting by the Daily Beast, the intelligence contractor MVM, Inc. won an $8 million five-year contract to “provide assistance” in detention centers for unaccompanied children, and has made $42.9 million in less than a year, transporting minors to centers in Texas.
“It is mind-blowing that those types of industries would be even considered with respect to the care of children.” —Matthew Kolken, immigration attorney
Such facilities have become crowded with children in recent months, especially following the administration’s unveiling of its new “zero tolerance” policy for undocumented immigrants who cross the southern border seeking asylum—under which adults are imprisoned while they await immigration trials and any children traveling with them are sent off to detention centers, sometimes thousands of miles away.
Previously, MVM worked with the CIA in the Iraq War, during which its employees were accused of “procuring and possessing unauthorized weapons and explosives.” The company has also faced accusations of discrimination against employees who were Muslim and African-born.
“I’m guessing that in [MVM’s] mission statement, one of the central components isn’t the care of refugee children,” immigration attorney Matthew Kolken told the Daily Beast. “It is mind-blowing that those types of industries would be even considered with respect to the care of children. They’re not equipped to be able to do it. Would you want your child to be dropped off in their hands? I know I wouldn’t.”
Still, MVM as well as the defense contractor General Dynamics are rapidly hiring new employees to oversee the dozens of detention centers for children who have been taken from their parents or guardians after crossing the border.
Recently-advertised positions include compliance coordinators tasked with overseeing detention centers, youth care workers, and bilingual transport specialists.
Our government is responsible for child trafficking.
Fuck. Trump. Fuck your congress. Your flag. Your government. Everything about it.
When news anchors can’t deliver news because it’s too horrible, we have a problem. News anchors see Some Shit, but this is too fucking much.
I have not seen this many reporters choke up, tear up, or outright break down on air since the first days after the September 11th attacks. Dear God, please let this be the turning point. Internment camps for children…where else is there lower than this?
wupacing 