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Some captain at an ICE detention facility appears to have lost his rag last night with a small group of protesters blocking the entrance to the ICE facility. He drove at them in his pick up. Stopped, drove slowly into some people who decided to crowd the front of his pick up (1 guy suffered a broken leg it seems) and then got out of his vehicle and started pepper spraying people.

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Aaron Regunberg, a former state representative and activist, said the night started off as a "lovely, peaceful protest," with songs and speeches to make "a powerful statement." But he said the scene turned violent in an instant when the truck drove into the line of protesters that he said included three minors. He said guards then pepper-sprayed the crowd.

"It was peaceful and it was non-violent," he said. "You had minors and elderly there. Then there were elderly people on the ground with their eyes all puffed out (from the pepper spray). It was scary in the moment. This happened with all those bystanders around and all the media right there."

Regunberg said those who were there have been urged to go to the Central Falls Police Department to give witness statements today after he said police did not take statements last night.

"We were shocked there were no arrests last night," he said. "This was a violent assault."

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"Never Again Action" issued a statement to Patch Thursday morning: "Last night we experienced a small example of the violence that ICE uses against our immigrant neighbors every day. As Jews, our families taught us the lessons of the Holocaust, and we promised that we would speak out and act if we ever saw a group of people being targeted, dehumanized, and rounded up.

"We will continue to answer the call of our ancestors and sound the alarm: #NeverAgainIsNow. Every person in the United States needs to join the fight to close the concentration camps, shut down ICE, and secure permanent protection for all undocumented people in the U.S."

https://patch.com/rhode-island/providence/ri-protest-turns-chaotic-wyatt-detention-center

 

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A view from the right about what's wrong with the shithole.

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...Once upon a time, Youngstown, Ohio, was a typical smokestack city, part of the steel belt running through Pennsylvania and Ohio. As with Camden, things there started turning south in the 1970s. From 1977 to 1987, the city lost 50,000 jobs in steel and related industries. By the late 1980s, the years of Ronald Reagan’s presidency when it was “morning again in America,” it was midnight in Youngstown: foreclosures, an epidemic of business bankruptcies, and everywhere collapsing community institutions including churches, unions, families, and the municipal government itself.

Burglaries, robberies, and assaults doubled after the steel plants closed. In two years, child abuse rose by 21%, suicides by 70%. One-eighth of Mahoning County went on welfare. Streets were filled with dead storefronts and the detritus of abandoned homes: scrap metal and wood shingles, shattered glass, stripped-away home siding, canning jars, and rusted swing sets. Each week, 1,500 people visited the Salvation Army’s soup line...

 

...In the 1980s, when Jack Welch, soon to be known as“Neutron Jack” for his ruthlessness, became CEO of General Electric, he set out to raise the company’s stock price by gutting the workforce. It only took him six years, but imagine what it was like in Schenectady, New York, which lost 22,000 jobs; Louisville, Kentucky, where 13,000 fewer people made appliances; Evendale, Ohio, where 12,000 no longer made lights and light fixtures; Pittsfield, Massachusetts, where 8,000 plastics makers lost their jobs; and Erie, Pennsylvania, where 6,000 locomotive workers got green slips.

Life as it had been lived in GE’s or other one-company towns ground to a halt. Two travelling observers, Dale Maharidge and Michael Williamson, making their way through the wasteland of middle America in 1984 spoke of “medieval cities of rusting iron” and a largely invisible landscape filling up with an army of transients, moving from place to place at any hint of work. They were camped out under bridges, riding freight cars, living in makeshift tents in fetid swamps, often armed, trusting no one, selling their blood, eating out of dumpsters...

...One-third of Detroit, an area the size of San Francisco, is now little more than empty houses, empty factories, and fields gone feral. A whole industry of demolition, waste-disposal, and scrap-metal companies arose to tear down what once had been. With a jobless rate of 29%, some of its citizens are so poor they can’t pay for funerals, so bodies pile up at mortuaries. Plans are even afoot to let the grasslands and forests take over, or to give the city to private enterprise...

...The ascendancy of high finance didn’t just replace an industrial heartland in the process of being gutted; it initiated that gutting and then lived off it, particularly during its formative decades. The FIRE sector, that is, not only supplanted industry, but grew at its expense–and at the expense of the high wages it used to pay and the capital that used to flow into it.

Think back to the days of junk bonds, leveraged buy-outs, megamergers and acquisitions, and asset stripping in the 1980s and 1990s. (Think, in fact, of Bain Capital.) What was getting bought and stripped and closed up supported windfall profits in high-interest-paying junk bonds. The stupendous fees and commissions that went to those “engineering” such transactions were being picked from the carcass of a century and a half of American productive capacity. The hollowing out of the United States was well under way long before anyone dreamed up the “fiscal cliff.”

For some long time now, our political economy has been driven by investment banks, hedge funds, private equity firms, real estate developers, insurance goliaths, and a whole menagerie of ancillary enterprises that service them. But high times in FIRE land have depended on the downward mobility of working people and the poor, cut adrift from more secure industrial havens and increasingly from the lifelines of public support. They have been living instead in the “pit of austerity.” Soon many more of us will join them.

A failed state.

The UN should organise relief, and the world community should arrange regime change.

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On 18/08/2019 at 13:40, VILLAMARV said:

Does someone want to try and explain the appeal of Warren to me? I'm not getting it.

It's the way she seductively hoids the microphone for some I guess, go on, just imagine it's a Cadbury Flake

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53 minutes ago, Seat68 said:

Even his most devout supporters must think he can be an absolute arse. 

No matter what you think of him,  at times ,  he is actually a funny bloke IMO. 

He can keep a straight face when no one else can that is for sure.  I dunno,  if he was a stand up,  he would be excellent I am sure of it.

He delivers sentences like a bunny hopping learner driver,  you are never quite settled where he is going,  sometimes there is no punchline or full stop,  just something else instead.  When he asks reporters questions,  they really should get their faces as well when he asks them.

If you watch him as a comedian doing a short skit,  doing an impression of himself,  being himself, as POTUS but as an ironic impression of what he could be like as president it's hilarious.  If you remember he is the actual POTUS,  not so amusing.

 

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22 hours ago, bickster said:

 

Pedant but Leif Erikson actually discovered Canada , he never went into America  ... and  Bjarni Herjólfsson beat him to it as well

Edited by tonyh29
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So given the success of hammering Corbyn with the anti-semitism thing, anyone think that Trump has taken some inspiration or had a chat with Boris, given his Dem Jew voters are traitors thing, following on from Omar? Or am I just connecting idiots here? 

I haven't paid a lot of attention to this issue in the UK lately. An interesting reaction going on over here this morning, given how craven both sides are in their desire for votes/support of the various Jewish etc. lobby groups in the US.

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The anti-Semitism smear was building over there a couple of months ago when AOC, Omar etc was becoming a thing. There were a number of references to them being anti-Semites. The Israelis also (shock horror!) decried Omar I think as anti-semitic at the same time they were shouting for Corbyn to go for his clear Jew hatred iirc.

It'll be interesting to see if it catches on over there. I think it might have to have a different approach/flavour to it in the US, given the much more obvious Jewish demographic and the basically ingrained pro-Israeli bent to the US.

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3 hours ago, bickster said:

He's becoming a parody of himself

I still think its a massive candid camera/beadle's about ruse!

They're pushing it even further now

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