fuckedupamerica

[fuckedupamerica]

The real issue with the COVID-19 lab leak theory? The US isn't spying on China like it used to

#usa #china

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Baltimore, Maryland - Taylor* was 13 when she first became a victim of sex trafficking. She had recently escaped from an abusive home and was living on the streets of Baltimore.

She was too young to work legally, but a close friend told her that she could make money by giving massages. Anxious to make a living, Taylor agreed.

"When I got out [to the hotel where the job was supposed to be] it wasn't what I expected," she said. "I got there, and they wouldn't let me leave."

It turned out that her friend was recruiting girls for a human trafficker. The traffickers forced Taylor to live and work out of hotels for the next two years.

A hotspot for human trafficking

Baltimore, Maryland is a hotspot for human trafficking, according to experts. The confluence of highways, including the I-95 corridor that connects Baltimore to other nearby cities like Washington, DC and New York City, combined with the proximity to several major airports, a plethora of hotels and casinos, and extreme poverty beside extreme wealth, has created the perfect conditions for the trafficking industry to thrive.

Several interstate highways cut through the heart of the city, running on the east and west of the Baltimore port. Thousands of trucks, cruise lines, and cargo ships pass through Baltimore each year.

Meanwhile, deep social divisions and a long history of racial and economic inequality also mark the local landscape. More than 100 years of segregation and racist housing and economic policies have divided Baltimore into an L-shaped corridor that runs north to south, where an advantaged majority white population lives, and a butterfly-shaped majority Black area spreading through the east and west of the city.

The "white L", as it is known, enjoys access to public transportation, bike lanes, and quality grocery stores. The majority Black neighbourhoods, meanwhile, are plagued by urban blight; dotted with boarded-up abandoned houses. These neighbourhoods experience gun violence paired with police brutality, including the now infamous 2015 murder of a 25-year-old Black man named Freddie Gray.

Today, neighbourhoods that are less than 50 percent Black receive almost four times the amount of investment as those where more than 85 percent of the population is Black, according to the Washington DC-based think-tank the Urban Institute.

These differences play out even in life expectancy, with a 20-year gap between the city's wealthiest neighbourhoods and its poorest. And inequality extends past the city's borders and into the suburban sprawl.

Read more: https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/baltimore-human-trafficking-industry-200621115219158.html

#usa #sex trafficking

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American military personnel are getting sick in significant numbers in the midst of the ongoing pandemic. As The New York Times reported in a piece buried in the back pages of its July 21st edition, “The infection rate in the services has tripled over the past six weeks as the United States military has emerged as a potential source of transmission both domestically and abroad.” Indeed, the military is sick and I think of it as both a personal and an imperial disaster. As the wife of a naval officer, I bear witness to the unexpected ways that disasters of all sorts play out among military families and lately I’ve been bracing for the Covid-19 version of just such a disaster.

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Most of the abuse never gets reported. Those cases reported often end with no action. Cases investigated sometimes can’t be proven, and many abusers have several victims.

And no one—not the schools, not the courts, not the state or federal governments—has found a surefire way to keep molesting teachers out of classrooms.

Those are the findings of an AP investigation in which reporters sought disciplinary records in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. The result is an unprecedented national look at the scope of sex offenses by educators—the very definition of breach of trust.

The seven-month investigation found 2,570 educators whose teaching credentials were revoked, denied, surrendered or sanctioned from 2001 through 2005 following allegations of sexual misconduct. […]

The findings draw obvious comparisons to sex abuse scandals in other institutions, among them the Roman Catholic Church. A review by America’s Catholic bishops found that about 4,400 of 110,000 priests were accused of molesting minors from 1950 through 2002.

Clergy abuse is part of the national consciousness after a string of highly publicized cases. But until now, there’s been little sense of the extent of educator abuse.

Beyond the horror of individual crimes, the larger shame is that the institutions that govern education have only sporadically addressed a problem that’s been apparent for years.

“From my own experience—this could get me in trouble—I think every single school district in the nation has at least one perpetrator. At least one,” says Mary Jo McGrath, a California lawyer who has spent 30 years investigating abuse and misconduct in schools. “It doesn’t matter if it’s urban or rural or suburban.”

One report mandated by Congress estimated that as many as 4.5 million students, out of roughly 50 million in American schools, are subject to sexual misconduct by an employee of a school sometime between kindergarten and 12th grade. That figure includes verbal harassment that’s sexual in nature.

Read more: http://www.nbcnews.com/id/21392345/ns/us_news-education/t/ap-sexual-misconduct-plagues-us-schools/

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Breaking Point: California's Homeless Crisis (Aug 19, 2019)

#usa #homelessness #homeless

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The massive interventions that made all this possible will soon come to an end — but the unemployment won’t.

On July 31, the $600 federal unemployment payments going to unemployed people every week will end, and there’s no sign they’ll be replaced with anything nearly as generous. In fact, many Republicans want to replace them with nothing at all — and there’s also little sign that another round of one-time stimulus checks will get mailed out. So income for tens of millions of households is likely to nose-dive in August.

That will coincide with evictions returning after being put on hold for months. This month, about one-third of renters were unable to pay their rent in full or at all, despite all the stimulus money. A federal law that bans evictions in any properties financed by federally backed mortgages — more than a quarter of all households, according to one estimate — expires on July 25, just a week before millions of people’s main economic lifeline is pulled away. Unless they are extended, statewide orders banning all evictions in places that have been hardest hit by the unemployment crisis will also expire around then: Florida’s on July 1, California’s on July 28, and New York’s on Aug. 20.

As millions of people experience a sudden collapse of their income at the very moment their landlords are allowed to start kicking them out, other bills will also come due. Payments on millions of paused student loans will begin again at the beginning of October; the more than 4 million homeowners who received a six-month pause on their mortgage after April’s mass layoffs will need to start making payments again at the end of October.

more: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/tomgara/economy-recession-coronavirus

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Real cool how tens of thousands of Detroit residents had their water access shutoff for “nonpayment” and don’t have access to drinking water or sanitation during a pandemic, and Michigan officials have explicitly stated that water is inaccessible because poor people spend too much of their money on “luxury cellphones” rather than paying utility bills. So for at least the past 6 years, people of Detroit have been forced to share limited supplies of water from unclean sources, and health research clearly shows connections between the city’s shutoffs and the spread of giardia and hepatitis. Michigan’s governor was petitioned by health officials, activists, city, and state officials yet again in November 2019 to end these water utility shutoffs in Detroit. But in February 2020, Michigan’s governor declined and decided not to consider this lack of water access an official “public health emergency,” only days before the arrival of covid/coronavirus. Now, there are tens of thousands of people, in the city alone, with no water during a pandemic.

Gathering to share water supplies provides a transmission pathway for the virus. But what are Detroiters supposed to do? People still have to drink water?

“This is an unfortunate accident. Bureaucracy got in the way. Individual responsibility. The post-industrial decline of manufacturing in the southern Great Lakes industrial corridor since the early 1970s has led to decrepit infrastructure and underfunded institutions, so this was inevitable. Why’d they buy a new laptop if they can’t afford food? People need to pay their bills and budget better.”

No. That’s not what happened.

Try: Antiblackness. Purposeful dispossession. Debt collection and debtors prison. Mass incarceration. Deliberately rerouting money away from communities, extracting it, consolidating corporate power. Michigan officials’ enthusiastic commitment to private industry, and facilitating resource extraction dependent on continued subjugation. Turning a blind eye while the poor die from illness left untreated due to abject poverty and malevolent local institutions.

Michigan officials knew what they were doing when they poisoned Flint. And, after so many home foreclosures and illnesses and deaths, they pretended to be surprised, feigning aloofness. “That’s unfortunate. How could this happen?” Michigan officials knew what they were doing when they stole local water sources to give to the Nestle corporation. Michigan officials knew what they were doing when they shutoff water to thousands in Detroit.

This “slow death.”  Poverty, illness, starvation, despair, exhaustion, incarceration, disregard. This slow death is still murder. Even if Michigan knows how to hide, even if Michigan wants to obscure how the machine works. We can see. They know we’re watching, right?

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When it comes to “crimes against humanity”, which Article 7 of the Rome Statue of the International Criminal Court defines as “widespread or systemic attack directed against any civilian population, with knowledge of attack”, there is simply no better candidate for prosecution than the United States of America. Among the 10 specific systemic crimes against civilians defined in Article 7 as crimes against humanity – murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation or forcible transfer of population, imprisonment or other severe deprivation of physical liberty, torture, sexual slavery, persecution against any identifiable group, enforced disappearance of person, and the crime of apartheid – the United States of America faithfully fulfills all.

Sung-Yoon Lee, American Hypocrisy Knows No Bounds (via beemill)

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Tete Gulley was a 31-year-old Black trans woman in Portland who was found hanging from a tree, dead. The police department ruled her death a suicide, and did not investigate further. Her family found out she had died through Facebook. Officials won’t look into the case further because there is “insufficient public interest”, despite numerous people of the homeless community witnesses contradicting that ruling. Someone even allegedly has a video. But due to negligent policing and, apparently, lack of public interest, the family hasn’t seen justice, let alone the autopsy.

We’re the public. Let’s show our interest.

Here is the petition demanding investigation into Tete, as well as accountability for the negligent behavior of the authorities. It also goes into further detail about her story.

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In the 1980s, the U.S. Subic Bay Naval Base in the Philippines was the largest U.S. military base outside of the U.S. with an estimated 500 million USD generated by the brothels surrounding it. Local traffickers and brothel owners engaged in the business of buying and selling women and girls to meet the demands of the servicemen stationed there. Alma, who had dreams of becoming an accountant, was one of the women sold in the local sex industry. After three years, she was able to escape this life and subsequently co-founded Buklod ng Kababaihan, a group that helps other exploited women. Though the U.S. bases in the Philippines officially closed in the 1990s, the problem persists today as U.S. sex tourists travel there to take advantage of the commercial sex industry entrenched by the once-large U.S. military presence. Thousands of U.S. servicemen are still deployed in the Philippines where they continue to seek out local women in prostitution despite laws against it. Alma and Buklod continue to fight the exploitation of the estimated 300,000 to 400,000 women and up to 100,000 children in the Philippines commercial sex industry. It is widely acknowledged that where there is a large military presence, there will be a significant and concurrent growth of the commercial sex industry and trafficking of women and girls into the industry. As former U.S. anti-trafficking Ambassador John Miller stated in 2004, “human trafficking, especially for women and girls forced into prostitution, has followed demand where a multitude of U.S. and foreign aid workers, humanitarian workers, civilian contractors, and yes, U.S. uniformed personnel, operate.” For example, in 2012 The Korea Times reported that women are trafficked to and exploited in brothels around U.S. military bases in South Korea “despite the military’s ‘zero tolerance policy.’” According to one estimate, more than one million Korean women have been used in prostitution by U.S. troops since 1945.

Equality Now: Role of U.S. military in fueling global sex trafficking (via koreaunderground)

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so uh

Anyone maybe thought the seattle autonomous zone should cede it to the original tribe that lived there

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Rich that Americans don't shut the fuck up about Chinese surveillance and censorship when the NSA is the biggest global surveillance network that logs an incomprehensible amount of information and the Big social media sites now censor you for questioning US propaganda

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Your tax dollars at work, America.

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this documentary is really watered down all made to order to be palatable for your to consumption. whatever you think whatever you know whatever you see whatever you’ll learn it’s way worse. this documentary does not even begin to describe the horrific reality in the USA.

Netlfix has made the documentary “13th” available for free on YouTube. If you are white and haven’t watched this, it should be required viewing. 

#usa

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USA, the police of the world, criminally invading criminally bombing criminally droning criminally overthrowing countries after countries mass murdering innocent people all over the world.

abolish the US military.

#us military

[fuckedupamerica]

people don’t think censorship happens in the US, this is a perfect example, an example of massive censorship. using the guise or excuse of “russia meddling” social media platforms including tumblr purged and terminated accounts. and this is censorship, this sort of “covert” censorship is going to happen again and again.

yall remember when tumblr staff suppressed the ferguson hashtags, tracked all the activist urls and later kicked them off just to say they were russian agents? yall remember that right??

#censorship