The American Gulag ought to be seen as a national shame but, instead, it is seen as another path to massive profits even though it is a source of equally massive misery and death, particularly privately owned prisons run solely for profit. Profit in America always comes first. I see the failure to correct this as another failure of the Biden administration.
The ACLU on Monday said that more than 90% of people held by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in July were locked up in for-profit facilities, despite promises and an executive order from President Joe Biden to phase out federal private prison contracts for immigrant detention.
“Three years into the Biden administration, the number of people held in ICE detention continues to grow, and private prison companies hold an increasingly tight grip on the mass immigration detention system,” ACLU National Prison Project senior staff attorney Eunice Cho wrote in an analysis.
“The federal government’s immigration detention system overwhelmingly relies on private prison corporations,” Cho added. “Private prison corporations, like the GEO Group, CoreCivic, LaSalle Corrections, and the Management Training Corporation have pocketed billions from ICE detention contracts in the past two decades.”
While campaigning for president in 2020, Biden declared that “the federal government should not use private facilities for any detention, including detention of undocumented immigrants.” Just days into his presidency in January 2021, he signed an executive order “on reforming our incarceration […]
I keep seeing in the professional and peer-reviewed literature articles about forever pollutants in over half the water available to Americans. The water in the U.S. can no longer be assumed to be safe to drink. So I went looking for a reliable report about how to get these chemicals out of your water. Please do yourself and your family a service and have your water checked, making sure that the test will detect these forever chemicals. If necessary get one of the filters listed in this report.
Clean, safe drinking water is a luxury that many people in the United States take for granted. But your tap water may not be as safe as you think.
Nearly half of US tap water, from both public utilities and private wells, contains so-called forever chemicals—commonly known as per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS—according to a US Geological Survey study released this month.
The risks of PFAS exposure are well documented and have been linked with a host of health risks, including cancer, obesity, and weakened immune function.
If you’re concerned about PFAS in your tap water, you can take several practical steps.
First, determine whether your water is in fact contaminated, and if so, to what degree.
Then, if necessary, invest in a water filter that significantly reduces PFAS.
Keep in mind that PFAS are ubiquitous in the environment. They’re present in numerous common household products. It’s almost impossible to avoid PFAS entirely. But you can limit your exposure.
That distinction is important. Because PFAS don’t break down, they can accumulate in soil, water, and living tissue. Thus, the health risks may build with repeated exposures over time. For more on limiting your risk, see our guide.
The Fox propaganda network seems to specialize in hiring sleazeballs. But even by their low standards Greg Gutfield stands out for his loathsomeness. I watched their coverage of the Republican debate (if you could call it that) and was once again surprised at how disconnected Fox is from any reality I could identify. What I don’t understand is how a network which specializes in lies and misinformation can get a federal license to spew their vomit out.
One of Fox News’ top hosts said that many of the world’s problems would be solved if women were to vanish from the planet.
Greg Gutfeld, the right-wing channel’s resident jester who was recently promoted to host his own prime time hour, made a series of brazenly sexist comments on Monday’s edition of “The Five” during a discussion on looting.
As surveillance video played showing a smash-and-grab that occurred over the weekend at a Los Angeles Nordstrom, Gutfeld went on a rant portraying women as soft on crime and effectively blaming the entire gender for supposed policies that would prevent such crimes from being committed.
“What would happen if all the women took a ladies week off and they went to Venus … How many of these problems would still exist?” Gutfeld wondered aloud.
Gutfeld, who allowed for the possibility that new problems would emerge in the absence of women, confidently argued that “smash and grabs” and “rampant recidivism” would “disappear.”
At one point during the discussion, Gutfeld acknowledged that what he was saying might not sit […]
Jonathan Taplin, Director Emeritus of University of Southern California’s Annenberg Innovation Lab - DNYUZ
Stephan:
This is the first comprehensive article I have seen describing what a small group of billionaire oligarchs are doing to transform America into and authoritarian anocracy which they and a few fellow billionaires control. After you read this consider the implications I describe in the next story. Indoctrinated peasants, controlling oligarchs. Do you think that is an exaggeration? It is not. We are seeing a small group attempting to turn the United States into a more sophisticated version of North Korea.
Four very powerful billionaires—Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Marc Andreessen—are creating a world where “nothing is true and all is spectacle.” If we are to inquire how we got to a place of radical income inequality, post-truth reality, and the looming potential for a second American Civil War, we need look no further than these four—“the biggest wallets,” to paraphrase historian Timothy Snyder, “paying for the most blinding lights.”
I call them the Technocrats, in recognition of the influence of the technocracy movement, founded in the 1930s by Elon Musk’s grandfather, Joshua Haldeman. The Technocrats make up a kind of interlocking directorate of Silicon Valley, each investing in or sitting on the boards of the others’ companies. Their vast digital domain controls your personal information; affects how billions of people live, work, and love; and sows online chaos, inciting mob violence and sparking runs on stocks. These four men have long been regarded as technologically progressive heroes, but they are actually part of a broader antidemocratic, authoritarian turn within the tech world, deeply invested in preserving the status quo and in keeping their market-leadership positions or near-monopolies—and their multi-billion-dollar fortunes secure from higher taxes. (“Competition […]
I have been writing about the Republican effort to dismantle public education and degrade university education for almost 30 years now. Particularly in Red states this strategy and the tactics to implement it have been playing out, as two generations of Americans have voted to make themselves and their children willfully ignorant, and turn them into easily manipulated peasants. But I have to confess that until I read this piece I had not realized how extensive the Republican effort has been. Think about it, 377 bills designed to degrade education and turn schools into indoctrination centers. It is exactly what is done in North Korea, and the voters in those states don’t seem to comprehend what is being done, and continue to vote christofascists into office so they can continue these efforts. It is so very sad, and it is going to have a generation-long effect of diminishing America.
A student holds a placard during a rally protesting Florida education policies on April 21, 2023 in Orlando, Florida. Credit: Paul Hennessy / Anadolu Agency / Getty
Over the past two and a half years, Republicans across the United States have introduced nearly 380 bills aimed at establishing a climate of fear among educators, librarians, and other school officials, according to a report released Wednesday by the free expression group PEN America.
Distinct from the outright censorship measures that GOP lawmakers have unveiled in a number of U.S. states in recent years, “educational intimidation” bills “pressure educators to be more timid in the content they teach, pressure librarians to be more restrictive in the books they make available to students, and pressure students to limit their self-expression, without imposing direct prohibitions,” the new report notes.
“Put simply, these ‘educational intimidation’ provisions, as we dub them, empower the use of intimidation tactics to cast a broad chilling effect over K-12 classrooms by mandating new and intrusive forms of inspection or monitoring of schools, as […]
