America's Deportation Squads Want to Expel Our Neighbors. We Are Saying No.

By Bill McKibben, Guardian UK

29 March 17

When Kike Balcazar, Zully Palacios and Alex Carrillo were held in a detention center, their tragedy united a great many Vermonters

ermont, where I live, has the second-smallest population of any state. It’s also among the most rural parts of America, and taken together those two facts produce an iron law: if you see someone with their car stuck in a snowbank, you don’t drive by. You stop and help push. Because if you don’t, nobody else may come by for an hour.

Which is why, I think, many of us have spent part of the past couple weeks trying to win the freedom of three of our neighbors – Kike Balcazar, Zully Palacios and Alex Carrillo. They are undocumented immigrants, who came here to work on our farms, and were detained by the (aptly named) Ice, or Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, in New Hampshire, awaiting deportation.

Even as the great healthcare debate came and went, even as the Keystone pipeline won approval – even as enormous affairs of great and lasting import captivated the nation – this particular small-town tragedy united a great many Vermonters.

Hundreds rallied in Burlington, and then hundreds more of us knelt down in the street in the capitol city of Montpelier, and hundreds more down south in Brattleboro. In Vermont, “hundreds” is a sizeable denomination – save for the tractor pulls at the best county fairs, that’s about as many people as ever gather in one place at one time.

The arrest of these three was clearly punitive and retaliatory. They weren’t just farmworkers – they were leaders of the community, who had come out into the open to try to win some rights for their brethren. Two were picked up after they left the office of Migrant Justice, the local campaign that tries to improve conditions for the undocumented. The third was on the way to the local courthouse, where state prosecutors were waiting to dismiss an old DUI arrest. It’s the type of Trumpish political repression we need to push back at whenever it happens.

The harassment of the undocumented, which makes little sense across America, where they clearly contribute more economically than they cost, is utterly illogical in Vermont. Vermont’s unemployment rate in February was 3%, which means it’s about as low as anywhere in the known universe.

For employers in the state, the great problem is attracting enough new workers, especially young ones. They tend to stay away in part because Vermont is about as white as it gets, lacking the diversity that young Americans now take as a normal blessing. (Also, your cellphone won’t work in about 75% of the state, but that’s a different story.)

The dairy economy of Vermont would collapse without these workers. The number of dairy farms has dropped from 15,000 at the end of the second world war to less than a thousand today, but the amount of milk the state produces has remained at the same level – that is, family farms have been replaced by big industrial dairies.

The work there is hard and unforgiving, and the farmers report they can’t find many Americans, at any price, willing to do it. Big industrial dairies are a bad idea, and Vermont will be better off in every way if it continues to build local, small-scale agriculture – but for the moment it’s what we’ve got.

We can’t afford to have people forced into the shadows. Clearly that’s Ice’s intent, to punish anyone who speaks out. But we need people speaking out, on every front; problems like healthcare or global warming require active citizenship. These three were a productive part of the state, doing volunteer jobs like serving on government taskforces – doing the work of citizens, which is a moral category before it’s a legal one.

The worship of national borders gets increasingly absurd in our world. One of the arrested, Zully Palacios, will likely be deported to her native Peru which, last summer, had the greatest drought and then wildfires in its history, and, as the climate whipsaws, is currently suffering through record floods, with hundreds dead and hundreds of thousands homeless.

Vermonters, per capita, have poured a lot more carbon into the atmosphere than Peruvians, and what do you know, it floated right past the national boundaries drawn on a map.

They’re our neighbors. For those of us who are Christians, it’s written down in black and white: “love your neighbors” is the one commandment Jesus keeps repeating. Since Vermont is the most atheist state in the union, though, it’s a good thing that the same commandment is written on the heart of any decent person. Neighbors are what make a place worth living in. Only a creep would drive by the guy in the snowbank.

On Monday, a federal judge in Boston – with lots and lots of Vermonters singing in the rain outside his courtroom – freed Zully and Kike on bail. They still face deportation, but for the moment they’re home. Home.

Trump's Morally Repugnant Budget Must Be Defeated

By Bernie Sanders, USA TODAY

29 March 17

This spending plan would be one of the cruelest in American history.

ick Mulvaney, Donald Trump’s budget director, recently made a truly remarkable and cynical statement. He claimed the draconian cuts in the president’s budget were “one of the most compassionate things we can do” for a single mother living in Detroit.

Really? Let’s look at what Trump’s “compassion” actually means for that mother, her two children and tens of millions of other working-class Americans.

If Trump’s budget becomes law, the after school programs that provide both enrichment and a safe space for Mick Mulvaney’s hypothetical mother’s children while she is still at work would be ended.The Trump budget eliminates the federally-funded afterschool program— the 21st Century Community Learning Centers Program. “Compassion,” according to the Trump administration, would throw 1.1 million children into the streets or leave them home alone instead of in a safe environment for care and learning when the school day ends.

In the classroom, teachers would be less prepared because this “compassionate” budget eliminates funding for professional development and support for teachers in high-need schools.

As a single mother in Detroit, her greatest hope is that her children will be able to attend college. That dream is even more distant because this budget would slash Pell grants and eliminate the Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grant, putting education further out of reach for at least 1.5 million students.

The budget could cut as much as $1 billion from Head Start which means some 95,000 children will be thrown out of early education and child-care programs, among them, this mother’s younger child. Moreover, according to Mulvaney, under the Trump budget, nutrition assistance for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) would be cut by $100 million, enough to eliminate nutrition assistance for nearly 150,000 people.

This single mother’s parents would likewise suffer under this “compassionate” budget, as their weekly visits from Meals on Wheels could be eliminated, due to cuts to the Community Development Block Grant along with other programs. Next winter their house could have no heat because the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program has been abolished. As a result, they can no longer live independently. If Republicans eventually succeed with their plans for health care, nursing home care is out of the question, because of $880 billion in cuts to Medicaid, the largest source of funding for nursing home care.

With no other choice, her parents move into her apartment, adding more stress to her already precarious position.

“Compassion” from the Trump White House for this single mother living in Detroit includes $6.2 billion in cuts to affordable housing programs which could force her out of her apartment.

If the eviction notice arrives, she will not have a lawyer to defend her in court because this “compassionate” budget would eliminate the Legal Services Corporation.

Any hope this single mother living in Detroit had for a new, better paying job could be dashed because Donald Trump’s budget would eliminate more than 200,000 federal jobs and slash funding for job-training programs.

Trump’s 31% cut to the Environmental Protection Agency means this woman’s children would likely be breathing dirtier air and drinking contaminated water. And the 18% cut to the National Institutes of Health would mean that research for cures to some of the worst diseases facing humanity would be delayed.

Mulvaney claims that “compassion” means not asking Americans, like this single mother in Detroit for her “hard-earned money anymore . . . unless we can guarantee that money will be used in a proper function.”

Yet over this year and next, President Trump is proposing a massive increase in the already bloated military budget.

Let’s be absolutely clear. When Mulvaney talks about spending taxpayer money “carefully,” he really means abandoning programs that will help millions of working-class Americans so that the Pentagon can get an $84 billion increase in spending over the next year and a half. According to new analysis released on February 14, 2017, the United States spends as much on its national defense as the next 12 countries combined, many of which are our close allies and strategic partners. And, according to a recent study, the Pentagon has “buried evidence of $125 billion in bureaucratic waste.” Moreover, the Pentagon’s $1.44 trillion acquisition portfolio currently suffers from more than $469 billion in contractor cost overruns.

So much for Mulvaney’s promise to spend taxpayer money more carefully.

Far from compassionate, this budget — if enacted — would be one of the cruelest in American history. In the words of former Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower, the four star general who warned us about the power of the military industrial complex, it, “signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”

This budget, and its absurd priorities, must be soundly defeated.