Month: August 2020

US Media Can’t Think How to Fight Fires Without $1-an-Hour Prison Labor

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)

US Media Can’t Think How to Fight Fires Without $1-an-Hour Prison Labor

Trained firefighters being good enough to work for nearly nothing, but ineligible to get real jobs, would seem to represent an even bigger irony — and a more important story — than California having to spend a few million dollars extra to fight two crises at once. But covering the wildfire story that way would require seeing it through the eyes of inmates, not of a government whose main concern is the inconvenience of having to pay people when you’re used to getting their work almost for free. That’s an argument we’ve heard before, of course — but one would have hoped it wouldn’t still be guiding news coverage nearly 200 years later.

Explaining Nikki Haley’s Racism toward Palestinians

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)

Explaining Nikki Haley’s Racism toward Palestinians

But of course, the Indian-American from an immigrant family (did they come on a H1-B visa of the sort Trump is attempting to get rid of?) has done whatever she can to escape her past. She adopted Christian Zionism if not all the appurtenances of Evangelicalism. She threw in with the anti-immigrant, white nationalist Trump administration. And now she is delighting in helping crush the Palestinians the way Indian Moghul Emperor Aurangzeb crushed her Sikh ancestors. She even tried to whitewash Trump’s history of sexual harassment. Trump’s one-time campaign manager, Steve Bannon, once went to Silicon Valley and noticed all the Indian-American software engineers, and is said to have wondered, “Why are these people here?” Nimrata has attempted to escape her own subalternity in order to pretend to be part of an elite that will never really accept her.

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