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Fuck the Poor

You are here: Home / Archives for Fuck the Poor

Voter Suppression and Life Suppression Go Hand in Hand

by $8 blue check mistermix|  May 6, 202010:50 am| 59 Comments

This post is in: The Brown Enemy Within, Fuck the Poor

This story about the Seattle Indian Health Board requesting medical supplies and getting body bags and toe tags instead is making the rounds.

I’m not surprised. My dad was a physician in what was at the time called Indian Health Service (IHS) in the late 50’s and early 60’s — I spent my first few months of life on the South Dakota reservation where he was stationed. He also practiced on the Navajo Nation and has some terrible, horrible, no good stories about that time in his life, and the many, many children who died in the pediatric service there. “We were so stupid then” is one of the common refrain of those stories, which include accounts of how he and his fellow doctors did blood chemistry on dehydrated children by judging the color of the flame in a bunsen burner. Today those tests are done in seconds with a machine. The children were often dehydrated because it was common for sick kids to spend some time at a Navajo ceremony called a sing prior to being brought a long way to the hospital. Today, the Navajo Nation is one of the worst COVID-19 hot spots.

Back in the 50s and 60s, there was a compulsory draft, and the IHS was considered military service, so most of the medical staff consisted of people who joined to avoid the draft, many of whom went on to distinguished careers — my guess is that the quality of care when judged by standards back then was probably decent, who knows. I do know that the services offered at the reservation hospitals were bare-bones, and Dad has a lot of stories about riding in an ambulance to a far-off hospital with a sick person. He also has many stories of the illnesses of poverty on the rez, mostly shared after a few martinis.

I don’t have a lot of reservation stories but I do have a story about voter suppression. Because of their clear-eyed, rational concern about fraud, the South Dakota state legislature took a minute off from their usual work of banning abortion to pass laws requiring that voter registration forms and absentee ballots be notarized. So, more than 30 years ago, I became a notary public, following the advice of the South Dakota Democratic Party (RIP). It costs money to become a notary (application fees, a bond, a stamp and a seal), and notaries can charge for services. Who knows what the laws are today — they probably require that notaries wet their stamps using ink obtained from Chilean octopuses on full moon high tides in months ending in “r”, a requirement that John Roberts would understand and endorse as an eminently reasonable safeguard of democracy. The point is that, back before voter id became a thing, Republicans were pioneering voter suppression in their laboratory of anti-democracy, the reservation.

Well, enough story time, but it’s obvious that voter suppression and being shipped body bags when you ask for medical supplies are two pieces of bread around the shit sandwich called “being poor” and “being brown” here in the greatest country God has ever wrought, the U.S.A.

By the way, Pine Ridge knows the score — over a month ago, they posted guards at the entrances to their reservation towns to keep the modern day equivalent of smallpox blankets away from their people.

Voter Suppression and Life Suppression Go Hand in HandPost + Comments (59)

Every Day Ends in Wasted Motion

by $8 blue check mistermix|  May 5, 20203:07 pm| 62 Comments

This post is in: COVID-19 Coronavirus, Fuck the Poor

If you want to understand why meat is cheap and slaughterhouses are COVID-19 hotspots, here’s some really good journalism about John Deranamie, 50 year-old survivor of the Liberian civil war, and now COVID-19:

He’s one of 3,700 workers at the Smithfield Foods pork processing plant in Sioux Falls, where more than 800 employees have contracted the novel virus spreading across the world. But those employees are just a fraction of essential workers across the nation who are feeding America.

Deranamie understands the importance of his role in the food supply and keeping Americans fed. But he’s risking his life every time he steps into his uniform, he said.

“I don’t like the term essential worker,” he said. “Essential worker just means you’re on the death track.”

Deranamie makes $18.50/hour as a night shift worker at Smithfield. His wife works there, too. They support 8 kids on their pay, and send half of his paycheck home to his family in Liberia.

The story details how he kept going to work until he became ill, then quarantined in his bedroom while his wife and family (six of the eight children) stayed in the rest of the house. Luckily, nobody else got sick.

Part of the reason there was a big cluster around Smithfield is that the immigrants not only work close together, but a lot of them live together in densely packed housing near the plant.

Slaughterhouses like this are just one part of a food chain optimized for cheap meat. Other prices we pay for cheap meat: stinking, cruel confinement farms, overuse of antibiotics to the point where they lose effectiveness in human beings, and watershed contamination from manure spills, pesticide, herbicide and fertilizer runoff. Those are just off the top of my head.

Every Day Ends in Wasted MotionPost + Comments (62)

Bernie’s Right

by $8 blue check mistermix|  December 18, 20195:30 pm| 29 Comments

This post is in: Education, Fuck the Poor

I am proud to stand with the students in Rochester who are fighting proposed teacher layoffs. I urge government officials to keep these educators in their classrooms. Together, we will invest in public education and reduce class sizes. https://t.co/YNLMP4lAxv

— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) December 18, 2019

Because of horrible mismanagement, the Rochester City Schools are facing a huge budget shortfall and are laying off teachers to balance their budget. We live in a rich state where the right answer to this problem would be legislation to close the $65 million shortfall along with some kind of oversight by an outside board of management. Instead, we’re going to take a bunch of kids who haven’t had the best start in life and fuck them over.

I hope the other candidates will say something about this–it’s a tragedy.

Bernie’s RightPost + Comments (29)

If a Thousand Dollar Car Was Worth a Damn, Why Would Anybody Spend $10 Grand?

by $8 blue check mistermix|  December 6, 20195:06 pm| 120 Comments

This post is in: Open Threads, Fuck the Poor

This:

The devil (that starves low-income Americans) is in the details. https://t.co/lqxUqKjjCY

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) December 6, 2019

And, of course, this:

If a Thousand Dollar Car Was Worth a Damn, Why Would Anybody Spend $10 Grand?Post + Comments (120)

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