2021-01-09: News Headlines

_____ (2021-01-09). Hunger Strikes At Three New Jersey Prisons. popularresistance.org The filthy conditions, indefinite incarceration and escalating COVID infections have touched off desperate hunger strikes at three New Jersey county jails. Each jail operates as a prison-for-profit, renting space at $120 a day for ICE to jail out-of-state migrant detainees. | The N.J. counties use the contracts to generate tens of millions of dollars in revenue annually. Immigrant detention has become a moneymaking "cash cow" raising more than $87 million in revenue. | There are four immigration detention facilities in New Jersey — Bergen, Essex, and Hudson County jails, and the Elizabeth Detention Center,…

Christoph Spehr (2021-01-09). For a borderless pragmatism. Outline of a Progressive Migration Policy. indybay.org Immigration leads to stronger economic growth, which in turn creates jobs, Without migration, we would all be sitting in Olduvia in East Africa, as we were 100,000 years ago. About 3% of the world's population, about 215 million people, live in a state other than the one in which they were born. Migration has always existed. Not everything has become more right-wing in the last 50 years.

_____ (2021-01-08). Patriarchy And The Pandemic. popularresistance.org The COVID-19 pandemic has made it agonizingly clear that the systems under which we are living were already broken. The pandemic has only exacerbated the crisis of the capitalist system and removed any illusions about this reality. However, the impact of the crisis has not been uniform. The neoliberal capitalist model, which survives and profits by exploiting the vulnerable, again fell back on its same old ways. As a result, it has been the workers, the migrants, the women, and others, whose unpaid and underpaid labor serves as the basis for capitalists to profit, who have suffered the most. | In this conversatio…

Staff (2021-01-08). COVID Scientist Rebekah Jones Condemns Armed Police Raid on Her Home & Florida's Pandemic Response. democracynow.org As Florida sets new records for daily coronavirus cases, we speak with a whistleblower who was fired in May from the Florida Department of Health after she refused to censor information about the state's COVID-19 outbreak. Rebekah Jones is a data scientist who helped build Florida's coronavirus tracking dashboard, and she says her termination came after she refused to manipulate data to support the state's reopening. In December, police raided Jones's home in Tallahassee, seizing her computer and phone and holding her family at gunpoint, as part of an alleged investigation into a hacking of the Florida Health Dep…

teleSUR (2021-01-08). Venezuela Reaffirms Its Sovereign Rights Over the Essequibo. telesurenglish.net Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro Thursday signed a presidential decree setting the country's maritime and territorial borders in order to protect national jurisdiction rights, especially on the disputed Essequibo territory. | RELATED: | He informed that the United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres was notified about his government rejections over the recent International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruling…

WSWS (2021-01-07). Nebraska governor says undocumented meatpacking workers will not receive vaccine. wsws.org Governor Ricketts said during a press conference that undocumented immigrants in the meat processing industry will not receive the COVID-19 vaccine and his spokesman said its distribution will be prioritized by citizenship status.

Danica Jorden (2021-01-07). France Grants Citizenship to Immigrant Essential Workers as Protests Against Racist "Security" Laws Grow. globalresearch.ca The government of France has decided to recognize the contributions of essential workers from other countries working within its borders during the pandemic by offering them French citizenship. On 22 December 2020, the day of the announcement, 74 immigrants were …

_____ (2021-01-07). How Activists Shut Down Key Pipeline Projects In New York. popularresistance.org If all had gone according to plan, the Constitution pipeline would be carrying fracked gas 124 miles from the shale gas fields of Pennsylvania through streams, wetlands, and backyards across the Southern Tier of New York until west of Albany. There it would join two existing pipelines, one that extends into New England and the other to the Ontario border as part of a vast network that moves fracked gas throughout the northeastern United States and Canada. | For a while, everything unfolded as expected. When the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission approved the project in 2014, the U.S. was in the midst of a frack…

WSWS (2021-01-06). Australia: Chinese immigrant meatworkers locked out after protesting alleged assault. wsws.org The meatworkers' union acted as strike-breaker, shutting down the Chinese workers' principled act of solidarity with their victimised colleague.

Peoples Dispatch (2021-01-06). Activists ask UK government to ensure safety for migrants crossing English Channel. peoplesdispatch.org According to reports, 8,400 migrants risked their lives crossing the English Channel to reach the UK in 2020, four times the number recorded in 2019…