Peace on Earth, Goodwill Towards Men

'Tis the season... to let human beings freeze to death:

My lovely hometown council told the homeless of our community to freeze to death. In their last meeting of the year before heading to their warm homes in our suburban town, they denied a request by the Interfaith Community Services to use their own building to house a few homeless during our unprecedented cold snap we're having (temps have pretty regularly dipped below 30F, which is very cold for a So Cal town):

Four of the five council members said during their last meeting of the year that they couldn't support a request by officials of the Salvation Army and Interfaith Community Services to open a temporary winter shelter in the gymnasium of the Salvation Army at Las Villas Way near Centre City and El Norte parkways.

The council didn't vote on the matter because no motion was made. Only Mayor Lori Holt-Pfeiler, who put the item on the meeting agenda, said she supported opening the shelter. No city money was requested for the shelter, only the council's approval of the building's additional use.

How heartless can you get? It wouldn't have cost the city a thin dime. The members of the council just don't want dirty ugly people anywhere near them.

In addition, 'tis the season... to imprison children in American internment camps:

The T. Don Hutto Residential Center in Taylor, Texas (on the outskirts of Austin, Texas) is a private detention facility operated by Corrections Corporation of America. It and a smaller center in Pennsylvania are the only two facilities in the country that are authorized to hold non-Mexican immigrant families and children on noncriminal charges.

What does this mean?

It means that at the Taylor facility of the 400 people "held" there, 200 are children. And all are families that can be held there for whatever length of time without due process conducted in a timely manner.

To top it off, as long as the men, women and children are held there, the facility's operator draws a daily profit - per person.

The children range in age from infants on up.

[snip]

Jeans and t-shirts have been replaced with jail uniforms; children are issued uniforms as soon as they can fit into them and everyone must wear name tags, even the babies.

Infants wearing name tags.

Ah, the spirit of the holidays.

I almost want to throw up at reading this. Our damaged moral fiber as a nation is almost too much for me to bear. We have federally managed detention centers where small children are treated like common criminals. And don't give me this bullshit about how the kids broke the law. The employers broke the law. As Pachachutec says:

Here's what you need to know about immigration politics in this country: everything you hear is utter cant. Here's the litmus test: no discussion of immigration reform is in any way honest or serious if it excludes serious tracking and enforcement mechanisms on employers. Period.

If we can create a point of sale system to verify credit card accounts at purchasing sites all over the country, we can create a central verification and tracking process to ensure workers hired are legal. My issuing bank tells me if there's unusual or suspicious activity on my card, and I get a regular accounting of all charges on my card that I can verify personally. I think some central system could pick up if someone is working under my name at a second full time job somewhere. This is not rocket science.

People flee poverty and oppression in Mexico, Central America and other places because American employers offer them jobs, dangerous jobs in unsafe conditions, knowing these people have no recourse but to work in horrible conditions without protest or questions asked. This is systematized exploitation, American style, of mostly brown people. American lobbyists for big corporations want it this way (like Swift, Conagra and others), and they are paying well for no one in politics to address the job supply side of this problem, which is the only place the flow of illegal immigration can effectively be managed and controlled.

I couldn't agree more. Making criminals out of the children of those who come escaping poverty and seeking a better life ends up hurting the wrong people. The criminals are the agribusinesses and meatpacking corporations and fat cats who exploit cheap labor, skirt payroll taxes, drive down wages for everybody nationwide, and increase job insecurity. But they're not wearing orange jumpsuits in a dusty field enclosed with barbed wire in the middle of Texas. Children are.

And so this is Christmas. Silent night, holy night.

For shame.