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The 47th President and the Post-Biden World

 
 
hightor
 
  2  
Reply Fri 4 Apr, 2025 05:03 am
Trump tells UK to buy chlorinated chicken from US if it wants tariff relief

The UK has long-ruled out allowing imports of chlorine-washed chicken from the US, with Rachel Reeves in November reiterating her opposition

Quote:
Britain must allow US chlorine-washed chicken into UK markets if it wants relief from sweeping tariffs, Donald Trump has indicated.

It comes after the UK failed to avoid tariffs imposed on the global economy, with the US president slapping a 10 per cent levies on all British exports to the United States.

Mr Trump - who imposed heavier tariffs on a raft of other countries, including a 20 per cent on EU imports - said they were “reciprocal” in response to measures put in place by other countries who had “looted, pillaged, raped, plundered” the US economy.

https://i.imgur.com/yvBX2Qh.png
US President Donald Trump announced a range of international economic measures

In a statement published alongside the tariff announcement, the White House said: “The UK maintains non-science-based standards that severely restrict US exports of safe, high-quality beef and poultry products.”

It suggested that Britain’s ban on chlorinated chicken was among a range of “non-tariff barriers” that limit the US’s ability to trade.

The UK has long ruled out allowing imports of chlorine-washed chicken from the US due to health concerns, with Downing Street on Thursday reiterating its manifesto commitment to high food standards.

Asked whether the UK could allow imports of chlorine washed chicken in order to appease the US, the prime minister’s officials spokesperson said: “Our position on that is unchanged. You’ve got the manifesto commitment on food standards, which obviously remains.”

It comes after Rachel Reeves in November said the UK would not allow “British farmers to be undercut by different rules and regulations in other countries”.

Chlorine-washed chicken, or chlorinated chicken, refers to poultry products that have been washed or dipped in water containing chlorine dioxide in order to kill bacteria.

While evidence suggests chlorine itself is not harmful in small doses, critics argue the need to treat chicken with the chemical stems from poorer hygiene earlier on in the production process.

A 2014 report by US non-profit Consumer Reports found that 97 per cent of 300 American chicken breasts tested contained harmful bacteria, including Salmonella, campylobacter and E.Coli.

Around half of the chicken breasts tested also contained at least one type of bacteria that was resistant to three or more antibiotics.

Meanwhile, if you ate a large amount of chlorinated chicken – the equivalent to 5 per cent of your body weight in one day –you could be exposed to harmful levels of the chemical compound known as chlorate, according to the European Commission.

The last major polling done on the issue, conducted in 2020, revealed that 80 per cent of Britons are opposed to allowing imports to the UK, and the same proportion is also against allowing chicken products that have been farmed using hormones.

There is also growing pressure from the farming industry to rule out concessions on the issue, amid fears it could undercut British farmers and drive down food standards.

Nigel Farage admitted he would allow American chlorine-washed chicken to be sold in the UK as part of a free trade deal with the US. But Liz Webster, founder of Save British Farming, last week hit back, telling The Independent the British public would be “rightly appalled” and warned against trading away the UK’s high standards.

“A US trade deal would be devastating for British farming, food security, public health, animal welfare, and the environment”, she said.

“US agriculture is heavily subsidised and relies on intensive, industrial methods - including chemicals and practices banned in the UK. The British public is rightly appalled by chlorinated chicken and hormone-fed beef. We are an animal-loving nation that values high standards, and we must not trade them away.”

Previous prime ministers, including Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss, were forced to rule out concessions on chlorinated chicken and hormone-fed beef in future trade deal talks with the US after pressure from the British public.

The Department for Business and Trade (DBT) has been contacted for comment.

independent
Walter Hinteler
 
  2  
Reply Fri 4 Apr, 2025 05:11 am
@hightor,
The European Union banned chlorine-washed chicken in 1997 to protect consumers and ensure high food safety and animal welfare standards.
Here, animal welfare standards are prioritized, which are lower in the US.
And chlorine washing masks poor hygiene standards, which can lead to disease-causing bacteria like salmonella and listeria.

The UK-laws are very similar to those in the EU.
izzythepush
 
  1  
Reply Fri 4 Apr, 2025 06:48 am
@Walter Hinteler,
I'm concerned about Trump's focus on us.

As we're the English speaking country in Europe he seems to think we share values as well as language.

Trump keeps telling Americans how popular he is over here, while the truth is the exact opposite. He's hated.

It will build up resentment and anti Americanism.

You can't make irreverent people religious, it won't happen regardless of how much money you pour in.

Even amongst church going Britons the razzmatazz of American evangelism is offputting and stomach churning.

People are more likely to be turned off, equating Christianity with Fascism.

It's the same with chicken. Bleach should be used to clean toilets, it has no place in food preparation. The very idea turns my stomach.

The only people likely to buy it are the very poor and then only if it's considerably cheaper than unadulterated chicken.

Starmer should go on the offensive and take the state visit off the table.
izzythepush
 
  3  
Reply Fri 4 Apr, 2025 07:43 am
Russell Brand, (oft quoted by Lash,) has been charged with rape and sexual assault.
hightor
 
  2  
Reply Fri 4 Apr, 2025 08:08 am
@izzythepush,
The USA's aggressive marketing of chicken has, ironically, contributed to the flood of illegal border crossings. Central American chicken farmers can't compete with cheap imported mass-production poultry from the north so farm families are forced leave their small farms and travel to urban areas looking for work where they are prey to gang violence and human trafficking. They often end up using their meager savings to pay smugglers to get them across the US border after making the dangerous trek on foot.
0 Replies
 
thack45
 
  2  
Reply Fri 4 Apr, 2025 08:59 am
@hightor,
Quote:
Trump reportedly kept Waltz on the team purely to deny giving “a scalp” to the Democrats and what he perceives as their allies in the mainstream media.


This is good for a few reasons. One, it's confirmation that the concept – recently touched on here, where certain "leaders" sacrifice competence and talent for the sake of absolute loyalty – is this administration's reality. The crackpot Loomer is a good example, who can't even fathom putting country before the ruler:

“I will continue working hard to support his agenda, and I will continue reiterating the importance of strong vetting, for the sake of protecting the President and our national security.”

Now there's a good loyalist.
https://c.tenor.com/6IG9Cl6VNjIAAAAC/tenor.gif



Or look at his team lawyers, who keep trying to argue in court that because Donald Trump is president, laws do not apply to him, oh and also, he is the law.

https://64.media.tumblr.com/ee33240cd04f433c7a0cb23d028e4493/tumblr_mn9l448ThR1qgr0y2o1_250.gif


Two, it confirms the absolute necessity of optics to this administration. They put on a good show to start, with the rapid fire spectacle of the stern father (also discussed here) acting decisively and making tough choices for the poor, misguided American people.

But it's coming apart. They've got about a year and a half to keep the weight of sheer indifference and stupidity from collapsing in on itself like a dying star, and I don't think things are going how they'd hoped; certainly not abroad.


I think Dems should be clowning Susie Wiles for this. She's been presented as a capable gatekeeper who won't let the mistakes of the first administration be repeated. It's not a great fit, but probably good enough for the media.
0 Replies
 
thack45
 
  1  
Reply Fri 4 Apr, 2025 09:03 am
@Walter Hinteler,
Quote:
The US president, Donald Trump, took a moment last night to use his social media channels to offer his full backing for the French far-right leader Marine Le Pen.


This response (I didn't even read it) was unusually delayed, even for Trump, who in his first term often took a day whenever something in the news didn't look so good for him.
0 Replies
 
hightor
 
  1  
Reply Fri 4 Apr, 2025 11:05 am
@Walter Hinteler,
Trump might want to come up with some different wording in this case – "Witch Hunt against Marine Le Pen" might be a bit too suggestive.

From what I've heard, the case against National Rally is strong, and if laws were broken her prosecution is hardly the "lawfare" Trump makes it out to be.
Walter Hinteler
 
  2  
Reply Fri 4 Apr, 2025 11:29 am
@hightor,
hightor wrote:
From what I've heard, the case against National Rally is strong, and if laws were broken her prosecution is hardly the "lawfare" Trump makes it out to be.
According to an Ifop poll for 'Ouest France', almost two-thirds (64%) of French people do not want the law to be amended to abolish provisional execution for elected representatives convicted at first instance.
While 68% of Rassemblement National supporters would like to see the provisional execution of a first instance conviction against an elected representative abolished, only 36% of French people, across all political affiliations, are in favour.

Marine Le Pen condamnée : 64 % des Français favorables à l’exécution provisoire des peines

Walter Hinteler
 
  2  
Reply Fri 4 Apr, 2025 12:39 pm
@Walter Hinteler,
On the other hand:
The conviction of French right-wing populist Marine Le Pen for embezzling EU funds has so far done nothing to dampen her popularity, according to a survey. Almost half of those surveyed - 49 per cent - would like the leader of the Rassemblement National (RN) party to run in the next presidential election, according to a survey published on Friday by the opinion research institute ‘Ifop-Fiducial’. (link)

Within a month, support for Le Pen has risen significantly in this respect, by seven percentage points. However, only 37 per cent of respondents are still convinced that she can actually run. At the end of February, the figure was 74 per cent, which represents a drop of half. For the survey, 1000 French people over the age of 18 were questioned online.
glitterbag
 
  2  
Reply Fri 4 Apr, 2025 08:23 pm
@izzythepush,
izzythepush wrote:

Russell Brand, (oft quoted by Lash,) has been charged with rape and sexual assault.


Hasn't that happened before?
hingehead
 
  2  
Reply Sat 5 Apr, 2025 01:11 am
https://i.pinimg.com/736x/6c/46/8b/6c468b2183f5ecf3953937cccae410b9.jpg
0 Replies
 
hightor
 
  2  
Reply Sat 5 Apr, 2025 02:45 am
Quote:
The stock market rout continued today. As expected, China announced retaliatory tariffs in response to those President Donald Trump announced on Wednesday. Chinese leaders say they will impose a 34% tariff on all U.S. goods imported into China next Thursday. Apparently, Trump did not think China would respond to his tariffs, and tried to sound as if he was still in control of the situation.

Trump is spending a long weekend in Florida, where he is attending the LIV golf tournament at his Doral club. But at 8:25 this morning, he reposted on his social media channel a video in which the narrator claimed that Trump is crashing the markets on purpose. The video claimed that legendary investor Warren Buffet “just said Trump is making the best economic moves he’s seen in over fifty years.” It went on to explain how “the secret game he’s playing” “could make you rich.” Buffett’s conglomerate Berkshire Hathaway quickly denied Buffett had said any such thing as the video claimed. “All such reports are false,” it said. In March, Buffett called tariffs “an act of war, to some degree.”

Then, about an hour before the U.S. markets opened, Trump posted on his social media channel: “CHINA PLAYED IT WRONG, THEY PANICKED—THE ONE THING THEY CANNOT AFFORD TO DO!” About twenty minutes later, he posted: “TO THE MANY INVESTORS COMING INTO THE UNITED STATES AND INVESTING MASSIVE AMOUNTS OF MONEY, MY POLICIES WILL NEVER CHANGE. THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO GET RICH, RICHER THAN EVER BEFORE!!!”

When the markets opened, they plummeted again. During trading today, the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 2,231 points, or 5.5%, on top of the 1,679 points it fell yesterday. The S&P 500 fell 5.97% following the 4.84% it lost yesterday. The Nasdaq Composite dropped a further 5.8% after yesterday’s drop of nearly 6%. Oil prices also fell sharply despite the fact that Trump had exempted the U.S. energy industry from tariffs, as traders anticipate lower economic growth and thus less demand for gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel.

Twenty-five minutes before the market closed, Trump posted: “ONLY THE WEAK WILL FAIL!”

After-market trading continued downward.

Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said today that Trump’s tariffs are “highly likely” to increase inflation and risk throwing people out of work. Economists at JPMorgan now place the odds of global recession at 60% unless the tariffs are ended.

Natalie Allison, Jeff Stein, Cat Zakrzewski, and Michael Birnbaum of the Washington Post reported how Trump came to impose the tariffs. After aides from a number of different government agencies came up with options for Trump to review, he decided instead on a different option, one that has drawn ridicule because it is crude and has nothing to do with tariffs at all. He reached the amounts of tariff levies by dividing the trade deficit of each nation (not including services) by the value of its imports and then dividing the final number by 2.

The reporters note that Trump didn’t land on a plan until less than three hours before he announced it, and made his choice with little input from business or foreign leaders. Neither Republican lawmakers nor the president’s team knew what Trump would do. “He’s at the peak of just not giving a f*ck anymore,” a White House official told the reporters. “Bad news stories? Doesn’t give a f*ck. He’s going to do what he’s going to do. He’s going to do what he promised to do on the campaign trail.”

While right-wing media and Republican lawmakers have worked hard to spin the economic crisis sparked by Trump’s tariffs, Financial Times chief data reporter John Burn-Murdoch used charts on social media to show that Americans are not happy. Consumers give Trump’s economic plan the worst ratings of any administration’s economic policy since records began. He has had the same impact on economic uncertainty as the global coronavirus pandemic did. Almost 60% of Americans expect the economy to deteriorate over the next year, and they are very worried about job losses.

Burn-Murdoch noted that despite the attempt of right-wing media to hide the crisis, more than half of Americans have heard unfavorable business news coverage of the government’s policies. While MAGA continues to approve of Trump, he’s rapidly losing support among the rest of the coalition that put him into office.

The administration apparently doesn’t care much more about the law than it does about the reactions to the tariffs that are crashing the economy. Today, U.S. District Court judge Paula Xinis ordered the government to bring back to the United States no later than 11:59 p.m. on April 7 a legal resident it mistakenly sent to a notorious prison for terrorists in El Salvador. On Monday, administration lawyers told the court that the government had swept up Kilmar Abrego Garcia because of an “administrative error” but that it could not bring him back because he was outside the reach of American laws.

Priscilla Alvarez and Emily R. Condon of CNN note that in a hearing about the case, Xinis said that Abrego Garcia, who was in the U.S. legally and was not charged with any crimes, was arrested last month “without legal basis” and was deported “without justification of legal basis.” “This was an illegal act,” Xinis said. “Congress said you can’t do it, and you did it anyway.”

Trump’s deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, responded to the judge’s order by calling Xinis a “Marxist judge” who “thinks she’s president of El Salvador.” The White House responded to the judge’s order by saying, “We suggest the Judge contact President Bukele [of El Salvador] because we are unaware of the judge having jurisdiction or authority over the country of El Salvador.”

Legal analyst Steve Vladeck responded that while a U.S. federal court cannot order the Salvadoran government to release Abrego Garcia, the U.S. government should be able to secure his release. If it can—and in this case it should be able to—the court can order it to do so.

If that were not the case, the administration could simply get rid of anyone it wanted to by sending them to a prison outside the jurisdiction of the United States and then claiming it had no way to get them back.

Tonight, as the economy is in turmoil, Trump is speaking at a $1 million-per-person candlelight fundraising dinner at the Trump Organization's Mar-a-Lago property for the super PAC, MAGA Inc., that supports Trump. By law, MAGA Inc. can’t coordinate with Trump’s campaign organization, so the invitations for the dinner say that Trump is simply a guest speaker and is not asking for donations.

The terrible storms in the middle of the country continue. Authorities have issued flash flood emergencies in parts of Missouri, Texas, and Arkansas, and heavy rains are also expected in Kentucky.

Finally, four soldiers who died when their military vehicle sank in a deep swamp in Lithuania during a training exercise came home to Dover Air Force Base, in Dover, Delaware, today. Their recovery took about 200 U.S., Polish, Estonian, and Lithuanian personnel a week and required drones, search dogs, Navy divers, and ground-penetrating radar, as well as 70 tons of sand and gravel.

“We consider US soldiers in Lithuania as our own,” the Lithuanian Defense Ministry said after thousands of people joined Lithuanian president Gitanas Nausėda and other dignitaries in a dignified departure ceremony of the soldiers from Lithuania. “The farewell ceremony once again demonstrated our society's solidarity, respect, and gratitude to the Americans.”

hcr
0 Replies
 
izzythepush
 
  2  
Reply Sat 5 Apr, 2025 04:11 am
@glitterbag,
A Channel 4 documentary detailed allegations, but he's only just been charged by the police.
0 Replies
 
izzythepush
 
  2  
Reply Sat 5 Apr, 2025 05:10 am
Quote:
I was a British tourist trying to leave America. Then I was detained, shackled and sent to an immigration detention centre

Graphic artist Rebecca Burke was on the trip of a lifetime. But as she tried to leave the US she was stopped, interrogated and branded an illegal alien by ICE. Now back home, she tells others thinking of going to Trump’s America: don’t do it


Just before the graphic artist Rebecca Burke left Seattle to travel to Vancouver, Canada, on 26 February, she posted an image of a rough comic to Instagram. “One part of travelling that I love is seeing glimpses of other lives,” read the bubble in the first panel, above sketches of cosy homes: crossword puzzle books, house plants, a lit candle, a steaming kettle on a gas stove. Burke had seen plenty of glimpses of other lives over the six weeks she had been backpacking in the US. She had been travelling on her own, staying on homestays free of charge in exchange for doing household chores, drawing as she went. For Burke, 28, it was absolute freedom.

Within hours of posting that drawing, Burke got to see a much darker side of life in America, and far more than a glimpse. When she tried to cross into Canada, Canadian border officials told her that her living arrangements meant she should be travelling on a work visa, not a tourist one. They sent her back to the US, where American officials classed her as an illegal alien. She was shackled and transported to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) detention centre, where she was locked up for 19 days – even though she had money to pay for a flight home, and was desperate to leave the US.

Burke had arrived in the US during the Biden administration, only to become one of 32,809 people to be arrested by Ice during the first 50 days of Donald Trump’s presidency. Since February, several young foreign nationals have been incarcerated in Ice detention centres for seemingly little reason and held for weeks, including Germans Lucas Sielaff, Fabian Schmidt and Jessica Brösche. (Brösche, 26, spent more than a month in detention, including eight days in solitary confinement.) Unlike these other cases, Burke had been trying to leave the US, rather than enter it, when she was detained for nearly three weeks.

I had been following news of Burke’s trip since she arrived in the US on 7 January. To me and my family, Burke is Becky, our neighbour and, for two and a half years, the person who took care of my kids after school. Her London home was only five doors down from us, but we met online, through a website that matches families with people offering childcare. Becky spent her mornings as a graphic artist and comic-book editor, and her afternoons collecting my son and daughter from primary school and entertaining them back at my place, making them snacks and refereeing their squabbles. Best of all, she drew with them. When my daughter turned seven, she asked if she could have a comic-making party; all her friends went home with little zines Becky had helped them make. We felt so lucky to have her in our lives.

Two years ago, Becky went to San Francisco for two weeks on a Workaway placement, staying in a family home free of charge in exchange for sweeping floors and walking the dog. Last August, she used Workaway again, in Switzerland. The internet was opening up the possibility of another life for her – one where she could see the world on a shoestring. In September, Becky told me she was going to leave London in January to go travelling on her own. We were sad to see her go, but I was full of admiration for her; I wish I had been as bold and free in my 20s. We threw her a farewell party just before Christmas; everyone cried. I kept up with news of her travels on Instagram, and there were regular postcards and WhatsApps: pictures of the tattoo she had got in Portland; a video she filmed of herself on a forest walk. She told me she had seen bald eagles and woodpeckers, deer and seals. And then, on 26 February, everything went silent.

Becky wasn’t someone who liked to be immersed in global news. But, even if she had been, she could never have foreseen what would happen to her. She booked her plane ticket six months ago, while pundits were still predicting a close race for the presidency, or a Kamala Harris victory. Her story gives a glimpse of what America has become since then.

Imeet up with Becky at her parents’ house, in Monmouthshire, six days after she arrived back in the UK. After so long in detention, she wants to spend as much as possible in the sunshine, so we sit in the garden while their dog – a cocker spaniel named Mr Bojangles – runs circles around us. Becky is much paler than the person my family knew so well. Her eyes are hollower.

She began her trip with a stopover in Iceland, taking in the northern lights, going on to spend three nights in a hostel in New York City. Having already stayed in San Francisco on a Workaway placement, she didn’t feel she had anything to hide when she landed in New York. She would have told the border official her plans in full had he asked about them, she tells me. But he didn’t.

The homestays were a big part of the appeal of her trip. “I really liked becoming part of these other families. You don’t get placed so firmly in the community if you’re going to a hotel that’s sterile and separate.” Her first placement was three weeks with a household just outside Portland. Becky would “destroy dandelions from their lawn” and cook meals; her hosts took her on day trips, including an overnight stay at the seaside. They drove her to her next homestay, which was in Portland itself. Becky’s second host took her on forest hikes. “She knew every single plant, every single bird call. It was like having a personal tour guide,” Becky beams. “It was incredible. I thought, this is going too well, I’m having too much fun here.”

Both her hosts had been worried about how the US was changing under Trump. “I’m hearing so many scary stories about Ice raids and passports being detained,” Becky WhatsApp’d me on 8 February. Her first host had a transgender friend whose passport had been seized after she tried to change the name on it. But Becky felt like a spectator to it all. “I was worried on their behalf – an abstract worry and concern for others – rather than for myself. Because, I thought, I’m getting out of here.”

On 26 February, Becky boarded a Greyhound coach for the three-hour ride from Seattle to Vancouver. She was due to spend two months in the home of a divorced father who wanted help with meal prep and laundry during the one week out of every two that his kids lived with him. Becky had never been to Canada before and was looking forward to this part of her trip. She sat at the back of the coach, listening to a comedy podcast, watching the world flash by.

She wasn’t thinking about the dismal state of US-Canada relations when she handed her passport to the Canadian border official. He asked what she was planning to do in Canada. Travel, she replied. He asked where she was staying. Living with a man and his family, she said. He asked how she knew him. Becky said they had met on Workaway, and that she would be helping out around the house. The official told her they needed to research what Workaway was. He told Becky’s coach driver to leave without her.

Workaway warns users that they “will need the correct visa for any country that you visit”, and that it is the user’s responsibility to get one, but it doesn’t stipulate what the correct visa is for the kind of arrangements it facilitates in any given country. Becky had always travelled with a tourist visa in the past – including to the US in 2022 – without any problems. She checked that work visas were only required for paid work in Canada. She had had months to plan her trip, and would have applied for a work visa if it was necessary, she says.

But the Canadian officials told Becky they’d determined she needed a work visa. She could apply for one from the US and come back, they said. Two officers escorted her to the American side of the border. They talked to the US officials. Becky doesn’t know what was said.

After six hours of waiting – and watching dozens of people being refused entry to the US and made to return to Canada – Becky began to feel frightened. Then she was called into an interrogation room, and questioned about what she had been doing during her seven weeks in the US. Had she been paid? Was there a contract? Would she have lost her accommodation if she could no longer provide services? Becky answered no to everything. She was a tourist, she said.

An hour later, Becky was handed a transcript of her interview to sign. She was alone, with no legal advice. “It was really long, loads of pages.” As she flicked through it, she saw the officer had summarised everything she told him about what she had been doing in the US as just “work in exchange for accommodation”. “I remember thinking, I should ask him to edit that.” But the official was impatient and irritable, she says, and she was exhausted and dizzy – she hadn’t eaten all day. “I just thought, if I sign this, I’ll be free. And I didn’t want to stay there any longer.” So she signed.

Then she was told she had violated her tourist visa by working in the US. They took her fingerprints, seized her phone and bags, cut the laces off her trainers, frisked her, and put her in a cell. “I heard the door lock, and I instantly threw up.”

At 11pm, Becky was allowed to call her family. Her father asked what was going to happen next. “I looked at the officer and he said, ‘We’re going to take you to a facility where you’ll wait for your flight. You’ll be there one or two days – just while we get you on the next flight home.’”

Becky was shackled and put into the back of a van. “I had no idea where we were going. It was just bumping around in darkness with handcuffs on.” At 2.30am, she arrived at the Ice facility in Tacoma, Washington. She was made to change into standard-issue underwear, a yellow top and trousers. Officers took away all her personal belongings, measured her height and weight, made her pose for a mugshot, and assigned her an “A” number (short for “alien”). Whenever she asked the people processing her arrival how long she would be detained for, they told her they couldn’t help: they worked for GEO, the private company contracted to run the facility, and not Ice, the government body that would decide her fate.

At 5.30am, she was taken to the dorm that she was to share with 103 other women: a massive room filled with metal tables, benches and bunk beds, some cells around the perimeter, and a row of payphones, “like a hospital mixed with a canteen”. It was bathed in bright halogen light that Becky would come to learn would always be on, albeit slightly dimmed between 11.30pm and 5.30am. Becky’s bunk was on a mezzanine level.

All Becky wanted to do was sleep, but instead she headed to the payphones to make the one free call she had been told she was entitled to, to tell her family how to put money into her inmate account. “In my head, this was a thing I had to do immediately, otherwise I’d be stuck without a way to communicate with the outside world.” She gave her parents her A number, and they tried to reassure her. It’s just one or two days, they repeated to her. A horrible experience. But over soon.

As soon as the call ended, Becky went on one of the detention centre iPads, which had apps allowing inmates to send messages to Ice and check the balance on their inmate account. “I sent a message to Ice straight away saying: ‘I am a tourist. I was just backpacking. I have not outstayed my visa. I’ve only been in America one month and two weeks. I don’t know why I’m here. I want to go home. Please can you help?’” She frantically refreshed the app to see if her account had been credited. (It took longer than expected, because funds can only be transferred into accounts for “illegal aliens” from within the US. Becky’s father, Paul, discovered he could only do it through an American friend.) “I was seeing no money arrive, and I was getting really upset thinking I told them the wrong A number.”

As she sobbed holding the iPad, Becky found herself surrounded by other inmates who wanted to comfort her. A woman called Lucy offered to let Becky use her phone credit if money hadn’t appeared in the account within a few hours. Rosa, a Mexican woman who spoke barely any English and had already been detained for 11 months, offered Becky a Pot Noodle she had been able to buy from the commissary, the shop where they could purchase luxuries. At 8am, Becky finally curled up in her bed to sleep, with Rosa praying in Spanish in the bunk below.

Becky quickly learned the monotonous rhythms of the detention centre. Wake-up time was 5.30am. Breakfast – which for Becky was cold potato and a sachet of peanut butter, the only vegan option – was at 6am. Lunch – black beans and more cold potato – was anytime between 11.30am and 2pm. Four times a day, inmates had to sit on their bunks for an hour so they could be counted by staff. Dinner frequently arrived after 8pm. They were often ravenous between meals, which was why the commissary was so vital. It was also the only place they could access shampoo, deodorant, nail clippers and anti-shank toothbrushes.

On her first day in the facility, Becky asked for a scrap of paper and a pen, and began to draw the inmates on the table next to her. She was immediately inundated with portrait requests. A Mexican woman called Lopez, who had a photo of her children stored on one of the iPads, told Becky she would buy her some paper and colouring pencils from the commissary if Becky drew her kids. She soon became the dorm’s unofficial artist-in-residence, with women huddling around the dirty mirrors to make themselves look presentable before they sat for her. They would decorate their cells with Becky’s drawings, or send them to their families. Lopez declared herself Becky’s manager. “She kept saying, ‘Becky, you need to ask for stuff in exchange. Ask for popcorn.’ And I’d be like, ‘Lopez, I don’t need anything.’ I thought, I’m here briefly, you’re stuck here a long time. I’m not going to take your food away from you.”

The majority of the women were from Latin American countries, but some were from India, China, Iran, Afghanistan and Gaza. “Most of them were asylum seekers, but there was this handful of new people who had come in recently who did not know why they were here.” Lewelyn joined the dorm a few days after Becky. She had just returned from visiting her family in the Philippines; she had been living in the US since 1976, working as a lab technician at the University of Washington hospital’s cancer centre. “She’d had a visa issue that had been resolved many years ago, but now it was flagging on the system again.” Kseniia, a Russian woman who had been working for two years in a California nail salon, had permission to work in the US but was handcuffed while waiting for her husband to come out of an Ice interview. “She was so confused. She kept saying to me, ‘I’ve got a work permit.’”

There were other tourists, too. Bana, from Romania, was on holiday in Canada and visited Peace Arch park, on the international boundary between the US and Canada. She told Becky she had been taking selfies with her husband when a US border official told her they had strayed into American territory without the right visa and took her into custody.

Becky had arrived in the detention centre on a Thursday. She soon realised she would not be out of it before the end of the weekend. No one ever replied to the message she sent to Ice on the iPad; she found out the Ice officer assigned to her case had gone on annual leave. The following Monday, Paul contacted the Foreign Office in London, and the British consulate in San Francisco. “They were doing the diplomatic bit,” he tells me. “But, after seven days, I could see it wasn’t really working. My perception is the British consulate couldn’t get Ice people to respond to them. There was no end in sight.”

After Becky had been incarcerated for more than 10 days, Paul decided to go to the media. A quiet, unassuming man, he found himself live on Newsnight, Sky News and Good Morning Britain. Becky made it to every national newspaper in the UK, and had coverage in US press, too. Hours after her story broke, she was visited by an Ice officer who told her she was now “at the top of the pile” to be processed. Four days later, on a Thursday, another Ice officer came to the facility to tell Becky her flight had been booked for the following Monday.

Becky’s face began to appear in the newspapers they received at the facility. At one point, her face flashed up on one of the three TV screens they had in her dorm. “Everyone clapped. After that, a few people came up to me and said, ‘Can you put me on TV, too?’” She feels very guilty that she was able to leave. “I was aware that it was from a major position of privilege that the press listened to this story. I was a British tourist, I had these images of my trip on Instagram, and I had contacts with journalists, so I was very lucky. And I wanted the same thing that Ice wanted, which was for me to go home.”

At lunchtime on 17 March, officers came into the dorm, barked Becky’s name and told her to get ready to go. She had hidden some of her drawings among her official paperwork – her signed transcript and the document declaring her an illegal alien – in the hope she could smuggle them out. She wasn’t allowed to tell her family she was on her way home, but one of the women offered to ring her parents to notify them. Becky was shackled at the ankles, wrists and waist, and then made to shuffle out into a van.

“When I got close to the airport, I felt really relieved and also overwhelmed, watching people with their suitcases, people going on holiday. It was a bit like whiplash – reality whiplash. Did that just happen?”

But her ordeal was not over. She was taken to the basement of Seattle-Tacoma international airport for a security check. While every item in her bag was swabbed and dismantled, she was subjected to a full body search. “I was in this very loud, weird, industrial space with pipes and conveyor belts and lights and sirens, being told to open my legs. I was silently crying, watching all my stuff being torn apart as someone else was searching every crevice of me.” She boarded the plane before any of the other passengers. “I found my seat, threw my bags on it, and went into the toilet and sobbed in the cubicle, with the British Airways classical music surrounding me.”

Six days after she landed at Heathrow, Becky still sleeps with her lamp on. She is enjoying home-cooked food and long showers, but feels guilty for resting in comfort when she knows her friends are still incarcerated. “I’m thinking of them every day,” she tells me. She is working on a comic that will tell the story of what happened to her, and the women she shared 19 days with, based on the drawings, notes and official documents she managed to take out of the detention centre.

Becky still doesn’t know why she was incarcerated for so long. She suspects it might be because Ice is simply overwhelmed. “Maybe border security have been pressured to prove they’re stepping up.” She shrugs. “It did feel like they wanted to get me from the moment I was walked to the American side.” On 4 March, the White House issued a statement celebrating how “Ice arrests of illegal immigrants have surged 627%” during Trump’s first month in office.

Jasmine Mooney, a Canadian woman who was detained by Ice for two weeks, says while the private companies who own the facilities are run for profit, there’s no incentive to get people out quickly. But in the era of Elon Musk’s department of government efficiency (Doge), it seems counterintuitive for public money to be deliberately wasted on detaining illegal aliens with the will and means to return home.

Trump’s border tsar, Tom Homan, promised “shock and awe” from day one of his administration. Perhaps Becky’s incarceration was political theatre – or performative cruelty. Whatever the reason, in Trump’s America, a tourist who makes a mistake can be locked up, seemingly indefinitely.

The deportation paper Becky signed bans her from the US for the next 10 years. Paul tells me they are going to try to appeal it, but Becky says America isn’t the country she thought it was. Her advice to anyone planning to travel to the US is simply not to go. “First, because of the danger of what could happen to you. And, secondly, do you really want to give your money to this country right now?”

She has emerged from the experience with new eyes. “I was naive to think that what was going on in the world, or at the border, wouldn’t affect me,” she tells me, her arms folded across her chest. She had believed if she was honest and acted in good faith she would be insulated from harm, but now thinks that might have been naive, too. “If I’d lied, I’d be on holiday in Canada right now.”


https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/05/i-was-a-british-tourist-trying-to-leave-america-then-i-was-detained-shackled-and-sent-to-an-immigration-detention-centre<br />
0 Replies
 
Walter Hinteler
 
  2  
Reply Sat 5 Apr, 2025 05:30 am
Congressman tells the Guardian Trump is exploiting fight against antisemitism as a ruse to stamp his will on schools

Jerry Nadler on Trump’s university attacks: ‘He doesn’t give a damn about antisemitism’
Quote:
Jerry Nadler, the most senior Jewish member of the House of Representatives, has accused Donald Trump of being a “would-be dictator” who is cynically exploiting the fight against antisemitism as a ruse to stamp his will on top-flight universities.

In an interview with the Guardian, the New York congressman lashed out against the president for using genuine dangers confronting American Jews as a guise to justify his attacks on Columbia, Harvard and other universities. “Trump obviously doesn’t give a damn about antisemitism, this is just an expression of his authoritarianism,” he said.

Nadler’s broadside came as the Trump administration is stepping up its attack on Ivy League and other universities in an unprecedented challenge to academic independence. This week $210m in research grants to Princeton University were suspended by the energy and defense departments and NASA, under the mantle of a federal investigation into “antisemitic harassment”.

Days earlier, the Trump administration announced it would review $9bn in federal contracts and grants to Harvard University. Another $500m of federal funds to Brown University are reportedly under threat.

The latest assaults on the Ivy League follow the cancellation of $400m in federal money to Columbia University in New York. At least 60 other universities have been warned by the administration that they face similar punishment.

Earlier this week Nadler released a sternly-worded statement denouncing the attacks. He said the president was “weaponizing the real pain American Jews face to advance his desire to wield control over truth-seeking academic institutions”.

In his Guardian interview Nadler expanded on his stance, warning fellow American Jews not to be taken in by Trump’s rhetoric. He said that if the president were allowed to get away with his efforts to restrict free speech on campuses, Jews would be among those most impacted.

“Whenever freedom is curtailed, Jews in particular become victims,” Nadler said. “That’s the history.”

He added that Trump’s actions in the name of fighting antisemitism would paradoxically make the lives of American Jews less safe. “There are always antisemites looking for an excuse to react, so this is dangerous and it certainly does not help at all.”

Nadler said that if Trump were sincere about protecting Jewish people he would root out the “numerous antisemites he has appointed to some of the highest positions in government”. Asked to specify which officials he had in mind, the congressman named Kingsley Wilson, a Pentagon spokesperson.

Wilson has amplified on social media far-right lies about a Jewish businessman, Leo Frank, who was lynched by a hate-filled mob in Georgia in 1915. Frank had been wrongly convicted of killing a 13-year-old factory worker.

Nadler also pointed to Trump’s firing of large numbers of investigators in the civil rights office of the Education Department who act as the front line of federal efforts to curb anti-Jewish hate on campuses. “If he were serious about antisemitism, Trump would be bringing cases in front of the Office of Civil Rights rather than destroying it.”

Nadler, 77, has represented New York’s 12th congressional district, which covers a large swath of Manhattan, for 32 years. Until January he was the ranking Democrat on the powerful House judiciary committee.

He describes himself as a “committed Zionist” and a strong supporter of Israel as a homeland for Jewish people. Despite those convictions, he has increasingly spoken out in condemnation of the aggressive handling of pro-Palestinian protests on US campuses that erupted in the wake of the Gaza war.

“From my point of view, the protesters are expressing obnoxious opinions, I don’t agree with them. But they’re entitled to those opinions,” Nadler told the Guardian.
0 Replies
 
hightor
 
  1  
Reply Sat 5 Apr, 2025 07:07 am
Global Economic Crisis

Everyone in the country at the moment, albeit from different vantage points, seems to have the same question: What the actual **** is going on?

Quote:
Is the plan to have permanent tariffs? Are these meant as the basis of some kind of negotiation? Are we going to have blanket tariffs as the basis of a system of corruption in which favored industries and companies gain exemptions in exchange for fealty and cash? (So, countries as universities and law firms?) Is the idea just to replace income taxes with tariff income and fundamentally shift taxes to the middle and working classes?

At a basic level, the entire MAGA movement, and Donald Trump from whom all of it stems, simply doesn’t grasp the nature of American power or its limitations. In their view, the United States is the natural and inherent dominating power in the world. We’re the most powerful and the strongest. And starting from that view they look out onto the world and think if we are in charge why don’t we act like we’re in charge?

Instead of acting like we’re in charge, we do a lot of consulting and asking. That’s weak and leads everyone to take advantage of us, protecting their industries while we keep our markets open, letting their defenses atrophy and relying on our protection, etc. It’s lost on them that the U.S. is not actually the inherently dominating power on the planet. U.S. primacy is based yes on a vast military, access to the American domestic market, American wealth. But really it’s based on America’s role as the custodian of a global system that on balance works quite well, at least for the other advanced economies of the world. It provides a general peace, a system of more or less known rules enforced with some consistency, a U.S. primacy that keeps the peace without dominating other middle powers, etc. The U.S. global order is like a trampoline with a bowling ball in the middle; like a giant star, the very fabric of the system is subtly angled in the U.S. direction. But on balance it works. The U.S. is the first among equals more than a dominating power.

In other words, precisely what MAGA views as examples of weakness are the bases of American power. Donald Trump wants to hold the rest of the world in subjection. But the U.S. simply isn’t powerful enough to do that. It may have been just after World War II for a while. But it certainly isn’t now. That’s also why the American primacy has so long outlasted the Soviet one, whose satellites tore away from it at the first opportunity, and even before any real opportunity: because the U.S. primacy actually worked quite well for allies in Europe and East Asia. Donald Trump is only able to look at America’s persistent trade deficits. The role of the dollar as the global reserve currency and the massive advantages it brings are lost on him and that’s what makes the trade deficits in some ways inevitable and also sustainable. It also gives the U.S. a whole series of other vast advantages, one of which is being able to borrow and borrow and have it mostly not matter.

Yesterday, a friend sent me this video from a Youtube Channel called Money & Macro. It’s quite good. I really recommend it. It’s basically an effort to make sense of what the goal and plan of all this chaos really is by looking closely at the arguments of Trump’s Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and his Chair of the Council of Economic Advisors Stephen Miran. The argument goes like this …


The global neo-liberal economic order created in the early 1980s by Reagan, Thatcher and the G7 powers has de-industrialized the United States to the point where it has become not so much an economic problem as a national security one. You can’t remain the dominant military power without a dominant or at least robust industrial base because that’s how you sustain a war-fighting machine. That is what made the U.S. so critical in World War II. So how do you re-industrialize without losing the dollar’s role as the global reserve currency? Because to a great degree it’s the global trade in dollars and the dollar’s outsized value that makes trade deficits so persistent.

The plan goes something like this. Put huge tariffs on everyone, create a lot of chaos and near-term pain. But their pain will be greater than our pain. And eventually the other countries will come calling, wanting to cut deals because their economies are all based around the need for access to the U.S. domestic market. Then you cut deals in which other countries peg their currencies to the dollar. That locks them into using the dollar as the global reserve currency while also allowing the value of the dollar to fall and thus allowing the re-industrialization of the United States. How much sense this makes in narrowly global economic terms I’ll have to leave to others. But the video’s host, Joeri Schasfoort, makes a pretty strong case that whatever its merits, this is the plan of these two key Trump advisors.

Joeri Schasfoort argues that the plan actually does make some sense on its own terms. The fatal flaw is that it relies on the buy-in of all these other countries. It relies on these other countries trusting U.S. protection and fair-dealing. And the countries of the world are hardly going to have a lot of trust in a country which has just bullied them into a new and unequal global economic regime through what amounts to extortion and force.

And yes, that really is the problem. This whole plan amounts to a highly destructive power play in which the U.S. will force the countries of the world to knuckle under and accept Trump’s demands. (Any of this sound familiar? It should.) But you come back to the essential problem: the point of a global trade regime is something that is enduring. But how enduring are deals made under duress? Probably not very. It goes back to the essential point: is the U.S. strong enough, economically and militarily, to coerce the rest of the planet into a new economic regime of its own choosing? I doubt it. And to the extent it can do it short term, by creating a kind of bum rush or panic response, how enduring can that be? No one stays in a deal agreed to under duress. They leave at the first opportunity.

But the whole theory has a much bigger problem. We all know there is a persistent desire, need, insistence on figuring out the plans behind Donald Trump’s seeming chaos. But that whole enterprise is flawed. There is no more plan here than a giant worm consuming everything in its path has. It eats and it moves forward. That’s all there is. What you have is a man who can only understand relationships through the prism of domination. There’s the dominating and the dominated. And you want to be the first and not the second. He also thinks countries can only be great and rich if you make a lot of heavy industrial products. That’s where the thinking stops. There’s a lot of grievance and a general nostalgia about the 1950s. But that’s really where the thinking stops. There is no thinking really. There’s a set of impulses.

Now, given Trump’s great political power, he attracts to him people either who have ideas that seem similar to these impulses or for whom these impulses fit well into their theories or strategies. And to be clear the world is due for a reform to its system of global economic and trade governance. So lots of people have ideas. Some good, some bad. People like Bessent and Miran sidle up to Trump. And in the process of sidling up to him and gaining influence with him, his goals and actions do take on more shape and coherence, on the surface. So there is sort of a plan. Miran and Bessent have one. It has some impact on Trump. But really it’s just the same guy with the same impulses, with a desire for domination and who’s super hung up about trade deficits.

And that’s the chaos. Because everyone’s desire to find a plan is based on magical and wishful thinking. None of it is real. And Donald Trump is still the guy making it up as he goes along every day.

This brings us back to another point about Donald Trump.

Trump’s self-image is that of a deal maker. But there are different kinds of deals. There are collaborative deals like the ones commercial businesses make with each other. So I make a widget and I contract with you to make one of the parts I need for my widget. You make money. I make money. It works. Great. If it stops working for both sides that deal is going to fall apart. Or it will need to be renegotiated. This is the nature of business deals in the real economy.

But there’s another kind of deal … say, the kind of deal when I sell you my car. If I get you to pay way more than it’s worth, I win and you lose. It’s binary. The only way for me to win in fact is for you to lose. I only know I won when I can see that you lost. This kind of deal only works if it’s a one-off. I don’t care if you’re mad. I don’t need to sell you another car.

If you look at Donald Trump’s career, it is heavily, heavily based on the latter kind of deal. And that kind of deal is only possible with some degree of razzmatazz, coercion or deceit. That really is his understanding of what a deal is: getting something over on the other guy. And that’s what we see here. To the extent that there’s any plan it’s basically a fast-action power play; Trump is pulling on the economic powers of the world to bum rush them into a newly subservient global trading regime. But really there is no plan. Even calling it a “regime” is falling into the Trump/retcon house of mirrors.

That notional plan is just something players like Miran and Bessent have tried to impose on Trump’s impulses and grievances. But he remains in charge. So their notional plans don’t really mean anything. It’s not that different from Trump’s war against the “Deep State.” Trump doesn’t give a crap about the federal bureaucracy or what it does. It’s just something he got mad about during his first term because he got saddled with so many federal investigations and the “Deep State” was the thing that made it hard for him to break the law or generally use the U.S. government as his personal property. For him that’s like the general counsel’s office investigating the CEO. What the ****? Then too a lot of people who had deeply articulated and pre-existing visions of stripping down the state gathered around him. Because his impulses and anger were useful. And here we are.

We saw this in the furious Wall Street run-up from November to January. Everyone wanting to convince themselves that Trump had a plan and that it was one that would be good for them. There must be a plan, right? The lure of magical thinking runs so damn deep. This is the most consistent pattern of the Trump era, the quest to divine some underlying plan or theory when all it really is is a degenerate huckster following his gut. It’s retcon, retcon, retcon all the way down.

And here we are.

tpm
0 Replies
 
hightor
 
  2  
Reply Sat 5 Apr, 2025 07:22 am
Leaked Memo Reveals Insane Ban on Words Agriculture Department Can Say

The Department of Agriculture is no longer allowed to use the phrase “safe drinking water.”

https://i.imgur.com/sIHw52K.png
Donald J. Trump, President of the United States of America

Quote:
Forget DEI buzzwords—the Trump administration’s government censorship ordinance is now infringing on language that will make it nearly impossible for agencies to do their job.

A leaked memo from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Research Service division revealed Sunday that the agency has banned some key language from its vocabulary, including the words “climate” and “vulnerable,” as well as the phrase “safe drinking water.”

Other baffling entries on the memo’s banned language list are “greenhouse gas emissions,” “methane emissions,” “sustainable construction,” “solar energy,” and “geothermal,” as well as “nuclear energy,” “diesel,” “affordable housing,” “prefabricated housing,” “runoff,” “microplastics,” “water pollution,” “soil pollution,” “groundwater pollution,” “sediment remediation,” “water collection,” “water treatment,” “rural water,” and “clean water,” among dozens of others.

“When evaluating agreements, those entries that include these terms or similar terms cannot be submitted,” wrote Sharon Strickland, the USDA’s Northeast area financial management, travel and agreements section head, in an internal March 20 email. The review will “ensure that we maintain compliance with the Administration’s EOS.”

It’s unclear how the guidance would do anything other than completely hinder the department’s ability to monitor the health and edibility of crops, or aid America’s rural development—some of its primary functions. What is clear, however, is that purging such basic speech will stifle scientific research and discourse.

Donald Trump began censoring the government as soon as he returned to office. In January, the Office of Management and Budget held tens of billions in federal funding hostage, requiring executive branch agencies to purge language related to “environmental justice,” abortion, DEI initiatives, “woke gender ideology,” and “illegal aliens” in their reports and missions. Otherwise, they would forgo their congressionally appropriated funds, per an OMB memo.

That threat has since rolled its way through the American legal system. Last week, an appeals court upheld a block on the sweeping freeze, agreeing with a previous court’s ruling that the 22-state coalition that brought the lawsuit would “irreparably suffer” under Trump’s ordinance.

“These harms included the obligation of new debt; the inability to pay existing debt; impediments to planning, hiring, and operations; and disruptions to research projects by state universities,” wrote Chief Judge David Barron.

Barron’s ruling echoed a similar decision issued by Judge Loren AliKhan in February, in which the federal judge indefinitely blocked Trump’s effort.

“In the simplest terms, the freeze was ill-conceived from the beginning,” AliKhan wrote in her ruling. “Defendants either wanted to pause up to $3 trillion in federal spending practically overnight, or they expected each federal agency to review every single one of its grants, loans, and funds for compliance in less than twenty-four hours. The breadth of that command is almost unfathomable.”

tnr
0 Replies
 
hightor
 
  2  
Reply Sat 5 Apr, 2025 07:31 am
@glitterbag,
Quote:
Hasn't that happened before?


Izzy explained the timeline of the accusations and the charges, but to take your question a bit further, it's certainly not the first time that sources Lash uses and individuals she admires have been exposed as dishonest, disreputable scumbags.
Walter Hinteler
 
  2  
Reply Sat 5 Apr, 2025 08:30 am
@hightor,
hightor wrote:
... sources Lash uses and individuals she admires ...
As with Russell, primarily those who belong to the anti-vax and anti-Democrat movement, spread pro-Russian and all kinds of other conspiracy theories.
0 Replies
 
 

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