Undernews: September 26, 2012

Immigrant imprisonment hits a record

Immigration Impact - The latest data on immigration enforcement show that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detained a record high of 429,247 noncitizens in the 2011 fiscal year, an increase of 18 percent over 2010. Immigration detention has been steadily increasing over the last two decades..

Recovered history: 1968 Elivis medley

America's other death sentence
James Ridgeway, Mother Jones - As of 2010, state and federal prisons housed more than 26,000 inmates 65 and older and nearly five times that number 55 and up, according to a recent Human Rights Watch report. (Both numbers are significant, since long-term incarceration is said to add 10 years to a p..

America's costly but lousy cable and internet service
The Daily Ticker - The U.S. has fallen behind much of the Western world when it comes to phone, cable and Internet service. Americans actually pay much more for inferior service compared to their global counterparts. In his new book, The Fine Print: How Big Companies Use 'Plain English' to Rob You ..

On Romney's offshore accounts
Mother Jones - James Henry, a former chief economist at McKinsey & Co. , describes offshore tax havens like the "bar scene in Star Wars." He explains, "Dictators and kleptocrats used them to conceal stolen loot. Arms dealers and drug dealers use them to launder their deals. Google and Apple and Pfi..

Recovered history: Before a "hipster neighborhood" became hip
Forbes recently named Washington's H Street corridor as one of the ten leading hipster neighborhoods of the nation. To one coming from a time when being hip reflected an almost complete opposite of today's fashion and style driven definition, the idea of Forbes telling us what is hip is iron..

The story so far: Tuesday
Sam Smith Missing in action: Campaign debate and coverage of Afghanistan, drought or foreclosure, just to name a few that the candidates and media are happily ignoring. Which helps to explain why the media is covering the campaign as if it was all about saying the right thing rather than fin..

Word
@ BorowitzReport - If cavemen had Twitter we would still not have fire.

Quakers divest from Hewlett Packard over Palestine
Mondoweiss - Friends Fiduciary Corporation, the socially responsible investment firm serving over 300 Quaker institutions in the United States, has dropped its holdings in Hewlett Packard and Veolia Environment, multinational corporations that support Israel’s Occupation of the Palestinian Territor..

Scott Walker finds something good about unions

As a member of Wal-Mart's management team, you are our first line of defense against unionization. It is important you be ... • constantly alert for efforts by a union to organize your associates, and • constantly alert to any signs your associates are interested in a union. This toolbox has been pu..

From pepper sprayed to pregnant
Greg Mitchell - Almost exactly a year ago I covered the famous incident, and video, of a small group of Occupy Wall Street protesters getting pepper-sprayed by a certain NYC cop with the too good to be true name of Tony Bologna. It was a watershed moment. Occupy had just formed and was ..

Paul Ryan 2005 speech make Romney seem like a moderate
Vincent Miller, America Magazine - This isn’t from a secret video, it's from the untranscribed portion of Ryan’s 2005 speech at the Atlas Society’s “Celebration of Ayn Rand.”... This is the event where Ryan stated that Rand was the “one thinker” who is the “reason I got involved in public service;”..

Bacon shortage possible due to drought
Huffington Post - With pork costs rising, Great Britain is facing a bacon and sausage shortage as pig farmers cut back on herd size. But the problem may soon become global. In a recent press release, the U.K.'s National Pig Association is warning that a " world shortage of pork and bacon next year ..

More proof the Bush-Obama-Gates war on public education has failed
NPR - The class of 2012 scored the lowest average SAT reading score since 1972.

Italy's top court upholds convictions of 23 Americans for renditions
ACLU - The U.S. government may have closed without any prosecutions its inquiries into and investigations of CIA involvement in torture, homicide and other gross human rights violations, and convinced courts to dismiss civil accountability suits for such abuses – but across the pond, courts are hol..

Romney would rely on business consultants to run the country
As Consultant in Chief, Mitt Romney Would Rely on the Advice of Other Consultants Peter Suderman, Reason - Romney started as a management consultant at Bain and brought consulting tools to the private equity offshoot he founded, Bain Capital. He continued to rely on the consultants toolkit during h..

Romney's Olympics paid for by record federal subsidy
Donald L. Barlett & James B. Steele, Dead Spin - It's been called Mitt Romney's "golden moment"¬the time he took over the troubled Salt Lake City Winter Olympics and led them to respectability on the world stage in 2002. His boosters say that Romney's stewardship of the U.S. Olympics show that he w..

Lost stereotype of the day
Politicus USA - According to a new Zogby Poll the wheels are close to coming off the Romney campaign. President Obama leads Mitt Romney among NASCAR fans, 48%-41%.

Prison populaiton continues to grow 50-80 thousand a year
Atlantic - Today the United States has approximately 1.8 million people behind bars: about 100,000 in federal custody, 1.1 million in state custody, and 600,000 in local jails. Prisons hold inmates convicted of federal or state crimes; jails hold people awaiting trial or serving short sentences. Th..

14,000 New England janitors authorize strike
SEIU - Janitors in Massachusetts and Rhode Island have voted overwhelmingly to authorize their leadership to call a strike against their employers over unfair labor practices committed by their employers. The janitors are in the midst of bargaining for a new contract covering 14,000 workers across ..

Uenmployment rate hides record departure from labor force
Christian Science Monitor - Economists, analyzing government data, estimate about 4 million fewer people are in the labor force than in December 2007, primarily due to a lack of jobs rather than the normal aging of America's population. The size of the shift underscores the severity of the jobs cri..

Maine governor starving the poor
Kathryn Skelton, Sun Journal, ME - Last winter the state gave Lewiston a heads-up: 337 families were about to lose state welfare benefits. Portland had 237, the second-highest number among all Maine cities, in the same boat. Those families had nearly hit the state's new 60-month lifetime limit in t..

Problems we hadn't started worrying about yet
Fox News - City authorities in Zimbabwe's second largest city said Saturday they were appealing to home owners to flush their toilets at a specified time as a way to unblock sewers after days of severe water rationing. Bulawayo City Council has asked its more than 1 million residents to flush their..

Word
Maureen Dowd: Mitt Romney is . . . so bad that if he were a Bain company, he would shut himself down.

Wildlife more desperate for water and food
Salt Lake Tribune - Ranchers all along the state’s western edge in the drought zone tell about the elk and deer raiding their irrigated alfalfa. They talk about the odd scene of coyotes, rabbits and antelope roaming the dry valleys during the afternoon in search of something to eat or drink. "It’s ..

Conspiracy theories are as American as the Declaration of Independence
Washington's Blog - America was founded on a conspiracy theory: that Britain’s King George was conspiring against the colonists by all his actions. The Declaration of Independence recites a series of conspiracies : When a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evi..

Voter suppression kickback in Pennsylvania
Philadelphia Inquirer - A voter-ID mutiny launched by Democratic-controlled Montgomery and Allegheny Counties showed signs of spreading across the state Friday, as Philadelphia and a handful of other local governments said they, too, would consider issuing poll-ready identification cards through co..

DA lets California cops get away with illegal pepper spraying
Star Tribune - The University of California, Davis police officers who doused students and alumni with pepper spray during a campus protest last November won't face criminal charges , prosecutors said Wednesday. The chemical crackdown prompted widespread condemnation, campus protests and calls for ..

Writing hints

Houston cop kills man in wheelchair for waving pen at him
KTRK, Houston - An amputee in a wheelchair was shot and killed by a Houston police officer Saturday at a group home for the mentally ill, and we've learned this is not the first time officer has fatally shot a suspect. The Houston Police Department said Brian Claunch -- a one-armed, one-legged man ..

The real moochers are corporations
Phil Mattera, Dirt Digger's Digest - If, as Romney suggested, moocherism begins with the failure to pay federal income taxes, then that label can easily be applied to many of the country’s major companies. A November 2011 report by Citizens for Tax Justice and the Institute on Taxation and Economic..

Films: Detroit's black community
We Are Not Ghosts. A 52-minute documentary about African Americans in Detroit who are trying to revitalize their neighborhoods through community businesses, urban food gardens, place-based schools, and arts projects. - World Wide Work

Poll: which brand do the candidates remind you of?

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