Category: Government

Will coronaplague boost teacher income the way that it has for daycare workers?

by philg

Parents in the western suburbs of Boston like to talk about First World problems. The License Raj here in Maskachusetts is has allowed daycares to reopen with some limitations (boston.com). Great news for working parents, right? (or for parents who are simply tired of dealing with their children 24/7) “It is impossible to enroll,” said one mom. “The daycare workers won’t go back because they’re getting $600/week plus regular unemployment plus under-the-table cash from parents who hired them to do in-home care after the daycares were shut down. If they went back to work, it would be a 70 percent pay cut.”

I wonder if the same thing will happen with school teachers. Based on my Facebook feed, teachers and rich parents are opposed to opening in-person schools. Unionized schoolteachers in particular say that they won’t work unless their safety is guaranteed somehow. “School closures ‘a mistake’ as no teachers infected in classroom” (Times of London):

Scientists are yet to find a single confirmed case of a teacher catching coronavirus from a pupil anywhere in the world, a leading epidemiologist has said.

Mark Woolhouse, an infectious disease epidemiologist at Edinburgh University, offered reassurance to staff preparing for the full reopening of schools next month.

Professor Woolhouse is definitely going to be an exception to the #FollowScientists rule!

Is there a cash value to #RejectScienceAndStayHome? In the cower-in-place system, public school teachers in Lincoln, Brookline, and Newton are required to work only a handful of hours per week (see “Massachusetts private school students zoom ahead”). If a teacher must send out one email on Monday morning, host a couple of chats on Tuesday and Thursday, and provide a bit of feedback on assignments emailed in on Friday afternoon, that leaves at least 40 hours in the middle of the week to… teach! Every public school teacher can offer to come into the homes of richer parents and provide some actual instruction at $100/hour in cash. As a practical matter, maybe this works for only 20 hours per week, but that should still be enough to at least double the spending power of a teacher receiving $70,000 per year (plus pension and benefits) from taxpayers.

(“Florida Orders Schools To Reopen In The Fall For In-Person Instruction” (NPR) is a possible exception:

In the state where more than 7,300 new coronavirus cases were announced on Tuesday, Education Commissioner Richard Corcoran declared that upon reopening in August, “all school boards and charter school governing boards must open brick and mortar schools at least five days per week for all students.”

but there are no guarantees for taxpaying parents: “Those services include in-person instruction unless barred by a state or local health directive“)

An aircraft owner friend hired a public school teacher at $60/hour cash to teach two children. If this were 4 hours per day, 180 days per year (the standard school year), that’s only $21,600 per year per child, i.e., much less than a lot of Boston-area districts spend even without counting the lavish capital spending.

His children are examples of “The Latest in School Segregation: Private Pandemic ‘Pods’” (NYT):

If they become the norm, less privileged kids will suffer. … As school districts across the nation announce that their buildings will remain closed in the fall, parents are quickly organizing “learning pods” or “pandemic pods” — small groupings of children who gather every day and learn in a shared space, often participating in the online instruction provided by their schools. Pods are supervised either by a hired private teacher or other adult, or with parents taking turns. … Based on what I’ve seen online, the learning pod movement appears to be led by families with means, a large portion of whom are white. Paradoxically, at a time when the Black Lives Matter movement has prompted a national reckoning with white supremacy, white parents are again ignoring racial and class inequality when it comes to educating their children.

Parents are also more likely to join pods with families who have similarly low exposure to the coronavirus. This seemingly rational impulse will, in practice, exclude many Black and Latinx families, who are disproportionately infected by the virus.

Related:

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Free rent today leads to higher housing costs tomorrow for America’s poorest?

by philg

One good thing about the U.S. response to coronaplague has been allowing our low-income residents, documented and otherwise, to skip paying rent while simultaneously forbidding landlords from initiating evictions (maybe until mid-2021 here in Maskachusetts?). So… the working poor are protected from harm by a benevolent government during this period when they are no longer “working” (probably making more money, though!).

Maybe not!

We’ve been doing a lot of helicopter flying lately with a photographer whose bread and butter is aerial real estate images. A typical mission involves going to a town with a lot of low-skill immigrants and/or multi-generational welfare-dependent native-born Americans and photographing an apartment building from the 1950s.

Why does anyone need these pictures? “All the rental landlords are trying to organize condominium conversions. Since they can’t collect rent, it makes a lot more sense to sell the apartments,” was the answer.

Especially given the high transaction costs of buying and selling real estate in the U.S. (5-6 percent every time someone needs to move!), is it fair to say that the result of today’s policy change will be higher long-run housing costs for low-income residents of the U.S.? With millions of immigrants arriving, plus population expansion from children of already-present immigrants, and a shrinking pool of rental housing, won’t that translate into higher rents?

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Republicans could win in November if they gave Americans universal health insurance?

by philg

In September 2009, I wrote “Health Care Reform”. Essentially the government would take the $trillions being spent on Medicare and Medicaid and put it into buying every American a reasonably good HMO policy.

  • each resident will be given a voucher good for signing up at the clinic or HMO of his or her choice; the amount of the voucher will depend on the resident’s age and sex (the weighted average of all vouchers will equal $2,000 or whatever we’ve decided we want to spend)
  • a clinic or HMO that wishes to get any revenue from the federal government will be required to take any person who submits a voucher, regardless of preexisting conditions
  • a resident of the U.S. can switch clinics annually, let’s say on May 1.
  • the clinic is responsible to pay for the resident’s emergency medical care at another facility

A note:

One likely side effect of this reform is the return to centrality of the primary care physician. Joe Medicare Patient often does not have any doctor who understands much less coordinates his care. If Joe has seen six specialists, he may be on drugs that are working at cross purposes. If Joe is in the ICU at a typical hospital, the multiple doctors treating him may never talk to each other. Each one knows what tests and procedures he or she has ordered, but, except by looking at the patient’s chart, has no idea what the other doctors are investigating. One primary care doctor who reviewed this proposal said “The first item I address with new patients in my office is to try to get them off as many drugs as possible; when a 70-year-old is on 11 meds you better believe there are many unintended interactions.”

How has this aged and what would be different during coronaplague?

Americans want, most of all, for the Great Father in Washington to love them. “Trump, like Herbert Hoover, is ‘the man who doesn’t care.’ Biden can make that stick.” (USA Today, June 28):

Most of all, Trump is the man who doesn’t care. He doesn’t feel your pain. He doesn’t mourn the dead, comfort the grieving, or support the struggling. He doesn’t consider his words or worry that they could have consequences. He doesn’t listen to experts or ponder his options.

Congress is almost finished with its “work” for this session. If the Republicans want to win in November, why not make Americans feel that the they are loved and cared for? We don’t care about money anymore, right? We are happy to spend 100 percent of our accumulated wealth hiding from coronaplague if that is what it takes to cut the death toll slightly. We are happy to print and borrow trillions. A universal HMO policy for every resident of the U.S. wouldn’t have to cost any more than the current bleeding for Medicaid and Medicare plus whatever employers pay for mid-range coverage.

Will anyone, other than folks in the industry, miss the current system? A couple of recent news items:

At least to judge by my Facebook feed, Americans are convinced that, despite the lack of any effective therapy for Covid-19 and despite the fact that the Feds pick up the tab when the uninsured are treated for Covid-19, universal health insurance would hugely cut the number of Covid-19 deaths.

Readers: What do you think? Could Trump and the Republicans take most of the wind out of the Democrats’ sails with one big health care hand-out? (of course, all of the money for this would just come from taxpayers themselves, but somehow Americans never seem to consider that they will ultimately have to work for whatever the government “gives’ them)

Bonus pictures of the house that Medicaid and Medicare built, in Nome, Alaska, from September 2019. This single building is likely worth more than all of the rest of the houses and commercial real estate in the city.

Related:

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Get rid of single-family zoned suburbs?

by philg

“It’s Time To Abolish Single-Family Zoning” (The American Conservative, so you know already that it can’t be right!):

The first of many ironies, of course, is that single-family zoning became the standard for American suburbs during the New Deal when the Roosevelt administration, through various programs such as the Home Owners Loan Corporation, required it for home refinancing assistance.

These onerous regulations were further mandated for new construction by the Federal Housing Administration as well as the government-sponsored enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

So if you want federal support for your housing, build a single-family home. If you want to live in that downtown shop with the house on the second floor, convert your house to a two- or three-unit building and rent it out—or do any number of normal and reasonable things that humans had been doing with their property for centuries to build their own wealth and prosperity—don’t expect assistance from the government.

Regarding some new proposed laws and regulations:

So, suburban governments, you won’t get the subsidy this time unless you repeal the regulation we required you to enact decades ago to get the subsidy we were offering back then. And we oppose this today because we are conservatives?

This article seems ill-timed in light of the fact that Americans, as evidenced by recent policy and spending, care about only one thing: coronavirus infection. Isn’t the bleak isolated car-dependent suburban lifestyle (“broad lawns and narrow minds”) the best defense against the evils of Covid-19?

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Fairfax County School Shutdown Karen thought process

by philg

A friend sent me this post from Joe the Shutdown Karen of Fairfax County:

To our fellow FCPS families, this is it gang, 5 days until the 2 days in school vs. 100% virtual decision. Let’s talk it out, in my traditional mammoth TL/DR form.

Full disclosure, we initially chose the 2 days option and are now having serious reservations. As I consider the positions and arguments I see in my feed, these are where my mind goes. Of note, when I started working on this piece at 12:19 PM today the COVID death tally in the United States stood at 133,420.

“My kids want to go back to school.”

I challenge that position. I believe what the kids desire is more abstract. I believe what they want is a return to normalcy. They want their idea of yesterday. And yesterday isn’t on the menu.

“I want my child in school so they can socialize.”

This was the principle reason for our 2 days decision. As I think more on it though, what do we think ‘social’ will look like? There aren’t going to be any lunch table groups, any lockers, any recess games, any study halls, any sitting next to friends, any talking to people in the hallway, any dances. All of that is off the menu. So, when we say that we want the kids to benefit from the social experience, what are we deluding ourselves into thinking in-building socialization will actually look like in the Fall?

“My kid is going to be left behind.”

Left behind who? The entire country is grappling with the same issue, leaving all children in the same quagmire. Who exactly would they be behind? I believe the rhetorical answer to that is “They’ll be behind where they should be,” to which I’ll counter that “where they should be” is a fictional goal post that we as a society have taken as gospel because it maps to standardized tests which are used to grade schools and counties as they chase funding.

In other words, the public school Shutdown Karens imagine that rich kids in private school won’t be working and learning! (see https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2020/05/20/massachusetts-private-school-students-zoom-ahead/ for the educational gulf that has opened up in Maskachusetts between public and private school children; see nytimes for how low-income students of color are the Shutdown Karens’ biggest victims).

How do people in the third richest country in the United States deal with numbers?

FCPS has 189,000 children. .0016 of that is 302. 302 dead children are the Calvary Hill you’re erecting your argument on. So, let’s agree to do this: stop presenting this as a data point. If this is your argument, I challenge you to have courage equal to your conviction. Go ahead, plant a flag on the internet and say, “Only 302 children will die.” No one will. That’s the kind action on social media that gets you fired from your job. And I trust our social media enclave isn’t so careless and irresponsible with life that it would even, for even a millisecond, enter any of your minds to make such an argument.

Out of more than 8,000 people (average age 82 and 98 percent with “underlying conditions”) killed in thoroughly-plagued Massachusetts (population 7 million), exactly 0 have been under the age of 20 (dashboard). Yet the 1.1 million rich government workers, contractors, and lobbyists of Fairfax County are going to experience 302 extra deaths among children (equivalent to over 2,000 for an MA-sized population). (Of course, if they still believe the March dogma of Flatten the Curve, a 10-year school shutdown won’t have any effect on the infection/death rate among children; the same number of infections and deaths will simply be spread out.)

I’m kind of amazed at the lack of imagination and lack of expectations among the subjects of American government. Our theory used to be that the U.S. had liberty while the Chinese had competence. They had the Shanghai Metro while we had complete freedom of speech, assembly, religion, etc. Our liberties are mostly gone, subject to the potentially arbitrary decisions of state governors (the perfect example of a “a government of men rather than a government of laws”) and of the mob (getting people fired from jobs if they don’t worship at the churches of BLM, #MeToo, and the Rainbow Flag). The Fourteenth Amendment is gone, with students being entitled to an education depending on their skin color. But nobody insists on receiving competent government in return. For example, if the Karens of Fairfax want their brats to be spaced farther apart in the schools, why can’t the schools rent more space? With retail going bankrupt and office buildings shut down, would it actually be hard for every school to double its physical size? The Chinese built a hospital for 5,000 people in 10 days. A U.S. school system can’t rent a bankrupt Sears store’s old space given six months to negotiate? And then drive to IKEA for some desks? Keep in mind that Fairfax is insanely rich by U.S. standards (thank you for paying your federal taxes!).

Related:

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Priority for Students of Color in returning to public K-12 school

by philg

From the Educrats in Washington State: Reopening Washington
Schools 2020 District Planning Guide. The phrase “students of color” occurs six times.

Good news for Rachel Dolezal: white students will be home driving parents crazy while “students of color” will enjoy in-person instruction and socializing with other students.

If that isn’t specific enough, “Prioritize face-to-face service for students that are most impacted by the loss of in-person services, including: … Students of color”

(“intersectionality” is involved, which presumably is a positive for the job market for PhDs in comparative victimhood)

I wonder if this is another good example of what Sweden has gained by just giving the finger to the coronavirus. Sweden isn’t pitting families of different skin colors against each other in competing for scarce slots in public schools.

Also, is this another example of a Constitutional right that Americans have lost due to the governor-declared emergencies? The Fourteenth Amendment was used to require school integration because of the Equal Protection Clause. How can states re-segregate their schools in light of the Supreme Court’s interpretation of this clause?

Related:

  • “N.Y.C. Schools, Nation’s Largest District, Will Not Fully Reopen in Fall” (NYT): Classroom attendance in September will be limited to only one to three days a week in an effort to continue to curb the outbreak, the mayor said. … The decision to opt for only a partial reopening, which is most likely the only way to accommodate students in school buildings while maintaining social distancing, may hinder hundreds of thousands of parents from returning to their pre-pandemic work lives, undermining the recovery of the sputtering local economy. [Wouldn’t the parents be better off moving to a state with (a) fully open schools, and (b) good Internet connectivity?]
  • “Research Shows Students Falling Months Behind During Virus Disruptions” (NYT): “When all of the impacts are taken into account, the average student could fall seven months behind academically, while black and Hispanic students could experience even greater learning losses, equivalent to 10 months for black children and nine months for Latinos, according to an analysis from McKinsey & Company, the consulting group.”
  • https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2020/06/18/coronashutdown-versus-un-universal-declaration-of-human-rights/ (the UN says that children have the right to go to school, with no exceptions for a powerful teachers union or a state full of Shutdown Karens)
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When does coronaplague stop being an emergency?

by philg

The Swedish epidemiologists, just as everyone else was shutting down, said “coronavirus is going to be with humanity maybe forever, just like influenza; can you stay shut down forever?”

Today’s question is whether the U.S. can have a permanent state of emergency based on the threat of coronaplague.

Examples:

Maybe we don’t like the new coronaplagued world, but at what point do we have to say “this is how life on Earth is; this is not an ’emergency'”?

Related:

  • April 17: Swedish MD/PhD says get used to coronavirus (and notes that, if influenza had been new in 2019, humanity would have panicked in exactly the same way that it panicked regarding coronavirus)
  • June 29: a different Swedish MD/PhD says get used to coronavirus…. Throughout it all, Tegnell has argued that the world is only in the first stage of dealing with a long, uncertain battle with Covid-19. That’s why Sweden’s strategy — keep much of society open, but train people to observe distancing guidelines — is the only realistic way to cope in the long run, he says.
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Supreme Court spreads a big rainbow flag over the word “sex”

by philg

“Civil Rights Law Protects Gay and Transgender Workers, Supreme Court Rules” (NYT):

The Supreme Court ruled Monday that a landmark civil rights law protects gay and transgender workers from workplace discrimination, handing the movement for L.G.B.T. equality a stunning victory.

“An employer who fires an individual merely for being gay or transgender defies the law,” Justice Neil M. Gorsuch wrote for the majority in the 6-to-3 ruling.

Until Monday’s decision, it was legal in more than half the states to fire workers for being gay, bisexual or transgender. The vastly consequential decision extended workplace protections to millions of people across the nation, continuing a series of Supreme Court victories for gay rights even after President Trump transformed the court with two appointments.

Personally, I think that any law like this actually reduces employment opportunities for the category of people whom such a law purports to help. The law highlights to employers the inferior nature of workers in this category and that, if the employer is unwise enough to hire someone from this category, a lawsuit is an ever-present possibility. Absent a substantial discount, therefore, a rational employer, even one who is completely without prejudice, should thus do everything possible to avoid hiring someone who might fit into the protected category.

In our neighborhood… (“Love is Love” in a larger font than “Black Lives Matter”; significant?)

Gary Drescher, an MIT computer science PhD who is also interested in cognition and philosophy, posted this analysis on Facebook:

Today’s 6-3 Supreme Court ruling on sex-discrimination is encouraging, and not only because the outcome is good (and not only because Trump’s appointee Gorsuch wrote the opinion rebuking the Trump administration’s position). It’s encouraging because the legal reasoning is correct and straightforward: discrimination against someone for being gay or transgender is an instance of sex discrimination, even if Congress did not understand it as such when they banned sex discrimination in the Civil Rights Act of 1964. That is, it’s sex discrimination to fire someone for, say, wearing a dress or having a male spouse, if those same behaviors would not be penalized if the person’s own sex were different than it is.

By fanciful analogy, imagine if Congresspersons were all numerologists who in the 1960s passed a law saying that a person must pay an income-tax surcharge in any year for which the person’s taxable income was a prime number of dollars, due to some mystical property of primes. But imagine that at the time, 23,069 was widely believed to be a prime number, so Congress expected the surcharge to apply to that income. Nonetheless, upon discovery of the factorization of 23,069, a court today would have to hold that income exempt from the prime surcharge, even though the exemption contradicts Congress’s expectation when they passed the law. It’s not that Congress was using the term ‘prime’ differently back then–rather, they had a factually incorrect belief about a particular number’s primality. Even originalism regarding the meaning of a legal text does not necessarily bind us to false beliefs held by the text’s framers.

Gary has persuaded me! Readers: what about you? Is this the dawning of a great new era in American employment litigation?

(Separately, I wonder if the new interpretation of the law leads to a logical contradiction among some American religious beliefs. Transgenderism is as “real” as science, per the sign above. Belief 1: If Joe Linebacker decides to identify as a “woman” starting tomorrow, she immediately becomes a completely successful 6’3″ tall, 275 lb. woman, indistinguishable from a cisgender woman. Belief 2: Employers, being more interested in after-work sexual activities and gender IDs than in profit, will ferret out the transgendered and, as the NYT says, “fire workers for being gay, bisexual or transgender”. How can Beliefs 1 and 2 be consistent? According to Belief 1, absent a DNA kit, nobody can discern the difference between a transgender woman and a cisgender woman. If that is true, how does the prejudiced employer figure out whom to fire?)

Finally, what if the Equal Rights Amendment had been passed?

Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.

With this new interpretation of “sex”, what else would change had the ERA been ratified?

Finally, what is the practical effect of the righteous elites passing laws like these? Here’s a private text message from a small business owner, responding to the NYT article:

Except transgender is mental illness. Do you really think a company should be forced to hire a 6 foot tall man who thinks he is a woman?

From an immigrant physician, near the beginning of coronapanic:

We have a transgender psychiatrist health secretary. We r f**ked

(she is from a conservative culture)

Will these people (Deplorables?) be persuaded to abandon their prejudices via threat of litigation? Or will they just hide behind Silicon Valley-style “not a culture fit” (regarding an over-35 applicant) cover stories?

To sum up: I am persuaded by Gary and think the Supreme Court made the right legal decision, but I also think this decision will end making it harder for a transgender person to get a job in the U.S.

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Chevy Volt and the Massachusetts RMV during Coronaplague

by philg

A Facebook post from the Great State of Maskachusetts:

When the rules get stupid…

I acquired a Chevy Volt last year. For the ones who don’t know it, this is a plugin/hybrid that can drive ~55 miles on pure electric mode.

Afterward, when the battery is down, the gas engine kicks up. 55 miles is way enough to go to the office (in a prior life) and to the tennis courts. Great, I installed a 220v charger in the garage and I went twice to the gas pump during the year, typically for longer trips.

Last week was the time for the yearly Mass state inspection. And the car was rejected!! The reason: I have not used the gas engine enough so the computer cannot retrieve the actual emission of the engine (thanks VW!). Now they ask me to run on forced gas before I come back for another inspection.

Let’s recap: I used my car 95% on electric energy, which means almost zero direct emission, and the car was rejected as it might pollute. And now they ask me to pollute to validate it! How is that stupid??

Related:

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Are the BLM protesters protesting against their own actions?

by philg

Friends on Facebook are posting support for the Black Lives Matter protests going on around the U.S. A few brave souls post selfies from the (daytime) protests themselves (the vast majority prefer to show their support by updating their Facebook status!).

My stupid question for today is why city-dwellers need to protest to obtain the changes that they seek. The typical American city in which protests have occurred is ruled by a single political party voted for by a population that overwhelmingly identifies with that one party. If the people who live in a city want a different mayor, want the police department to be disbanded and started over from scratch, etc., why didn’t they already just vote for that? What obstacle was in their path?

Consider a few of the cities that have been in the news lately. My friends on Facebook are saying that the protests are necessary #BecauseRepublicans.

If the single-party voters and politicians in the above cities want to change something, why does anyone have to protest? Why can’t they just change whatever they want to change? Nobody from a different party is opposing them.

I tried asking the Facebook righteous this question. Here are some responses;

Jack is suggesting only Republicans will make the argument that black people need to be more aggressively policed. The prediction is true (regardless of your view on the merits of the argument, because some arguments are only made by one party or the other.)

(What difference does it make what arguments Republicans put forward? Why would the Mayor or the City Council of any of the above cities listen to an argument from a Republican?)

Republicans are the Core of Trump’s supporters, White Supremacists, and folks who never questioned the most bizarre acts of Trump.

(But if those Republicans live and vote in the suburbs, how can they stop the people of Minneapolis, for example, from voting to disband the police department, fire the city employees involved with management of police, replace the mayor, hire a new police force with different objectives, etc.?)

What’s it like for folks who are just trying to live in these towns? A friend in Venice, California (on the border with Santa Monica):

LA looks like a zombie movie. Every business boarded up and spray painted. Mobs with picket signs constantly. Everyone wearing masks. Never seen more thieves in a city in my life. People attempted to rob my house on a Friday at 930p while we were home.

In the chat group, a San Francisco resident responded to the above with security camera footage of a dark-sunglasses-wearing thief sifting through the day’s Amazon and UPS deliveries on his doorstep and taking a package.

A more rural Californian responded: Your stories make me feel better about my decision to live with the plane fueled up and the guns loaded. Lucky for us we are in a highly armed gated community. My father just bought a gun for the first time since when we were in Russia in the 1990s. [She speaks with an accent, so I assume she is an immigrant.]

To all of them, a member responded “Wyoming awaits.”

Separately, from a physician friend: “I bet Canada feels like they live in the apartment above a meth lab.”

Readers: The mayors of the big cities where protests are occurring have come out to support the goals of Black Lives Matter (example from San Francisco). If almost everyone in a city agrees that particular changes need to be made, why can’t they simply make those changes?

Related:

  • “Critics denounce Black Lives Matter platform accusing Israel of ‘genocide'” (Guardian, August 2016): The policy platform titled A Vision for Black Lives, is a wide-spanning document that was drafted by more than 50 organizations known as the Movement for Black Lives. … In the Invest/Divest section of the platform, the group criticizes the US government for providing military aid to Israel. “The US justifies and advances the global war on terror via its alliance with Israel and is complicit in the genocide taking place against the Palestinian people,” the platform says. “Israel is an apartheid state with over 50 laws on the books that sanction discrimination against the Palestinian people.” (If the U.S. police kill only the occasional citizen while Israel is committing “genocide” against millions of Palestinians, why is BLM bothering to protest anything being done in the U.S.?)
  • L.A. Protest Draws 50,000
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