REDEYE 12/09/15

France terrorizes workers
GW, 10/30 — Nadira Achab looked out across the curved concrete blocks of…La Grande Borne…south of Paris and sighed, “People here want to be treated like normal citizens, not second-class citizens….”
La Grande Borne…is…a byword for hardship and inequality where about half of the 13,000 residents live below the poverty line, and half of the children leave school with no qualifications. It is…the lack of services (even the post office closed…), the isolation of being hemmed in by motorways,…the feeling of abandonment… [and] the “stigmatization and discrimination” against people who live there….
It is ten years since.…the death of two boys hiding from the police in an electricity substation…outside Paris triggered weeks of unrest….More than 9,000 vehicles, dozens of public buildings and businesses were set on fire….evidence of the hopelessness of a generation of young people stuck in dismal suburbs, marginalized and jobless because of their address, skin color or parents’ immigrant origins.
Now, a decade on…the banlieues [slum neighborhoods] remain in crisis…. — “territorial, social and ethnic apartheid” in France….
France is ranked among the developed world’s most unequal school systems….
More than 4.4 million people live in…the banlieues…where, segregated along race and class lines, they face…”unbearable discrimination.” [In] Grigny, a town…south of Paris….three in five children live below the poverty line, unemployment — at 22 percent — is twice the national average,…more than 40 percent among young people….where private slumlords have been taken to court for housing people in fetid conditions.
Liar Obama: no help for child refugees
NYT, 11/6 — President Obama vowed a year ago to give Central American children fleeing violence a new, legal way into the United States by allowing them to apply for refugee status while in their own countries instead of accepting help from smugglers….
But not a single child has entered the United States…in the program since its establishment in December….
More than 5,400 children, most…trying to escape street violence, extortion and sexual assault…have applied to join their parents, who are already in the United States legally. So far the Department of Homeland Security has interviewed only 90 of them, and lengthy procedures for getting airplane tickets and processing paperwork have delayed those whose applications were approved.
Indonesia: bosses’ ‘slash-and-burn’ profits are toxic for 500,000
GW, 10/30 — Forest fires raging across Indonesia are…responsible for up to half a million cases of respiratory infection…now being described as a “crime against humanity.”
Tens of thousands of hectares of forest have been on fire fro more than two months as a result of slash and burn — …the fastest way to clear land for new plantations. Indonesia is the world’s largest producer of palm oil and fires are frequently lit to clear the land….
…Daily emissions from the fires have surpassed the average daily emissions of the entire U.S. economy….
…In…Sumatra and Kalimantan…levels of a pollutant standard index have pushed toward 2,000. Anything above 300 is considered hazardous….
…More than 500,000 cases of acute respiratory tract infections have been reported since 1 July….
…43 million people on the two islands had been inhaling toxic fumes….the number of unrecorded cases was likely much higher.
Bosses’ star wars
Stratfor, 11/15 — For most strategic planners, space represents the ultimate high ground...(and) in achieving military dominance, the United States came to increasingly rely on space-based infrastructure to wage war...However, the U.S. military is not the sole operator of space-based infrastructure...(and) the single biggest example of this threat to U.S. military orbital systems comes from China. A progression of Chinese anti-satellite missile tests carried out over the past few years has alarmed the Pentagon.
As militaries around the globe expand their capabilities, so will they increase their reliance on space-based systems. Thus space will become increasingly militarized.
History tells us that such opportunities for resources rarely go smoothly or unchallenged...(and has generally) led to perpetual conflict and military posturing, so it is logical that competition for resources elsewhere could inevitably lead to more conflict and could necessitate the ability to project military power there in one form or another.
Netanyahu blames Palestinian for Holocaust
GW, 10/30 — Binyamin Netanyahu…claim[ed] that the Palestinian grand mufti of Jerusalem had suggested the genocide of the Jews to Adolph Hitler….
…Historians…accused him [Netanyahu] of everything from fabrication to helping Holocaust-deniers’ cause.
“Hitler didn’t want to exterminate the Jews, he wanted to expel the Jews,” said Netanyahu. “And Haj Amin al-Husseini went to Hitler and said: ‘If you expel them, they’ll all come here [to Palestine].’” According to Netanyahu, Hitler then asked, “What should we do with them?” and the mufti replied: “Burn them.”
In reality Husseini did not meet Hitler until November 28, 1941, months after the mass killing of Jews had already begun.
Kids in jail suffer racist, sexual abuse
NYT, 11/11 — Vincent Schiraldi…accepted a job running a corrections department in Washington, D.C….
…For…19 years the department had been under court order for unconstitutional conditions:…Beatings  of children…were commonplace, inmates stuffed clothing around the toilets to keep out rats and cockroaches, young people were locked up for so long that they often defecated or urinated in their cells….Staff members were sexually harassing the kids….
The abuses are not meted out equally…with African-American and Latinos incarcerated at a far higher rate than whites. In my five years running the Washington system, I never saw one white youth…in may facility….
…Horrific institutional conditions are common….Systemic violence, abuse and excessive use of isolation and restraints have been documented in juvenile institutions in 39 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico.
Coal baron murdered 29 miners
NYT, 10/30 — Donald Blankenship,…baron of Big Coal in the mines of Appalachia, [assertion of] …profits above all else is at the core of…the Upper Big Branch mine explosion that killed 29 coal miners…in Raleigh County, W. Va….
…Under…Blankenships’s leadership, production demands trumped safety at Massey Energy, which owned the mine where a fireball of methane gas and coal dust exploded underground….
…Tape recordings reveal…Blankenship fretting about… [a] warning that the company is “plainly cheating” in its required sampling of the coal dust. “This game is about money,” he is heard to say.
The autopsies on victims of the…explosion….showed that 71 percent…suffered from black lung, the lethal coal dust affliction….Blankenship…dismiss[ed]…black lung…as “not an issue…worth the effort put into it.”