REDEYE 10/24/18

Concentration Camps for more than 13,000 immigrant kids

NYT, 10/1 — …From Kansas to New York, hundreds of migrant children have been roused in the middle of the night…and loaded onto buses…for a cross-country journey to…a barren tent city on a sprawling patch of desert in West Texas….In the rows of sand-colored tents in Tornillo, Texas, children…sleep lined up in bunks. There is no school….
The average length of time that migrant children spend in custody has nearly doubled….Hundreds of children are being shipped…to West Texas each week, totaling more than 1,600 so far….
The camp in Tornillo…. originally opened…with a capacity of 400….It expanded…to house 3,800….Their ages and the hazardous journey they take make unaccompanied alien children vulnerable to human trafficking, exploitation and abuse….
The system…came under strain…when the already large numbers were boosted by more than 2,500…[who] were separated from their parents under the Trump administration’s zero-tolerance policy. But those children were only a fraction of the total number who are currently detained….
The agency…confirmed that 70 percent of those arrested did not have prior criminal records….
The longer that children remain in custody, the more likely they are to become anxious or depressed….

Housework in Britain = $1.6 trillion of unpaid labor

(NYT, 10/5) — Household chores like washing dishes and taking care of children have long been undervalued….An official study in Britain has put a price on such unpaid contributions to society: 1.2 trillion pounds a year, about $1.6 trillion.
The findings [was] published by the British Office for National Statistics…
[S]huttling children back and forth at £358 billion ($483 billion)….Child care at £352 billion ($475 billion)….Nutritional services were valued at £158 billion ($213 billion), with laundry set at £89 billion ($120 billion). The overall total…amounts to £19,000 ($25,600) of unpaid work by each person in Britain….
…Women shouldered most of the burden of unpaid work,…doing proportionately more than twice as much cooking, child care and laundry as men….
Campaigners in Italy and in India have called for women who work in the home to be paid a salary….According to the agency’s studies, the value of unpaid household work in Britain has increased by 80 percent since 2005….Also…2.2 million vulnerable adults were being cared for without charge in 2016, equating to the work of more than four million adult social workers working every week of the year.

Payday loans: How U.S. Bank sucks workers’ blood (at 70 percent interest!)

NYT, 9/21 — U.S. Bank, one of the country’s biggest banks, has begun offering…high-cost loans….between $100 and $1,000….But the fees equate to an annual interest rate of about 70 percent….On a $400 loan, the fee would be $48, which equates to an annual interest rate of about 71 percent….
According to Pew’s [Charitable Trusts] research, 12 million people a year take payday loans. If borrowers can’t make the payment, they often pay more fees to renew the loan. Payday borrowers…spend an average of $520 in fees to repeatedly borrow $375….
“At the end of the day,” Ms. [Rebecca] Borne [Center for Responsible Lending] said, “a bank that pays its depositors less than 3 percent interest should lend for a whole lot less” than an interest rate of 70 percent or more.

Obama-Trump policy helps starve, maim and kill kids in Yemen

NYT, 9/26 (op-ed Kristof) — [The] crimes against humanity that the United States is supporting in…Yemen….is helping to kill, maim, and starve Yemeni children. At least eight million Yemenis are at risk of starvation from an approaching famine caused not by crop failures but by [U.S.] actions and those of…allies….
An American bomb made by Lockheed Martin struck a Yemen school bus…killing 51 people….American bombs killed 155 mourners at a funeral and 97 people at a market.
Starving Yemeni children are reduced to eating a sour paste made of leaves. Even those who survive will often be stunted for the rest of their lives, physically and mentally….
The United States is…providing arms, intelligence and aerial refueling to assist Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates as they hammer Yemen with airstrikes, destroy its economy and starve its people….This is a bipartisan….policy started under President Obama…and then Trump doubled down….