WEEKLY NEWSLETTER
NUMBER 7
SEPTEMBER 27, 2021
Snapshots, September 20 - 26 THE HAITIANS ARE WHIPPED
U.S. Border Patrol Agent on horseback whipping a Haitian refugee
The images conjured up antebellum slavery - or maybe the apes' treatment of primitive humans in the 1968 movie Planet of the Apes. Whatever the analogy, the cruel treatment of thousands of refugees fleeing poverty and despair in Haiti for a better life turned into a nightmare at the border between Texas and Mexico, where U.S. border agents wielding whips chased them back across the border to Mexico, where they are currently encaped. Not even President Donald Trump and his Minister of Immigrant Persecution, Steven Miller, ever approached this. Not a good sign from President Biden, who owes his election to black voters.
George Floyd Policing Bill Goes Down In Flames
Are Democrats Imploding? Democrats in Washington, wielding executive and legislative power for the first time since 2011, just can't get it done. Transformative bills on everything from infrastructure to voting rights to immigration to police reform are either languishing or dying outright. Leaving aside the fact that Republicans, smelling electoral blood in 2022, are sitting on the sidelines, the two Democratic factions - progressives like Pramiila Jayapal and Establishmentarians like Joe Manchin - are split over their diverging vision for America. It will all come to a head this week, with the fiscal year's end approaching on October 1.
Lead negotiators in Congress pulled the plug on talks over the George Floyd Justice In Policing Act, conceding that after months of discussions, Senate Democrats and Republicans were unable to reconcile their differences and send a “transformative” bipartisan bill to President Biden’s desk. Though House Democrats twice passed the police reform bill, launched after the 2020 murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer one in a string of killings of unarmed Black men by police that triggered nationwide racial justice protests - Senate inaction means the federal government is unlikely to enact new laws to improve policing practices over the next 15 months, even as Democrats narrowly control the House and Senate with Biden in the White House.