Sen. Lee Introduces Open America’s Water Act of 2019
WASHINGTON – Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) introduced the Open America’s Water Act of 2019 Thursday, a bill which would repeal the Jones Act and allow all qualified vessels to engage in domestic trade between U.S. ports.
“Restricting trade between U.S. ports is a huge loss for American consumers and producers. It is long past time to repeal the Jones Act entirely so that Alaskans, Hawaiians, and Puerto Ricans aren’t forced to pay higher prices for imported goods—and so they rapidly receive the help they need in the wake of natural disasters.”
In 1920, Congress passed the Merchant Marine Act (more widely known as the Jones Act), which requires all goods transported by water between U.S. ports to be carried on a vessel constructed in the U.S., registered in the U.S., owned by U.S. citizens, and crewed primarily by U.S. citizens.
The Cato Institute estimates that after accounting for the inflated costs of transportation and infrastructure, the forgone wages and output, the lost domestic and foreign business revenue, and the monetized environmental toll the annual cost of the Jones Act is in the tens of billions of dollars. And that figure doesn’t even include the annual administration and oversight costs of the law.
An online version of this release can be found here.
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WILL ETHNOCIDE IN WESTERN CHINA BECOME GENOCIDE?
By J.P. Linstroth
892 words
At this moment, China has as many as one million Uighurs, Kazakhs, and other Muslim minorities held in concentration camps in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) in northwestern China. This has been ongoing for some time now and is beginning, finally, to be noticed.
This unfolding tragedy is well-known by the United Nations as well as influential governments such as the United States. Thus far, little is being done to prevent the Chinese from carrying out its concerted efforts in imprisoning and politically indoctrinating its Muslim populations.
It is so objectionable that Badger Sportswear of North Carolina announced it stopped purchasing imports from that region of China due to credible reports of mass forced labor.
The Chinese government is spending huge amounts of money in Xinjiang Province where these ethnocidal horrors are taking place. These so-called “re-education camps” have been analyzed by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI). The ASPI examined 28 camps in Xinjiang but stated there may be as many as 1,200 across the entire region. Since 2016, the ASPI found an increase in growth of these camps to almost 470 percent.
In 1981 the Chinese signed onto and ratified the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD), but these camps clearly violate that law.
Chinese officials also heavily police the region, using surveillance cameras and security checkpoints, biometric data collection, voice recordings, and requiring identification cards of its mostly Uighur population in Xinjiang. According to the most recent estimates, there are most likely 11,000,000 Uighurs and 1.6 million Kazakhs living in the Western Chinese Province of Xinjiang.
Perhaps the best and most extensive report about the current situation in Xinjiang is by “Human Rights Watch” (September 2018). One Uighur refugee, Tohti, is quoted as saying: “What they want is to force us to assimilate, to identify with the country [China], such that, in the future, the idea of Uyghur will be in name only, but without its meaning.” From the Human Rights Watch Report we learn the Chinese government has arbitrarily detained its Muslim minority population, and not only this, these Turkic Chinese-Muslims have been abused, tortured, and deprived of fair trials. The Chinese want to eliminate basic freedoms of religion among this population for practicing Islam. The re-education of these Turkic Muslims is meant to Sino-assimilate or “Sinicize” them with Chinese identities, scrubbing them of their religious identity.
Two other refugees told Human Rights Watch: “[The guards] told us that Uyghurs and Kazakhs are the enemies of China, and that they want to kill us, and make us suffer, and that there’s nothing we can do about it.” Another stated: “[A detainee] showed me his scar from being hung from the ceiling. He didn’t have any religious materials, but after being hung for a night, he said he would agree to anything.” Others had died while in detention and their families were not allowed to bury the dead with Islamic blessings or ceremonies and were forced to bury their loved ones under military watch.
Aside from the political aspects of Chinese social control, how do we understand this type of discrimination in relation to modern world history?
Humans are highly complex and for the most part racism is entirely a social construct, usually involving essentializing entire populations and persecuting them en masse, virtually always with a veneer of rhetoric to make it all acceptable unless we actually look. The histories are shameful. Thus, we saw all non-Europeans referred to as, what Rudyard Kipling euphemistically called them, the “white man’s burden”; Jews and Gypsies sent by Germans to labor camps with sayings such as Work is Freedom; land stolen from Native tribes in the name of “progress”; Tutsis slaughtered by Hutus to “protect” themselves from a minority; Japanese-American families rounded up into compounds in the western US during World War II to secure the homeland; and millions of Armenian civilians killed by Turkey a century ago to punish traitors, and other horrific chapters in our human story. Almost all the terrible responses in the modern era that target innocent civilians are massive overreactions to violent attack. In China, those attacks from Islamic extremists were in 2013 and 2014 and have been the official justification for mass incarceration since then.
The magnitude of China’s efforts to incarcerate its Turkic Muslim minority populations is happening in an unprecedented way, which we have not seen since Nazi Germany and the imprisonment of Jews throughout Europe. As usual, there is an official rationale and a public relations effort, including the approval of the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, aka MBS, which “proves” that China’s systematic persecution of Chinese Muslims for religion is not its sole rationale.
How many more Muslim Chinese minorities need to be imprisoned before we say no more? When should the UN Security Council act in concert against China? When should the United States begin imposing economic sanctions upon China for its human rights abuses in Xinjiang northwestern China?
We know from our human history that it almost always takes outside pressure to bring regimes back from the brink of genocide.
What can you do to change the situation?
· Write the Chinese Embassy in Washington D.C.
· Email: chinaembrpress_us@mfa.gov.en
· Call the Chinese Embassy in Washington D.C. and complain: (202) 495-2266
· Write or call to your local US House of Representative and/or your two US Senators
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J. P. Linstroth, Ph.D., syndicated by PeaceVoice, is a former Fulbright Scholar to Brazil. His first book is: Marching Against Gender Practice (2015).
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If You Think Motherhood Is Driving
You Crazy – You May Be Right
Even in two-parent families, it appears that the bulk of child-rearing duties still fall to one person.
For all the help dads give, it is moms who take on most of the emotional labor of parenting, according to a recent study by researchers at Arizona State University and Oklahoma State University. Mothers handle grocery lists, doctor's appointments, playdates, homework help, and other responsibilities.
And sometimes juggling all those duties becomes more than they can bear, creating a strain on their mental health – as mothers themselves can tell you.
“I hit a time in my life when my ability to cope with the normal challenges of every day was weakening,” says Fran Pitre, a mother of three sets of twins and author of the book TwinsX3 (www.franpitre.com), in which she described the joys and stresses of raising six children.
“Looking back, I realize that I was experiencing mild anxiety attacks, and the situation would grow even worse when my husband was away on business trips. I found myself snapping at the children over the littlest things. Small irritations like a misplaced library book would seem much more serious than they should have.”
When other relaxation measures didn’t work, a doctor temporarily prescribed to Pitre an anti-anxiety medication to counter the chemical imbalance that the non-stop daily stress had created for her.
She says that medical assistance was critical at that time in her life. But, as the mother of six, she also found that staying organized was also crucial to keeping her family – and her mental health – under control.
Her tips to help other mothers avoid being overwhelmed by the normal stresses and strains of raising children include:
“Our ultimate goal as moms is to raise our children to become self-sufficient, responsible adults,” Pitre says. “They’re watching you handle the day-to-day challenges, and learning by watching your responses to the good and the bad. Does that feel like too much pressure? Take a deep breath and relax because you don’t have to be perfect. No one can be.”
About Fran Pitre
Fran Pitre, author of the book TwinsX3 (www.franpitre.com) and an aspiring musician, is a proud mother but she refuses to let that role define the rest of her life. Her three sets of twins include twin boys, twin girls, and one twin set that includes a boy and a girl. As the kids were growing up, Pitre did freelance work as a graphic designer, wrote and published a book, and returned to school to become licensed in medical massage therapy. Today she works as part of a physical therapy team. Her first album entitled “You Always Were” consists of 7 full-length original songs and was released in November 2018.
