Author: mopress

“There are currently 126 Harris County offenders under sentence of death in Texas. Only six states apart from Texas currently have more prisoners on death row – Alabama, California, Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. Between them, those six states account for 23 times the population of Harris County, and see thousands more murders take place in them each year than occur in Harris County. Together, these six states have executed 185 inmates in the past three decades, only twice the number of Harris County offenders who have been put to death.

“In Texas itself, Harris County is ahead of other local jurisdictions in ensuring a steady flow of individuals for the state’s lethal injection team to kill. The number of Harris County offenders executed or remaining on death row – 225 – is only equalled by grouping together the next seven largest Texas counties of Bexar, Dallas, Tarrant, Travis, El Paso, Hidalgo and Collin – counties whose jurisdictions include the cities of Austin, Dallas, El Paso, Fort Worth and San Antonio and whose combined populations account for nearly five million more inhabitants than Harris County and around a hundred more murders each year.

For the complete report and suggestions for a letter writing campaign to the Harris County District Attorney, see Amnesty International: One county, 100 executions: Harris County and Texas – A lethal combination–gm

There is nothing like a straight shot of classical economics to keep your attitude up, and Henry C K Liu is a mighty fine distiller of that spirit:

By making the rules of development treat capital as more scarce compared with labor and thus the more valuable factor of production, owners of capital are logically justified in receiving a larger share of the benefits from development.

. . . The only problem with this perverted cost-benefit approach to welfare economics is that it is not true. Optimum development requires capital and labor to be assigned fair and equitable value so that supply and demand can be balanced and for all human lives to be treated with equality . . .

All the economies of the world are competing in global markets by pushing their domestic wages and worker benefits down in search of globalized “growth”. The global market has turned into an arena for universal voluntary slavery to serve global capital.

In Liu’s work, we find delightful reminders why justice is, as Socrates said, expedient — and why Americans have no business blaming Mexicans for turning North America into a grazing ground of human sheep.–gm

Note: the following item was originally posted as a message at the Texas Civil Rights Review.

Houston Activists Converge on Austin Protest

July 20 at the Austin offices of Corrections Corporation of America:
see report from Houston Sin Fronteras

Thanks to Jay Johnson-Castro for alerting us to this story.–gm

IMMIGRATION

Family divided at U.S. border reunited in Miami

A Cuban man has an emotional airport reunion after his Venezuelan-born wife and children are released from a Texas immigration detention center.

BY ALFONSO CHARDY
achardy@MiamiHerald.com

Immigration authorities Friday abruptly released the Venezuelan-born wife and children of a Cuban refugee who was paroled into the country on the same day his family was put in deportation proceedings at the Texas-Mexico border.

An emotional Ocdalis Gómez, 22, and her children Abel, 2, and Winnelis, 6, immediately boarded a plane in Austin, Texas, bound for Miami, where they rejoined Abel Gómez, 30 — the Cuban migrant who for weeks desperately tried to gain freedom for his family.

When Abel and Ocdalis reunited at Miami International Airport, the husband and wife held each other tightly for a few seconds while their children stared in awe at the television cameras trained on the family. Then Abel Gómez picked up the children, hugged and kissed them and proudly displayed one on each arm for the cameras.

”I’m immensely happy,” he said when he finally was able to speak, tears rolling down his cheeks. “Thanks to God, I am now next to my family again.”

The Gómez family showed up June 11 at a U.S.-Mexico border crossing near McAllen, Texas. As a Cuban, Abel was paroled into the country under the wet foot/dry foot policy, but Ocdalis and the children were detained and placed in deportation proceedings because they were non-Cuban foreign nationals arriving without papers.

Gómez is among an increasing number of Cubans arriving through the Mexican border. Figures released last week by U.S. Customs and Border Protection showed that 84 percent of all Cuban migrants last year came through Mexico rather than the Florida Straits. Cuban arrivals at the Mexican border have increased year by year amid intensified Coast Guard interdictions in waters between Cuba and Florida.

With a wide smile on her face, Ocdalis said Friday she was happy to be with her husband in Miami — but added she also felt deep sorrow for other foreign families she came to know at the detention center who were left behind while she was freed.

”I am extremely happy, of course,” she told reporters gathered at MIA. “But I also feel sadness.”

She paused for several seconds and then burst into tears. ”Some people qualify for bond and release, but because they don’t have money for bond they are deported with their children,” Ocdalis said, sobbing as she spoke. “It’s very hard being there.”

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