Nico Hines, Barbie Latza Nadeau LONDON — Europe’s unofficial “Let Them Drown” immigration policy came into force on Saturday with new naval patrols in the Mediterranean under orders to act as border guards rather than search and rescue teams. This, even when rickety boats carrying refugees from Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East and Africa are struggling to make it safely ashore. Britain’s Conservative-led government said there should be no program to rescue drowning immigrants, arguing that the existence of a safety net had encouraged thousands more desperate people to attempt the dangerous maritime crossing than would have come otherwise. That claim was hard to stand up. A U.K. Home Office official was unable to provide evidence to The Daily Beast or cite any studies that demonstrated a causal link between the increasing number of refugees and the existence of rescue boats. Political opponents of the government in London described the British government policy as a “barbarous abandonment of British values.” Still, officials insisted that the rescue operations of Italy’s Mare Nostrum project had created an unintended “pull factor” for refugees attempting to flee violence and instability at home. The British government claimed that 3,000 migrants drowning at sea this year had proved that the rescue operation was counter-productive. A senior Labour Party MP scoffed at what he suggested was faulty logic. “The increase in the number of deaths is not because they have put in place a more expansive search and rescue operation, that is just ludicrous,” said Barry Gardiner, who pointed to the changing circumstances overseas. Alessio Mamo/Redux In recent months record numbers of refugees from Syria have spilled into North Africa, swelling the ranks of displaced people who are willing to risk a perilous journey on overcrowded boats. The push factor of a Syrian civil war that has killed more than 200,000 people is a more probable cause of people setting to sea than the attraction of a voyage into the arms of a European navy. In response to a deadly shipwreck that killed more than 400 migrants off the coast of Italy’s Lampedusa island last year, the Italian Navy’s Mare Nostrum operation has been scanning the seas looking for listing vessels. They have rescued more than 150,000 people so far from unsafe fishing boats that left the coasts of Tunisia and particularly Libya, where the ports are now virtually lawless. Unlike economic migrants that used to make the crossing to find work in Europe, more than three-quarters of the migrants who have come over in the last 12 months are seeking political asylum, according to the Italian Foreign Ministry. Of those rescued, almost half are women and children. The European Union’s operation Triton, which came into force on Saturday, is supposed to replace Mare Nostrum. But it will not attempt to replicate its search-and-rescue mission. It has a third of the budget and a fraction of the maritime vessels.Ships and aerial surveillance craft from Frontex, Europe’s border agency, will simply report any problems to the Italian coastguard. Without a dedicated and proactive rescue force, campaigners fear, the death toll in the Mediterranean will skyrocket. Britain and some of its allies in Northern Europe apparently believe that removing these protections will in fact help to stem the flow of migrants. James Brokenshire, Britain’s Immigration Minister, said those wanting to reach European soil were using Mare Nostrum as a kind of naval taxi service. “Traffickers have taken advantage of the situation by placing more vulnerable people in unseaworthy boats on the basis that they will be rescued and taken to Italy,” he told the House of Commons. “But many are not rescued, which is why we believe that the operation is having the unintended consequence of placing more lives at risk.” Britain’s claims have caused consternation among those dealing with the crisis. An Italian Interior Ministry official told The Daily Beast that issues in Africa offered a more accurate explanation. “The influx is due to a number of factors, starting with the lack of control in Libya,” he said. “Mare Nostrum has saved lives, and we have caught more than 60 human traffickers who are now facing judicial action who will not be able to continue their work.” David Cameron, the British Prime Minister, is under intense pressure from within his own party to take a more aggressive position on immigration because of the increasing electoral support for UKIP, an upstart right-wing party that wants to close the borders. “I would dearly love to believe that this has nothing to do with the tensions within the Conservative Party and the pull of its own right wing towards UKIP,” said Labour’s Gardiner. “I would like to believe that this is a decision—albeit a wrong-headed one—that is based on financial considerations and a bit of false logic.” While Europe’s political leaders wrangled over maritime patrols and who would pay for them, the men and women on the front line of the immigration battle were continuing to do their job. For now, at least. Captain Giuseppe Maggio described the nightmare situations the Mare Nostrum ships encounter. “We’ve seen things I cannot describe,” he told AFP in Palermo last week. “The hardest moment was one shipwreck when we managed to rescue 250 people, but with rough seas, at night, we weren’t able to save everyone.” Even with Mare Nostrum, death at sea is unavoidable. More than 3,300 migrants are known to have been lost in the last 12 months according to the United Nations Refugee Agency. Many of their bodies get caught up in fishing nets or disappear forever. When the body counts are high, the Mare Nostrum sailors have to nail the coffin lids so they stack better or, in one case last summer they haul in the rickety boats with the corpses still in the hulls. “Timing is everything. You need to keep your nerve and make sure they know everything’s going to be ok,” Maggio told AFP. “We’re dealing with people who often cannot swim, don’t speak our language and are exhausted from days in the sun. The key is to prevent panic.” Even as Italy’s Interior Minister Angelino Alfano promises his constituents that the Mare Nostrum program, which costs the Italian government some €11 million a month, is about to end, the Italian Navy promises that it will continue the mission. Commander-in-Chief Adm. Filippo Maria Foffi told a conference in Brussels that the fleet has no plans to cease the searching and rescuing. “At the moment, no one has told us to stop the mission,” he said. The Italian Navy confirmed to The Daily Beast on Friday that it will continue its missions “for the foreseeable future.” Triton will begin patrolling the seas with six ships based in Lampedusa and Porto Empedocle in Sicily on November 1. Ten days later, it will start air missions using two airplanes and one helicopter. Because it is not authorized to rescue migrants, it will still have to call Italian officials to conduct rescues when it sees ships in trouble. Amnesty International said that Italy “must continue the Mare Nostrum search and rescue operation until there is a better-equipped alternative supported by other European nations.” In a statement, John Dalhuisen, Amnesty’s Europe and Central Asia director said, “Frontex’s Triton operation does not begin to meet the needs of thousands of migrants and refugees, including those forced to flee war and persecution in the Middle East and Africa. The suggestion that it could replace Mare Nostrum could have catastrophic and deadly consequences in the Mediterranean.”
Death Panel By Brian Beutler Back in March 2011, when the biggest threats facing Obamacare were the Supreme Court and the 2012 elections, I argued that the demise of the Affordable Care Act would put people’s lives in immediate danger. At the time, the law had relatively few beneficiaries—people under 26 covered by their parents’ health plans, a small population of people with pre-existing medical conditions. But some of them had already used their new coverage to finance the kinds of life-saving treatments that would leave them in need of chronic care for the rest of their lives. Take away the health law, and most of these organ transplant recipients and other patients would have become unable to afford their medications, and some of them would die. Since then, millions of people have gained coverage under the law, and that group of chronic care patients has grown much larger. But despite the fact that the Court upheld the law, and President Obama won reelection, the ACA isn’t out of danger. On Friday, the Supreme Court agreed to hear a case that will determine whether the federal government can continue to subsidize private ACA coverage in states that didn’t set up their own insurance exchanges. That case is King v. Burwell, but the issue at stake has come to be defined by a comparable case called Halbig v. Burwell. The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against the challengers in King, but the Supreme Court agreed to grant cert to those challengers anyhow, despite the absence of a Circuit Court split. If the five conservative Supreme Court justices are so inclined, they can void ACA subsidies for millions of beneficiaries, and cripple the insurance markets in about three dozen states. Some of those beneficiaries will be the kinds of transplant recipients and other patients I wrote about three and a half years ago. Except today there are many more of them. Several of these patients explained the risk to their lives in an amicus brief, urging a different circuit court to reject the challenge to the subsidies, and thus to the viability of the insurance markets their lives depend on. “Without insurance, Jennifer [Causor’s] treatments would be completely unaffordable. Her transplant cost nearly $280,000. She takes three anti-rejection drugs, one of which has a sticker price of $2,400 per month…. Should she become uninsured, Jennifer would face bankruptcy and even death.” You can read the whole brief below. Conservatives are brimming with excitement over the Court's decision to hear the challenge. Should the five conservatives rule that the text of the law doesn’t provide for federal subsidies in states that didn’t set up their own exchanges, they’ll place the onus on Congress or state governments to address the consequences for constituents who lose their benefits. The contested text could be fixed with a comically simple technical corrections bill, which Democrats would happily support. If Republicans were to sit on their hands, or use the ensuing chaos as leverage to extract unrelated concessions, it will cost people their lives. That is a cardinal reality facing justices, and the people soliciting their conservative activism.
Feds selective in homeless they are pushing to help By Mark Brown The federally funded program that Ayesha Cargill credits with lifting her from homelessness — and possibly saving her life — no longer exists. That’s a personal concern for Cargill, who wonders where she would go if the mental health problems that contributed to her becoming homeless were to return. But she wonders, too, about all the people she sees on the street right now, “people who are just like me.” She’d like to refer them to those who gave her so much help, but they’re not there any more. Altogether, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development eliminated funding this summer to 12 of the 15 programs that provide so-called “supportive services” to homeless Chicagoans. These are services ranging from mental health and substance abuse counseling to help with finding a job or an apartment — the support that can enable a homeless person to not only get a roof over their head but also to keep it. “They helped find my apartment. They helped me understand my diagnosis and how to deal with my symptoms. They fed me. They clothed me. They helped me see a new light at the end of the tunnel,” Cargill says of the former homeless support program at Northwestern Medical Center’s Satellite Clinic, among those that lost funding. On Monday, a group of social service agencies led by the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless said it was asking Mayor Rahm Emanuel to increase the city transfer tax — only on sales of million-dollar plus homes — to help replace lost federal funding for homeless support services. The .1 percent “luxury” tax would add $1,000 to the city transfer tax burden on a $1 million home, up from the current $10,500. I don’t think that’s going to happen, certainly not any time soon with an election just around the corner. But city officials say they also are concerned about the federal cuts and have been meeting with the homeless coalition and others to try and find a solution. It’s a little ironic — and not entirely coincidental — that this problem arrives at the same time the federal government is making a big push to end homelessness for veterans by the end of 2015. Along with a new rapid re-housing philosophy in which an emphasis is placed on getting homeless individuals housed quickly, and helping them solve their other problems later, such re-ordered federal priorities benefit some at the expense of others. “Giving somebody an apartment will solve the condition but won’t solve the problem,” said Jackie Edens, executive director of Inner Voice, one of the city’s leading homeless service providers. Inner Voice lost $678,000 in the federal cutbacks, money that previously was spent on sending case managers into city homeless shelters to give individuals the assistance they need to piece their lives back together. Often, that starts with something as simple as getting a state identification card. Edens, a former director of homeless services for the city, knows these are difficult funding decisions, equating it to a doctor asking: “which limb do you want to cut off?” But cutting off supportive services won’t work, she said, noting that her surviving case managers are already seeing homeless individuals who benefited from rapid re-housing land back on the street as their subsidies run out. For Cargill, 26, who grew up in Uptown, the slide into homelessness followed a familiar pattern. “I became mentally disabled,” she explained. “It kind of runs in my family.” In her case, that meant hallucinations — hearing voices and seeing things that aren’t there. Schizophrenia is the term you probably know, a scary illness but mostly scary for her. That’s why I want to thank her for being brave enough to come forward. About five years ago, Cargill lost her job as a gas station cashier after failing to show up. She quit going to school, too, and then the grandmother with whom she had been living kicked her out. Cargill ended up living in homeless shelters, but as her downhill slide continued, police picked her up off the street one night and took her to Northwestern, which was the beginning of her turnaround. “I never really had anybody before this to guide me,” said Cargill, who now has an apartment, is preparing to return to community college to study fine arts and thinks she’s ready for a job again, too. Cargill had already advanced through the Northwestern program before it was closed, but still goes to the medical center for therapy. The next person in Cargill’s shoes probably won’t be as fortunate.
Cross-posted: Chef, 90, faces jail, fines for feeding the homeless By Zachary Fagenson Arnold P. Abbott, president of the Maureen A. Abbott Love Thy Neighbor Fund, Inc. MIAMI (Reuters) - For decades, 90-year-old Arnold Abbott has hauled pans filled with roast chicken and cheese-covered potatoes onto a south Florida beach park to feed hundreds of homeless people. For his good deeds, Abbott finds himself facing up to two months in jail and hundreds of dollars in fines after new laws that restrict public feeding of the homeless went into effect in Fort Lauderdale earlier this year. “I’ve been fighting for the underdog all my life, so this is nothing new,” Abbott said. He was first cited last Sunday, along with two clergymen and a volunteer from his nonprofit, Love Thy Neighbor. On Wednesday, several police cars waited for Abbott at a downtown Fort Lauderdale park, and officers pulled aside the frail man, clad in a white chef’s coat, soon after the first plates were ready to be served. “The ordinance does not prohibit feeding the homeless; it regulates the activity in order to ensure it is carried out in an appropriate, organized, clean and healthy manner,” Fort Lauderdale Mayor John P. Seiler said in a statement. Abbott moved to Florida from Massachusetts in 1970 and was a civil rights activist and wholesale jewelry salesman. He and his wife first began feeding the homeless on their own in 1979. He started the foundation and feeding full time in 1991 after his wife died, in a tribute to her memory. The dispute highlights a debate between two schools of homeless rights activists: Those who argue that banning public feeding criminalizes the homeless, and others who say feeding and panhandling helps keep them on the street. Since January 2013, 21 cities across the country have passed laws restricting public feedings and 10 more have similar rules under consideration, according to an October report from the National Coalition to the Homeless. Nationwide, at least 57 cities have limited or banned public feeding. "One of the reasons these kinds of ordinances are being embraced is that this is what cities can do without spending money,” said Jerry Jones, the coalition’s executive director. A widely agreed-upon solution - giving the longtime homeless beds as they work their way into treatment programs - is too costly for many municipalities that struggle with homelessness. But advocates for the homeless say that ignores the costs of not addressing the issue in a compassionate way. “What’s the cost if somebody presents themselves five times annually to an emergency room?” asked Ron Book, a high-profile Florida lobbyist who chairs Miami-Dade County’s Homeless Trust with a tax-backed, $55 million budget.
It's as though the DemoCraps hit them upside the head with a club, and then say... "I'll give you an aspirin for your headache if you vote for us"..