Hate Is Crippling an Ohio Town; Poverty in California Is Increasing–Coachella Valley Independent’s Indy Digest: Sept. 16, 2024

Indy Digest: Sept. 16, 2024

In Thursday’s Democracy Day-focused newsletter, I covered the havoc being wreaked on Springfield, Ohio, after former President Trump claimed that Haitian immigrants there were eating pets.

Those claims have been completely debunked. The Springfield mayor (a Republican), the Ohio governor (a Republican) and police in Dayton, Ohio (which has been the subject of yet another false rumor) have all spoken out against these claims.

Yet the Trump campaign, and most notably J.D. Vance—who, as a sitting Ohio senator, represents the people about whom he’s lying—refuse to back down. BBC News reports:

Appearing on Sunday talk shows, Vance defended the false stories, saying “media totally ignored this stuff until Donald Trump and I started talking about cat memes”.

“If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do,” he told CNN.

“It comes from firsthand accounts from my constituents. I say that we’re creating a story, meaning we’re creating the American media focusing on it.” …

Mayor Rob Rue told the BBC that the conspiracy theories – and Trump’s pledge to “mass deport” migrants from Springfield – were hurting the town.

“People’s pets are safe in Springfield, Ohio, ” Rue told the BBC’s Newshour programme. “We reached out to the JD Vance Campaign to let them know that we do not have any evidence that has happened, and I’ve made it known in multiple interviews that this is absolutely not true.”

“We need folks to understand, especially those that have a microphone that’s being listened to around the world, they need to understand the weight of their words and how it can negatively affect communities.”

Let me repeat what Vance said: “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.”

While Vance is making up stories and spreading claims that immigrants are causing American people to suffer—again, with no evidence—the people of Springfield are the ones who are actually suffering.

CNBC reports: “Ohio state police will conduct daily sweeps of schools in Springfield after authorities have been forced to investigate ‘at least 33’ bomb threats that led to evacuations and temporary building closures, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine said Monday. ‘We want to make sure, as school continues this week in Springfield, that parents have confidence that the school is in fact safe,’ the Republican governor said at a press conference.”

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Taylor Popielarz, a national political reporter for Spectrum News, made a list of 21 different facilities in Springfield that have been “placed on lockdown, evacuated, closed, or searched at some point over the last week due to threats.” It includes City Hall, multiple schools and even a hospital. The city also cancelled its annual CultureFest due to threats, and Springfield’s Clark State College closed its campuses and is doing remote classes all this week because of, as reported by the Springfield News-Sun, “two email threats of a potential bombing and shooting.”

These are real people—our fellow human beings who have done nothing wrong—who are being hurt. They’re being threatened with violence. I can’t imagine the fear the residents of Springfield are enduring.

There are a lot of words to describe the actions of J.D. Vance, Donald Trump and the others who are spreading this information. Racism. Xenophobia. Lies. But the most appropriate word of all is hate—pure, evil hate.

—Jimmy Boegle

More News

• Today’s recall news involves … mac and cheese and other Reser’s products! Fox Business reports: “Two types of macaroni and cheese products sold in five states were recalled due to fears that they had become spoiled during the transport process, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced this week. Reser’s American Classics Macaroni & Cheese and Reser’s American Classics Macaroni & Cheese White Cheddar were both included as part of a larger recall of Reser’s Fine Foods deli salads and refrigerated products due to concerns about ‘temperature abuse’ and potential spoilage. … The other recalled products include potato salad varieties, scalloped potatoes, pasta salad, corn, egg salad, spinach dip, gravy and desserts.” The products were sold in five states, including California.

• ProPublica has published yet another disturbing piece about women who have died due to delays caused by abortion bans. The lede: “In her final hours, Amber Nicole Thurman suffered from a grave infection that her suburban Atlanta hospital was well-equipped to treat. She’d taken abortion pills and encountered a rare complication; she had not expelled all of the fetal tissue from her body. She showed up at Piedmont Henry Hospital in need of a routine procedure to clear it from her uterus, called a dilation and curettage, or D&C. But just that summer, her state had made performing the procedure a felony, with few exceptions. Any doctor who violated the new Georgia law could be prosecuted and face up to a decade in prison. Thurman waited in pain in a hospital bed, worried about what would happen to her 6-year-old son, as doctors monitored her infection spreading, her blood pressure sinking and her organs beginning to fail. It took 20 hours for doctors to finally operate. By then, it was too late.”

• A new study shows that poverty in California is increasing. Capital and Main says: “For two years, researchers have both feared and expected that California’s poverty levels, annually the highest in the nation, would take off once the effects of pandemic-era safety net programs began to dissipate. The numbers are in. If anything, they’re worse than expected. The state’s overall poverty rate soared to 18.9% in 2023, according to research released this week by the California Budget & Policy Center. That’s up from 16.4% in 2022, but more significantly, it’s a staggering jump from the 11.0% rate that the center’s researchers had recorded in 2021. … That the jump in poverty occurred over the past two years is no coincidence. The year 2021 marked the last time that a series of pandemic relief efforts ran concurrently. Those programs included expanding the federal Child Tax Credit and Earned Income Tax Credit, enhancing unemployment benefits, providing occasional direct stimulus payments, and pouring more resources into the SNAP food assistance program, known in California as CalFresh.”

• More and more companies are demanding that workers stop working from home and come back to the office. CNBC reports on the latest: “Amazon is instructing corporate staffers to spend five days a week in the office, CEO Andy Jassy wrote in a memo on Monday. The decision marks a significant shift from Amazon’s earlier return-to-work stance, which required corporate workers to be in the office at least three days a week. Now, the company is giving employees until Jan. 2 to start adhering to the new policy. … ‘Before the pandemic, it was not a given that folks could work remotely two days a week, and that will also be true moving forward—our expectation is that people will be in the office outside of extenuating circumstances,’ Jassy said. … Jassy wrote in a lengthy missive to staffers that Amazon is making the changes to strengthen its corporate culture and ensure that it remains nimble.”

• The Los Angeles Times last week published an alarming piece about California’s underground puppy market. The lede is pretty awful (yet wonderfully written: “Blaring music drowned out the barking, but there was no masking the neglect inside the sweltering Riverside County garage. Jamie Abruzzo, a Missouri middle school teacher who picked up a summer job trucking puppies around the country, was overcome by anger as he took in the filth and feces that surrounded him. Outside, the temperature neared triple digits. Inside, where the air conditioner wasn’t working, dozens of puppies and kittens were jammed into small cages and storage bins lined with soiled shredded paper. Water containers nearby were empty. Abruzzo cradled his delivery, a 10-week-old Boston terrier that had made its way from an Indiana breeder to a broker, then to a crate inside his transport van. After two days on the road, this was the puppy’s next stop—the detached garage turned holding pen in an Inland Empire suburb. The driver knew where this multi-state pipeline was supposed to lead for the animals left unattended that day: loving homes. But what Abruzzo stumbled into was the underbelly of California’s lucrative, unregulated puppy market. And it haunted him.”

• And finally: Despite the examples of Kamala Harris and others, women remain underrepresented in local government. A public policy expert writes in The Conversation: “Our published research shows that women make up a smaller share of elected officials in county governments and city governments than they represent in the population. The gap between women’s share of the population in counties and women’s share of officeholders in counties is especially large. While women make up just over half of the population in counties, they make up only a little over a quarter of legislators who serve on county councils or county commissions. Women serving as county executives, sheriffs and prosecutors are even rarer. The office of sheriff is especially dominated by men, with women serving in less than 5% of these positions.”

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