We are begging to our President Trump and to the public to stand up and ask for our permanent—not temporary—legalization. We have been in the U.S. for more than 20 years, and they didn’t give us any permanent status. I think we are honorable people. We do the work other people don’t want to do. We earn very little money. We pay for housing and taxes and school for the children—for my three children—and they go to the school. And today I feel very sad, because they want to take the TPS from us.
America needs slave labor. Since the dawn of America, since it began, we have had a slave labor class. What we see now is the privatized prison system… If you can name a corporation right now, they are profiting off of labor, enslaved labor, given by privatized prison systems. To fill those spots, they need to be able to put bodies into those prison systems. And those bodies right now are being collected on the streets of America through cannabis arrest.
Wanda James, CEO of Denver-based cannabis company Simply Pure and Colorado’s first Black woman pot entrepreneur.
Read the full interview: Colorado’s First Black Woman Pot Entrepreneur on Edibles, Incarceration & the Industry’s Whiteness
One begins to wonder if that’s actually a strategy, that you make people poor enough, you make them obsessed with working out where their next meal is going to come from, they’re not going to vote, and so you can happily ignore them.
Obviously, it was very frustrating to hear that coming from Trump, but it was not surprising, because U.S. complicity with the Israeli occupation is not new. It’s something that has spanned over generations. And for Palestinians, it’s something that is expected, because a nation like the United States, that has been built on colonization, it’s only natural for them to support another colonizer state in Israel.
There is nothing in this plan that suggests that they intend to reform the tax system. This is simply the oligarchs of America reaching into the pockets of the middle class, and especially the upper middle class and the moderately prosperous, the people in America who make $100,000 a year up to about a million dollars a year, and taking money out of their pockets. People who make $100,000 to $250,000 a year would actually see their taxes rise under this plan, based on what we know so far. This is simply a huge redistribution scheme by the rich, for the rich and paid for by everybody who is not already rich.