If I Told You All That Went Down :: D.C. l Santa Cruz l SoCal l Lower East Side :: "Paper, Fiber, Fuel, Plastic, Medicine!" -Jack Herer
"bookhim" at the gmail
Florida paid a portable toilet company called Doodie Calls more than $92 million over six months to haul wastewater out of the Everglades. The state projected it would pay Doodie Calls $480 million over two years. For comparison, building a sewage treatment plant for a city of 10,000 people costs about $5 million.
That is one vendor. At one facility. Built in eight days on an Everglades airstrip using hurricane disaster funds because Ron DeSantis declared immigration a state of emergency in 2023 to access a $5 billion fund set aside for floods and hurricanes.
The facility costs between $1.2 million and $3 million per day to operate. A conservative estimate puts the annual per-capita cost at $500,000 per detainee. Florida spends $30,000 a year to house a convicted criminal in a state prison. The math on Alligator Alcatraz is not tougher than a prison. It is more than sixteen times more expensive.
Three quarters of the men held there have never been convicted of a crime. They are awaiting civil immigration proceedings. They are being held in kennels - cages with steel mesh sides, 16 bunks, three toilets, brightly lit 24 hours a day. Amnesty International documented what it called deliberate neglect designed to dehumanize, including credible allegations of men held in stress positions in direct sunlight without food or water for hours at a time.
Governor Braun opened the Speedway Slammer at an Indiana prison. The Cornhusker Clink in Nebraska. The Louisiana Lockup at Angola. The naming contest is ongoing. The cruelty is the point. The cost is someone else's problem. Florida's emergency fund has dwindled to $200 million. The facility cannot run to the end of the year.
The men in the cages are still there.
Marco Rubio once claimed his family fled Cuba's Revolution in 1959 after Fulgencio Batista was ousted. When that was debunked with official documentation proving his family fled the U.S.-backed Batista regime, which was killing its opposition in the streets, he responded by saying his story was based on family lore passed down by his parents and grandparents, not official accounts.
And that, my friends, is how many Cuban Americans derive their opinions about Cuba. Hyperbolic โfamily loreโ that when faced with even the slightest scrutiny, doesn't add up or jibe with historical records. That's why they get mad at you and call you names when you meet them with the slightest push back.
And I get it. Challenging decades-old false narratives that they lived their whole lives believing and accepting they were lied to my family is hard.
But it's absolutely necessary.
Listen to my people on the island. Give their stories more weight. They are no one's enemy. They just want to be left alone and to live without penalty.
@capitolhunters@trouble_man90 If I'm not mistaken, Ryan Grim knows him because Platner was a bartender at the Tune Inn on the Hill.
Weird that you'd frame it that way.
@trouble_man90 I didn't see people attacking her because she's a Republican, but instead for founding Ladies For Kavanaugh and uncorroborated allegations.
Kellyanne: Perhaps the most odious, offensive thing about himโฆ he will abolish ICE, he says fight the oligarchs, he thinks corporations are bad. He canโt be one of the 100 elite of this country to represent us.