Immigration is top-of-mind for voters heading into the 2024 presidential election and so, too, is the economy and our workforce. For highly educated, highly skilled immigrants, entering the workforce and obtaining high-wage work can feel impossible. Brain waste is to blame. I have a new piece out in the Worcester Telegram & Gazette looking at this phenomenon and ways we can better match skilled immigrants with high-wage jobs.

In 2020, over 260,000 immigrants with undergraduate health care degrees such as nursing were underemployed. How might this untapped group of health professionals have buoyed the workforce during the COVID-19 pandemic if they’d been licensed in the U.S.?

Read the whole piece here.

Research for this article was supported by Arnold Ventures.

Some years after President Nixon shared with a national TV audience the bald-faced lie that he was “not a crook,” he infamously claimed to David Frost in a one-on-one interview this little gem: “Well, when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.”

That that guy never served a day in prison is why we are in the fix we are in today.

Donald Von Shitzenpantz never read a thing about Nixon. Of that, I am sure. But he didn’t have to. What his campaign is currently doing in campaign contributions is not a new thing for him or for any given chiseling entrepreneur.

He’s making lucre out of excess donations.

Here is an FEC document that I got from Alfredo at the Dairy Queen. It pretty much sums up the whole larcenous affair. Take a look. We’ll wait.

That’s right. The official presidential campaign of Don Von has pulled in an aggregate of $226,669.43 in interest from funds donated to the campaign, including by people who have donated over the legal limit.

You see, the FEC because it is fair-minded, gives candidates a 60-day time period to discover overpayment, and refund the balance to the donor. A time limit that the Von Shitzenpantz campaign has typically violated. Oh yes, you do clearly see refunds, but just as clearly, you see that they take their damned time about doing it. So much time, and so much money, that the campaign can buy an extra quarter of a million dollars worth of McD’s hamberders for their campaign workers.

According to a pornographic film actor and director, The Former Guy is pretty quick about getting his business done.

Just not this business.

Because they cannot win by following the rules, the WA State GOP decided to play a game of To Tell the Truth. (I’m old, this is the show I remember, not the new one). Our Dem candidate for Governor, Attorney General Bob Ferguson, has a rather common name. What are the chances that TWO other candidates named Robert Ferguson would file for the governor’s race? The REAL Bob Ferguson has been an excellent AG, and has made a name for himself bringing successful challenges ranging from companies responsible for the opioid crisis to dark money in politics to Catholic Church sexual abuse to environmental protection to immigration to scam artists, and even TFG himself (85 times during his term as President). He even made Time Magazine’s 100 most influential people in 2017 (he was fine with not being on the cover). So why would these two doofuses think they could pull a fast one on the Attorney General with lots of justice notches on his belt?

There is a WA state law that they could be liable for a class B felony for attempting to mislead voters. We have a top 2 primary, and these kinds of shenanigans can easily affect the outcome. Of course they don’t see it as election interference at all. It turns out the orchestrator of this strategy, conservative activist Glenn Morgan, was hoping to get a few more Bob Fergusons before last Friday’s 5 pm deadline to file. He’d contacted 12 but ‘ran out of time’.  AG Bob Ferguson was having none of this. He sent a Cease and Desist letter to each of the Bobs, and called on them to withdraw their names by 5 PM yesterday or face legal action. BOOM! Both of the Bobs who were persuaded to file as Democrats to confuse voters withdrew before the deadline,72 hours after they filed. Smart move for a couple of dummies. Chalk up another win for the Good Guy, who was obviously working over the weekend.

Michael Cohen today surpassed everyone’s expectations of what would happen when the New York lawyer who has been known to be a “loose cannon” took the stand.

Under direct examination by the prosecution, Cohen gave one or two-word answers repeatedly:  Yes.  No.  I did.  He did.  When they got to the point of his testimony, which was to tie the Stormy Daniels payoff directly to Trump’s anxiety about how her story would affect his campaign, Cohen was stellar. 

Referring to the possibility that Stormy Daniels would speak about her one night stand with Trump before election day, Trump told Cohen, “This is a disaster, a total disaster. Women will hate me.” Trump said “guys, they think it’s cool” that Trump had sex with Stormy Daniels in a hotel room in Lake Tahoe, but if women hear about it, “this is going to be a disaster for the campaign.”

Polls in 2016 already had Trump running seriously behind Hillary Clinton with women because of the Access Hollywood tape, in which Trump boasted that with women, he could  “grab’em by the pussy” anytime, because “when you are a star, they let you do it.  You can do anything.” 

Cohen described Trump as desperate at the thought of the Stormy Daniels story coming out days before the election.  “Get control of it!  Just get past the election. If I win, it’ll have no relevance when I’m president. And if I lose, I don’t really care.”

When Susan Hoffinger, the attorney for the prosecution, asked Cohen if he had talked about Trump’s wife, Melania, with him, Cohen answered, “Yes.” Cohen then described Trump’s attitude about the possibility that his wife would learn about his one night stand with Daniels.  “Don’t worry. How long do you think I’ll be on the market for? Not long.” 

That comment is a direct reference to the idea that Melania might divorce him over the Stormy Daniels story.  It is also the reason that the row of seats for family members behind the defense table has been empty for four weeks, save for one day that Trump’s son, Eric, attended the trial for part of one day. The empty seats in the family row are in full view of the jury box.

Melania has her pride, even if her husband doesn’t.

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Last week, Stormy Daniels testified in one of the criminal cases against Donald Trump, this one for a hush-money payment he allegedly made to keep their sexual encounter a secret. In the defense’s cross-examination of Daniels, they tried out a familiar tactic: Suggesting that, because she is a woman whose sexual history is not exactly one of Christian chastity, she is more likely to be lying about a sexual encounter.

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Daniels has appeared in several adult films, and has also written and directed quite a few. This is a fact that Trump’s defense was virtually guaranteed to try to use against her. Despite the fact that most Americans watch porn, Americans (and people just about everywhere) remain pretty uncomfortable with porn, with sex generally, and with unapologetically sexually active women particularly. The idea that you can’t trust a promiscuous woman has been standard fare in rape cases for centuries — along with the related conclusion that you can’t rape a promiscuous woman.

Daniels wasn’t accusing Trump of rape, although the details she shared certainly made their encounter sound less than consensual. The question, though, wasn’t one of consent; it was whether sex happened at all. Daniels says it did; Trump says it didn’t. And that’s why Daniels was on the stand.

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During cross examination, Trump’s lawyer, Susan Necheles, asked Daniels, “You have a lot of experience in making phony stories about sex appear to be real?”

Daniels laughed. “Wow,” she said. “That’s not how I would put it. The sex in the films is very much real, just like what happened to me in that room.”

Necheles continued: “You have a lot of experience in memorizing these fictional stories?”

To which Daniels responded: “I have experience in memorizing dialogue, not how to have sex — pretty sure we all know how to do that.”

Daniels held her own. But the implication was clear, and it’s a familiar one for any person who has ever followed a very public sexual assault case: A porn star can’t be trusted. Just like a sex worker can’t be trusted. And a sexually active woman can’t be trusted.

As far as I can tell, there’s no actual evidence that a woman’s sexual history has any bearing on her likelihood of telling the truth about sexual assault. But the conventional wisdom is that the more chaste a woman, the less likely she is to lie about being raped (or, in Daniels’s case, about sex generally). When you pause to think about it, though, this totally defies common sense: Isn’t someone who has done something many, many times over, enthusiastically and without complaint, less likely to lie about doing that thing than someone who perhaps feels that thing is shameful or stigmatized or bad, and may be a whole lot more likely to feel guilty and embarrassed for having done it?

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Border Closures Impede Aid to Gaza, Sparking Humanitarian Crisis

Amid persistent calls from the United States and other countries that Israel needs to make it easier for life-saving aid to reach Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, the Israeli military closed two of the region’s few operating border crossings in Rafah, a southern Gazan city, on May 7, 2024.

Responding to political pressure and alarm, Israel then reopened a different border crossing into Gaza, called Kerem Shalom, on May 8.

These border crossings are crucial for aid workers and deliveries of food, fuel and other supplies, especially as commercial imports have stopped entering Gaza. The amount of aid going into Gaza each day has varied since Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, and Israel’s subsequent invasion of Gaza. But the overall number of aid trucks flowing through the Rafah and Kerem Shalom crossings is down 75% from before the war, according to the United Nations. Aid workers say they are unable to meet Palestinians’ needs in Gaza, even with the aid air drops and boat shipments that the U.S. and other countries are doing.

I spent 20 years as the president of Oxfam America, an international humanitarian organization, and have overseen humanitarian responses to some of the biggest crises of the past three decades, from the war in Kosovo to the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. I know from experience that the major aid organizations know how to run large, well-integrated operational responses to emergencies like Gaza. However, this is not happening, in part because Israel is not giving aid groups what they need to do so.

The Needs in Gaza

After seven months of conflict, the international community has not set up the kind of well-coordinated response it would normally provide during a crisis.

There are several reasons why enough aid deliveries are not quickly entering Gaza. First, Israel controls all of the border crossings into Gaza and does intensive searches of trucks for security reasons, slowing down the deliveries. Even if aid does cross into Gaza, it does not mean the goods will reach people in need.

There have also been reports of people dying and being injured when trying to collect aid packages that are air-dropped, as well as Hamas and other groups intercepting aid deliveries and either hoarding the items or selling them at high prices on the black market.

In early May, northern Gaza passed a critical threshold and is now entering into a “full blown famine,” according to the United Nations.

Bombings in Gaza have destroyed water and energy systems, leaving 95% of the population without access to clean water.

There’s a fairly standard playbook for how aid organizations respond to humanitarian crises like the one playing out in Gaza. In most cases, the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, a designated U.N. office that focuses on humanitarian affairs and is typically called OCHA, takes the lead in defining what exactly different U.N. agencies should do to help people in a crisis.

The World Health Organization, World Food Program and other U.N. agencies all have their own specialties – be it health, housing, hunger, education or other issues. The U.N. agencies coordinate their work, while OCHA also assigns an international nonprofit organization to help each U.N. agency share their workload with other international and local nonprofits.

In most emergencies, there is clear coordination among international aid agencies from day one. This is a well-oiled machine with decades of experience in meeting people’s immediate needs in some of the world’s most challenging circumstances.

Aid Work in Gaza Is Different

However, Gaza does not align with this typical system of aid work.

In Gaza and the West Bank, the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East, or simply UNRWA, has been the main U.N. agency that has been focused only on providing a full suite of services to Palestinians since the late 1940s, when Israel was created and many Palestinians were pushed out into what are now the Palestinian territories of Gaza and the West Bank.

Over the years, UNRWA’s role has evolved from meeting Palestinians’ basic needs for food and water, for example, to also providing health care and education. While other U.N. agencies like the World Health Organization work in Gaza, UNRWA is by far the largest aid organization there — and after Hamas is the second-largest employer in Gaza.

Both the Israeli and Egyptian governments have long recognized UNRWA as the main coordinator for trans-border aid shipments, especially those for other U.N. agencies and nonprofits that work with it.

While the UNRWA was accustomed to operating a large humanitarian operation in Gaza before the war, the agency is not equipped or staffed to help provide housing for the more than 1.7 million people in Gaza who have had to flee their homes.

Additionally, Israel and the UNRWA have a long, complicated relationship that came to a peak in March 2024, when Israel said that it would stop working with the agency altogether because of allegations —which have not been independently verified — that UNRWA staff participated in the Oct. 7 attacks and held hostages captive.

Israel no longer working with the UNRWA creates new logistical challenges that prevent a coherent, organized humanitarian response in Gaza. This may force other U.N. agencies to suddenly take over UNRWA’s long-established roles in Gaza.

Border Closings and Other Challenges

Israel’s intermittent closing of border crossings into Gaza – and continued long delays for arriving aid trucks – is another crucial factor that is hampering aid delivery.

Aid experts also say that the number of aid trucks entering Gaza, which in May 2024 reached an average of 180 per day through the two main crossing points combined, is inadequate to address the hunger crisis.

Achieving what’s actually needed, they say, would require many more trucks, an influx of aid workers, training of Palestinian medical personnel to treat people suffering from malnutrition and gastrointestinal diseases, the restoration of medical facilities and, above all, an end to the military conflict.

Meanwhile, international nonprofits and their staff are facing their own safety challenges. At least 224 aid workers, most of them Palestinians, have been killed in Gaza since October 2023. Indiscriminate bombings of residential neighborhoods have forced other aid workers to move their families multiple times to find safety and shelter, making it nearly impossible for them to do their jobs.

Possible Reforms

I think there are certain things that the U.N. could do to help make it easier for aid deliveries to reach people in Gaza.

First, OCHA could step in to better coordinate all of the relevant U.N. agencies that may need to join or take on a larger role in the Gaza humanitarian crisis.

I also think that the U.N. could insist that Israel help create safe and secure conditions for a well-coordinated and comprehensive U.N. response. This includes guarantees to open additional border crossings as needed, and increase the number of daily aid deliveries — especially food — as well as ensuring more consistent access and supplies.

Professional humanitarians are prepared to sacrifice ourselves to preserve and protect the dignity of all, both Israelis and Palestinians. History has taught that the only lesson from all wars is that no one really wins and millions suffer quietly well into the future.

Humanitarians’ job is to find and create safe spaces and save as many lives as we can, with the experience and resources at our disposal. We carry no weapons and rely entirely on respect for international humanitarian law and other rules of war to ensure our safety as we carry out this dangerous mission. But in order to carry out this work, we need access and minimally safe and secure conditions that let us do our jobs.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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The post I’ve Spent Decades Overseeing Relief Operations Around the World, and Here’s What’s Going Wrong In Gaza appeared first on DCReport.org.