BALTIMORE’S RATS

The Baltimore rat problem President Donald Trump tweeted about Saturday is apparently so extensive it was the subject of a documentary two years ago.

The president’s tweets took aim at Democratic Maryland Rep. Elijah Cummings, who has been very critical of the administration’s immigration and migrant detention policies, calling his home district in Baltimore “rodent infested.” ….. Turns out Trump is correct. Read an entire report HERE.

But according to earlier reports from The Baltimore Sun, that rat problem is actually quite a bit more extensive than the editorial board implied.

This is the perfect example of #TrumpDerangementSyndrome #TDS.

In April, the @baltimoresun newspaper was concerned about the trash in the city.

Only 3 months later, they are accepting of a rat infestation.

The citizens of #Baltimore deserve better.

In April of this year, the same editorial board published another op-ed titled “Baltimore’s perpetual trash problem.” Among other issues, the article detailed some of the problems that stemmed from ubiquitous piles of trash — increased rodent infestations among them.

Yet, here we are again in a mess of a city. Food containers, balled up clothes, paper, banana peels, plastic bags and tons of other pieces of litter line the shoulders of roads, pile up in alleys and are strewn across fields and yards. Not only is it unsightly and contributes to a rodent problem, but it can create a glum and gloomy feel in a time when the city is already facing self-esteem issues because of high crime and the scandal surrounding the University Maryland Medical System and Mayor Catherine Pugh, who’s now on an indefinite leave, and her Healthy Holly books.

In September 2018, another Baltimore Sun article quoted then-Mayor Catherine Pugh as saying that the problem was so extensive that “you can smell the rats.”

Ian Miles Cheong
✔
@stillgray
Baltimore has a rat problem. Even its mayor admits it. Why is Trump called a racist for bringing it up?

In July 2018, video of Baltimore’s Northeast Market showed rats inside — within a week of a similar problem being exposed at Lexington Market — forcing the market to close down.

A 2018 assessment from Orkin, the pest control company, listed Baltimore as the 9th “rattiest” city in the United States.

The problem was so far-reaching that “Rat Film,” a documentary based on Baltimore’s constant battle with the prolific rodents, premiered at a local film festival in 2017 and aired on public television in 2018. The Baltimore Sun covered the PBS premiere.

“Rat Film,” a documentary that takes the decades-long fight waged against Baltimore’s rat population and uses it as a lens through which to look at how the city has addressed myriad social issues over the decades, airs tonight on PBS.

When President Trump criticized Cummings and claimed that Baltimore was “rodent infested,” however, critics were quick to call his tweets offensive and even racist, arguing that he only used the term “infested” when he was speaking of “black and brown people.”

Animal Planet ranked Baltimore as one of the worst Rat Infested cities in the world reporting “Baltimore’s rat problem is bad enough that at one point, rats tunneled so intensely beneath a particular area of pavement that when garbage collectors drove over it, their truck sunk up to its axles. Rats in the vicinity took full advantage of the mishap and swarmed the truck, gorging on the garbage inside.”

Bernie Sanders flanked by Baltimore City leaders wasn’t called a racist when he called likened Baltimore to a third world country.

Videos from Cummings’ own district shows an epidemic of poverty, filth, and squalor plaguing the once-vibrant city of Baltimore, consistent with Trump’s criticisms.___________________________

VOX reports:

The opioid epidemic is increasingly killing black Americans. Baltimore is ground zero.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the city’s overdose death rate was 22.7 per 100,000 people in 2011. It climbed to 49.1 per 100,000 in 2015 — comparable to the current figures in West Virginia, the state with the highest overdose death rate in the country. In 2017, the rate in Baltimore reached 85.2 per 100,000. That’s almost the equivalent of 0.1 percent of the city’s population dying from drug overdoses in one year.

Based on the most recent figures, 2018 was likely worse. Black people make up most of the overdose deaths in the city. Yet Cummings goes after Trump.. What a disgusting way to treat Baltimorians.

HUMAN TRAFFICKING IN CUMMINGS DISTRICT… BALTIMORE, MD

In 2014, 396 survivors of human trafficking came in contact with the Maryland Human Trafficking Task Force. Of those, 381 were victims of sex trafficking, including 364 girls and women.

“We are talking about 14-, 15-, and 16-year-olds who are being sexually assaulted, raped, up to 20 times a day.”

The Baltimore Sun published an op-ed on Nov. 9, 2016 — the day Donald Trump was declared the winner of the 2016 presidential election — in which the author called for Baltimore to be declared a disaster, and rebuilt. The op-ed, was written by Sean Kennedy. So far Cummings hasn’t reacted to the human trafficking in Baltimore. Why not? It’s a horrible problem,  it needs a solution and as soon as president Trump finds out about it the sky will fall. .

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