Masha Gessen, in the New Yorker, explains why it is literally true that we have “concentration camps” to intern refugees right here. They have been coming to the US border to ask for asylum from unbearable conditions back home in Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala. The connotations of “concentration camps” point to Hitler’s Nazi Germany– but, by definition, a concentration camp is a place where you lock up people, without judicial procedure, for indefinite periods under bad conditions. Camps were started to lock up political dissidents, homosexuals, and undesirables of all sorts as soon as Hitler came to power in 1933. Jews were confined to ghettos but not systematically sent to concentration camps until 1938. When the “final solution” was formulated, death camps were developed to take care of business– but they were separate from concentration camps.
A “concentration camp” is anywhere you want to confine a group of people whom you want to keep out of the way, whether you just want to confine them or actually exterminate them. The lockups where ICE keeps people who surrender requesting asylum are as bad as anything you could want from Nazi Germany. They are massively overcrowded in some cases; in others, children are forced to care for their younger siblings as there is no adult supervision. They all share the same characteristic: people are locked up for indefinite periods without benefit of judicial process.
The sole purpose of these concentration camps is to keep refugees from being released inside the US; identifications and security checks are purposefully drawn out, tedious, and repetitious, used as an excuse to detain people longer.
The claim is that “the US is full”, but nothing could be further from the truth. We suffer from a shortage of young, employable people. We need young immigrants to repopulate areas of this country that have been hollowed out by emigration to the cities. These hollowed out areas contain many older people and few young people, and they need the young to balance out their economies.
In reality, the US could use exactly the type of people who are flooding over the border: young, educable, employable, and eager to get ahead. Those who are trying to get in to the US are not here for the welfare; they are here for a second chance at freedom. These people would take all the jobs that Americans don’t want to take, not just picking fruit but caring for the elderly, cleaning office buildings, and many other things.
The minimum wage should be at least $15, and full unionization with complete paycheck with-holding in fully legal jobs are important too. The status of all those with “Temporary Protected Status” should be made permanent, and people who were brought in as children should have regularized status as well. There is no excuse for not providing a clear path to citizenship for such people.
The Republicans will of course oppose any such plan under the assumption that more citizens means more Democratic votes, but that is self-defeating. It means that in order to carry such plans through, it will be necessary for Democrats to control the presidency, the House, and the Senate– and do something about the Supreme Court’s position. The Supreme Court could make up reasons to declare the necessary laws unconstitutional, somewhat in the way that Roosevelt was stymied by the Court during the rollout of his New Deal.
So, a radical notion but one that kills two birds with one stone: eliminate the concentration camps of refugees and infuse young, employable people into our country to balance out our aging population (and build up the Social Security trust fund.) From the monthly numbers of refugees detained by ICE, it appears that at least a million people a year are trying to immigrate into the US from Central America. Who knows how many people from India and Africa would come here given the chance?
[By the way, there is a climate-change association with all this: the forced emigration of people away from hotter areas of the world near the equator towards more northern climes. Climate change makes this inevitable, but human perversity makes it more painful than is necessary.]
(photo courtesy of pixabay.com and comfreak)
Straight-Up Oldstyle Corruption and Racism: Why the Murder Rate in Baltimore is so High (An Essay)
(this piece was originally drafted on April 26, 2019 and contributed to my overwhelming sense of helplessness and depression at the current state of affairs– even the epithet “Deranged Donald” wasn’t funny enough to lift my spirits)
There was recently an FBI raid on a house in Baltimore with a difference: the subject wasn’t going anywhere.
The mayor of Baltimore has been on sick leave since April 1, and an acting mayor is acting in her place. She reportedly has pneumonia, which carries a significant mortality risk at her age (she is 69 according to Google, whose reality we will share for the duration of this post)– in fact, pneumonia was once known as the “old person’s friend” in view of its high mortality rate among the elderly. Her lawyer says he visited with her and her doctor at her house at the time the FBI came (perhaps they didn’t need to enter with guns drawn) (despite a news story that she had “skipped town”) and that he will have a statement from her when she is “lucid.”
It seems that perhaps fifteen years ago, Ms. Pugh conceived of an idea: a trio of children’s books that tout self-improvement, standards such as plenty of outdoor exercise, eat all your vegetables both green and red, obey all street signs, et al. She self-published these books, an innovation which has either revolutionized the publishing business or further debased it, depending on your point of view.
At the time, she was a state senator. In her campaign for mayor (she apparently was elected on the Democratic ticket in 2016) she used these books as well as her ethnicity (an apparently recent photo shows an elderly, slightly built black woman with a pale complexion) and her experience in the State Senate to do very well at the polls. Since her election, she apparently sold some books to the health nonprofit Kaiser Permanente for $114,000; Kaiser later negotiated a $48 million contract with the city and she forgot to recuse herself from the negotiations. All told, she has grossed more than a million for these books (on which she says she gets a $1 profit each) but a large number of books are missing and an independent book critic says her expenses for self-publishing the book appear to be as inflated as her self-assessed literary talent.
…
I have a hard time imagining how she justified this to herself. Obviously, she’s selling books to a powerful company with deep pockets that has business before her as the mayor… maybe she thought no one would notice. More likely, she compartmentalized it so that she didn’t have to think about it or what would happen if it became public knowledge. You’ve got to have a good reason to be irrational.
She has so far resisted calls from the City Council and the governor to resign, although she has stepped down from her position on the board of the University of Maryland Medical System. According to her lawyer, she is too ill to make the decision to resign. I would have to agree with her, and I’m sure her doctor agrees. At the moment, she’s at home.
This is endemic corruption in a town known for its corruption and brutality. In 2010, a previous mayor was forced to resign after being convicted of embezzlement and theft. The city has had five police chiefs in five years. No wonder the Baltimore city police can shoot young black men with impunity, or tackle them, break their necks, not noticed that they are paralyzed, and leave them to suffocate in the back of a police vehicle (that really happened in one documented instance to a man named Freddie Gray a few years ago.)
Thus, with the reflexes of a long-abused dog although as human as you or me, the young black men of Baltimore shoot each other or beat their girlfriends or abuse their mothers. It is the cruelty from the top that drives the cruelty below; at the very tip of the spear sits Deranged Donald (beats Don the Con, which was my favorite) who seems to make cruelty the point of each and every one of his new policies, from declaring that “Our Country’s Full, Go Home” to terminating humanitarian assistance to the Palestinian Authority to withdrawing all American troops from Syria so that the Kurds could be betrayed to the Turks.
(photo courtesy of pixabay.com)
We all know that he has been a bully and a coward since he was a child. As a flagrant narcissist, he started out with a classic bullying personality. Ever since he was raised with a silver spoon in his mouth, he has assumed that everyone has to be subservient to his will and he doesn’t have to respect anyone else’s opinion.
He has never had to work for anything, much less work hard. Everything has been handed to him, including a handsome salary since the age of three. One wonders what his job description would have looked like when his father hired him as a toddler.
The result of his pampered upbringing and the constant whispering in his ear, “You’re special. You can do anything you want without any consequence” has been a narcissistic character disorder, extreme sociopathy, inveterate lying, and a Dunning- Kruger effect gone wild.
The results: bullying and cowardice. The classic mark of his cowardice is his numerous draft deferments, most notably for “bone spurs” in his heels– spurs which didn’t seem to affect his athletic performance or his lust-infused lifestyle. Dating in the eighties was his personal Vietnam, as he so poignantly confided– conflating the risk of venereal disease with the chances of getting shot or becoming a drug addict if he had been caught in the draft and sent to Southeast Asia.
The signs of his obsessive bullying are everywhere. Everyone who contradicts or criticises him comes in for degrading insults, belittling claims, attempts to delegitimize, and threats on his Twitter feed. The only way to stop his abuse is to abjectly apologize and praise him in the most sycophantic terms.
He held a news conference with his new cabinet which presented a bizarre spectacle as each one, in turn, mechanically repeated the statement that he or she was honored to work for the greatest president in the history of the United States. Each cabinet member was forced to sign on to the humiliatingly effusive statement of praise to defend himself against being singled out in private and attacked as the only one who hadn’t agreed that he was the greatest president ever.
So, the bottom line with this worthless con artist is that he is not just a narcissist, a liar, and a sociopath. He is also a coward and a bully. His shadow shames the very ground he walks upon. No-one who cooperates with him or even allows himself to be seduced by this liar’s lies can live down the degradation or face the reproach he will surely be subject to when the chickens come home to roost. As Humphrey Bogart said, “Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon, and for the rest of your life” everyone who listened to him or cooperated with him will be sorry– but by then it will be too late.
I have come to the conclusion that it is useless to talk about our current *president. Revelations about his personal behavior or his actions on the job, or even how he spends his nights and weekends, are uniformly bad. His policies, his Cabinet, the people he appoints as judges and justices– all are wrong, incoherent, corrupt, and incompetent. That is not to mention his obvious bigotry, destruction of precedent, xenophobia, homophobia, and sexism. His presence in office is maintained by his popularity (verging on idolatry) with about a third of the country, who are distinguished by their cupidity, ignorance, whiteness, bigotry, and sadism.
There is nothing good that can be said for this presidency or the people who support him. If they had their way, our country would devolve into a weak, divided, economically retrogressive, authoritarian– almost feudal– failed state.
All this has been apparent since the election of 2016, if not before. Nothing that has been said to point this out or to correct the record has had any effect. All the lies he has told have gone without an effective response, least of all from those he has maligned and betrayed. We should have contradicted him, loudly, from the very beginning, but instead we played broadcasts of his stump speeches as if they were important, breaking news. The news networks gave him an estimated $1-3 billion in free publicity. No wonder that the man who learned the art of speechmaking from reading Hitler’s speeches was elected president: he was allowed to lie without contradiction or interruption for months on end on CNN and FOX.
He has gotten to the point where he feels free to change history in the way that it was done in “1984”, completely reversing the facts. A few days ago he was quoted in an interview saying that Obama started the policy of child separation on the Mexico border ( in fact, Obama only separated families when the children were being abused, or under similar, extreme conditions) and that he should get all the credit for ending the policy and none of the blame (when he, in fact, deliberately instituted the policy against otherwise blameless parents for the express purpose of deterring undocumented immigration– and only stopped when the public outcry became too great to ignore. What’s more, he set up no mechanism for re-uniting separated families and no database showing all of the families separated or where they were sent.)
In the end, every people gets the government they deserve, and we deserve the supremely narcissistic ignoramus that we got. In fact, I’ll go one step further and call him what no-one else has dared to say: he’s a coward.
Therefore, I have decided that after today (and a few parting shots), I will no longer have anything to say about him, his administration, or the United States government that he leads so ineffectively. Nothing that I or anyone else has said has made any difference, so why bother?
(photo courtesy of pixabay.com)
(photo courtesy of pixabay.com)
He’ll never read the Mueller report and he’ll never understand why people think what he did was wrong. He doesn’t understand why it’s wrong to lie. That’s just he way he is: a sociopathic narcissist, the most dangerous personality disorder there is.
(cartoon courtesy of pixabay.com)
The full quote is thanks to Wikiquotes, which gives us the context of the whole paragraph within which it is embedded. Of course, we’re quoting this to throw shade on a certain president. It’s transparently political to bring this up at this time, but there’s no better time to point out that our Dear Leader is trying to assume authoritarian powers like those of the men he admires: Kim Jon Un and Vladimir Putin.
The president is trying to sweep aside the authority of the lower House of Congress to conduct oversight hearings and daring it to impeach him. He thinks that he has done nothing wrong and rationalizes all the contacts with Russia (except for the secret ones which are still concealed– see the relevant section of the Mueller report about contacts between Russians and the campaign in which what has transpired is unknown because relevant figures have tried to conceal them or taken the Fifth. See also our president’s private conversations with Putin of which no transcripts exist.)
We think we know that the Senate will refuse to convict the president if he is impeached… but what if new and damning evidence arises? The chances of that are fairly slim, in part because any “smoking gun” would have to be of huge caliber to get through the media smokescreen. There is an alternative, which is to start impeachment proceedings but slow-walk them enough to have a resolution in favor of impeachment delivered to the Senate on the day before Election Day 2020, or even later. All these things take time, and there is an art to moving things through the political process just in time to be on voter’s minds when they go into the booth.
Nancy Pelosi may be stalling in order to be sure that impeachment hearings are timed to get the maximum exposure during the critical period before the election. Who knows exactly when would be the right time to do the right thing?
Every day that impeachment is delayed means another assault on government efforts to do the right thing. (The apparent fact that he cannot be driven out of office by impeachment before the 2020 election is one of the most depressing things I have ever contemplated.)
The latest move in his assault on climate change is his attempts to gain control of the government agencies that produce the 4-year climate assessment. He’s using the “authority” of a 79-year old physicist who is a climate change “skeptic” to order the climate agency to cut off its predictions at 2040 instead of extrapolating all the out to 2100. That’s convenient, since the consensus prediction is that the worst of the effects of global warming won’t kick in until 2050 or so. In addition, the text of the next assessment will be scrubbed of references to “climate change” altogether. That will make it difficult to discuss their results.
(photo courtesy of pixabay.com)
Professor Drezner was commenting on a speech given by Kiron Skinner (the US State Department’s policy planning director) in a supposedly private seminar given by the New America think tank (probably a right-wing group.) Ms. Skinner seems to think that there is a clash of civilizations between China and the US– consistent with the current administration’s thinking about clashes between the US and such alien civilizations as those in countries like Mexico and the United Kingdom. In other words, it is a white nationalist point of view. What makes it particularly surreal, however, is the fact that Skinner is “African-American”.
What she said that was most disturbing was how she defined her job: to turn the president’s “hunches and instincts into hypotheses”.
I have this recurring feeling that I’m in one of those dreams where I can’t move or speak, no matter how much I try. Meanwhile, disasters are unfolding before my eyes and I am powerless to stop them. But it’s not a dream. This is really happening and the Republican Party is treating it like it’s a weenie roast.
(photo courtesy of pixabay.com)
(photo lifted from the Intelligencer, credited to Andrew Farrer on Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Mr. Amash is better known for his statement that He who must not be named is eligible for impeachment, partly because he is the first Republican in Congress to say this. His political tendencies in every other respect are abominable to me, but in this one instance I agree with him. The House should declare that they are entertaining impeachment and commence a specific impeachment enquiry. There is no need to hurry in this enquiry; if it still has not voted out an impeachment resolution by the time the next election comes up, that is a better outcome than if the resolution has been passed by the House and shot down by the Senate.
The most important thing is to speed the consideration of the House’s subpoenas in court. We need the Supreme Court to receive this case as soon as possible. Everything rides on this one case being decided and every consideration should be given towards strengthening the argument that Democratic lawyers can use before the court. For that reason, declaring the opening of impeachment hearings is a good idea. The argument that the House needs to see the subpoenaed materials to consider whether it should vote out impeachment of the president is the strongest possible one. It refutes the argument by Republicans that the subpoena serves no legitimate legislative purpose– that is, that the House is not considering any legislation related to its subpoenas. Executive privilege claims are negated by the assertion that there is criminal activity being covered up.
The longer a specific impeachment enquiry goes on, the more Republicans will sign on to this mission. As evidence is dragged out, piece by piece, its sheer weight will eventually tip them over to favor impeachment. The latest disclosure is that Deutsche Bank considered reporting both the president’s son-in-law and the president to the Treasury Department for suspicious financial transactions in 2016 and 2017. A number of transactions between those two and foreign parties were flagged for suspicion of money-laundering or other crimes. Only the intervention of a high-level staffer prevented these transactions from being reported to Treasury as suspicious.
Now the White House and Congress are struggling over access to Deutsche Bank’s records on the crime family. A clear declaration that an impeachment enquiry is underway may help speed along the court process of forcing revelations. The ultimate crisis will come when the Supreme Court considers the case of whether the House has the right to access IRS records and bank records as well as the working papers behind the Mueller Report.
If the Supreme Court decides that the House cannot force institutions to reveal the financial records that will show His corruption, then democracy in the United States will be over. There will be no way to recover adherence to the Constitution after that.
This is quoted from a New Yorker article about the perversion of meaning to meaninglessness especially in authoritarian/ignorant governments when they try to justify their policies. It is written by Masha Gessen, who is an expert in this sort of thing. Masha spent formative years under the old Russian government, the grandfather of these policy-words ( like “sovereign democracy” and “national interest”) that have been turned into meaningless “emanations” or even hints at more adverse decisions.
Commands are delivered in a unique language that is understood by speaker and auditor, but not outsiders. This is a conversation between the supporter of the government and skeptical outsiders. Words and phrases are contorted so that they become incomprehensible to the listeners yet seemingly freighted with meaning. Concepts that are objectively described as national fascism are disguised as “grassroots democracy” or “sovereign democracy”– anything to take away the real meaning of local democracy and substitute fascism with xenophobic characteristics.
The language of our national leader appears to conform to this standard, of incomprehensible verbiage mixed with appeals to patriotism, outright lies that can be easily debunked that supposedly contribute to his status as “the greatest president ever”, exaggerated praise of first responders, and poorly disguised dog whistles to white supremacists.
Conrad Theodore Seitz 