An Uncelebrated Holiday
Here’s a suitable variation on an old German Carol for today: O Migrants Day, O Migrants Day, Thy Menace Is So Rewarding.
Twenty three years ago, the United Nations declared December 18 to be International Migrants Day. It was supposed to be the basis for celebrating the diversity and creativity of people striving for a better life.
These days people moving across man-made boundaries are the universal bane of fear mongering leaders, used to stoke resentment and hatred. They represent a tangible force said to represent an attack on national self identity and the wellbeing of the masses. And they are the foundational construct for authoritarian-leaning politicians seeking to undermine representative democracy.
The Republican Party has cloaked their modern day offerings with a border security theme, confident in their belief that repression and oppression are tools of governance. Potential reforms are impossible for the simple reason of racism and hate being a core belief.
In his campaign(s) for the presidency Donald Trump has built his image around those qualities from day one. This weekend he praised authoritarians Vladimir Putin and (Hungary’s) Viktor Orban and went off script to include rhetoric reminiscent of that used by German fascist Adolph Hitler.
Via Reuters:
"They're poisoning the blood of our country," Trump told a rally in the city of Durham attended by several thousand supporters, adding that immigrants were coming to the U.S. from Asia and Africa in addition to South America. "All over the world they are pouring into our country."
I’m sure the GOP’s remaining establishmentarians will dismiss those words as Donald being Donald, chuckling to themselves about their candidate’s ability to “own the liberals.”
My non-establishmentarian take is that this rhetoric serves the purposes of softening up the general population in advance of the internment camps, prisons, and Russian-style “mental health” facilities.
In the meantime, sworn personnel who seemingly view themselves as being above the law in the U.S. are doing their best to inflict suffering on asylum seekers. Claiming insufficient resources, Border Patrol authorities have established open air prison camps in San Diego and Jacumba. Today’s Union-Tribune includes commentary about an American citizen of Chinese descent being questioned as she went about her business.
In Jacumba, I have seen children as young as 5 years old staying outside overnight for three consecutive nights in below-freezing temperatures with nothing except what supplies volunteers have provided. Others in my organization have seen migrants staying up to six nights outside in a row, detained by Customs and Border Protection but without being provided any basic necessities to survive.
Customs and Border Protection has levied multiple excuses as to why people, including babies, have been left outside for an extended time at risk of exposure and dehydration. Border Kindness and other nonprofits have already spent hundreds of thousands of dollars and countless volunteer hours to provide the food, water, clothing, firewood and tarp tents for the endless migrant camps. This dollar amount and time spent by volunteers are sure to exponentially rise.
The Los Angeles Times reported on families being separated at the California border, a practice not followed elsewhere.
Nearly 1,100 migrant families have been separated while being processed at the U.S.-Mexico border near San Diego since September, immigrant advocacy groups said in a letter sent Thursday to the Department of Homeland Security that seeks an investigation into the matter.
The separations stem from U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s ongoing practice of releasing high volumes of migrants to street locations around San Diego County without coordinated reception plans, according to the UCLA Center for Immigration Law and Policy and three other groups that signed the letter. As migrant arrivals at the California-Mexico border have increased, Customs and Border Protection has turned to street releases and holding migrants between border walls to reduce the number of people in its short-term facilities.
Immigration is impacting countries throughout the world. People facing repression or economic deprivation are simply seeking (in many cases) a life. Not necessarily a better life. Just not death.
It’s a problem that will only get worse, as economic inequities and climate change challenge less industrialized nations. Parts of the near and middle East will be physically uninhabitable thanks to temperatures higher than the human body can tolerate in the coming months and years. The ethos of self centered wealth is driving crime. Religious and ethnic intolerance are uprooting families bound to their homes for generations.
And then there is war. Palestinians leaving uninhabitable cities face the strong possibility they won’t be welcome anywhere; neighboring Arab states are rife with intolerance, and the tar brush of terrorism generates fear throughout the world.
Weaving its way through all the vile directed at immigrants is, of course, racism. At the rate things are going, I wouldn’t be surprised if a Trump administration turned a blind eye to roundups of Americans who happen to have darker complexions.
“Jews will not replace us,” the hate chant made famous in Charlottesville, was just the first step on an journey with racial purity as its destination. President Joe Biden says the events of that day motivated his run for higher office.
The haters have kept on hating, encouraged by a delusional man who saw the opportunity for increased profit. Now the spawn of those bigots has infected a plurality of voters.
So, as the holidays near for followers of many faiths, let acceptance and empathy replace “managing the flow” and “building a border wall” as the least we can do.
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Monday’s Grab Bag of Links
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Is Moms For Liberty Imploding? Via the Status Kuo
So is Moms for Liberty dunzo? The group has taken a serious reputational hit and has suffered crushing electoral defeat. So you’d think that the GOP would want to cut the groups loose, because it’s clear that its presence brings out a sizable protest vote.
But this is the MAGA Republican Party, where little makes sense. So long as the base is hungry for red meat cultural issues, this kind of extremism will find a home and an audience. After all, it’s what keeps the most extreme voices, like Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert, funded and incentivized to continue waging these wars.
But as Jennifer Berkshire and Jack Schneider write in The Nation, there is a more insidious reason that Moms for Liberty will likely stick around. Their institutional backers, such as the Heritage Foundation, see this brand of local educational terrorism as critical toward their larger goal of disrupting public education so they can continue to press for things like school vouchers. Such vouchers are a naked giveaway by the state to wealthier, conservative, more religious elements, while simultaneously robbing public education of resources.
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Why Wasn't Trump Quickly Arrested in Classified Docs Case? Via Jeff Stein at Spytalk
ON AND ON AND ON IT GOES—the federal effort to bring disgraced former President Trump to justice for what, in cases involving many others less protected, has resulted in swift arrests and severe consequences, including the immediate loss of jobs and security clearances, stiff fines and even jail. Now we’ve learned that investigators believe the prince of Mar-a-Lago, or his onetime chief of staff, Mark Meadows, absconded from the White House with ultra-sensitive documents relating to Russian interference in the 2016 elections. adding urgency to the probe.
The government’s discovery of Trump’s mere hoarding of classified documents, not to mention the ensuing coverups, should have been a slam dunk, open-and-shut, quickly resolved case of mishandling and lying about his illegal retention of classified documents. But no. As with all the other indictments he’s facing in New York and Georgia, Trump lawyers have adopted Washington’s cardinal rules of dodging accountability: Admit nothing, deny everything, make counter accusations.
Trump is hardly the first official to be prosecuted for such crimes under the Espionage Act of 1917 (which should have been replaced decades ago with legislation that clearly segregates real spy cases from the rest, if only for the public’s understanding). He’s merely the highest ranking one. Whatever, defendants caught red handed usually quickly plead out.
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A “Delicate Matter”: Clarence Thomas’ Private Complaints About Money Sparked Fears He Would Resign Via ProPublica
During his second decade on the court, Thomas’ financial situation appears to have markedly improved. In 2003, he received the first payments of a $1.5 million advance for his memoir, a record-breaking sum for justices at the time. Ginni Thomas, who had been a congressional staffer, was by then working at the Heritage Foundation and was paid a salary in the low six figures.
Thomas also received dozens of expensive gifts throughout the 2000s, sometimes coming from people he’d met only shortly before. Thomas met Earl Dixon, the owner of a Florida pest control company, while getting his RV serviced outside Tampa in 2001, according to the Thomas biography “Supreme Discomfort.” The next year, Dixon gave Thomas $5,000 to put toward his grandnephew’s tuition. Thomas reported the payment in his annual disclosure filing.
Larger gifts went undisclosed. Crow paid for two years of private high school, which tuition rates indicate would’ve cost roughly $100,000. In 2008, another wealthy friend forgave “a substantial amount, or even all” of the principal on the loan Thomas had used to buy the quarter-million dollar RV, according to a recent Senate inquiry prompted by The New York Times’ reporting. Much of the Thomases’ leisure time was also paid for by a small set of billionaire businessmen, who brought the justice and his family on free vacations around the world. (Thomas has said he did not need to disclose the gifts of travel and his lawyer has disputed the Senate findings about the RV.)