|
The Art of the Deal, Pentagon-Style |
 |
|
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=13111"><span class="small">William J. Astore, TomDispatch</span></a>
|
|
Tuesday, 04 February 2020 14:32 |
|
Astore writes: "The expression 'self-licking ice cream cone' was first used in 1992 to describe a hidebound bureaucracy at NASA. Yet, as an image, it's even more apt for America's military-industrial complex, an institution far vaster than NASA and thoroughly dedicated to working for its own perpetuation and little else."
Konar Province, 2010. (photo: Moises Saman/Magnum Photos)
The Art of the Deal, Pentagon-Style
By William J. Astore, TomDispatch
04 February 20
Here was the headline that recently caught my eye: “Former Top U.S. General Dunford Joining Unicef.”
Okay, you knew it was a joke immediately, right? There’s really only one conceivable headline of that sort when you’re talking about a figure like four-star general Joseph Dunford, Jr., who commanded the 5th Marine Regiment in the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and all U.S. (and NATO) forces in Afghanistan from 2012-2014, then became commandant of the Marine Corps, and, until last October, was the only chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Trump era. I’m sure you’ve already more or less guessed, but here’s the actual headline that caught my eye the other day: “Former Top U.S. General Dunford Joining Lockheed Martin’s Board.”
How boringly (or do I mean boardingly) everyday can you be? After all, where else but to big defense contractors do top U.S. military commanders go to rake in the spoils of the system they’ve promoted and supported all their lives? Here, for instance, is a headline from last year about former Trump-era Secretary of Defense James “Mad Dog” Mattis, a four-star with a similarly impressive military CV: “Jim Mattis Rejoining General Dynamics Board of Directors.” That’s right! Unlike Dunford, he wasn’t even joining, but rejoining the board of a giant weapons maker, since he had initially signed on in 2013, having just retired from the Marine Corps.
And as the Washington Post has reported, those two generals now are part of a roiling mass of former military and national security figures who “sit” on such boards or work as lobbyists for the giant defense contractors. As Lockheed CEO Marillyn Hewson so sagaciously put it when talking about her most recent acquisition, “General Dunford’s service to the nation at the highest levels of military leadership will bring valuable insight to our board.” The only question here is “insight” into what exactly in a world in which generals like Dunford have overseen America’s unsuccessful forever wars for years before passing through that famed Washington revolving door into the “industrial” part of the military-industrial complex with their military ties intact. What a system for victory, if you’re talking not about the wars themselves but those triumphant defense giants -- and what a loss if, like retired U.S. Air Force lieutenant colonel, historian, and TomDispatch regular William Astore, you’re talking about our otherwise “self-defeating military.” Tom
-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
 he expression “self-licking ice cream cone” was first used in 1992 to describe a hidebound bureaucracy at NASA. Yet, as an image, it’s even more apt for America’s military-industrial complex, an institution far vaster than NASA and thoroughly dedicated to working for its own perpetuation and little else.
Thinking about that led me to another phrase based on America’s seemingly endless string of victory-less wars: the self-defeating military. The U.S., after all, hasn’t won a major conflict since World War II, when it was aided by a grand alliance that included Soviet dictator Josef Stalin’s godless communists. And yet here’s the wonder of it all: despite such a woeful 75-year military record, including both the Korean and Vietnam wars of the last century and the never-ending war on terror of this one, the Pentagon’s coffers are overflowing with taxpayer dollars. What gives?
Americans profess to love “their” troops, but what are they getting in return for all that affection (and money)? Very little, it seems. And that shouldn’t surprise anyone who’s been paying the slightest attention, since the present military establishment has been designed less to protect this country than to protect itself, its privileges, and its power. That rarely discussed reality has, in turn, contributed to practices and mindsets that make it a force truly effective at only one thing: defeating any conceivable enemy in Washington as it continues to win massive budgets and the cultural authority to match. That it loses most everywhere else is, it seems, just part of the bargain.
The list of recent debacles should be as obvious as it is alarming: Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Yemen (and points around and in between). And even if it’s a reality rarely focused on in the mainstream media, none of this has been a secret to the senior officers who run that military. Look at the Pentagon Papers from the Vietnam War era or the Afghanistan Papers recently revealed by the Washington Post. In both cases, prominent U.S. military leaders admitted to fundamental flaws in their war-making practices, including the lack of a coherent strategy, a thorough misunderstanding of the nature and skills of their enemies, and the total absence of any real progress in achieving victory, no matter the cost.
Of course, such honest appraisals of this country’s actual war-making prowess were made in secret, while military spokespeople and American commanders laid down a public smokescreen to hide the worst aspects of those wars from the American people. As they talked grimly (and secretly) among themselves about losing, they spoke enthusiastically (and openly) to Congress and the public about winning. In case you hadn’t noticed, in places like Afghanistan and Iraq that military was, year after endless year, making “progress” and “turning corners.” Such “happy talk” (a mixture of lies and self-deception) may have served to keep the money flowing and weapons sales booming, but it also kept the body bags coming in (and civilians dying in distant lands) -- and for nothing, or at least nothing by any reasonable definition of “national security.”
Curiously, despite the obvious disparity between the military’s lies and reality, the American people, or at least their representatives in Congress, have largely bought those lies in bulk and at astronomical prices. Yet this country’s refusal to face the facts of defeat has only ensured ever more disastrous military interventions. The result: a self-defeating military, engorged with money, lurching toward yet more defeats even as it looks over its shoulder at an increasingly falsified past.
The Future Is What It Used to Be
Long ago, New York Yankee catcher and later manager Yogi Berra summed up what was to come this way: “The future ain’t what it used to be.” And it wasn’t. We used to dream, for example, of flying cars, personal jetpacks, liberating robots, and oodles of leisure time. We even dreamed of mind-bending trips to Jupiter, as in Stanley Kubrick’s epic film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Like so much else we imagined, those dreams haven’t exactly panned out.
Yet here’s an exception to Berra’s wisdom: strangely enough, for the U.S. military, the future is predictably just what it used to be. After all, the latest futuristic vision of America’s military leaders is -- hold onto your Kevlar helmets -- a “new” cold war with its former communist rivals Russia and China. And let’s add in one other aspect of that military’s future vision: wars, as they see it, are going to be fought and settled with modernized (and ever more expensive) versions of the same old weapons systems that carried us through much of the mid-twentieth century: ever more pricey aircraft carriers, tanks, and top of the line jet fighters and bombers with -- hey! -- maybe a few thoroughly destabilizing tactical nukes thrown in, along with plenty of updated missiles carried by planes of an ever more “stealthy” and far more expensive variety. Think: the F-35 fighter, the most expensive weapons system in history (so far) and the B-21 bomber.
For such a future, of course, today’s military hardly needs to change at all, or so our generals and admirals argue. For example, yet more ships will, of course, be needed. The Navy high command is already clamoring for 355 of them, while complaining that the record-setting $738 billion Pentagon budget for 2020 is too “tight” to support such a fleet.
Not to be outdone when it comes to complaints about “tight” budgets, the Air Force is arguing vociferously that it needs yet more billions to build a “fleet” of planes that can wage two major wars at once. Meanwhile, the Army is typically lobbying for a new armored personnel carrier (to replace the M2 Bradley) that’s so esoteric insiders joke it will have to be made of “unobtainium.”
In short, no matter how much money the Trump administration and Congress throw at the Pentagon, it’s a guarantee that the military high command will only complain that more is needed, including for nuclear weapons to the tune of possibly $1.7 trillion over 30 years. But doubling down on more of the same, after a record 75 years of non-victories (not to speak of outright losses), is more than stubbornness, more than grift. It’s obdurate stupidity.
Why, then, does it persist? The answer would have to be because this country doesn’t hold its failing military leaders accountable. Instead, it applauds them and promotes them, rewarding them when they retire with six-figure pensions, often augmented by cushy jobs with major defense contractors. Given such a system, why should America’s generals and admirals speak truth to power? They are power and they’ll keep harsh and unflattering truths to themselves, thank you very much, unless they’re leaked by heroes like Daniel Ellsberg during the Vietnam War and Chelsea Manning during the Iraq War, or pried from them via a lawsuit like the one by the Washington Post that recently led to those Afghanistan Papers.
My Polish mother-in-law taught me a phrase that translates as, “Don’t say nothin’ to nobody.” When it comes to America’s wars and their true progress and prospects, consider that the official dictum of Pentagon spokespeople. Yet even as America’s wars sink into Vietnam-style quagmires, the money keeps flowing, especially to high-cost weapons programs.
Consider my old service, the Air Force. As one defense news site put it, “Congressional appropriators gave the Air Force [and Lockheed Martin] a holiday gift in the 2019 spending agreement... $1.87 billion for 20 additional F-35s and associated spare parts.” The new total just for 2020 is “98 aircraft -- 62 F-35As, 16 F-35Bs, and 20 F-35Cs -- at the whopping cost of $9.3 billion, crowning the F-35 as the biggest Pentagon procurement program ever.” And that’s not all. The Air Force (and Northrop Grumman) got another gift as well: $3 billion more to be put into its new, redundant, B-21 stealth bomber. Even much-beleaguered Boeing, responsible for the disastrous 737 MAX program, got a gift: nearly a billion dollars for the revamped F-15EX fighter, a much-modified version of a plane that first flew in the early 1970s. Yet, despite those gifts, Air Force officials continue to claim with straight faces that the service is getting the “short straw” in today’s budgetary battles in the Pentagon.
What does this all mean? One obvious answer would be: the only truly winning battles for the Pentagon are the ones for our taxpayer dollars.
“Dopes and Babies” Galore
I can’t claim that I ever traveled in the circles of generals and admirals, though I met a few during my military career. Still, no one can question that our commanders are dedicated. The only question is: dedication to what exactly -- to the Constitution and the American people or to their own service branch, with an eye toward a comfortable and profitable retirement? Certainly, loyalty to service (and the conformity that goes with it), rather than out-of-the-box thinking in those endlessly losing wars, helped most of them win promotion to flag rank.
Perhaps this is one reason why, back in July 2017, the military’s current commander-in-chief, Donald Trump, reportedly railed at his top national security people in a windowless Pentagon room known as “the Tank.” He called them -- including then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Joseph Dunford, Jr. -- “a bunch of dopes and babies.” As the president put it, America’s senior military leaders don’t win anymore and, as he made clear, nothing is worse than being a loser. He added, “I want to win. We don’t win any wars anymore... We spend $7 trillion, everybody else got the oil and we’re not winning anymore.” (And, please note, that hasn’t changed a whit in the year and a half since that moment.)
Sure, Trump threw a typical tantrum, but his comments about losing at a strikingly high cost were (and remain) absolutely on the mark, not that he had any idea how to turn America’s losing wars and their losing commanders into winners. In many ways, his “strategy” has proven remarkably like those of the two previous presidents, George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Send more troops to the Middle East. Drone and bomb ever more, not just in Afghanistan and Iraq but even in places like Somalia and Libya. Prolong our commitment to “loser” wars like the Afghan one, even while talking ceaselessly about ending them and bringing the troops home. And continue to “rebuild” that same military, empowering those same “dopes and babies,” with yet more taxpayer dollars.
The results have been all-too predictable. America’s generals and admirals have so much money that they don’t ever have to make truly tough choices. They hardly have to think. The Air Force, for example, just keeps planning for and purchasing more ultra-expensive stealth fighters and bombers to fight a future Cold War that we allegedly won 30 years ago. Meanwhile, actual future “national security” threats like climate-related catastrophes or pandemics go largely unaddressed. Who cares about them when this country will clearly have the most stealth fighters and bombers in the world?
For the Pentagon, the future is the past and the past, the future. Why should military leaders have to think when the president and Congress keep rewarding them for lies and failures of every sort?
Trump believes America doesn’t win anymore because we're not ruthless enough. Take the oil, dammit! The real reason: because America’s wars are unwinnable from the git-go (something the last 18 years should have proved in no uncertain way) and -- irony of all ironies -- completely unnecessary from the standpoint of true national defense. There is no way for the U.S. military to win “hearts and minds” across the Greater Middle East and Africa with salvos of Hellfire missiles. In fact, there’s only one way to “win” such wars: end them. And there’s only one way to keep winning: by avoiding future ones.
With a system that couldn’t work better (in Washington), America’s military refuses to admit this. Instead, our generals just keep saluting smartly while lying in public (the details of which we’ll find out about only when the next set of “papers” is released someday). In the meantime, when it comes to demanding and getting tax dollars, they couldn’t be more skilled. In that sense, and that alone, they are the ultimate winners.
“Dopes and babies,” Mister President? No, just men who are genuinely skilled in the art of the deal. Small wonder America’s leader is upset. For when it comes to the military-industrial complex and its power and prerogatives, even Trump has met his match. He’s been out-conned. And if the rest of us remain silent on the subject, then so have we.
William Astore, a TomDispatch regular, is a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF) and history professor. His personal blog is Bracing Views.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel (the second in the Splinterlands series) Frostlands, Beverly Gologorsky's novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt's A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy's In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower's The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.
 |
|
Why Bernie Sanders Is the Strongest Candidate on Mental Health Care |
|
|
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=53207"><span class="small">Colette Shade, Jacobin</span></a>
|
|
Tuesday, 04 February 2020 14:32 |
|
Shade writes: "From rising anxiety to suicides to drug abuse, we're in the middle of a mental health crisis. Bernie Sanders is the best candidate to tackle that crisis head-on."
Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders speaks during a stop at a campaign field office on February 02, 2020, in West Newton, Iowa. (photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
Why Bernie Sanders Is the Strongest Candidate on Mental Health Care
By Colette Shade, Jacobin
04 February 20
From rising anxiety to suicides to drug abuse, we’re in the middle of a mental health crisis. Bernie Sanders is the best candidate to tackle that crisis head-on.
he United States has a serious mental health crisis, and everybody knows it. The nation’s suicide rate rose 33 percent between 1999 and 2017, with the sharpest increase occurring after 2006. Anxiety levels are increasing. Overdose deaths are at epidemic levels. According to the Center for Disease Control’s most recent data, the national opioid overdose death rate rose by 9.6 percent between 2016 and 2017.
Epidemics like these aren’t complete mysteries, the product of biological phenomena or cultural shifts. They are political problems with political solutions. And the only candidate with the political solutions to solve these problems is Bernie Sanders. Here’s why.
Medicare for All
First among these is Medicare for All. Medicare for All is good for everybody, but there are some specific reasons why it is the most important policy to improve mental health outcomes in the United States.
First, Bernie’s Medicare for All program will provide full coverage for mental health and substance abuse treatment. Many people wrongly believe that the Affordable Care Act provided universal coverage for mental health care due to its requirement for “mental health parity.” This policy was an expansion of the Paul Wellstone and Pete Domenici Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act of 2008 (MHPAEA), which required group insurance plans to have the same cost structure and benefit limitations for mental health services that they applied to other types of health care.
The Affordable Care Act took this law and expanded it to include individual insurance plans as well as group insurance plans. The Affordable Care Act also eliminated “preexisting conditions” and lifetime limits on care, including for mental health.
However, these policy changes are hardly helpful to people who cannot afford their co-pays or deductibles — let alone their premiums. It does nothing to actually lower the cost of health care. It simply says that mental health care cannot cost more than other types of health care, which is already unaffordable to most Americans. Many of those with insurance can’t afford their co-pays and deductibles. And, as of 2017, 28 million Americans had no health insurance at all. This is up from 27.3 million the previous year.
Most of these people are working-age Americans, like twenty-nine-year-old Daniel Desnoyers. In 2019, Desnoyers committed suicide after he lost his insurance and access to his psychiatric medication because he was $20 short on the monthly premium.
Meanwhile, many Americans who have “good” health insurance think they are safe from financial ruin. But there are plenty of ways for insurance companies to screw their customers, including on mental health.
My current insurer, UnitedHealth Group, lost a federal lawsuit in California in 2019 after they were found to have discriminated against patients with mental health and substance abuse disorders to increase profits. Other insurance companies will cover only some types of mental health services — and patients often don’t find out until it is too late.
For example, Nicole Vlaming received a bill of nearly $20,000 after she checked herself into a psychiatric emergency room for suicidal ideations. Her employer-sponsored insurance covered no inpatient mental health treatment.
“I do have a supplemental insurance plan that will hopefully cover $6,000, leaving me on the hook for over $12,000,” Vlaming wrote in a Facebook post. Our health insurance system is the only one on the planet in which providing people access to life-saving care is incidental to turning a profit.
The Social Determinants of Mental Health
Simply implementing Medicare for All would drastically improve mental health outcomes in the United States. But access to health care does not fully address the root causes of this country’s mental health epidemics. Mental health outcomes are deeply influenced by economic and political policy choices. These choices are what public health scholars call “social determinants of health.”
An example of this is asthma, which is more common in black and Latino populations than in white populations in the United States. The reason for this is not that there is a genetic link between, say, melanin and asthma. Rather, highways, factories, waste treatment plants, and other sources of pollution tend to be placed in black and Latino neighborhoods, causing the people who live there to get sick. This is a political choice — and it doesn’t have to be this way.
Similarly, people are anxious, depressed, and addicted to substances because their lives are stressful, painful, and precarious, and their lives are stressful, painful, and precarious because of policy choices our government has made. Humans have to meet physiological needs like clean air, clean water, food, shelter, clothing, and reproduction before we can meet non-material ones like building self-esteem and achieving self-actualization. Right now, 32.7 million Americans are food insecure, more than 550,000 Americans are homeless, and one in eight Americans lives below the poverty line. It’s impossible to self-actualize when you don’t know if you’ll be eating dinner.
Bernie is the candidate with the best solutions for these problems. Bernie supports the Green New Deal, which is the best program to ensure that all Americans have clean air and water — especially poor people and people of color. Bernie supports the right to housing, which includes instituting national rent control, expanding public housing, and making it more difficult for landlords to evict tenants.
Bernie wants to empower workers to bring democracy to the workplace and raise their living standards. More than simply raising the minimum wage (which, by the way, has been shown to lower the suicide rate), Bernie wants to institute laws that guarantee the right to unionize workplaces and allow for sectoral bargaining, which would greatly strengthen workers’ power in the United States. And Bernie has been fighting for these causes for his entire career, even when political elites made him a pariah.
It’s Not Your Fault
Beyond policy questions, however, there is something else at play in Bernie’s campaign. As Briahna Joy Gray and Meagan Day recently discussed on Gray’s “Hear the Bern” podcast, the official podcast of the Sanders campaign, Bernie tells struggling Americans a message they desperately need to hear: “It’s not your fault.”
The dominant ideology of the past four decades has told people that their worsening living conditions are due to their own bad choices and lack of merit. On top of that, it has promoted an individualized view of mental illness that tells people that their anxiety, depression, and substance abuse is the fault of their brain chemistry alone — not the reaction of their brain chemistry to external conditions.
People are ashamed to share that they are struggling, even among friends. Bernie has given people a platform to connect and place the blame where it belongs: on the political causes of our individual problems.
And in an attempt to rebuild unions and other institutions that are rooted in a sense of solidarity and common purpose, he is working to given them a community, which, as Day has written, can be a bulwark against despair.
The other candidates borrow Sanders’s rhetoric because it is popular. But their policies offer the same incrementalism and non-solutions that got us into this situation.
Other Candidates Don’t Cut It
Elizabeth Warren’s website says she supports Medicare for All. But in recent months, she has vacillated on this position. Besides, Warren has said she will implement her plan over three years. This is political suicide, because the president’s party usually loses seats in Congress during a midterm election, which will make it particularly impossible for any of the president’s policies to be implemented.
The nation watched as Barack Obama squandered his majorities in the House and Senate during the first two years of his presidency. His ineffective policies arguably contributed to his losses in 2010. Contrast this to FDR, who, in his first one hundred days in office, pushed through sixteen major new laws, including the Federal Emergency Relief Act, the National Industrial Recovery Act, the Tennessee Valley Authority Act, and the Glass-Steagall Banking Act.
Warren must know this, which leads me to believe that that her policy timeline is a delaying tactic put forth by someone who doesn’t actually want Medicare for All.
Joe Biden’s health care plan is even worse. He wants to “give Americans a new choice, a public health option like Medicare.” There is very little information about what this would look like, except that he wants to do it in conjunction with private health insurance — which would be a disaster, as Timothy Faust explored in his 2019 book Health Justice Now: Single Payer and What Comes Next, essentially creating a bifurcated, tiered system. This might be marginally better than the current system, but it is hardly a rallying cry.
Moreover, from a strategic standpoint, Medicare for All is more politically durable than a patchwork system that divides constituents. In the decade since the Affordable Care Act was implemented, we have watched its meager reforms get dismantled piece by piece. Meanwhile, in the UK, the National Health Service (NHS) has hung on despite decades of cuts and a current Tory government.
Pete Buttigieg, Michael Bloomberg, and Amy Klobuchar also have terrible ideas for improving US health insurance. Klobuchar wants to expand Medicare and Medicaid. This is a good thing, building upon the most successful part of Obamacare. But it’s not enough. Plus, her program would be means-tested, making it political poison.
Bloomberg and Buttigieg want to provide a new public option that will coexist with a private health insurance system. For Bloomberg, this program will have co-pays that he says are “affordable.” But there is no explanation of what that means. And besides, we should eliminate co-pays. Why not just go all the way and shoot for single payer? It would be far less confusing and far more resistant to Republican sabotage.
Our Best Bet
Beyond the immediate realm of health care, none of the other Democratic candidates offer the kinds of transformative policies Bernie does. Besides, Bernie is the only candidate whose strategy aims to redistribute power in American society. As many to Bernie’s right have pointed out, Bernie will be up against a hostile Republican Party willing to do whatever it takes to stop him. But this will be the case with any Democratic president. Bernie has the best strategy for dealing with this situation.
Americans hate their health insurance, their jobs, and their lives. In fact, almost half of Americans hate capitalism, period. Bernie, unlike the other candidates, has centered his career around this. People find catharsis in Bernie’s yelling and pointing. He makes people feel, as some therapists might say, validated.
Klobuchar, Buttigieg, Biden, and Bloomberg act like they’re keeping it real by telling Americans that we can’t have nice things. They’re wrong — we can, and Bernie is our best bet for achieving them and solving the mental health crises in the United States.
|
|
|
Confronting Internal Forced Displacement in El Salvador |
|
|
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=53205"><span class="small">Sonja Wolf, NACLA</span></a>
|
|
Tuesday, 04 February 2020 14:32 |
|
Wolf writes: "El Salvador's Legislative Assembly adopted the Special Law for the Aid and Integral Protection of Persons in a Condition of Internal Forced Displacement on January 9, 2020."
A young internally displaced man in El Salvador who went in hiding to flee gangs. He told UNHCR: 'You either join, die or flee.' (photo: UNHCR/Diana Diaz)
Confronting Internal Forced Displacement in El Salvador
By Sonja Wolf, NACLA
04 February 20
El Salvador passed a new law to help victims of forced displacement. Will it be enough?
 l Salvador’s Legislative Assembly adopted the Special Law for the Aid and Integral Protection of Persons in a Condition of Internal Forced Displacement on January 9, 2020. The legislation mandates the creation of a registry of displaced persons and the establishment of a National System with the same name, SINAPI, headed by the Ministry of Justice. Resources permitting, the SINAPI is meant to coordinate humanitarian assistance, such as housing in temporary shelters, protection, and durable solutions, including the safe return or resettlement of victims of forced displacement.
The law is the result of years of civil society activism, and responds to a July 2018 ruling of the Supreme Court of Justice in an amparo proceeding (a remedy for the protection of constitutional rights). In July 2017, the human rights organization Cristosal presented the amparo on behalf of a 35-member family group that had been displaced twice in 2016: first, after enduring repeated gang violence because two of the relatives were members of the Armed Forces; and second, when police fatally wounded one mother in an anti-gang operation after they had relocated to another town.
The amparo alleged that the family’s rights to security, property, and freedom of movement had been violated. The Court agreed and ordered the Salvadoran state to create statutes and policies that ensure that displaced persons receive the humanitarian assistance and protection they require. Cristosal and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) applauded the recently passed law.
The decree is an important achievement and should help address the various impacts of forced migration, including emotional disorders, temporary or permanent family separation, loss of income, and interrupted educational processes. This is all the more important since, with the exception of the Human Rights Ombudsperson, the Salvadoran government had long refused to even acknowledge the reality of forced displacement. It was only with the publication of a Ministry of Justice report in 2018 that the government began to speak euphemistically of “violence-motivated internal mobility.” The law, however, may well have only a modest scope, because its implementation hinges on the state’s ability to ensure the confidentiality of victims’ data, to reduce the gangs’ territorial control, and to build public institutions’ technical and material capacity.
The Violences of Migration
Salvadorans have migrated northwards for decades, chiefly for economic reasons and family reunification. This external mobility has often been perceived as voluntary, even though migration decisions motivated by structural violence (threats to livelihood) are forced. But for the past decade or so, physical violence (threats to life) has increasingly driven both internal and external migration. It includes persons forcibly displaced within national borders—the subject of the new law—and those crossing international borders: refugees fleeing persecution under the narrow grounds recognized in the 1951 Refugee Convention, as well as individuals who may not qualify for refugee status but nonetheless have no choice but to abandon their country.
In the Forced Migration from Central America Project (FMCAP), my research team documents why and how people are fleeing from El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala—also known as the Northern Triangle. We see many cases tied to economic insecurity and/or aggressions—real or threatened—by gang members or state agents. The migrants we encounter in Mexico, while desperately poor and traumatized by uprooting, have managed to scrape together some money for their perilous and uncertain journey. But the internally displaced, who lack even the most minimal resources, are perhaps the most vulnerable among the forced migrants. They tend to be invisible, because fear of reprisals makes them want to hide, rather than report what has happened. Moreover, there are few systematic data for measuring, understanding, and responding to displacement.
Networked Gangs
El Salvador has been struggling for years to contain street gangs—mainly MS-13 and the Barrio 18—which split in two rival factions more than a decade ago. Both groups were originally formed in the United States by children of Mexican immigrant laborers and Central American war refugees. Under the illusion that expulsions could rid the country of its homegrown gang problem, successive U.S. administrations deported those who had broken the law.
Over the past three decades the gangs developed in the Northern Triangle thanks to a combination of initial inertia and mano dura (iron fist) policies. Pursued since the early 2000s by governments across the political spectrum, this repressive approach aimed to crack down on gangs. It has proved popular with voters, but can only be described as a politically rewarding policy failure. Focused on arrest and incarceration in segregated prisons, the strategy bolstered the gangs’ growth, cohesion, and criminal capacity.
According to United Nations estimates, El Salvador has the highest number of gang members of any nation in the region. The groups maintain a nationwide networked presence, especially in marginalized areas, and possess surveillance and communication capabilities that allow them to track people down virtually anywhere in the country. President Nayib Bukele admitted that the gangs had become de facto powers in many communities—places where the state has no presence nor holds the monopoly on the use of force.
El Salvador’s small size—comparable to the U.S. state of Massachusetts—together with the gangs’ embeddedness in communities, local governments, and the security forces, makes it practically impossible for displaced persons to relocate safely within the country. In the past, the Salvadoran government has placed victims in temporary shelters until it deemed the security situation had sufficiently improved. The challenge, now and in the years ahead, is not just to provide safe housing options. People need to be able to go to work and school or to visit family and friends—in short, to lead a normal life. So long as the gangs rule entire neighborhoods through fear, this will be difficult to do. Many of the threatened migrants we interviewed in Mexico felt that staying behind would have been a death sentence.
Governance in Local Territories
The Supreme Court ruling that spurred the new legislation stresses that the Salvadoran state must find a way to break the gangs’ stranglehold over marginalized neighborhoods. Not only has no government achieved this, but the gangs have become more combative and managed to outnumber the police and military combined. The security policy has generally given short shrift to social prevention and insertion. Instead, it has prioritized harsh law enforcement tactics and legislation criminalizing gang membership, eradicating acts of terrorism, sanctioning organized crime, and banning street gangs.
The high murder rate, combined with a debilitated security and justice apparatus, led the government of Mauricio Funes to broker a gang truce in 2012. The initiative fell apart after one year amid political recriminations and a lack of socioeconomic opportunities that were required to encourage youths to desist from gangs. The ceasefire was widely credited with achieving an impressive—albeit short-lived—reduction of homicides. But other forms of criminal violence, such as extortion, sexual abuse, and forced recruitment were not controlled and play a role in forced migration. Bukele, during his tenure of mayor of San Salvador (2015-2018), recognized that he had to buy the gangs’ goodwill to prevent them from obstructing the city’s projects. Under Funes’s successor, Salvador Sánchez Cerén, the government refused to negotiate with gangs and doubled down on iron first policies.
Bukele, like his predecessors, claims to break with this past. His Territorial Control Plan aims to recover gang-controlled territories in the country’s largest municipalities, attack the gangs’ finances, and cut off communication from the prisons. Since Bukele took office in June 2019, the murder rate has dropped significantly, down to an average of seven homicides per day compared to nine in 2018. But it is unclear whether the government’s strategy or potential renewed—and secret—negotiations with the gangs have prompted this decline.
Among Salvadorans, both at home and among the migrants we interviewed, there is a perception that Bukele is effectively eliminating the blight of gangs and restoring tranquility at least in parts of the country. That perception may be shored up largely by the social media savviness of a politician who capitalized on popular disenchantment with the traditional parties. There is a risk that, once again, social policy will become an afterthought and that Bukele’s security strategy will remain stuck in the repression-retaliation cycle that characterized previous administrations. Policy is one element in this puzzle, but police performance is another one.
Law Enforcement Outside the Law
El Salvador’s National Civilian Police (PNC) is the main institution tasked with providing public security. The Armed Forces have, despite their limited constitutional role, played a supportive function throughout the postwar period. The police has a dismal human rights record that is rooted in both the institution's origins and its weak accountability mechanisms. Officers are regularly accused of corruption, abuse during stop-and-frisk, arbitrary arrests, leaking of sensitive law enforcement information, and extrajudicial killings of suspected gang members. The government of Bukele’s predecessor, Sánchez Cerén, even acknowledged that security agents sometimes cause forced displacement.
Police misconduct has shaped citizen perceptions of the agency. A 2016 survey by the local Central American University (UCA) showed that 70 percent of respondents had little or no trust in the police. At best, officers are seen as useless. At worst, they are feared. Journalists have witnessed, for example, how police have offered internally displaced persons prayers rather than protection. The migrants we spoke to thought officers were often bribed or coerced into colluding with gang members. Like many Salvadorans, they had decided not to report crimes, because they thought doing so would not change anything or might even get them killed. Our research participants told harrowing stories about officers ignoring their pleas for help, framing them for crimes they did not commit, or raping them at a police station and covering up the act.
These testimonies reflect the loss, the terror, and the feelings of injustice and impotence forced migrants have experienced. They also raise questions about the extent to which victims of displacement will make use of the SINAPI in a context where institutional trust and data confidentiality are sorely lacking.
Political Priorities
The new law serves to raise the visibility of the displacement issue and the needs of forced migrants. But it remains to be seen how effectively the institutional system can be mobilized and inspire trust in its potential beneficiaries. Bukele, mirroring a trend elsewhere in Latin America, is helping the Armed Forces return to a position of power. The attendant investment in personnel and equipment may well drain already scarce resources from the SINAPI and make significant international donor support indispensable.
The legislation’s intended institutional response also risks being a palliative gesture unless structural measures are also included. The government must control the police’s use of force and strengthen the capacity of a justice system that relies on witnesses rather than investigations and achieves few convictions. If El Salvador took a more decisive stance against impunity, it might even restore hope for change in those who no longer feel the country has much to offer them.
The prevention of forced migration also requires a sustained effort to reduce the marginalization that drives young people into gangs. The state will never take back local territories by incarcerating or shooting gang members while ignoring their desire to “be someone.” In the face of the continuing exodus from Central America, policymakers need to stop treating migrants as a burden or a threat, and understand that they abandon their homes because of threats to their lives and livelihoods. Mexico and the United States must do more than deter irregular migration through publicity campaigns and border barricades. Leaving desperate people in limbo will only cost more human lives and make no one safer.
|
|
RSN: Iowa Fiasco Raises the Stakes for New Hampshire, Where Sanders Could Win Big |
|
|
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=48990"><span class="small">Norman Solomon, Reader Supported News</span></a>
|
|
Tuesday, 04 February 2020 13:12 |
|
Solomon writes: "While journalists pick through the ashes of the Iowa caucuses meltdown, thousands of progressive activists are moving forward to make election history in New Hampshire."
Sen. Bernie Sanders speaks to supporters at a caucus night campaign rally in Des Moines, Iowa, on Feb. 3, 2020. (photo: Elise Swain/The Intercept)
Iowa Fiasco Raises the Stakes for New Hampshire, Where Sanders Could Win Big
By Norman Solomon, Reader Supported News
04 February 20
 hile journalists pick through the ashes of the Iowa caucuses meltdown, thousands of progressive activists are moving forward to make election history in New Hampshire. In sharp contrast to the prattle of mainstream punditry, the movements behind Bernie Sanders are propelled by people who engage with politics as a collective struggle because the future of humanity and the planet is at stake. As a result, the Granite State’s primary election on February 11 could be a political earthquake.
Whether or not the Democratic Party’s corporate backers truly understand what progressive populism is all about, they’re determined to crush its strongest electoral manifestation in our lifetimes — the Bernie 2020 campaign. And since the bottom fell out of Iowa’s capacity for dramatic political impact, New Hampshire now looms larger than ever.
Monday night’s collapse of the caucus vote-counting process in Iowa has amped up the spotlight on — and political consequences of — what will happen in the New Hampshire primary. A clear Sanders victory would make him the frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination.
Perpetuating passivity is a key undercurrent when corporate media report on election campaigns. Routinely, the coverage is rendered as entertainment, as historic events to be individually consumed rather than collectively created. Progressive social movements have the opposite approach.
Propagandistic attacks on Sanders and his campaign are likely to reach new depths between now and the New Hampshire election. Effectively countering the distortions and smears will require concerted individual efforts on a large scale.
Full disclosure: As an active Bernie supporter, I’m part of an expanding team set to do independent, on-the-ground outreach in New Hampshire until Election Day. (Information available:
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
.)
Whatever its budget or priorities, no presidential campaign can possibly maintain a presence in every neighborhood to do what ideally would be done. The success of the Sanders campaign depends on supporters taking the initiative rather than waiting for a national campaign to fill the gaps.
I often think about how Bernie used the opportunity to make a closing statement at a Democratic presidential debate last June. Instead of tooting his own horn and touting his leadership, he got to the core of terrible realities that won’t change unless people organize effectively from the grassroots.
After reeling off a few lowlights of the status quo — “for the last 45 years wages have been stagnant for the middle class … we have the highest rate of childhood poverty … 45 million people still have student debt” — he asked: “How can three people own more wealth than the bottom half of America?” Then he closed by saying: “And here is the answer. Nothing will change unless we have the guts to take on Wall Street, the insurance industry, the pharmaceutical industry, the military industrial complex, and the fossil fuel industry. If we don’t have the guts to take them on, we will continue to have plans, we will continue to have talk, and rich will get richer and everybody else will be struggling.”
Whether they agree with Bernie or not, people widely understand that he absolutely means what he says. And that helps to explain why, during the next seven days, in national media and across New Hampshire, corporate forces will be in overdrive to prevent a Bernie Sanders victory in the New Hampshire primary.
It’s not mere happenstance that the sound system at a Bernie rally often blasts out the song “Power to the People” as he takes the stage. Only the power of people, determined and mobilized, can overcome the forces arrayed against the Bernie Sanders campaign and the movements supporting him at this pivotal historic moment.
Norman Solomon is co-founder and national coordinator of RootsAction.org. He was a Bernie Sanders delegate from California to the 2016 Democratic National Convention. Solomon is the author of a dozen books including War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
|
|
n 2015, two colleagues—Deen Freelon and Meredith Clark—and I set out to better understand how Black Lives Matter emerged. Our report, Beyond the Hashtags, the Online Struggle for Offline Justice, crystalized then-NAACP president Cornell Brooks’ sentiment: “This isn’t your grandparents’ civil rights movement.” Our study showed us that Ferguson, Missouri birthed Black Lives Matter. It told us that Twitter named Michael Brown for the world. Traditional news media outlets were a day late, and when they did arrive, Twitter was their primary source for information. It afforded a 24-hour glimpse into a radical new way of making news, of telling stories—giving unfiltered voice to those whose voices are traditionally unheard, ignored, or silenced.
