Call Immigrant Detention Centers What They Really Are: Concentration Camps

By Jonathan M. Katz, The Los Angeles Times

10 June 19

f you were paying close attention last week, you might have spotted a pattern in the news. Peeking out from behind the breathless coverage of the Trump family’s tuxedoed trip to London was a spate of deaths of immigrants in U.S. custody: Johana Medina Léon, a 25-year-old transgender asylum seeker; an unnamed 33-year-old Salvadoran man; and a 40-year-old woman from Honduras.

Photos from a Border Patrol processing center in El Paso showed people herded so tightly into cells that they had to stand on toilets to breathe. Memos surfaced by journalist Ken Klippenstein revealed that Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s failure to provide medical care was responsible for suicides and other deaths of detainees. These followed another report that showed that thousands of detainees are being brutally held in isolation cells just for being transgender or mentally ill.

Also last week, the Trump administration cut funding for classes, recreation and legal aid at detention centers holding minors — which were likened to “summer camps” by a senior ICE official last year. And there was the revelation that months after being torn from their parents’ arms, 37 children were locked in vans for up to 39 hours in the parking lot of a detention center outside Port Isabel, Texas. In the last year, at least seven migrant children have died in federal custody.

Preventing mass outrage at a system like this takes work. Certainly it helps that the news media covers these horrors intermittently rather than as snowballing proof of a racist, lawless administration. But most of all, authorities prevail when the places where people are being tortured and left to die stay hidden, misleadingly named and far from prying eyes.

There’s a name for that kind of system. They’re called concentration camps. You might balk at my use of the term. That’s good — it’s something to be balked at.

The goal of concentration camps has always been to be ignored. The German-Jewish political theorist Hannah Arendt, who was imprisoned by the Gestapo and interned in a French camp, wrote a few years afterward about the different levels of concentration camps. Extermination camps were the most extreme; others were just about getting “undesirable elements … out of the way.” All had one thing in common: “The human masses sealed off in them are treated as if they no longer existed, as if what happened to them were no longer of interest to anybody, as if they were already dead.”

Euphemisms play a big role in that forgetting. The term “concentration camp” is itself a euphemism. It was invented by a Spanish official to paper over his relocation of millions of rural families into squalid garrison towns where they would starve during Cuba’s 1895 independence war. When President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered Japanese Americans into prisons during World War II, he initially called them concentration camps. Americans ended up using more benign names, like “Manzanar Relocation Center.”

Even the Nazis’ camps started out small, housing criminals, Communists and opponents of the regime. It took five years to begin the mass detention of Jews. It took eight, and the outbreak of a world war, for the first extermination camps to open. Even then, the Nazis had to keep lying to distract attention, claiming Jews were merely being resettled to remote work sites. That’s what the famous signs — Arbeit Macht Frei, or “Work Sets You Free” — were about.

Subterfuge doesn’t always work. A year ago, Americans accidentally became aware that the Trump administration had adopted (and lied about) a policy of ripping families apart at the border. The flurry of attention was thanks to the viral conflation of two separate but related stories: the family-separation order and bureaucrats’ admission that they’d been unable to locate thousands of migrant children who’d been placed with sponsors after crossing the border alone.

Trump shoved that easily down the memory hole. He dragged his heels a bit, then agreed to a new policy: throwing whole families into camps together. Political reporters posed irrelevant questions, like whether President Obama had been just as bad, and what it meant for the midterms. Then they moved on.

It is important to note that Trump’s aides have built this system of racist terror on something that has existed for a long time. Several camps opened under Obama, and as president he deported millions of people.

But Trump’s game is different. It certainly isn’t about negotiating immigration reform with Congress. Trump has made it clear that he wants to stifle all non-white immigration, period. His mass arrests, iceboxes and dog cages are part of an explicitly nationalist project to put the country under the control of the right kind of white people.

As a Republican National Committee report noted in 2013: “The nation’s demographic changes add to the urgency of recognizing how precarious our position has become.” The Trump administration’s attempt to put a citizenship question on the 2020 census was also just revealed to have been a plot to disadvantage political opponents and boost “Republicans and Non-Hispanic Whites” all along.

That’s why this isn’t just a crisis facing immigrants. When a leader puts people in camps to stay in power, history shows that he doesn’t usually stop with the first group he detains.

There are now at least 48,000 people detained in ICE facilities, which a former official told BuzzFeed News “could swell indefinitely.” Customs and Border Protection officials apprehended more than 144,000 people on the Southwest border last month. (The New York Times dutifully reported this as evidence of a “dramatic surge in border crossings,” rather than what it was: The administration using its own surge of arrests to justify the rest of its policies.)

If we call them what they are — a growing system of American concentration camps — we will be more likely to give them the attention they deserve. We need to know their names: Port Isabel, Dilley, Adelanto, Hutto and on and on. With constant, unrelenting attention, it is possible we might alleviate the plight of the people inside, and stop the crisis from getting worse. Maybe people won’t be able to disappear so easily into the iceboxes. Maybe it will be harder for authorities to lie about children’s deaths.

Maybe Trump’s concentration camps will be the first thing we think of when we see him scowling on TV.

The only other option is to leave it up to those in power to decide what’s next. That’s a calculated risk. As Andrea Pitzer, author of “One Long Night,” one of the most comprehensive books on the history of concentration camps, recently noted: “Every country has said their camps are humane and will be different. Trump is instinctively an authoritarian. He'll take them as far as he’s allowed to.”

Ohio's "Chernobyl Socialism" Would Hand $20 Million to Seven Utility Scammers

By Harvey Wasserman, Reader Supported News

10 June 19

huge proposed bailout of two Chernobyl-in-progress Ohio nukes (plus two old coal burners) would put $20 million directly into the pockets of seven utility executives. Their bankrupt company last year spent $3 million “lobbying” the legislature.

Akron’s bankrupt FirstEnergy (FE) owns the Perry nuke, east of Cleveland, which in 1986 became the first US reactor damaged by an earthquake. Critical pipes and concrete were cracked, as were nearby roads and bridges. A top-level state study showed soon thereafter that evacuation amidst a major accident would be impossible.

FE’s uninsured Davis-Besse nuke, near Toledo, is a 42-year-old Three Mile Island clone. In 2002, boric acid ate through its head, threatening a Chernobyl-scale accident irradiating Toledo, Cleveland, and the Great Lakes. At FE’s request, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has exempted Davis-Besse from vital regulations for flooding, fire protection, earthquake vulnerability, and security. Its radiation shield building is literally crumbling.

In 2003, when nearby power lines sagged onto tree limbs, FirstEnergy blacked out some 50 million people throughout the northeast and well into Canada.

By then, FE had scammed Ohio for some $9 billion in “stranded cost” bailouts. The utility said “open market competition” would lower rates ... after it pocketed the public’s money.

Now FE says its subsidized nukes can’t compete with gas and wind power. It wants $190 million/year or more from all Ohio ratepayers, even though most get zero nuke electricity.

FE first said the money was for “clean air” and “zero emission reactors.” But all nukes emit heat, chemicals, radiation, Carbon 14, and more. Their cooling towers kill birds, their waste hot water kills marine life, their cores (at about 300 degrees Centigrade) heat the planet.

The bailout bill, called HB6, attacks renewable and efficiency programs that have saved Ohio ratepayers billions of dollars and created thousands of jobs. A single sentence in the Ohio Code is blocking some $4 billion in turbine development.

The breezy “North Coast” region along Lake Erie is crisscrossed with transmission lines and good sites near urban consumers. Farmers throughout the flat, fertile agricultural land desperately want the income turbine leases could provide. The new projects would create thousands of construction and maintenance jobs. They would feed Ohio’s manufacturing base, which produces a wide range of wind and solar components. By lowering electric rates, they would restore a competitive position long lost to high electric rates. Indiana, Michigan, New York, and Pennsylvania all have at least double Ohio’s installed wind capacity. Texas has twenty times more. By 2022, Germany will be totally nuke-free.

Ohio has just been shaken by findings that significant radiation has leaked from a dead uranium plant in southern Ohio, contaminating schools and terrifying local residents.

Like that old “stranded cost” scam, FE’s new bailouts would suck desperately needed capital from Ohio’s faltering industrial base. The reactors are obsolete. The workforce is aging. The nukes will shut anyway … if they don’t blow up first.

FE is really protecting its huge executive salaries. In 2018, it spent $3 million on “lobbying.” Its top seven officers, who bankrupted the company, were collectively paid more than $20,000,000, more than 10% of the proposed bailout:

Charles E. Jones Jr., President & CEO: $9,858,109;

Leila L. Vespoli, EVP, Corporate Strategy, Regulatory Affairs & Chief Legal Officer: $3,801,639;

James F. Pearson, EVP, Finance: $3,840,576;

Donald R. Schneider, President, FE Solutions: $2,343,232;

Steven E. Strah, SVP & CFO: $2,798,523;

Bennett L. Gaines, SVP, Corporate Services & Chief Information Officer: $1,442,149;

Samuel L. Belcher, SVP & President, FE Utilities: $3,004,019.

The Ohio House has already ignored extensive anti-bailout public testimony (see mine at https://ohiochannel.org/video/ohio-house-energy-and-natural-resources-committee-5-22-2019) and voted 53-43 to keep those executive handouts soaring.

The bill now moves to the Senate and its gerrymandered GOP majority. Ohio’s corporate-owned governor has assured FE he’ll approve their bailout.

Ohio consumers may then join lawsuits against similar bailouts in New York, New Jersey, and elsewhere. A referendum, which they might well win, is also possible.

Meanwhile, millionaire utility execs everywhere will see if the Buckeye State can be suckered again into bailing out two obsolete, cash-sucking nukes on the brink of catastrophic collapse.

Stay tuned.

Harvey Wasserman's Green Power & Wellness Show is podcast at prn.fm; California Solartopia is broadcast at KPFK-Pacifica, 90.7 fm, Los Angeles. His book The People’s Spiral of US History: From Deganawidah to Solartopia will soon be at www.solartopia.org.