Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=8625"><span class="small">Eugene Robinson, The Washington Post</span></a>
Saturday, 07 July 2018 08:45
Robinson writes: “Racism is a feature of the Trump administration, not a bug. Like demagogues before him, President Trump and his aides consistently single out one group for scapegoating and persecution: nonwhite Hispanic immigrants.”
Donald Trump speaks to supporters at a rally. (photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Trump Can’t Make America White Again
By Eugene Robinson, The Washington Post
07 July 18
acism is a feature of the Trump administration, not a bug. Like demagogues before him, President Trump and his aides consistently single out one group for scapegoating and persecution: nonwhite Hispanic immigrants.
Trump doesn’t much seem to like nonwhite newcomers from anywhere, in truth — remember how he once expressed a fond wish for more immigrants from Norway? — but he displays an especially vicious antipathy toward men, women and even children from Latin America. We have not seen such overt racism from a president since Woodrow Wilson imposed Jim Crow segregation in Washington and approvingly showed “The Birth of a Nation,” director D.W. Griffith’s epic celebration of the Ku Klux Klan, at the White House.
Trump encourages supporters to see the nation as beset by high levels of violent crime — and to blame the “animals” of the street gang MS-13. He is lying; crime rates nationwide are far lower than two or three decades ago, and some big cities are safer than they have been in a half-century. But Trump has to paint a dystopian panorama to justify the need to Make America Great Again.
MS-13 is, indeed, unspeakably violent. But it is small; law enforcement officials estimate the gang’s total U.S. membership at roughly 10,000, concentrated in a few metropolitan areas that have large populations of Central American immigrants — Los Angeles, New York and Washington. Trump never acknowledges that the gang was founded in the United States by immigrants from El Salvador and exported to Central America, where it took hold. He also neglects to mention that its members here, mostly teenagers, generally direct their violence at one another, not at outsiders.
Trump deliberately exaggerates the threat from MS-13 in order to justify his brutality toward Central American asylum seekers at the border. People should never be treated that way, but “animals” are a different story.
It is unbelievable that the U.S. government would separate more than 2,300 children from their parents for no good reason other than to demonstrate cruelty. It is shocking that our government would expect toddlers and infants to represent themselves at formal immigration hearings. It is incredible that our government, forced to grudgingly end the policy, would charge desperate parents hundreds or thousands of dollars to be reunited with their children. It is appalling that our government would refuse even to give a full and updated accounting of how many children still have not been returned. Yet all of this has been done — in our name.
Trump uses words such as “invading” and “infest” and “breeding” to describe Central American migrants who arrive at the border lawfully seeking asylum. I’ll believe this is neutral immigration policy when Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents begin hunting down and locking up Norwegians who have overstayed their visas.
Said Norwegians, if anyone bothered to look for them, might well be taking jobs away from American workers or taking advantage of social-welfare programs or boosting crime rates. There is no evidence that asylumseekers are doing any of these things.
Trump’s policies flow from a worldview that he has never tried to hide. To describe Trump and aides such as Attorney General Jeff Sessions and senior policy adviser Stephen Miller as “anti-immigration” tells only part of the story. They adopt the stance of racial and cultural warriors, “defending” the United States against brown-skinned, Spanish-speaking hordes “invading” from the south.
Trump has proposed not just building a wall along the border with Mexico to halt the flow of undocumented migrants but also changing the system of legal immigration so that it no longer promotes family unification. He calls his aim a “merit-based” system, but Miller has specified that the administration wants to produce “more assimilation.”
Yet there is no evidence that immigrants from Latin America fail to assimilate in any way except one: They do not come to look like Trump’s mental image of “American,” which is basically the same as his mental image of “Norwegian.”
This is a story as old as the nation. German, Irish, Polish, Italian and other immigrant groups were once seen as irredeemably foreign and incapable of assimilating. The ethnic and racial mix of the country has changed before and is changing now.
Hispanics are by far the biggest minority group in the country, making up nearly 18 percent of the population; by 2060, the Census Bureau estimates, that share will rise to nearly 29 percent. Trump is punishing Central American mothers and babies because, try as he might, he can’t Make America White Again.
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=40776"><span class="small">Dan Rather, Dan Rather's Facebook Page</span></a>
Friday, 06 July 2018 13:42
Rather writes: "In the end, I trust the American people will not sit idly by and allow the fleecing of their country to take place without a reckoning at the ballot box, and likely in the halls of justice."
Don Rather. (photo: CBS)
I Detest the Stench of Corruption
By Dan Rather, Dan Rather's Facebook Page
06 July 18
o man who is corrupt, no man who condones corruption in others, can possibly do his duty by the community." - Theodore Roosevelt
As a citizen, I detest the stench of corruption. As a journalist, I know corruption makes for very fertile investigative reporting. And as a student of history, I have learned that corruption often lays waste to the powerful.
That is why I am dismayed by what is taking place today. Over the course of my life I have never seen a level of corruption in the United States equal to that emanating from the Trump Administration (I was not alive during the 1920s). What is happening today is the ultimate threat to effective governance. It is morally repugnant and a repudiation of the very ideals of our democracy. It is the rot of power for sale.
Of all the current dangers to the norms of our democracy, and there are many, I worry most that we will become a nation that shrugs off corruption as business as usual. This is not to say that we haven't had corruption in the past. But one thing that has marked this country from others is that, especially at the highest levels of government, our corruption (and our tolerance for it) has been comparatively very low.
I have long felt that one reason why our global competitors and adversaries like China and Russia would falter was that the corruption that pulsates through their political systems is ultimately destabilizing. And now we are following down that same dangerous path.
I hear many on air and on line invoke President Trump's promise to "drain the swamp" to mark his rank hypocrisy. But I suggest that those who care about this issue drop the "swamp" metaphor as a reference. It is too cute, too passive, and too esoteric for what is going on. This is about hardworking, law-abiding Americans being played for suckers (Pruitt being a timely example). This is about the very idea of honest government becoming just another partisan divide. There are already many worrisome signs that this mindset is seeping into the candidacies of those seeking lower office.
In the end, however, I trust the American people will not sit idly by and allow the fleecing of their country to take place without a reckoning at the ballot box, and likely in the halls of justice.
Trump Is Set to Separate More Than 200,000 US-Born Children From Their Parents
Friday, 06 July 2018 13:39
Schneider writes: "If you think the last few weeks of separating 2,300 children from their migrant parents along the southern border were heart-wrenching, imagine if 273,000 American-born children are separated from parents whose temporary protected status (TPS) is terminated."
Protesters in front of the US Citizenship and Immigration Services office in Miami on May 13, 2017. (photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
Trump Is Set to Separate More Than 200,000 US-Born Children From Their Parents
By Mark L. Schneider, The Washington Post
06 July 18
f you think the last few weeks of separating 2,300 children from their migrant parents along the southern border were heart-wrenching, imagine if 273,000 American-born children are separated from parents whose temporary protected status (TPS) is terminated. That is what could happen if the Trump administration’s decision to revoke TPS for Haitians, Salvadorans and Hondurans is allowed to take effect.
Despite President Trump’s executive order reversing his policy of separating migrant families, most of those 2,300 children have not been returned to their parents. That is truly unconscionable.
More than 100 times that number of children — all U.S. citizens — will be placed in similar jeopardy if the Department of Homeland Security begins programs to deport more than 58,000 Haitians on July 22, 2019, more than 262,000 Salvadorans on Sept. 9, 2019, and 86,000 Hondurans on Jan. 5, 2020. Parents will be faced with the decision of whether to take their children — most of whom speak mainly English and know only life in this country — back to countries deemed by the State Department as not safe for travel, some with the highest homicide rates in the hemisphere.
Otherwise, parents will have to leave their children alone in the United States or, if they’re lucky, with relatives, or foster parents who they may or may not know, or some with “adult sponsors” chosen by federal agencies. The only other choice available to those parents would be to hide in the shadows as undocumented aliens. And that is what the ambassadors to the United States from El Salvador and Honduras, during an event at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), predicted that most families would attempt. And DHS would undoubtedly begin a massive hunt for them.
The TPS provision in the Immigration Act of 1990 states that after each 18-month review, if conditions have changed — and governments can adequately handle the return of their citizens, and the returnees can return in safety — then it can be terminated. It does not say it is okay to deport them even as governments say they would still be overwhelmed or that it is still unsafe.
The Trump administration’s TPS termination decision reversed the findings of Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, their secretaries of state and secretaries of homeland security, and their legal advisers. They found conditions justified legally extending the temporary protected status after each of 14 reviews for Honduras since it was granted following Hurricane Mitch in 1999, each of 13 reviews for El Salvador following two earthquakes in 2001, and each of four reviews for Haiti following the worst earthquake in the region’s history in 2010.
The decision to terminate the temporary protected status appears blatantly political since it contradicted the evaluation of U.S. diplomats in each of the countries who sent cables urging extension of TPS. They wrote that deportation of TPS holders and their children would endanger the fragile economies in those countries, overwhelm the countries’ abilities to provide services, lead to more violence, and prompt new flows of migrants to our borders, thus undermining U.S. national security interests. The U.S. Southern Command, which covers Central and South America, came to the same conclusion.
The Department of Homeland Security also ignored these State Department travel advisories in January warning U.S. travelers to “Reconsider Travel” to those countries:
El Salvador: Violent crime, such as murder, assault, rape, and armed robbery, is common. Gang activity, such as extortion, violent street crime, and narcotics and arms trafficking, is widespread. Local police may lack the resources to respond effectively to serious criminal incidents.
Honduras: Violent crime, such as homicide and armed robbery, is common. Violent gang activity, such as extortion, violent street crime, rape, and narcotics and human trafficking, is widespread. Local police and emergency services lack the resources to respond effectively to serious crime.
Haiti: Reconsider travel to Haiti due to crime and civil unrest. Violent crime, such as armed robbery, is common. Local police may lack the resources to respond effectively to serious criminal incidents or emergencies. Protests, tire burning, and road blockages are frequent and often spontaneous.
Various studies show that more than 80 percent of TPS beneficiaries work, pay taxes, and contribute an estimated $690 million each year into Social Security. It would cost an estimated $3 billion to deport them and the U.S. economy would lose about $4.5 billion each year in gross domestic product.
Finally, U.S. policy, begun under Obama and a Republican Congress, and continued, according to Vice President Pence, in the Trump administration, sees the best way to reduce the “push” factors on illegal migration is to assist Central America to strengthen their economies, democratic institutions and law enforcement.
Sending back hundreds of thousands of people to those countries, when the governments themselves have said they cannot handle it, undermines that policy. And placing at risk 273,000 U.S. citizen children — some still being nursed — undermines our values.
The immediate answer is for the president to reverse the DHS termination decisions. The best answer for those U.S. citizen children is for Congress to authorize permanent residency for their parents now and a pathway to citizenship — they have been here for as long as two decades and have demonstrated they can contribute to our future — as immigrant parents in this country have done for almost 250 years.
Cole writes: "Investors and buyers are jittery, worried about what prices will be like six months out."
A gas station customer. (photo: Scott Olson/Getty)
Iran: Trump’s Tweets Have Added $10 to Cost of Oil, Upping Cost of Gasoline
By Juan Cole, Informed Comment
06 July 18
ran’s official for the Organization of Petroleum Countries, Governor Hossein Kazempour Ardebili, was quoted by the Iranian Press on Thursday as addressing US President Donald Trump, saying that Trump’s twitter activity is roiling the oil markets: “Your tweets have increased the prices by at least $10. Please stop this method.”
Investors and buyers are jittery, worried about what prices will be like six months out. Lots of imponderables go into the price. The world produces about 99 million barrels a day. If even a million barrels a day goes off the market because of political turmoil (Libya, Venezuela), it has a disproportionate impact on prices. This year, world demand is likely to be up by over a million barrels a day. And, political turmoil and other factors could reduce supply.
Iran exports about 2.5 million barrels a day. Take that off the market, or any substantial part of it, and demand is higher than supply, equaling rising prices.
Hence Trump’s tweets can put up the price up.
Moreover, Trump’s brinkmanship with Iran has led the hardliners in Iran to threaten to close the Straits of Hormuz to shipping if Iran is crushed. They can’t actually do this, I have been assured by US Navy officers, but as I said, oil markets are jittery and often put up prices for reasons that seem to me silly.
The episode is full of ironies. Trump has a thing about gasoline prices, probably remembering how everyone hated Jimmy Carter in the late 1970s during the oil price spike. But he can’t help wanting to strong arm Iran and undo the 2015 nuclear deal, just because it was a signature achievement of Barack Obama. If Obama had jumped in a river to save children from drowning, Trump would hire hit men to track them down and shoot them now.
So he is as usual his own worst enemy, producing the opposite of what he is aiming for.
In fact, Trump is a one man inflation-machine. The trade wars he is picking will cause consumers to have to pay more for automobiles and lots of other commodities. His own voting base will suffer most, since they probably shop in Walmart, the chief marketing agent in the US for the goods produced by the Chinese Communist Party.
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=63"><span class="small">Marc Ash, Reader Supported News</span></a>
Friday, 06 July 2018 08:50
Ash writes: "The decision on impeachment should be governed by the facts. If the facts support impeachment, then the members are sworn to act on that. Again, these are the most serious charges ever brought against a sitting American president. This is it. If the members of Congress do not act, they are corrupt and complicit."
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, an outspoken proponent of confronting Trump and his enablers head-on, has a message: “fight.” (photo: Rolling Stone)
The Curious Ongoing Impeachment Sermon
By Marc Ash, Reader Supported News
06 July 18
teve Kornacki, sitting in with Rachel Maddow at MSNBC on the 4th of July, wanted to explain something to viewers about the wisdom, or lack thereof, of pursuing impeachment of Donald Trump with the midterms looming.
Kornacki presented his perspective as objective, but it was clearly an argument against pushing for impeachment as election season nears. His argument rested largely on the notion that by impeaching Bill Clinton in 1998 for covering up an affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky, House Republicans had overreached and damaged themselves politically.
Kornacki supported that theory by citing six House seats gained by Democrats in the 1998 midterms, arguing that historically the opposition party – which with a Democratic president was the Republican Party – would have been likely to gain, not lose, seats.
Kornacki added for context an interview with a contrite former Republican congressman from Virginia, who lamented having taken part in the Clinton impeachment proceedings because, unsurprisingly, it had damaged House Republicans and brought about the downfall of then-Speaker Newt Gingrich.
This logic is so tortured on so many levels that it leaves open the question of the underlying motivation for going there.
First, not to let the air out of the tire too quickly, there isn’t going to be any impeachment proceeding in the House before November. Not of Donald Trump, not as long as Paul Ryan and the Republicans are in control. So it’s a purely political discussion about what Democratic House members should say or not say.
The conservative Democrats, in a surprising development, want the progressive Democrats to shut up about impeachment because they think it will hurt the Democrats’ chances of taking back the house in November. Kornacki seems prepared to lend his support.
The comparison of the impeachment of Bill Clinton for lying about his affair with Monica Lewinsky with impeachment proceedings in the Trump-Russia case is really the mother of all false-equivalence arguments.
Donald Trump is not under investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller for an affair with an intern, and Bill Clinton never should have been. Donald Trump is under investigation for conspiring with agents of Russia to sway the presidential election in his favor and for executing the will of Russian president Vladimir Putin from the Oval Office.
Obstruction of justice in the firing of the FBI director, money laundering, tax evasion, and general unbridled corruption on a staggering scale are some of the other issues Mueller and his team are looking into. These are by far the most serious allegations ever made against a sitting American president.
American democracy is under immediate, direct threat. Donald Trump and his enablers are engaged in an effort to destroy the rule of law and remake it as an instrument of their power.
The decision on impeachment should be governed by the facts. If the facts support impeachment, then the members are sworn to act on that. Again, these are the most serious charges ever brought against a sitting American president. This is it. If the members of Congress do not act, they are corrupt and complicit.
For any member of Congress to remain silent, knowing what they know, invites and emboldens the authoritarian revolution underway in our nation’s Capitol. Failure to speak out now is one of the few things that can scuttle the Democrats’ excellent chances this November.
Silence itself is now the enemy.
Marc Ash is the founder and former Executive Director of Truthout, and is now founder and Editor of Reader Supported News.
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.
THE NEW STREAMLINED RSN LOGIN PROCESS: Register once, then login and you are ready to comment. All you need is a Username and a Password of your choosing and you are free to comment whenever you like! Welcome to the Reader Supported News community.
acism is a feature of the Trump administration, not a bug. Like demagogues before him, President Trump and his aides consistently single out one group for scapegoating and persecution: nonwhite Hispanic immigrants.
o man who is corrupt, no man who condones corruption in others, can possibly do his duty by the community." - Theodore Roosevelt
f you think the last few weeks of separating 2,300 children from their migrant parents along the southern border were heart-wrenching, imagine if 273,000 American-born children are separated from parents whose temporary protected status (TPS) is terminated. That is what could happen if the Trump administration’s decision to revoke TPS for Haitians, Salvadorans and Hondurans is allowed to take effect.
teve Kornacki, sitting in with Rachel Maddow at MSNBC on the 4th of July, wanted to explain something to viewers about the wisdom, or lack thereof, of pursuing impeachment of Donald Trump with the midterms looming.
