Politics

Not in Our Town: Can American Cities Stop Trump From Deporting Millions?

Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=40027">Henry Grabar, Slate</a>

Monday, 21 November 2016 14:51

Grabar writes: "In the 100-day action plan his transition team released, Trump has promised to block all federal funding for such places, which, depending on how you define sanctuary cities, may number as many as 400. That pledge sets Trump up for a showdown with local officials, including police chiefs and sheriffs, who say aggressive immigration enforcement isn't compatible with good policing. And it places cities at the frontlines of the resistance against the incoming administration's policies."

If cities such as San Francisco don't comply with Trump's pressure, Congress has the ability to withhold federal funding. (photo: Robert Galbraith/Reuters)

Not in Our Town: Can American Cities Stop Trump From Deporting Millions?

By Henry Grabar, Slate

21 November 16

rom the day he announced his campaign and called Mexicans �rapists� through 17 months of promises to erect his big, beautiful wall, Donald Trump made contempt for immigrants a central theme of his campaign. Friday brought news that Trump plans to nominate Sen. Jeff Sessions, who enjoys a reputation as the most anti-immigration U.S. senator, as attorney general. And the previous Sunday, in an interview on 60 Minutes, the president-elect told Lesley Stahl that one of his first priorities in office would be the immediate deportation of 2 million to 3 million undocumented immigrants with criminal records. (Most advocates say there are at most 800,000 such people.)

Big-city officials had an immediate response: not with our help. Last Monday, Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck said his department would not assist the Trump administration with deportations. Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel said his city �is and will remain a sanctuary city.� A handful of other mayors, including those of New York; Oakland, California; Minneapolis; San Francisco; and Seattle, also pledged that they would not relinquish their status as sanctuary cities, places that in some way decline to put their powers in the service of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. In the 100-day action plan his transition team released, Trump has promised to block all federal funding for such places, which, depending on how you define sanctuary cities, may number as many as 400. That pledge sets Trump up for a showdown with local officials, including police chiefs and sheriffs, who say aggressive immigration enforcement isn�t compatible with good policing. And it places cities at the frontlines of the resistance against the incoming administration�s policies.

This conflict goes back two decades. Many of the so-called sanctuary cities were indispensable partners in the enormous wave of deportations that surged in the George W. Bush era and peaked, under Obama, with the eviction of more than 400,000 people in fiscal year 2012. The following year, local law enforcement initiated more than half of all nonborder deportations. Now, most large jurisdictions�even those that do not label themselves as sanctuaries, such as Philadelphia, which considers itself a �Fourth Amendment city,� a municipality that protects against unreasonable searches and seizures�will no longer commit their police to federal immigration work. Hundreds of U.S. jurisdictions, including cities, counties, and whole states, are exhibiting some form of noncompliance with federal immigration authorities.

�Local law enforcement is not going to do the job of the federal immigration agency,� Denver Mayor Michael Hancock told me. �It�s not our responsibility.� Denver doesn�t have a formal policy of noncooperation with federal immigration authorities, but it refuses to unlawfully detain suspected undocumented immigrants without warrants. For some jurisdictions, resisting ICE is about limited resources. For others, it is a political, ethical, or economic stand. For nearly all of them, rejecting federal entreaties to find, hold, and hand over undocumented immigrants is considered a requirement of effective urban police work.

This is not a new phenomenon. New York City had a law prohibiting city employees from reporting to federal immigration authorities until Congress pre-empted it in 1996. Then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani, of all people, fought for the city�s law in court and lost. �We can remind people that no one is required to turn in the names of illegal aliens,� he said at the time, �and we can encourage people not to do that.� But even though cities can no longer mandate �don�t tell� provisions, they can still adopt �don�t ask� and �don�t enforce� rules, and so they have.

Today, the nation�s three biggest cities, New York, L.A., and Chicago, alone account for about 2 million of the undocumented residents who help make up the fabric of American life. Can cities�and the hundreds of other jurisdictions that have some kind of explicit sanctuary policy�serve as a bulwark against a Trump administration pushing to deport millions? The answer is almost certainly yes. The question is what it will cost them.

ICE divides deportations into two categories: border and interior. The former is straightforward: Agents apprehend entrants on the coastlines, at airports, and in the desert around the southern border with Mexico. The latter is much more complicated. Once immigrants have integrated into society, their evictions are harder to achieve�in part because they�re harder to justify: They have homes, jobs, children, and communities.

For years, immigration enforcement was the purview of the federal government, which managed to deport tens of thousands each year. Then came the 1996 immigration bill, which gave immigration officials vast powers and expanded the types of crimes that enabled detention. Annual deportations leaped from 70,000 in the 1996 fiscal year to nearly 200,000 two years later. The law also deputized local law enforcement as immigration police. In the wake of Sept. 11, 2001, dozens of jurisdictions signed up, which helped the Bush administration deport 200,000, and then 300,000, and finally nearly 400,000 people a year during his terms. Under a 287(g) agreement, counties such as Texas� Harris (which includes Houston) and states such as Florida opted to make their cops into the eyes and ears of ICE, changing the nature of police work. The largest local collaborator was Arizona�s Maricopa County, home of Phoenix, where Sheriff Joe Arpaio waged a yearslong campaign of intimidation, harassment, and racial profiling against immigrants. (The Department of Homeland Security rescinded the agreement with Maricopa County in 2010.)

This was a crucial factor in the linear growth of deportations under Bush. ICE is the largest investigative agency in DHS and employs about 6,000 enforcement officers. But its numbers are tiny compared with the nation�s full-time law enforcement officers, who numbered about 725,000 in 2013.

In 2008, at the recommendation of the 9/11 Commission, the Bush administration introduced a new information-sharing program called Secure Communities. The idea was simple: Any time a participating jurisdiction took fingerprints, it sent them to the FBI. Now, those prints would also be checked against a DHS database. If DHS found someone it suspected could be deported, the agency issued a detainer request. Flagged individuals would then be held in local jails until ICE could arrive and place them in federal custody. Some saw a judge, some didn�t. Few had legal representation. Between 2011 and 2013, when the program was at its peak, S-Comm led to 243,000 deportations�about 40 percent of the total interior removals.

In 2011, states and cities began to withdraw from the program. Part of municipalities� reluctance stemmed from the human cost of complying with ICE. Jobs were lost and families ruined over minor offenses. Between 2007 and 2012, for example, 260,000 noncitizens were deported for drug possession. Through 2011, according to ICE, more than half of those deported through S-Comm either had no criminal record or had been convicted of minor offenses like traffic violations.

The economic impact of deportations was also becoming obvious, especially in small towns. Postville, Iowa, lost a fifth of its residents over a few hours when 1,000 DHS agents raided the nation�s largest kosher meatpacking plant. The company filed for bankruptcy. The raid cost $5 million.

Perceived as agents of ICE, local police officers were met with growing distrust in Hispanic neighborhoods by both legal and illegal immigrants. A survey of Latinos in Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, and Phoenix�four of the nation�s largest Latino population centers�found that 44 percent of Latinos were less likely to contact the police when they were the victims of crimes for fear of ensuing investigations. Even among citizens of Latino origin, nearly a third were less likely to contact the police for fear that cops would use the interaction to investigate their family, friends, or neighbors. The President�s Task Force on 21^st Century Policing, a report released last year, recommended DHS terminate its reliance on state and local criminal justice.

Finally, the policy had a dubious legal foundation. By detaining people on the word of ICE, cities made themselves vulnerable to Fourth Amendment lawsuits. In 2014, a handful of federal district courts concluded that local police would be liable for civil rights violations for heeding ICE detainer requests without warrants.

Three things changed in Obama�s second term that conspired to send deportation numbers plummeting to a 10-year low. The Obama administration replaced S-Comm with a less stringent protocol. DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson declared a new focus on high-risk individuals. And local resistance flourished.

A crucial question heading into the Trump administration is this: To what extent did local noncompliance precipitate the deportation decline?

When the Obama administration ditched S-Comm, its replacement was a more flexible system called the Priorities Enforcement Program. In some cases, instead of asking local authorities to detain immigrants until they could be picked up, ICE started asking to know release dates. This decreased cities� liability for complying, and DHS was able to boast that dozens of sanctuary jurisdictions had come back around. It also allowed both federal enforcers and cities to claim victory. Under PEP, only a small percentage of detainer requests are rejected. At the same time, many fewer requests are made. Many advocates, however, saw little difference between S-Comm and PEP and doubted the administration�s claim to be focused on more serious criminals.

Still, deportations fell rapidly. Apprehensions at the border now account for more than two-thirds of deportations, up from about one-third in 2008. The number of ICE deportations that start in the interior and evict U.S. residents has fallen by 70 percent since 2009. Hard-liners see the shift as a concession and a result of a policy that�s a poor, porous substitute for S-Comm.

Trump, among others, has called for S-Comm to be reinstated.

Now the immigration hard-liners have taken over. And we�re about to find out if ICE has really been stymied by the sanctuary movement.

Local resistance to S-Comm posed a �significant challenge,� ICE Director Sarah Salda�a testified last year. But because the backlash to ICE pressure coincided with a vocal realignment of federal priorities�the emphasis on serious criminals, plus PEP�it�s hard to pinpoint how many deportations were avoided because of local noncompliance and could be avoided in the future. Some scholars believe the anti-detainer policies helped change federal policy. Others aren�t so sure.

�If the main reason for that drop is state anti-detainer policy, then a huge amount depends on state resistance,� said Adam Cox, a professor at New York University Law School. If, on the other hand, detainers and deportations have fallen because of federal priorities, cities and states may not have played so great a role in sending the numbers down�and may not be able to offer substantive reprieve in a Trump administration. Trump could immediately direct ICE to aggressively pursue detainers for individuals with nonviolent offenses like marijuana possession or illegal re-entry on their records.

But forcing cities and states to participate will be more difficult. Thanks to a 1997 Supreme Court case (over, of all things, federally mandated background checks for gun sales), local police can�t be dragooned into doing Washington�s work. On the campaign trail, Trump promised to get noncompliant jurisdictions on board. But if the past decade is any guide, local police will resist any stricter policy. Major city police chiefs have repeatedly stated their opposition to enforcing federal immigration law.

They were once the single most important funnel of immigrants into detainment, according to Muzaffar Chishti of the Migration Policy Institute. �I don�t know of a single major city police chief that does not abhor the general entanglement of federal immigration enforcement and local police,� he said. Chishti is optimistic that local authorities can effectively slow a deportation push by Trump.

But while Congress almost certainly cannot force local cops to hold suspects, it can withhold funding�a common way to avoid violating the 10^th Amendment, which gives power not explicitly held by the federal government to the states. Trump has said he will cut all federal funding from sanctuary cities as a threat to ensure compliance, taking up a threat that congressional Republicans made last year after a San Francisco woman was murdered by an undocumented immigrant with a criminal record whose detainer request had been ignored by the county sheriff�s department.

The version of that bill that was proposed by Sen. Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania this summer would have cut two types of federal grants to sanctuary jurisdictions, amounting to a penalty of about $700 million, collectively, on the 10 largest noncompliant localities. That is a small portion of the money cities receive from the federal government but would still put local authorities in a difficult position.

Trump can take action elsewhere, of course. The president can reverse President Obama�s 2012 executive action that created Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, which allowed so-called Dreamers, who were brought to this country as children, to receive deportation protection and work permits. About 750,000 have been approved. Their information is also in a federal database, putting them at risk under a Trump administration.

Trump�s attorney general�whether it ends up being Sessions or someone else as eager to crack down on undocumented immigrants�could do a wide number of things: Support hostile immigration judges, as Bush Attorney General John Ashcroft did, or tighten asylum rules, or decline to investigate reports of civil rights violations like those that occurred in Maricopa County under Arpaio. He could sue cities with soft �don�t tell� policies, which may violate a section of federal law but have rarely been contested in court. Trump could also try to make good on his campaign promise to triple ICE�s manpower, creating a �deportation force.� House Speaker Paul Ryan has said that is not on the table.

If there is a barrier to Trump resurrecting the massive deportations of the Bush and Obama years, though, it lies in the independence of local law enforcement. To override them is certainly possible. But it would require a vast expansion in federal power that, under any other circumstances, would be anathema to small-government conservatives worried about Washington overreach and rejecting the judgment of local police. The self-proclaimed law-and-order candidate would have to act against the wishes of police chiefs. Trump couldn�t persuade voters in those places to support his candidacy. How much punishment is he willing to inflict on them to ensure they assist in an unprecedented eviction of the American populace?

9 comments

White People, It's the Bigots Where You Live That Need You the Most

Monday, 21 November 2016 14:46

Jeffries writes: "In Ferguson, Missouri, the Truth Telling Project works with the community to address police violence, and supports other communities, some White, with their approach to truth-telling and unlearning racism."

'Polls show the nearly 60 million people who voted for Trump were overwhelmingly White.' (photo: Nilesyan/istock)

White People, It's the Bigots Where You Live That Need You the Most

By Zenobia Jeffries, Yes! Magazine

21 November 16

To address the bigotry that helped elect Trump, White people might consider the work ahead in their own families and communities.

n Michigan, the day after Donald Trump won the election, White students at a middle school in the Detroit suburb of Royal Oak harassed Latino students during lunch, chanting �Build a Wall! Build a Wall!� A video of the incident went viral. In it, an adult can be seen standing in the aisle, making no attempt to end the derision. That same day, at another suburban Detroit high school, a White student called an African American female schoolmate a �ni**er b**ch!� The incident wasn�t videotaped, but it happened to a friend of my close friend�s daughter.

Several other occurrences of racial harassment, including physical violence, took place across the country that day. And they continue. But before I could process those acts of ignorance and hatred, my son called me. He�d just left a protest on his mostly White college campus in Pittsburgh. While he and other students, Black and White, were upset about the election results, they were the minority on campus. The gloating by the students who supported Trump was insufferable to him.

�How am I supposed to go back to class with these people like everything is ok, knowing they voted for Trump?� he asked. �I don�t even feel safe here.� Like many parents this week, I didn�t know what to say to my child right then.

Later, I found an answer. I told him it was everyone�s responsibility to forge ahead with the work we were already doing to better our own communities, no matter what Trump�s presidency brings. Stay informed and make wise decisions in local elections. Support organizations and individuals making a positive impact, and businesses and institutions that keep money circulating locally. And continue to build relationships with others who have access to resources and can help influence policies that benefit everyone.

Most of what I said to him describes the world I live in here in Detroit.

Detroit has a history as a union town and home to Black nationalist movements. It�s easy to become politicized here. Even �new Detroiters��a local euphemism for White transplants from the suburbs and elsewhere�came to town with their sleeves rolled up, ready to work alongside lifelong and longtime residents in the struggle against racist policies that were dismantling our local institutions. Many of them left their homes in neighboring suburbs because they couldn�t take the bigotry and racism in their families across the border�that�s 8 Mile Road, the street that separates the urban core from its wealthier northern suburbs.

In an �Undoing Racism� workshop in New Orleans two years ago, I learned that those former Detroit suburbanites were not the only White people leaving home to escape the intolerance of family members or neighbors. White participants from New York to California told similar stories.

What I wondered then, I am wondering even more so now: Wouldn�t it have been better for race relations if those woke White folks had instead stayed in their intolerant communities and worked to make them better, one family member at a time, one neighbor at a time?

Polls show the nearly 60 million people who voted for Trump were overwhelmingly White. Many them are relatives of White people who did not vote for Trump. What difference might have been made if those people had worked hard at truth-telling and undoing racism and healing bigotry in their own circles?

More importantly, I wonder what difference still could be made.

Recently, I�ve talked to a number of racial and restorative justice activists who have participated in truth and reconciliation processes. I learned of two occasions where those processes have had success.

In Maine, a Truth and Reconciliation Commission was set up to investigate the kidnapping of Native American children who were placed in foster care with White families. Recommendations from the commission are now being implemented. In addition, White allies of the Wabanaki tribe held a workshop to talk about how White privilege has benefited them and negatively impacted Native people.

In Ferguson, Missouri, the Truth Telling Project works with the community to address police violence, and supports other communities, some White, with their approach to truth-telling and unlearning racism.

This is what I mean by �doing the work� in your own community.

Initiate truth-telling circles around the shared histories of your community, city, and state. Ask what happened to�directly or indirectly�reinforce White supremacy and racism. From there we can move to a place of understanding and start to work together. This will strengthen the existing White-Black alliances as we continue to rally and protest together, supporting policies that benefit under-resourced communities and rejecting those that don�t.

Now�s the time to do something different. And I think it should start in our own communities.

45 comments

FOCUS: NYT Advocates Internet Censorship

Monday, 21 November 2016 12:47

Parry writes: "The New York Times wants a system of censorship for the Internet to block what it calls 'fake news,' but the Times ignores its own record of publishing 'fake news.'"

Should Facebook censor fake news? (photo: Czarek Sokolowski/AP)

NYT Advocates Internet Censorship

By Robert Parry, Consortium News

21 November 16

The New York Times wants a system of censorship for the Internet to block what it calls �fake news,� but the Times ignores its own record of publishing �fake news,� reports Robert Parry.

n its lead editorial on Sunday, The New York Times decried what it deemed �The Digital Virus Called Fake News� and called for Internet censorship to counter this alleged problem, taking particular aim at Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg for letting �liars and con artists hijack his platform.�

As this mainstream campaign against �fake news� quickly has gained momentum in the past week, two false items get cited repeatedly, a claim that Pope Francis endorsed Donald Trump and an assertion that Trump was prevailing in the popular vote over Hillary Clinton. I could add another election-related falsehood, a hoax spread by Trump supporters that liberal documentarian Michael Moore was endorsing Trump when he actually was backing Clinton.

But I also know that Clinton supporters were privately pushing some salacious and unsubstantiated charges about Trump�s sex life, and Clinton personally charged that Trump was under the control of Russian President Vladimir Putin although there was no evidence presented to support that McCarthyistic accusation.

The simple reality is that lots of dubious accusations get flung around during the heat of a campaign � nothing new there � and it is always a challenge for professional journalists to swat them down the best we can. What�s different now is that the Times envisions some structure (or algorithm) for eliminating what it calls �fake news.�

But, with a stunning lack of self-awareness, the Times fails to acknowledge the many times that it has published �fake news,� such as reporting in 2002 that Iraq�s purchase of aluminum tubes meant that it was reconstituting its nuclear weapons program; its bogus analysis tracing the firing location of a Syrian sarin-laden rocket in 2013 back to a Syrian military base that turned out to be four times outside the rocket�s range; or its publication of photos supposedly showing Russian soldiers inside Russia and then inside Ukraine in 2014 when it turned out that the �inside-Russia� photo was also taken inside Ukraine, destroying the premise of the story.

These are just three examples among many of the Times publishing �fake news� � and all three appeared on Page One before being grudgingly or partially retracted, usually far inside the newspaper under opaque headlines so most readers wouldn�t notice. Much of the Times� �fake news� continued to reverberate in support of U.S. government propaganda even after the partial retractions.

Who Is the Judge?

So, should Zuckerberg prevent Facebook users from circulating New York Times stories? Obviously, the Times would not favor that solution to the problem of �fake news.� Instead, the Times expects to be one of the arbiters deciding which Internet outlets get banned and which ones get gold seals of approval.

The Times lead editorial, following a front-page article on the same topic on Friday, leaves little doubt what the newspaper would like to see. It wants major Internet platforms and search engines, such as Facebook and Google, to close off access to sites accused of disseminating �fake news.�

The editorial said, �a big part of the responsibility for this scourge rests with internet companies like Facebook and Google, which have made it possible for fake news to be shared nearly instantly with millions of users and have been slow to block it from their sites. �

�Facebook says it is working on weeding out such fabrications. It said last Monday that it would no longer place Facebook-powered ads on fake news websites, a move that could cost Facebook and those fake news sites a lucrative source of revenue. Earlier on the same day, Google said it would stop letting those sites use its ad placement network. These steps would help, but Facebook, in particular, owes its users, and democracy itself, far more.

�Facebook has demonstrated that it can effectively block content like click-bait articles and spam from its platform by tweaking its algorithms, which determine what links, photos and ads users see in their news feeds. � Facebook managers are constantly changing and refining the algorithms, which means the system is malleable and subject to human judgment.�

The Times editorial continued: �This summer, Facebook decided to show more posts from friends and family members in users� news feeds and reduce stories from news organizations, because that�s what it said users wanted. If it can do that, surely its programmers can train the software to spot bogus stories and outwit the people producing this garbage. �

�Mr. Zuckerberg himself has spoken at length about how social media can help improve society. � None of that will happen if he continues to let liars and con artists hijack his platform.�

Gray Areas

But the problem is that while some falsehoods may be obvious and clear-cut, much information exists in a gray area in which two or more sides may disagree on what the facts are. And the U.S. government doesn�t always tell the truth although you would be hard-pressed to find recent examples of the Times recognizing that reality. Especially over the past several decades, the Times has usually embraced the Official Version of a disputed event and has deemed serious skepticism out of bounds.

That was the way the Times treated denials from the Iraqi government and some outside experts who disputed the �aluminum tube� story in 2002 � and how the Times has brushed off disagreements regarding the U.S. government�s portrayal of events in Syria, Ukraine and Russia. Increasingly, the Times has come across as a propaganda conduit for Official Washington rather than a professional journalistic entity.

But the Times and other mainstream news outlets � along with some favored Internet sites � now sit on a Google-financed entity called the First Draft Coalition, which presents itself as a kind of Ministry of Truth that will decide which stories are true and which are �fake.�

If the Times� editorial recommendations are followed, the disfavored stories and the sites publishing them would no longer be accessible through popular search engines and platforms, essentially blocking the public�s access to them. [See Consortiumnews.com�s �What to Do About �Fake News.��]

The Times asserts that such censorship would be good for democracy � and it surely is true that hoaxes and baseless conspiracy theories are no help to democracy � but regulation of information in the manner that the Times suggests has more than a whiff of Orwellian totalitarianism to it.

And the proposal is especially troubling coming from the Times, with its checkered recent record of disseminating dangerous disinformation.

Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America�s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com).

40 comments

FOCUS: Here's What We Do Now - a Personal Note

Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=13834">Greg Palast, GregPalast.com</a>

Monday, 21 November 2016 11:38

Palast writes: "No way around it, this is one frightening moment."

Investigative reporter Greg Palast. (photo: GregPalast.com)

Here's What We Do Now - a Personal Note

By Greg Palast, GregPalast.com

21 November 16

eing right never felt so horrid.

�This is the story of the theft of the 2016 election.
It�s a crime still in progress.�

So opens my film, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy.

And on Election night I waited for the returns to make a fool of me.

Instead, the returns made the fool a President.

And so, my vacation�s cancelled. My life�s cancelled; that is, a life of anything but sleuthing and exposing the details of the heist of our democracy.

What�s at stake?

No way around it, this is one frightening moment.

Decades of progress created with sweat and determination face destruction. Within the next six months, we may see the Voting Rights Act repealed�and civil rights set back 50 years; the entirety of our environmental protection laws burnt in a coal pit; police cruelty made our urban policy; the Education Department closed to give billionaires a tax holiday; and a howling anti-Semite as White House Senior Counselor.

But the horror we face is countered by this one hard and hopeful fact: Donald Trump did NOT win this election.

Trump not only lost the popular vote by millions � he did not legitimately win the swing states of the Electoral College.

Michigan, Florida, North Carolina, Arizona, Ohio: every one was stolen through sophisticated, and sickeningly racist vote suppression tactics.

If you saw my report for Democracy Now! on election morning, it revealed that Ohio GOP officials turned off anti-hacking software on voting machines, forced Black voters to wait hours in line (while whites had no wait).

And, crucially, I confirmed that purged tens of thousands of minority voters on fake accusations they�d voted twice. I first exposed this bogus double-voter blacklist called Crosscheck, in Rolling Stone. It�s the sick excrescence crafted by Kris Kobach, the Trump transition team's maven who also created the Muslim-tracker software he�s bringing to the Trump administration.

What can we do now?

I have been INUN21 November 16D with requests for my factual reports and findings by media and, most important, the front-line activist groups preparing for the fierce fight to protect our votes. Some examples:

Rev. William Barber of the NAACP filed a suit based in North Carolina, hoping to overturn the Trump "victory" � and protect the tiny margin of the Democrat�s win of the Governor�s mansion. The NAACP cites my discovery of "Crosscheck" � in which North Carolina removed upwards of 190,000 voters on false charges they voted twice.

They now need my facts.

Congressmen Keith Ellison and Alcee Hastings of the Congressional Black Caucus, personally presented Attorney General Loretta Lynch with my investigative reports and demanded investigation � "and indictments." That investigation must kick off immediately.

They now need my facts.

The Asian-American civil rights group 18 Million Rising has gathered 50,000 signatures to push the Justice Department to investigate my evidence of a massive attack on the Asian-American vote.

They now need my facts.

In Michigan, the ACLU is ready to take action on the purge scheme I uncovered, "Crosscheck," that wrongly gave the state to Trump. In Ohio, voting rights attorney Robert Fitrakis is going into court with evidence, much that I uncovered, of racist voting games � from 5-hour-long lines in Black precincts to shutting off ballot security measures on the voting machines.

The team need my facts.

I expect to be in Washington at the Justice Dept and meeting with civil rights groups in December before the Electoral College meets.

Information�plus film, video, investigative reports

And beyond the voluminous files and confidential documents my team has uncovered that is sought by activists, we are deluged with requests for our film, videos, writings and more.

And now we have US networks, even major comedy shows, asking for our material and, of course, new investigative findings.

Information and facts make a difference

With our investigative reports, with our hard and unassailable evidence, we can challenge the legitimacy of the Trump "election." Most important, we must begin the difficult but necessary work of protecting and restoring voting rights. The 2018 Election � and the threat of more stolen elections � is upon us.

What we need to keep going...

Your extraordinary support and faith in our work funded my film The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, which is now more relevant than ever and being seen by ever more audiences.

Now we need your financial support again to keep this fight going. We just did not budget for the GOP's in-your-face steal of the Congress and White House. All our resources went into raising the alarm before the election.

So, now, I have to re-hire the staff, hit the road again. Ohio, North Carolina, Washington DC and who knows where, retain attorneys�and retain our team of technicians from cameramen to outreach organizers.

Can this new work be done?

Is there any choice?

Honestly and personally, I was hoping for some rest and time off.

But a lifetime of your work and mine is now in the balance.

PLEASE, say, "Count me in to count the votes" by supporting the 2016 Stolen Election Investigation for a donation of any size no matter how small or large

Be listed as a producer ($1,000) or co-producer ($500) in the credits of the broadcast version of my film The Best Democracy Money Can Buy

Stay informed and get a signed DVD of my film The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, a signed copy of the book with the same title or better still - get the Book & DVD combo.

And does an angel have the $8K needed for our Washington work and filming? If so, flap your wings.

I can't thank you enough for all the years of support. Alas... our work is not done.

Greg Palast
and the Palast Investigations Team

64 comments

Life Under Trump

Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=31568">Rebecca Gordon, TomDispatch</a>

Monday, 21 November 2016 09:22

Gordon writes: "I'm too old and too stubborn to cede my country to the forces of hatred and a nihilistic desire to blow the whole thing up just to see where the pieces come down. I've fought, and organized, and loved too long to give up now."

The cover of 'TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald' by Timothy O'Brien. (photo: Warner Books)

Life Under Trump

By Rebecca Gordon, TomDispatch

21 November 16

At 72, I experienced election night with a 103-degree temperature, so it was literally a fever-dream for me. And in a certain sense, it�s remained so ever since. Now that a white supremacist has just been made the next president�s closest White House adviser, and the president-elect has called conspiracy theorist Alex Jones of Infowars to thank him and his followers for their part in his election victory, we have reasonable confirmation that we are indeed in a fever-dream America.

Hate incidents are on the rise. It�s easy enough to imagine the Bundy brothers being let loose in the West. A climate change denier is running the Trump environmental policy transition. The candidate himself will arrive in Washington with an enemies list already in formation (beating Dick Nixon to the punch by years). The mainstream media have tied themselves in apologetic knots for believing the pollsters on Hillary�s �victory� and not bothering to talk enough to the white working class voters who came out for Trump (and whom Clinton abandoned for white millionaires and billionaires). And the new president is being normalized by the old one, who previously excoriated him in the name of democracy, while mainstream pundits and journalists desperately look for signs that Donald Trump will be a pragmatic, recognizable American president once he takes the mantle of power.

Thanks to the Obama years (not to speak of the Bush ones), our new �pragmatic� president will enter the Oval Office fully weaponized. He will have expanded and expansive executive powers of death, destruction, and coercion directly at his disposal when it comes to acts like assassination by drone, surveillance, global kidnapping operations, the pursuit of leakers and whistleblowers, and the torture of potential terror suspects, among many other things. At his beck and call, he will have a private army of 70,000 elite troops -- the Special Operations forces -- already scattered across the planet, and a private air force of CIA-run drones at bases ringing, or actually in, the Greater Middle East. Put another way, Donald J. Trump is not going to be the president of the Philippines. He�s going to be the head of the single most powerful, most potentially destructive, most potentially intrusive force on the planet and on many of the powers he�ll inherit there are remarkably few restraints. That is, in fact, anything but normal.

In the meantime, the rest of us have ended up in the fun house. The mirrors that line the walls are weird. It�s truly hard to tell what world we�re looking at. We�re wandering in here lost and freaked out. Fears are rising.

Whatever Donald Trump ends up doing, however, he�s just a symptom. His already certifiably bizarre pre-presidency was born of a long, grim history, domestic and foreign. As Donald Trump leads an ever more extreme Republican Party (and the American people) into a darkening future, it's probably necessary to add that, if there were such a thing as national psychiatrists, as a country we might now be diagnosed with some kind of personality disorder. Today, TomDispatch regular Rebecca Gordon takes us on a journey deep into our already disordered and disorderly world (before the Trump presidency even starts), offering -- surprisingly enough -- a little hope along the way.

-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch

Life Under Trump
Night Terrors and Daytime Hopes

he night after the election, this long-time pacifist dreamed she shot a big white man carrying an arsenal of guns. He was wandering around a room full of people, waving a pistol and threatening to fire. Someone pushed a gun into my hand and said, �Shoot now, while his back is turned!� I shot. Blood seeped from a hole in his back. He fell. I woke up stunned.

And the election results had not changed.

Night Fears

More bad nights have followed, filled with dreams in which people who know me well accuse me of terrible things I haven�t done or of failing to protect people in my charge.

And there have been nights when my partner and I hold each other in the dark and whisper our worst fears. Some of these are personal and selfish: Under the new regime, will I still be able to get the meds that keep me going? Will I have to work for money until I die to keep my health care benefits? Because I turn 65 next year, will I miss the 2017 Medicare cutoff and fall under Paul Ryan�s plan to turn that program into a voucher system?

Some fears are national: How can the two of us, and the organizations we�re connected with, continue to shield the vulnerable in an era when a white supremacist serves as the president�s chief strategist?

Some are global: Can we hold back the rising seas that are already closing over island nations on a planet where Donald Trump promises to abandon the fight against climate change and walk away from the historic Paris climate accord?

And then, it�s back to the personal again: Just how vulnerable are we, two middle class white lesbians in our sixties, during a Trump presidency? In the 1980s and 1990s, we used to wonder why the two things our �gay leaders� thought we wanted most in the world were to join the Army and get married. Now, the question isn�t what we�ll be able to do, but what we won�t be able to do.

Admittedly, the two of us will never again need the right to an abortion that a Trump-influenced Supreme Court will probably devolve to the states, essentially abrogating the Roe v. Wade decision. But I did need it in 1975, and I thank God I had it. On the other hand, such a court could easily decide to revisit its 2003 decision in Lawrence v. Texas, which invalidated sodomy laws. It�s easy enough to forget now that, as recently as 1986, in Bowers v. Hardwick, the court opined that no one has �a fundamental right to engage in homosexual sodomy.�

But the terror that�s shaken us the most is that, in the coming years, we might witness the final collapse of the rule of law in this country. I�ve spent the last decade and a half writing about torture and other war crimes committed in the global �war on terror.� First, the Bush administration brought us two illegal wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, along with �enhanced interrogation techniques� and a permanent extralegal prison at Guant�namo Bay. The Obama administration followed with its policy of extrajudicial murder by drone, and undeclared but very real wars in Libya, Syria, and Yemen. Between them, they twisted and warped and finally broke domestic and international laws of all sorts.

But the past two administrations at least gave lip service to the rule of law. In Donald Trump, we have a president-elect who has said he will simply ignore the law if it gets in his way. In a primary debate last March, he insisted that the military would follow any order he gave -- whether to torture detainees or to �take out� the families of suspected terrorists. When debate moderator Bret Baier pointed out that soldiers are prohibited from obeying an illegal order, Trump answered, �They won�t refuse. They�re not gonna refuse me. Believe me. I�m a leader. I�ve always been a leader. I�ve never had any problem leading people. If I say do it, they�re going to do it.� Apparently he got some advice about saying such things in public; the following day found him walking back the comments, acknowledging that �the United States is bound by laws and treaties and I will not order our military or other officials to violate those laws.� But it�s pretty clear what he really thinks about the binding power of law.

There�s so much to worry about with a Trump presidency. Why does contempt for the rule of law stand out for me? Part of the answer is that by making laws we human beings both recognize and secure our need to live together. In the thirteenth century, Thomas Aquinas defined a law as �an ordinance of reason for the common good, made by [whoever] has care of the community, and promulgated.� It�s still a pretty decent definition: a reasonable rule made for the good of everyone in the community, rather than for one particular group, by those with responsibility for ensuring that good, and made public so that everyone knows what the law is and how it operates. No secret laws. No secret courts. A premature medieval democrat, Aquinas allowed for the possibility that the one who �has care of the community� might, in fact, be a body of elected representatives, or even the community as a whole.

The law is not sexy. It�s not click-bait. But it can, for instance, be the protective wall between a group of people designated as less than human and those who hate them (though that is, of course, not Trump�s idea of a useful wall). That�s only true, however, if the law is enforced. International law could also be the barrier, the wall, that protects the world from a country that for the past 15 years has behaved like an angry two-year-old giant, stomping around the world, waving missiles and smashing things with its outsized feet. Or it might have been, had Barack Obama not begun his presidency by promising that he (and therefore the rest of us) would �look forward as opposed to looking backwards� when it came to the crimes of the Bush administration.

That failure to respect the law made it clear that, in twenty-first-century America, some people are exempt from it. Obama continued,

�And part of my job is to make sure that, for example, at the CIA, you�ve got extraordinarily talented people who are working very hard to keep Americans safe. I don�t want them to suddenly feel like they�ve got to spend their all their time looking over their shoulders.�

I think people who have extraordinary power should spend a good part of their time looking over their shoulders. And more to the point, we should be able to look over theirs.

It appears that the International Criminal Court has finally been looking over the CIA�s shoulders. In its annual report, issued earlier this month, the chief prosecutor indicated that she will likely open a full investigation into �war crimes of torture and related ill treatment, by U.S. military forces deployed to Afghanistan and in secret detention facilities operated by the Central Intelligence Agency.� The report observes:

�These alleged crimes were not the abuses of a few isolated individuals. Rather, they appear to have been committed as part of approved interrogation techniques in an attempt to extract �actionable intelligence� from detainees.�

This is the first move the ICC has made to investigate U.S. war crimes and so to hold this country to the standards of international law. We�ll see how far the effort goes. The court�s jurisdiction here is murky indeed, because the United States is not party to the treaty that created it.

Day Dreams

I teach ethics to college students. The Wednesday morning after the election I threw out the lesson plan for the day (a lecture on institutionalized state torture). Instead, we considered the election. We watched a few videos: the live feed of Hillary Clinton�s concession speech, Trump�s victory speech, and CNN commentator Van Jones�s unfiltered reaction to the election (�this is a whitelash�). Then I invited my students to discuss how they felt about Trump�s stunning victory.

A young white woman started the conversation by saying how angry she was at the �uneducated white men� who voted for Trump. I asked my students what percentage of people in the U.S. they thought had four-year college degrees. (The answer is roughly a third.) �That means,� I said, �that two-thirds of the people in this country don�t have the chance to go to college. If they are uneducated, it is not entirely by choice.� I went on to talk about the real pain of watching your income shrink, and losing the work that defined your place and your value in a society that measures everything in dollars and cents. I suggested that even as we abhor the political choice to support a candidate who openly declares his racism, misogyny, and contempt for Muslims, disabled people, and the rule of law, we can still respect that pain -- and the humanity of those who feel it.

An Asian American woman began to cry a little as she described her terror not only for herself, but for African American and Latino friends who are more vulnerable than she is.

I can understand her fear. Between the day after the election and Monday, November 14th, the Southern Poverty Law Center had already logged 437 reports of hate incidents, many of them involving �direct references to the Trump campaign and its slogans.�

I�ve been remembering the times I�ve been yelled at, contemptuously addressed as �sir,� or chased down the street by people who�d discerned that I�m a lesbian. Donald Trump has spent the last year telling people that their hatred is a good thing, and to feel free to express it with physical violence. It�s no wonder some of us are a little scared.

In another class a few days later, an Indian American student told us two stories. The first was about an African American friend of hers at the University of California, Berkeley. She was walking away from a post-election anti-Trump demonstration on campus, when she found herself surrounded by a group of young white men. They began to taunt her. And then they did the thing that Trump boasted his fame allows him to do. They grabbed her pussy. She ran, and fortunately they�d had their �fun� and didn�t follow her.

The second story was about my student herself. �I was on the BART [our local subway] going to visit my grandmother this weekend,� she began.

�I noticed a group of white men around a very young woman, about 18, wearing a hijab. They were making fun of her and calling her names. So I went and sat down next to her and told her to ignore them. When we got to her stop, she was afraid to leave, afraid they�d follow her. I had another five stops to go, but I couldn�t let her leave alone, so I got out, too. And so did the boys. They followed us out of the station and stood near us yelling as the young woman waited for her ride to come. They started to get closer, and her ride still hadn�t made it, so I called a Lyft, and rode with her to her home.�

My student�s courage humbled me.

No New Normal

The full-time faculty at my university has been working for months without a contract. We�ve had a change of administration, and the new regime is fighting hard against a demand for a very modest salary increase. To put the struggle into words, my colleagues have made buttons sporting a red circle and the words �new normal� with a red slash through it. I�ve been wearing one to show solidarity with my full-time colleagues. Since Donald Trump�s election, I�ve taken to wearing it off campus as well. It seems like a particularly appropriate slogan these days for those of us who don�t want the new normal to mean a return to a very old normal. Having it on makes me feel a bit braver and a bit more hopeful.

We need hope now, so we can face a world in which hopelessness, despair, and the tears of my students could also become the new norm. Hope doesn�t mean pretending that the danger isn�t very clear and very present. If your tastes run to good left rhetoric, there�s the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci�s suggestion in his Letters from Prison that we should combine pessimism of the intellect with an optimism of the will. In an article on �The Indifferent,� he wrote, �To really live means to be a citizen and to take part.�

That�s a sentiment not so different from what my students read in Aristotle�s Nicomachean Ethics. Human beings, says Aristotle, are political animals; we live best when we live as citizens. He also believed that our best qualities are habits we get by practicing them. �We become just,� he says, �by doing just acts.� So you might think of hope as a habit we build in ourselves by doing hopeful things. Think of each of us as assembling it like a rock wall from bumpy stones that don�t necessarily look like they�ll ever fit together. Hope is the wall we can build, stone by stone, to fence in a future Trumpian autocracy.

A few rocks in my personal wall of hope:

It�s 1984. I�m in Nicaragua traveling with 15 other people jammed into the back of a tiny pickup truck, bouncing through dangerous territory. It�s the height of the war the Reagan administration has illegally funded against the left-wing Sandinista government, which was installed after the ouster of a U.S.-backed dictator, Anastasio Somoza. The road we�re traveling down goes through territory controlled by the CIA-backed Contra rebels. We�re heading toward a town called San Juan del Bocay. We round a bend and the land flattens out, revealing a barn standing in a field. Someone who has clearly learned to read and write since the 1979 Sandinista revolution has painted a slogan on the side of the building in careful block letters: �Nosotro vencimo Somo libre Nunca volveremo a cer esclavo.�

The spelling is terrible; there�s no punctuation; and since, like all Nicaraguans, the writer doesn�t pronounce the letter �s� at the end of a word, he or she doesn�t even realize that it�s there, as in �nosotros� -- �we.� But it doesn�t matter. The meaning couldn�t be clearer. �We won. We are free. We will never go back to being slaves.�

When people decide that they are human beings and not beasts of burden, that is a genie no one can shove back into the bottle. Over the last 50 years, groups of people in this country have one by one fought for and claimed their full humanity: African Americans, women, LGB and now T people, those with disabilities, immigrants of whatever documentation status. Trumplandia may not yet recognize our humanity, but we do. You can�t shove that back in the bottle either.

It�s the Thursday after the 2016 election. I�m riding my bike towards campus when I see a phalanx of San Francisco police lining Valencia Street. Then I realize that there�s a mid-day, mid-week march coming down the sidewalk. As I get closer, I see that they�re all middle school students, shouting and carrying signs like �Dump Trump� and �Love Trumps Hate!� I stop and call to them, �You�re going to finish what people like me started.� They cheer for themselves and their own astonishing courage. You can�t shove youth back in the bottle. As the folksinger Holly Near sang decades ago, �You can�t murder youth, my friend, youth grows the whole world round.�

It�s 7:45 a.m. on the Friday after the election. I�m entering the building where I teach my 8:00 class. On the door, someone has taped up a simple black and white notice:

�To all those hurt by
recent election
results:
Lets mourn and then
Lets organize.�

Details follow about where people can meet �to openly discuss methods and ideas to sidestep this horrific election result.� That meeting, says the notice, is to last from �1:00 p.m. -- till whenever we come up with something.� It ends with this observation: �We can be the change we wish to see, we just have to embody it.� There may be a comma splice in that last sentence and an apostrophe missing from �lets,� but again the meaning is clear. These young people are the inheritors of everything my comrades and I have worked for so much of our lives.

The day after the election, I made a rare post on Facebook:

�Bad enough we gave the world 8 years of G.W. Bush. Now this. We hadn't figured on the depth of hatred and despair in this country. Now to pick ourselves up and get back to work. No emigration for this woman.�

I�m an old dyke, a little ragged around the edges, and prone to the occasional night terror. But I�m too old and too stubborn to cede my country to the forces of hatred and a nihilistic desire to blow the whole thing up just to see where the pieces come down. I�ve fought, and organized, and loved too long to give up now. And Trump and the people who run him can't shove me -- or any of us -- back in that bottle.

Rebecca Gordon, a TomDispatch regular, teaches in the philosophy department at the University of San Francisco. She is the author of American Nuremberg: The U.S. Officials Who Should Stand Trial for Post-9/11 War Crimes. Her previous books include Mainstreaming Torture: Ethical Approaches in the Post-9/11 United States and Letters from Nicaragua.

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