Lazy Saturday Reads: Something Is Very Wrong
Posted: June 23, 2018 Filed under: Afternoon Reads, U.S. Politics 43 Comments
Marek Okrassa
Good Afternoon!!
The Trump administration is torturing children. Please read this article; it’s not long. It’s an anecdote from an “emergency physician in South Texas,” Alicia Hart.
The New Yorker: A Physician in South Texas on an Unnerving Encounter with an Eight-Year-Old Boy in Immigration Detention.
Last week, on a day when Hart was on duty, the charge nurse called her over to examine a child who needed clearance for psychiatric treatment. He was eight years old, and he sat hunched in a recliner chair next to the nurses’ station. Four men, who had brought him from an unidentified holding facility for migrant children, hovered around him….
“The guardians didn’t step more than two feet away from the kid. One of the four was an armed police officer. I thought, Does it take an army of adult men to take care of one elementary schooler? I walked over to the boy, crouched down, and asked him, in Spanish, ‘How do you feel?’ ‘Sad,’ he said.
Carl Theodor von Blaas, Austrian, (1886-1960) Woman Reading
“The boy had been in custody for over a month. One of his guardians told me that he had been ‘acting out’ and threatening to harm himself, by jumping from his bed. This man told me, ‘I’m his clinician,’ but he was definitely not a doctor. I don’t know if he’s a social worker, a medical assistant, a housekeeper. I have no clue. But he obviously had been granted some sort of authority in regard to assessing children and determining what their needs are. He wouldn’t provide basic background. I couldn’t find out any information because he would say, ‘I’m not at liberty to tell you that’ and ‘You don’t need to know that,’ even though a lot of my questions were relevant to taking care of the child. I was asking things like ‘Where are his parents?’ [….]
“I asked the clinician, ‘When is this child going to be reunited with his parents?’ He was evasive. First it was ‘Oh, well, we don’t know.’ And then it was ‘Well, he won’t be reunited with his parents unless he behaves.’ The lack of compassion was scary, and it didn’t seem like there was really a plan.
“This boy seemed devastated—quiet and withdrawn. He barely spoke. I asked if he needed a hug. I kneeled down in front of the recliner, and this kid just threw himself into my arms and didn’t let go. He cried and I cried. And to think he’s been in a facility for a month without a hug, away from his parents, and scared, and not knowing when he’ll see them again or if he’ll see them again. While I held him, I heard the men standing behind me muttering that I was ‘rewarding his bad behavior.’ Thankfully, it was in English, so I don’t think the boy understood what they were saying, but it just revealed their attitudes toward these kids.
Hart recommended the boy for inpatient psychiatric treatment in order to get him away from his “caretakers.” She worried that he might be given antipsychotic drugs, but she felt she could send him back to the place where he had obviously been mistreated.
Michael Pracht, Girl reading
Can anyone doubt that something similar is happening to thousands of refugee children? This is an outrage. We truly do need UN intervention. I’ve heard that UN and Red Cross inspectors have been turned away from Trump’s child concentration camps. This cannot go on.
This morning Putin biographer Masha Gessen appeared on MSNBC’s AM Joy. Joy Reid asked her, “Is it too much to call this fascism? Gessen replied, I don’t think it’s too much. I don’t think we have fascist rule in this country, but what we have is a fascist leader. We have a nativist, nationalist leader…”
Gessen writes at The New Yorker: By Separating Families at the Border, the Trump Administration Enforces the “Rule by Nobody.”
Donald Trump said that the Democrats made him do it. Jeff Sessions, the Attorney General, said it was the Bible. Kirstjen Nielsen, the Secretary of Homeland Security, said it was the law. They all said it wasn’t them. In their unified defense of the policy of separating children from their families at the border, Administration officials have adopted a technique of deflection that renders victims and critics powerless: they have depersonalized the violence.
This is how violence works in the world’s most cruel and terrifying societies. The victims of genocide, ethnic cleansing, mass deportations, mass incarceration, man-made famines, and other disasters that humans intentionally visit on the “other” are always anonymous….But in the Administration’s telling, it’s not only the victims who are anonymous—it is also the perpetrators. When Trump blames the cruelty at the border on the Democrats; when Sessions says that God made him enforce the law indiscriminately; or when Nielsen claims, in effect, to be just following orders, the nation’s top officials are not merely lying; they are de-personifying the perpetrators. They are not merely refusing to be held accountable but are saying that no one will account for the violence.
Gina Brown (USA)
The Trump Administration didn’t invent this tactic. The Russian President, Vladimir Putin, has perfected it over the years….But, of course, Putin didn’t invent this deflection technique, either.
Writing about the relationship between violence and bureaucracy, Hannah Arendt said, “In a fully developed bureaucracy there is nobody left with whom one could argue, to whom one could present grievances, on whom the pressures of power could be exerted.” She called bureaucracy the “rule by Nobody.”
Thank goodness Americans rose up and expressed their outrage at Trump’s cruelty and racism. But we have to make sure that every single one of the children who have been effectively kidnapped by this administration is reunited with his or her family.
At Vanity Fair, Peter Hamby writes that Trump lost this round because of pictures: “The Images Are Out Of His Control: How Trump Lost His Grip On The Child-Detention Narrative.
Rarely has Donald Trump been on his heels as he has over the past week. Even during the hottest-burning controversies and scandals of his administration, Trump is usually the stick-and-move president: provoke, evade, pivot to the next thing. The media has a hard time keeping up, and congressional Democrats are too busy holding limp-dick press conferences like it’s still 2006. They’re about as effective as those digital finger-waggers who tweet “Sir!” at the president every time he burps. As I wrote previously for the Hive, Trump is absolutely curb-stomping his opponents in the battle for attention.
But the wrenching story of migrant children being separated from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border has unfolded differently. Trump has been forced to play defense. It’s not just because the policy is cruel, inhumane, and an ugly stain on our country’s moral integrity. It is all of those things. But Trump has done plenty of ugly things. What’s different this time, and the handful of times Trump has found himself losing, is that there are pictures.
Marius Borgeaud, Swiss (1861-1924), Woman Reading at the Window
Think of the handful of moments when Trump has been subjected to a sustained drubbing that’s lasted more than just a day or two: the Access Hollywood tape. Sean Spicer’s lie about the size of the inauguration crowd. The massive airport protests around the travel ban. Trump’s “very fine people” comment about neo-Nazi marchers in Charlottesville. The Rob Porter domestic-abuse allegations fiasco. (Porter has denied the allegations.) And now the gross panorama of migrant children being separated from their desperate parents. All of these stories were accompanied by images—pictures or video—that either tilted public opinion against the president or blatantly contradicted the dubious claims of Trump and his allies.
We don’t yet have photos of the missing girls and babies; Trump is hiding them because he know those images could be even more shocking than the ones we’ve seen up till now.
And so far Trump and Sessions have not ended their “zero tolerance” policy. USA Today reports that as a result of that policy, the feds are not dealing with serious drug smuggling cases.
Federal prosecutors warned they were diverting resources from drug-smuggling cases in southern California to handle the flood of immigration charges brought on by the Trump administration’s border crackdown, records obtained by USA TODAY show.
Days after Attorney General Jeff Sessions instructed prosecutors to bring charges against anyone who enters the United States illegally, a Justice Department supervisor in San Diego sent an email to border authorities warning that immigration cases “will occupy substantially more of our resources.” He wrote that the U.S. Attorney’s Office there was “diverting staff, both support and attorneys, accordingly.”
The email, sent by the lawyer who runs the office’s major crimes unit, said prosecutors needed to streamline their work on smuggling cases. He said that would mean tight deadlines – sometimes just a few hours to produce reports and recordings – for those that would land in federal court. Going forward, the lawyer, Fred Sheppard, warned, if agents can’t meet that high bar, “the case will be declined.” [….]
Johan Gudmundsen-Holmgreen, 1900
Still, there are signs that border authorities are seeking to prosecute drug smugglers in state courts instead, even though the possible sentences typically are harsher in the federal system.
The District Attorney’s office in San Diego said Friday that the number of cases submitted to them by border authorities had more than doubled since the administration started its border crackdown.
Read more at USA Today.
One more recommended read, and it’s a long one. The Financial Times: Donald Trump and the 1930s playbook: liberal democracy comes unstuck.
“I really don’t care. Do u?” said graffiti on the back of Melania Trump’s coat as she boarded the plane for Texas to visit encaged child migrants. No one, except Donald Trump, who tweeted that her garb was meant as a criticism of the “fake news” media, could be sure whom the First Lady was targeting. Some thought she was channelling her husband’s views. Others believed she was telling the world what she thought of her marriage. Either way, it captured the nihilism of a week in which the west’s liberal democratic glue appeared to be coming unstuck. It was hard to miss the echoes of the 1930s.
“Make no mistake, there is a concerted attack on the constitutional liberal order,” says Constanze Stelzenmüller, a German scholar at the Brookings Institution. “And it is being spearheaded by the president of the United States.”
Mr Trump started the week by trying to undermine a key American ally. He attacked Angela Merkel’s “tenuous” coalition government in Germany for “allowing in millions of people who have so strongly and violently changed their culture”. It followed a summit between the premiers of Austria and Bavaria in which they called for an “axis of the willing from Berlin to Vienna to Rome” to stop migration. Italy’s deputy prime minister, Matteo Salvini, called for a “census” of Roma citizens evoking Italy’s fascist-era registry of Jews. “Unfortunately, we have to keep” those with valid resident permits, he said.
Back in Washington, public outrage forced Mr Trump to pause his policy of corralling “tender age” migrants into separate child detention centres. He nevertheless ordered the Pentagon to prepare camps to house up to 20,000 children. Last weekend Mr Trump called Hungary’s proudly “illiberal” Viktor Orban to issue a joint call for “strong national borders”.
The differences with the 1930s are obvious. No one expects war to break out today. There is no Imperial Japan, Nazi Germany nor fascist Italy egging each other on to plunder the old order. Nor is the US standing aloof. But the parallels are too troubling to ignore. In Europe, the forces of disintegration are on the march. The status quo is struggling to come up with a defence.
Read much more at the FT link.
What else is happening? What stories are you following today?
peej
Carissa
ecocatwoman
mablue2
peggysue22
quixote
skydancingguestblogger
Mona (aka Wonk the Vote)
Sky Dancing 
Have a nice weekend, Sky Dancers!
Sanctimonious liar and child abuse enabler thinks she deserves respect? Thinks businesses should be allowed to refuse service to LGBTQ but should have to make dinner for her lying ass and throw in respect as well??? WTF?
Nielsen, Miller and now Sanders – shunned in public as they should be. I hope it keeps up.
She needs to look up respect in the dictionary. It’s more than polite greetings (as in to pay respects). It’s main meaning is to hold someone in high regard, to treat with consideration.
On second thought, forget it. She’d have to look all those words up and they still wouldn’t mean anything to her. At the rate she’s burning truth and facts to ashes, she’ll be able to do a lot more than smoky eyeshadow soon. Prepare for the full Goth look.
It’s not just her lies. She’s incredibly rude and demeaning to WH reporters.
Says a lot about the restaurant owner that she won’t serve fascists and their enablers.
Hey, that’s right in line with not baking a wedding cake for gays! Don’t complain, Press Secretary. And if it wasn’t such a big deal to you why are you tweeting about it?
And why is she using her official twitter account to unleash the Nazi Hellhounds on a small business owner? She has the right to say anything she wants to say about her personal life, on her personal twitter account. I guess she got the impression this is okay from her direct supervisor.
Great article about a woman who digs up ancestry info on anti-immigration folks.
Trump aide Stephen Miller, meet your great-grandfather, who flunked his naturalization test
Do Unto Others, indeed.
While they’re not really stopping separations, and not reuniting families, the Congressional Repubs have quietly cut the food stamp program (SNAP).
As Pierce says, these really are the mole people.
I’ve been keeping track of the coming economic crash … it looks like I live in ground zero. We haven’t recovered from Jindal’s terrible policies yet. But here are a few of them,
China is slamming $34 billion worth of US goods with tariffs. Here are the states that will be hurt the most.
https://amp.businessinsider.com/trump-china-tariff-list-states-exports-losers-2018-6
Southeast Missouri nail company gets hammered by Trump’s tariffs
Arkansas Farm Bureau president “concerned” with soybean prices because of Chinese tariffs
http://katv.com/news/local/arkansas-farm-bureau-president-concerned-with-soybean-prices-because-of-chinese-tariffs
Double whammy: U.S. pork, fruit producers brace for second wave of Chinese tariffs
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trade-china-tariffs/double-whammy-u-s-pork-fruit-producers-brace-for-second-wave-of-chinese-tariffs-idUSKBN1JH0KZ
I recommending your hoard some cash frankly. Prices are going to be sky high on some things. Possibly will have shortages. Then, the market will be flooded with pork products before those companies and farmers start going under. This is not going to be pretty.
I’ll probably see it shortly in decreased barge and river traffic since most of the food belt’s product come down the river on the barges and get loaded on the big ships blocks from my home. I have two international exporters of fruits and veggies and coffee really close and Purdue chicken gets sent to Cuba via Russians up the street.
I knew we were bombing Iraq about 3 months before because all the national guard tanks and Humvee were unloaded to merchant marine ships at the Poland Ave wharf which is like 3 blocks straight down from me.
A minor point but I resent “limp dick press conferences.” What can the Democrats do? They-we-are the minority of all three branches of Government. I notice that Hamby didn’t have any concrete suggestions. I did see many Democratic Congresspeople in Texas, today, describing the awful conditions they had demanded to see. Nothing will change until the Democrats take over in November or the Republicans find their souls and I’m not holding my breath for the latter.
I think more Democrats need to be getting on TV denouncing Trump’s policies, although I don’t know how difficult that is. The Sunday News shows mostly have Republicans and Bernie Sanders, who is useless.
We’ve been discussing where we are on this list ….
Depending on the issue, we’re in all stages. “Deny the existence of any crime” has been going on since the 2016 campaign. But no death lists yet — that we know of.
You’re right, BB, and they can want to go on Sunday shows but who’s to say that the shows will book them. We remember the amount of coverage given to Trump and the coverage given to HRC (mostly negative) but the Media will never acknowledge their complicity in placing the monster in the White House.
The Repugs are clearly the bad guys, but we need to demand that non-democrat, carpetbaggers, like Sandburg, not be allowed to run as democrats; he pulled a lot of votes, Hillz won by 3,000,000 votes; if Bernie had’t run on the demo ticket we’d have been in much better shape. More strong democrats need to point out the LIES for what they are not, merely repeat what others are saying. STAND UP and don’t back down.
Laurie Garrett @Laurie_Garrett on Twitter
Click to access Government-Reform-and-Reorg-Plan.pdf
Who’s Really Crossing the U.S. Border, and Why They’re Coming
https://www.lawfareblog.com/whos-really-crossing-us-border-and-why-theyre-coming
https://twitter.com/KFILE/status/1010542808694951936
and the blowback is fierce for sistewife Huckabuck #Restaurants4Sarah
Just finished the FT article BB. Putin is certainly getting his rubles worth out of KKKremlin Caligula. What a mess!!!
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jun/22/trump-world-1930s-children-parents-europe-migrants
Opinion
Inspired by Trump, the world could be heading back to the 1930s
Jonathan Freedland
Newborn babies have been taken away from their mothers!!
newborns? Seriously? Newborns? okay, that’s seriously evil
Mother have been told their children will be put up for adoption.
Whaaaaaaaaat?
These aren’t even the mole people. They’re a decomposing unidentifiable pile of rot.
That cannot possibly be legal. That’s child trafficking.
Unfortunately state and federal laws require ending parental rights after a certain amount of time. That’s how they steal the children. It was reported on MSNBC this morning by a legal correspondent. Read this article from 2012.
Also, the feds are reporting relatives to ICE if they try to get the children out of custody.
Wow – the couple who adopted the boy should be ashamed of themselves. Courts wouldn’t even provide a translator for the mother? That’s still trafficking in my opinion.
The whole situation is just unbelievable. Our government can raid businesses – arrest undocumented workers – and steal their kids. Geez – I want to move to Belize or somewhere. Anywhere but here.
That’s awful! It’s those fucking christian baby mills!!!
Mike Godwin of “Godwin’s Law” Fame speaks
http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-godwin-godwins-law-20180624-story.html
A Jury May Have Sentenced a Man to Death Because He’s Gay. And the Justices Don’t Care.
During deliberations, the jury had often discussed the fact that Mr. Rhines was gay and there was “a lot of disgust” about it, one juror recalled in an interview, according to the court petition. Another said that jurors knew he was gay and “thought that he shouldn’t be able to spend his life with men in prison.” A third recounted hearing that if the jury did not sentence Mr. Rhines to death, “if he’s gay, we’d be sending him where he wants to go.”