— from the Independent Media Institute
On June 5, a call came into the Broward County Sheriff's Office alleging an ongoing hostage situation at the family home of student activist David Hogg, a survivor of the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. Law enforcement officers arrived on the scene only to find no such situation: Hogg and his family had been swatted.
Swatting involves falsely reporting a crime, which leads to the deployment of heavily armed law enforcement officers, usually para-militarized Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) teams, who anticipate confronting violence. Hogg was not home, and was therefore unharmed, but previous swatting victims have not been so fortunate.
Trump’s most lasting legacy might be his impact on the federal court system. It must be stopped.
Quite apart from the Supreme Court, Trump is already having a dramatic effect on the lower federal courts.
Even though much of his legislative agenda has stalled in Congress, Trump is nominating and getting Senate confirmation of judges to the federal bench much faster than previous presidents.
Many of Trump’s picks for these lifetime positions are extremists with little judicial experience. For example, Thomas Farr, his nominee for a North Carolina judgeship has ties to a group that has promoted white supremacist policies and eugenics.
The NY Times:
Trump … signed an executive order meant to end the separation of families at the border by detaining parents and children together for an indefinite period.
"I didn’t like the sight or the feeling of families being separated," [said the man who separated the families].
The president’s order does nothing to address the plight of the more than 2,300 children who have already been separated from their parents.
The surreal spectacle of thousands of little children — including toddlers and even infants — torn from their parents’ arms and jailed like animals in cages by US immigration authorities has rightfully shocked the world’s conscience. It has left many Americans asking, “what have we become?”
It’s not what we’ve become but rather what we’ve always been. We are a nation that has, since its earliest days, stolen children from their parents. When a country is built upon a foundation of genocide and slavery, such crimes are inevitable.
Leaders are routinely confronted with philosophical dilemmas. Here’s a classic one for our Trumptopian times: If you make enemies out of your friends and friends out of your enemies, where does that leave you?
What does winning (or losing) really look like? Is a world in which walls of every sort encircle America’s borders a goal worth seeking? And what would be left in a future fragmented international economic system marked by tit-for-tat tariffs, travel restrictions, and hyper-nationalism? Ultimately, how will such a world affect regular people?
The Koch brothers’ extremist political agenda of empowering multinational corporations to reign as sovereigns has always been inextricably entwined with the profiteering agenda of their wholly-owned, $100-billion-a-year industrial conglomerate.
The brothers’ plutocratic view of business-as-government even has a name: Pompeo. As in Mike Pompeo, the Trump regime’s latest secretary of state.
Years ago, while living in the billionaire brothers’ hometown of Wichita, Kansas, Mike got lucky when they pumped a load of Koch capital into a business he’d started, turning him into a millionaire. Then, they partnered with him in another business that essentially made him a Koch Industries subsidiary: politics.
— from Foreign Policy In Focus
The U.S. Congress has power over two very important things: money and information.
It can, in theory and practice, end a war by refusing to fund it. It can — and has — compelled the leading architects of American foreign policy — CIA directors, national security advisors, secretaries of defense — to answer for their uses and abuses of executive power publicly and under oath.
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Justice system abuses mothers with no apologies
The piercing, bone-deep pain for a parent from having their child forcefully snatched away by authorities is a hurt Debbie Sims Africa knows in horrific ways.
The immense suffering some immigrant parents currently experience -- triggered by the child-snatching/ family separation anti-immigration policies pursued by the Trump Administration on America’s southern border – is something that impacts Africa very personally.
On August 8, 1978 authorities in Philadelphia, literally snatched Africa’s two-year-old daughter from her arms.
Attorney General Sessions didn’t lose any sleep over those children forcibly separated from their parents. He maintained most of the asylum seekers will be denied because “many of them . . . like to make more money . . .” Unfortunately, however, when children are used as bargaining chips we may never know the conditions these families have experienced. As Daily Kos argues, “sign here and get your baby back” is hardly a way to elicit accurate information.
Trump’s hard right base imagines hordes of greedy, poorly educated workers eager to steal our well- deserved prosperity. Unfortunately, amidst the justifiable horror evoked by US authorities’ criminal treatment of these children there is too little examination of the conditions that spur many of these mass migrations. Nor is this an accident. US policy has played a major role in fostering or sustaining the violence that impels many to flee. Admitting that role by implication challenges the legitimacy of those policies.
Q: “And babies?”
A: “And babies.”
These four words, broadcast by CBS News in 1969, had a profound impact on the American public, the Nixon presidency and the course of the Vietnam War. Questions about babies have arisen again at the White House, this time about thousands of immigrant children, some only months old, ripped from their parents and jailed in cages on the orders of President Trump.
They gather every Monday. Hundreds of low-wage workers, faith leaders, civil rights organizers, trade union members and liberal activists from all over the US have been taking to the streets every Monday since May 13th, to protest inequality, racism, ecological devastation, militarism and all kinds of discrimination.
They call themselves the “Poor People’s Campaign,” a direct reference to the movement launched by Martin Luther King Jr. a few months before his assassination on 4 April 1968.
The heart of the campaign was a mule-drawn procession from Marks, Mississippi, at that time the poorest town in the poorest State of the United States, eventually arriving in Washington. Today’s “Poor People’s Campaign” will also culminate in a national action at the US Capitol. It will be on 23 June, UN Public Service Day.
Peace, love and Donald Trump?
I get the skepticism regarding the tentative nuclear disarmament agreement the president and Kim Jong-un reached last week, but not the cynicism — not the outright dismissal.
It’s too easy to hate Trump, but he isn’t the point. In his reckless unpredictability — in his lust for applause and desperation to steal headlines from the Robert Mueller investigation — he snatched an opportunity to meet with the leader of North Korea . . . “Little Rocket Man” . . . and talk about reducing the danger of nuclear war. Say what?
An implicit coalition of corporate media, Democratic partisans and others loyal to the national security state are actively hostile to any agreement that would endanger the continuation of the 70-year-old Cold War between the United States and North Korea.
The hostility toward Donald Trump on the part of both corporate media (except for Fox News) and the Democratic Party establishment is obviously a factor in the negative response to the summit. Trump’s dysfunctional persona, extremist domestic strategy and attacks on the press had already created a hyper-adversarial political atmosphere that surrounds everything Trump says or does.
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According to the New York Times in one of its more elitist articles, Americans who can afford them are taking “culturally anointed vacations timed to big life events” like honeymoons, babymoons and now jobbymoons (trips between jobs). Now here’s some culturally anointed BS for the rest of us.
There are too many ridiculous conspiracy theories out there. I usually go with the most simple explanation.
I believe that Trump was having a pissing contest and he lost. He failed to predict the outcome. He wanted to inflict the most pain on as many refugees as he could. He forgot to consider the optics of crying children on TV 24/7.
Now we have one of the biggest failures of the Bureaucracy in history. Imagine taking thousands of kids and not getting the proper identifying information on them. Now they might never be matched with their parents. For years I gave free child care. I always had all of the information first - health concerns, allergies, contact info, etc etc etc
Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s longtime personal attorney, has resigned from his position as deputy finance chair of the Republican National Committee's Finance Committee as he considers cooperating with special counsel Robert Mueller, ABC News and CNN report.
In his resignation letter, Cohen cited the special counsel investigation, writing it’s “simply impossible” for him to proved the “the full time attention and dedication” the role requires.
As CNN reports, Cohen has told friends he’s “willing to give investigators information on President Trump.”
State terrorism comes in many forms, but one of its most cruel and revolting expressions is when it is aimed at children.
Separating children from their parents is indeed a form of terrorism and it points not only to a society that has lost its moral compass, but has also descended into such darkness that it demands both the loudest forms of moral outrage and a collective resistance aimed at eliminating the narratives, power relations and values that support it.
State violence against children has a long, dark history among authoritarian regimes.
Let’s be clear about something: Separating children from families, as the Trump regime is doing to undocumented immigrants, isn’t just cruel. It’s going to cause irreparable damage to the children involved — and probably to the parents too.
The difference is that developmental trauma — trauma experienced in childhood — is much more difficult to heal that trauma suffered as an adult. Trauma itself can be healed, but it’s painful, difficult, and as is often the case in this country, expensive. For many it’s simply out of reach.
I suffered childhood trauma. Here’s what it’s like. I knew from my earliest memories that something in me was not right. I thought it was my fault. I thought I was just born bad.
— from Foreign Policy In Focus
It’s a famous story, though perhaps not famous enough.
The 1939 voyage of the MS St. Louis, a German ocean liner, was recounted in a 1974 book and a 1976 film (both titled Voyage of the Damned) as well as a 1994 opera. This history is not forgotten. Yet so many unfortunate people around the world are still doomed to repeat it.
In 1939, the MS St. Louis carried more than 900 Jewish refugees away from Germany. The ship docked in Cuba, but the government there allowed only a handful of passengers to disembark. The others learned to their surprise that Havana didn’t recognize their visas. So, the ship headed to the United States. But the Roosevelt administration also refused to accept the refugees — and even sent out the Coast Guard to make sure that the ship didn’t try to dock illegally and unload its passengers. Canada, too, refused to get involved.
Just after noon Eastern Time today, on World Refugee Day, the president of the United States got small in his hole and backed down on his vicious policy of separating children from their families at the US/Mexico border. Appearing before a restive gaggle of reporters, Donald Trump announced he would be “signing something” later in the afternoon to effectively end the separation practice. A few hours later, the executive order ending family separations was signed.
The executive order, it is important to note, does not end the “zero-tolerance” policy that created this debacle in the first place. Migrants trying to cross the border illegally will still be arrested but will not have their children taken away. More ominously, the order’s method for keeping families together involves ending the ban on imprisoning children for no more than 20 days, which means the children will be subject to indefinite detention along with their parents.
Perhaps we need to talk about what feels like obligatory apathy.
We live in a society that despises any sign of caring about just how bad things are for most people. The planet is corroding and smoldering, and time and resources are going into nuclear weapons and sending humanity into its own carefully prepared hell. The unequal global economy is efficiently stimulating the starvation and hunger of 815 million people, and the Internet is a plutocracy where money buys the biggest microphones. The thriving communities of Syria and Yemen are being turned to moonscape, while corporate corruption and consumerism are being cultivated instead of culture. We continue to build a hierarchy of human worth that relegates certain classes, ages, genders, sexualities, and races to low status, and while millions of refugees are being put On Hold for ever in camps. But society is collectively rejecting even the mention of politics and having an opinion.
Indian Country remembers. This is not the first administration to order the forced separation of families.
The Trump administration has initiated a zero-tolerance policy on the border. Zero tolerance means that people caught crossing the border are treated as criminals.
On Friday, the Department of Homeland Security said the Trump administration separated 1,995 children from the adults they were traveling with at the U.S. border between April 19 and May 31.
Two forms of government have dominated in the west over the last hundred years. In one big power is vested in the state, the government, in the other policy is dominated by the influence of big industry, big corporations, or big money. Well a hundred years after the Russian revolution, and ten years after the financial crash, a whole lot of people all around the world are saying “are there any alternatives?” especially as neither of those models has delivered on a promise of shared prosperity.
In Preston, Lancashire, England, a formerly industrial city, the birthplace of the industrial revolution in many ways, they’ve seen ten years of austerity, and partly out of need, and partly out of aspiration they’re practicing, experimenting, with a new model. They’re calling it the Preston model of community wealth building, and it’s inspired by a model in another formerly industrialized city: Cleveland, Ohio, the Evergreen Cooperative model.
Europe is facing the most significant refugee crisis since World War II. All attempts at resolving the issue have failed, mostly because they have ignored the root causes of the problem.
On June 11, Italy’s new Interior Minister, Matteo Salvini, blocked the Aquarius rescue ship, carrying 629 refugees and economic migrants, from docking at its ports.
A statement by Doctors without Borders (MSF) stated that the boat was carrying 123 unaccompanied minors and seven pregnant women.
In the state of Georgia’s Glynn County Detention Center, four activists await trial stemming from their nonviolent action, on April 4, 2018, at the Naval Submarine Base, Kings Bay. In all, seven Catholic plowshares activists acted that day, aiming to make real the prophet Isaiah’s command to “beat swords into plowshares.” The Kings Bay is home port to six nuclear armed Trident ballistic missile submarines with the combined explosive power of over 9000 Hiroshima bombs.
This week, five people have gathered for a fast and vigil, near the Naval Base, calling it “Hunger for Nuclear Disarmament.”
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