Friday, June 15, 2018

America Is Imprisoning Children (Updated)

The United States of America is imprisoning children, after ripping them away from their mothers and fathers.  Here's how it is being done:

"According to public defenders, immigration agents told some parents that their children were being taken for a bath, or taken briefly for questioning. It took hours for parents to realize their children had really been taken away indefinitely."

Shades of the Nazis, offering a nice shower but delivering poison gas.

"Nick Miroff of the Washington Post revealed that one father died by suicide in a detention cell, the night after his 3-year-old had been physically ripped out of his arms.
According to CNN, one mother reported that her child had been taken from her while she was nursing. The mother claimed she was placed in handcuffs when she tried to protest."

Update 6/16: The government admits to taking nearly 2,000 children away from their parents in the first few weeks of the program, an average of 48 a day.  Some observers believe this is an undercount.   A Border Patrol chief says that the current rate could soon double.

A doctor who visited a shelter for young children was interviewed by the Washington Post:

"But the first child who caught the prominent pediatrician’s attention during a recent visit was anything but happy. Inside a room dedicated to toddlers was a little girl no older than 2, screaming and pounding her fists on a mat. One woman tried to give her toys and books to calm her down, but even that shelter worker seemed frustrated, Kraft told The Washington Post, because as much as she wanted to console the little girl, she couldn’t touch, hold or pick her up to let her know everything would be all right. That was the rule, Kraft said she was told: They’re not allowed to touch the children.

“The really devastating thing was that we all knew what was going on with this child. We all knew what the problem was,” Kraft said. “She didn’t have her mother, and none of us can fix that.”

According to NBC news, there are as many as 11,000 children imprisoned: infants, babies, toddlers, young children, adolescents.  Some have been kept in cages.  But nobody knows the actual number.  The media has seen only one facility--a converted Walmart--with more than 1500 boys, but nobody has seen others, particularly with infants, babies and toddlers. [see update above]  Even at that one facility, reporters weren't permitted to speak with inmates or in most cases to take photos.

We do know that the existing prisons are overcrowded, and the administration is set to build tent cities, the first one in Texas to hold hundreds of children in this improvised concentration camp or gulag, which will not be subject to the regulations governing health and safety in for example the Walmart prison.

White House spokesperson S.H. Sanders was heavily questioned on Thursday about this human rights abuse.  One outburst by a media rep has been widely featured, but not this one, noted by Politico:

“It's a policy to take children away from their parents," Acosta said. "Can you imagine the horror these children must be going to, when they come across the border, they're with their parents and suddenly they're pulled away from their parents? Why is government doing this?”

“Because it's the law,” Sanders said.


That is first of all a lie, as every legitimate news organization affirms.  It is not the law, but a policy to separate children from their parents unique to this US government.  The antipresident himself blames the policy on congressional Democrats because they won't join the administration's cruel and unnecessary immigration legislation.  As if Republicans didn't hold majorities in both houses anyway.  But even to pretend to hold the future of these children as items of blackmail in a political fight is beyond cynicism and well into Hitlerland.

It is a policy established by AG Jeff Sessions, who also wants everyone to believe it is the law, as he justified it by quoting a Biblical passage from St. Paul, which out of context says that laws must be obeyed because they are the instruments of God.

As Ed Kilgore comments:
Those who are unacquainted with the Bible should be aware that the brief seven-verse portion of St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans has been throughout the ages cited to oppose resistance to just about every unjust law or regime you can imagine. As the New York Times’ Yoni Applebaum quickly pointed out, it was especially popular among those opposing resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act in the run-up to the Civil War. It was reportedly Adolf Hitler’s favorite biblical passage. And it was used by defenders of South African Apartheid and of our own Jim Crow."

Sessions himself is pretty selective about which laws he thinks are God's will: the Affordable Care Act's guarantee that care will be covered for pre-existing conditions being one of them that must be the devil's work.

Senator Feinstein of California has introduced legislation that simply and directly reverses this policy and prevents families from being broken at the border.  If Republicans are so flummoxed by the law let them vote to change it.

But no one expects that to happen.  So Americans take to the streets--first locally, as in California on Monday, on a related aspect: the treatment of asylum seekers:

"In what is likely the first in a series of immigration-related protests, several hundred people came to a rally outside the Otay Mesa Detention Center on Sunday demanding the release of asylum seekers fleeing gang violence and state repression.

They were taking up the cause of asylum seekers who –for the most part–have voluntarily turned themselves at the border. Little did the protesters know their own participation in the event would lead to harassment by border authorities.

Protests are spreading nationwide in the wake of horrific reports of abuse and mistreatment by immigration agencies. People are speaking out against a President who refers to immigrants as ‘animals’ and implements policies inflicting punishment on people whose rights to due process are rapidly vanishing."

Conditions in one facility for these captives involved virtual slave labor.


The first national protests on the separation of children from parents and the imprisonment of children were held on Thursday, as thousands of Americans marched in an estimated 30 US cities and towns.  That will have to be just the beginning of protest.

The New York Times coverage on the Los Angeles demo began:

"Drawing on an American history of cruelty, from the conquest of the Indians to the slave trade to the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, activists in this city gathered on Thursday to voice outrage at what they see as the latest affront to American values by the Trump administration: splitting up migrant families at border crossings, and confining children in detention facilities.

“I think we are fighting for the heart and soul of America,” Yolanda Varela Gonzalez, a teacher and activist, told a crowd of several hundred protesters in MacArthur Park, before they marched to an immigrant detention center in downtown Los Angeles."

Thursday, June 14, 2018

Help On the Way

‘Resist’ is too passive.”
Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan

The political primaries so far this year suggest big changes could be coming.  There's more progress in inclusiveness, even to the extent of including First Americans--in the nomination of the candidate who could become the first Native American woman in Congress.

A general trend for more nominated women candidates, especially among Democrats, is even more conspicuous in several states, most recently Virginia, where women candidates for the House are now the majority of nominees.

Among the women joining the trend are Obama alums, some of whom are coming out of retirement to run.  The Politico piece begins:

So many Obama administration alumni are running for office this year that the former president’s staff has lost count, but it is keeping close tabs on whether they’re winning their primaries—and nearly all are, everywhere around the country.


Jenny Durkan, who ran for Seattle mayor and won, is one example.  And it isn't just that the Obama administration found and nurtured highly talented and committed people, who thought they might rest awhile during the Hillary administration but have since been motivated by the antipresident to run for office.

It's that when they identify themselves as Obama people that voters flock to them.

Lauren Baer, a former State Department aide who is running for a U.S. House seat in Florida, said she’s found voters are “incredibly nostalgic for the Obama era now.” “To the extent that people know about and hear about my ties to the administration, that reminds them of a time when the government didn’t always get everything right, but tried its hardest to work in the best interest of all Americans.”

These candidates also have the Obama alum network of political expertise and fundraising connections to call on.  For them, and the candidates new to politics, and especially women and candidates of color, everything will depend on turning out voters who didn't vote last time.  If they strike a spark, help could be on the way.

The Daily Nightmare

Prompted by a couple of suicides by persons famous in New York, the New Yorker published an article on the increasing number of Americans killing themselves.

It repeats some points made before that nevertheless bear repeating: that suicides are to some extent social, and there would likely be many fewer suicides or even attempts if there were fewer guns in the closet.

But it brings us up to date on other factors. Certain new drugs, like opiods, are complicit, as are other social factors. "A third of Americans are sleep-deprived, and sleep deprivation has a devastating effect on mental health. The mental-health system has deteriorated; according to Schwartz, there is less access to good care in most parts of the country than there was fifteen or twenty years ago. Rates of teen depression have risen since 2011, and students are carrying more debt and face more uncertainty about their lives. Despite a growing economy, people who are employed today do not feel confident that they will be employed tomorrow; with automation, many jobs feel terribly precarious. And the social safety net is being reeled in at every opportunity."

In certain high-stress occupations suicide is an invisible scourge: "... more policemen die of suicide than die on the job; more soldiers die of suicide than die in combat; more firefighters die of suicide than die in fires."

Then there's the terrible pressure of the current national regime. "There is another factor that should not be underestimated. On a national stage, we’ve seen an embrace of prejudice and intolerance, and that affects the mood of all citizens.
The viciousness that has become normalized, when added to the cultural addiction to the media moment, increase the feeling of being alone in one's particular misery. "There is a dearth of empathy, even of kindness, in the national conversation, and those deficits turn ordinary neurosis into actionable despair."


Look no further that the human crisis created by the current administration's cruel and inhuman policy of splitting up families and incarcerating children of those deemed illegal immigrants. This policy itself has led to at least one suicide.  Thousands of children face irreparable trauma from these acts that stink of Nazism.

 Were this occurring in any other country or any other time, there would be a UN resolution and world condemnation.  We might even expect it from some countries (and indeed it may be par for the course in say North Korea) but who would ever have believed it would happen in the United States of America.  Now we know why our brutal dictator wannabe loves him the brutal dictator of North Korea.

But even for those who are not under severe pressure, like many of the New Yorker's readers, there is a price to pay for continually feeling that the world has gone crazy, that it is in some respects almost literally upside down.

In this article, its writer Andrew Solomon offers a personal observation:  "My psychoanalyst said that he had never before had every one of his patients discuss national politics repeatedly, in session after session."

And why not?  We don't necessarily expect our President to be very smart or totally truthful.  But the antipresident astonishes a little more every day, with statements, tweets, speeches and lately a press conference in which everything he said was untrue, made up or a demonstrable lie.  Everything.  As for smarts, here's a recent headline: Mother of School-Shooting Victim: Meeting Trump Was ‘Like Talking to a Toddler’  Or this:Teacher corrects White House letter with 'many silly mistakes,' sends it back to Trump.

That's not about style points.  It's about the need to trust the leadership of the United States, and it's gone, thoroughly, and on the most basic levels.  Even worse, there is apparently no one better in the White House, no one even close to competent.  How about the state department spokesperson who evidently didn't realize that the US and the Nazis were not allies on D-Day?  It happened, and almost no one noticed.

The national anxiety grows as it becomes apparent that the head of the US government amounts to a paid agent of the Russian government, and that he is doing everything in his power to further the Russian agenda in the world, and to weaken the US.  And the Republican party with control of the other two branches of government are letting him do it, without a peep.

For those of us who lived much of our lives with the Soviet Union as powerful adversaries capable of ending our lives at any moment, it is beyond surreal.  For decades the Soviet Union was the second most powerful nation in the world.  Now Russia, with an economy smaller than the state of California, is accomplishing what the Soviet Union could not.

Evidence grows that Russian meddling swung the British vote to exit from the European Union, coordinated with at least one of the Brexit leaders.  Weakening European unity and the Western alliance is Russia's wet dream.  Evidence is growing of the extent of the conspiracy to take over the US government, and the extent of its success.

In just the past week, the antipresident did his best to wreck the Western alliance while proposing that Russia reenter the G-8, which he followed up by giving Russia and China everything they could want in relation to North Korea.  How can we cope with this happening, while those in power in Washington pretend that it isn't happening?  Ask your psychiatrist.