Journal of the Plague Years

January 30, 2018

 

Consider the FBI.  Founded by Attorney General Charles Bonaparte in 1908 to provide a newly industrialized and expansive United States with a cadre of coordinated federal law enforcement officers, throughout its history, the FBI has been a conservative institution with a view of national security that privileged our country’s hierarchical status quo and perceived threats in any organized voices that challenged that status quo.

Thus, early in its history, in addition to pursuing gangsters and bootleggers like Al Capone and “Babyface” Nelson, the FBI pursued anarchists, communists and labor unions like the International Workers of the World (Source:  “A Brief History.  The Nation Calls 1908-1923,” www.FBI.gov).  The FBI was notorious for its surveillance of Civil Rights and Black Power organizations, infamously sending Martin Luther King a letter in 1964 urging him to commit suicide (Source:  Taylor Branch, Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years, 1963-65).  It launched COINTELPRO, which infiltrated everything from Black student organizations to the Black Panther Party with a goal to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit or otherwise neutralize,” the movements and their leaders (Source:  “Cointelpro Revisited- Spying & Disruption,” citing FBI internal memo from J. Edgar Hoover dated 8/25/67). Continue reading “Enemy of the State?”

January 28, 2018

 

All week, the news has been filled with stories of Trump’s reception at the World Economic Forum in Davos. While he was booed by foreign journalists who recognize the palpable threat embodied in Trump’s constant attacks on the press, world leaders were more tempered in their response. The New York Times reported that Trump was well received by the global economic elite, some of whom, confoundingly, thought that his bellicose rhetoric on trade might be a useful bargaining tool (Source: “Trump Arrived in Davos as a Party Wrecker. He Leaves Praised as a Pragmatist,” by Peter S. Goodman and Keith Bradsher, The New York Times, 1/26/18). Continue reading “What is your price?”

January 26, 2018

In the last 24 hours, we have been mesmerized by the bombshell revelation that Trump tried to fire Special Counsel Robert Mueller in June 2017, a mere month into his tenure. According to The New York Times, who broke the story, Trump only relented because White House Counsel, Don McGahn threatened to resign. While this story clearly provides more concrete evidence of Trump’s ongoing effort to thwart investigations into his complicity with Russian election meddling, it is not as consequential as the breathless coverage it has received would indicate.

The sad reality is that although evidence that Trump obstructed justice is piling up, it is abundantly clear that the Republican led Congress has progressed from passive enablers to active participants in the feverish campaign to undermine not only Robert Mueller, but the entire historically conservative federal law enforcement establishment.

Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin went on national television and alleged that there was a “secret society” within the FBI seeking to overthrow Trump. Johnson extrapolated this fabulist tale from a sarcastic text exchange between Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, (Source : “A Wild Conspiracy Theory about an FBI ‘secret society’ has been swirling around the right-wing universe,” by Alan Smith, Businessinsider.com, 1/25/18).

Although the trumped up rage of the Fox News blowhards at the so-called “deep state“ seems patently ridiculous to those of us who rely on fact based journalism, we forget at our peril the fact that Fox News is the only news source that millions of Americans trust.

We need to bear that in mind as we engage in the coming policy fight over immigration. Yesterday, Trump released the “four pillars” of his proposed immigration policy. In exchange for a twelve year path to citizenship for the Dreamers, Trump wants to build a wall, end family reunification immigration for parents and siblings and end the diversity lottery, which is responsible for immigration from many African countries that Trump recently derided.

Let’s be crystal clear. This proposal represents a return to the immigration policy of the 1920’s which viewed all non white immigrants as undesirable. It is the panicked response of fear stricken racists to the perceived threat of our country’s demographic change. Notably absent from Trump’s proposal is any mention of the 11 million undocumented immigrants currently living, working and paying taxes in this country. It is obvious that the administration position is that those people are fair game for deportation. In the words of acting ICE Director, Thomas Homan, “there’s no population off the table….If you’re in this country illegally, we’re looking for you and we’re going to look to apprehend you.” (Source: “Have deportations increased under Donald Trump? Here’s what the data shows,” by Miriam Valverde, Politifact.com, 12/19/17).

Once arrested, the undocumented are added to the pool of coerced prison labor, where they can be thrown into solitary confinement for refusing to work (Source: “Private U.S. Detention Center Punishes Immigrants for Refusing to Work,” by Donald Kaufman, Truthdig.com, 1/15/18). This white supremacy as policy is a harbinger of things to come and none of us should be sanguine because of our citizenship status. The scapegoating, terrorizing and rounding up of a target population has a well known antecedent. We would do well to remember the words of Martin Niemöller, “First they came for the Socialists and I did not speak out, because I was not a Socialist.” We all know how that ends.

January 23, 2018

The last four days could not have provided a starker example of the crippling dysfunction caused when the party in control of two branches of government has racism and xenophobia as its animating principles. On Friday, due to the Republicans’ unwillingness to include CHIP reauthorization and any protection for the Dreamers in the Continuing Budget Resolution, the government shut down. Despite the furious and cynically dishonest propaganda campaign waged by Congressional Republicans, Trump and Pence, the Republicans own this shutdown.

Although the Republicans control the House, the Senate and the White House, the Republicans could not cobble together a budget bill that all of their members would support. Despite the fact that they have repeatedly tried to lay this failure at the feet of the Democrats, Mitch McConnell intentionally manufactured this crisis by withholding a vote on CHIP reauthorization for four months, in order to use the health insurance of nine million children as a bargaining chip. McConnell sought to force Democrats into a “Sophie’s Choice” between saving health care for nine million children or protecting nearly 700,000 Dreamers from deportation. McConnell’s callous calculation was driven in part by the hardliners in his caucus, but also by the blatant racism of both Trump and his closest advisors, Chief of Staff, John Kelly and White House advisor, Stephen Miller. Kelly and Miller have made it clear that The White House won’t allow the passage of any bill that fails to punish people for the “crime” of being brown. A frustrated Lindsey Graham baldly stated, “As long as Stephen Miller is in charge of negotiating immigration, we are going nowhere,” (Source: “A President Not Sure of What He Wants Complicates the Shutdown Impasse,” by Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Maggie Haberman, The New York Times, 1/21/18).

Yet, Monday afternoon, faced with a cabal of bigoted nativists led by an unprincipled cynic incapable of acting in good faith, the Democrats blinked. Despite having the wind at their back of the millions of Americans who have engaged in sustained, principled, progressive activism for the past year, Democrats caved and voted for another Continuing Resolution that will keep the government open for less than three weeks, without extracting protection for Dreamers. In fact, the feckless Dems extracted nothing more than a vague promise from McConnell that “it would be [his] intention to consider legislation,” to address DACA. Apparently, Democrats were spooked that Republican demagoguery that they had “prioritized illegal immigrants over American citizens,” would cost them seats in November (Source: “Why the Democrats Lost Their Nerve,” by Robert Costa, Erica Werner and Karen Tumulty, The Washington Post, 1/22/18). In other words, Mitch McConnell’s CHIP hostage gambit worked.

If we are honest with ourselves though, we know that it worked because this current of xenophobic racism has long standing roots in American history. Over the 244 year span of our nation’s history, white men have arrogated to themselves the sole authority to police borders, both real and metaphorical, to decide who gets to be called American. At our country’s founding, despite colonizing a land already inhabited by indigenous people and forcefully kidnapping Africans to cultivate it, the founders excluded both groups from the definition of “citizen.” That designation was begrudgingly and fleetingly bestowed on African-Americans after a bloody, internecine war, only to be immediately snatched back upon the withdrawal of federal troops from the South in 1877. Native Americans were robbed of their land by genocidal westward expansion that herded them into allegedly sovereign reservations and provided the justification for not granting Native Americans citizenship until 1924(Source: “Congress Granted Citizenship to All Native Americans Born in the United States, June 2,1924,” Americaslibrary.gov, Library of Congress).

The point is that we have been fighting these wars for a long time. Throughout our history, America has strictly guarded the borders of race and national origin. Master of. misogynoir, John Kelly probably would not like to be reminded that when his forebears arrived here from Ireland in the nineteenth century, they were not deemed white, or even fully human (Source: “When America Despised the Irish, by Christopher Klein, www.History.com, 3/16/17). Abandoning our deep investment in defining America as white and policing the borders of whiteness is a very recent and far from universally accepted phenomenon. Until the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. it was official U.S. policy to explicitly favor immigration from three Northern European countries and disfavor it from Latin America, Africa and Asia. (Source: “The Immigration Act of 1924(The Johnson-Reed Act)”, Office of the Historian, U.S. Department of State,www.history.state.gov).

This history bears recapitulating because we won’t attain justice for Dreamers or other undocumented people by flinching from the ugly entrenched racism that has always been at the core of our immigration policy. We cannot tell ourselves a fairy tale illustrated by pictures of the Statue of Liberty, with Emma Lazarus’ words etched on its base. Resistance to immigration has always been rooted in white supremacy. The only difference is who gets to be called “white.”

#CleanDREAMActNow

#Bluewave

#Runforsomething

#Resist

One year ago today, a corrupt and racist charlatan stood on a platform in front of the Capitol and vowed to “faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and …to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” Most of us knew that Trump was lying that day. We strongly suspected that he did not know or care about the Constitution or the country and that he viewed the Presidency as a mere racket and marketing opportunity. Trump was in it to see what he could get.

Some of us fervently, if foolishly, hoped that the weight of the responsibility would imbue him with some gravitas and that Trump would grow into the office. What a cruel joke! His inaugural address set the tone for what was to come. Trump outlined a bewildering portrait of an America in decline— beset by criminality and decay, disrespected around the world. We couldn’t know at the time that he was articulating his vision, foreshadowing the fate America had in store under a Trump presidency.

His first official act was to sign an Executive Order reversing Obama era rules designed to make mortgage insurance premiums more affordable for middle income home buyers. Trump didn’t even wait twelve hours to start screwing over middle class Americans.

The very next day, Trump sent his press secretary, intellectual lightweight, Sean Spicer, to the podium to tell a laughable, easily disprovable lie about the crowd size at his inauguration. The point was less to try and fool us, than to establish that Trump was willing to destabilize us by insisting on an alternative reality. Sharp observers like Sarah Kendzior and Masha Gessen pointed out that this was a tool of autocrats and any of us who paid attention when we read George Orwell in high school saw the chilling parallels.

By every metric we use to measure modern presidents, Trump has been worse than a failure. He has been simultaneously ubiquitous in his destructive toxicity and yet, criminally absent where it counts. Trump is constitutionally incapable of donning any mantle of moral, civic or political leadership. Every predecessor, going back almost 100 years,whether considered great (FDR), average (George H.W. Bush) or terrible (George W. Bush), had moments where they advanced the country’s interests. Even Nixon had China!

Not so Trump. In the year that he has been in office, he has brought us closer to the brink of nuclear war than we have been in fifty years. Trump has been indolently corrupt, spending more than 90 days of his tenure golfing at properties he owns, while the country and the world lurch from crisis to crisis. He has presided over a gleefully sadistic Department of Homeland Security, which has sent the jackbooted thugs of ICE to raid 711s and courtrooms, in their zeal to deport Brown people.

Meanwhile, Trump, like some cross between Triumph the Insult Comic Dog and the Grand Wizard of the Klan, incessantly ridicules and insults Black people and attacks freedom of the press. There is not one moment, one action, one speech in the last 365 days in which Trump has acted like an American president. It is said that the American president is like the father to the country. By that measure, we are a nation of fatherless children. Time to grow up.

January 17, 2018

 

In a pattern that has become depressingly familiar, the last few days have been full of seismic developments, any one of which, in the pre-Trump era, would have dominated the news cycle for days.  Instead, in order to cope, we have to sift through the avalanche of awfulness and determine which of the momentous occurrences of the last several days truly merit our time and attention.

Thus, we correctly determined that the revelation that Trump’s attorney, Michael Cohen, had paid porn star, Stormy Daniels, $130,000 on the eve of the 2016 election to prevent her from revealing her 2006 affair with Trump (one year after his marriage to Melania), was barely a one day story.  After all, we have become inured to presidential infidelity and, as Patton Oswalt drolly observed, the most shocking thing about the whole story is that Trump actually paid someone.

That news faded into the background as the news cycle continued to be dominated by the fallout from Trump’s “shithouse” comments.  Tom Cotton’s memory evolved from not recalling the comment to issuing a flat out denial that it was said (Source:  “Senators Cotton and Perdue are outed for lying on Trump’s behalf,” by Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post, 1/16/18).  Trump promptly threw Cotton and Perdue under the bus when it became clear that his naked racism played far worse than Trump thought it would.  Finally, Trump’s blatant bigotry jolted the news media out of its timidity.  Journalists were openly calling Trump racist, and more importantly, linking his policies to that racism (Source:  https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/it-finally-time-call-trump-racist-n837041).  Tom Cotton’s refutation of Dick Durbin’s and Lindsey Graham’s accounts fooled no one and merely exposed him as a craven liar willing to savage the reputation of a fellow senator, either to curry favor with Trump, or more likely, because he shares Trump’s racist views of immigration (Source:  “Immigration Advocates:  RAISE Act inherently racist,” by Tina Vasquez, Rewire.com, 8/3/17).

Cotton does not, however, hold the monopoly on using brazen dishonesty in the service of bigoted, xenophobic policy goals.  Yesterday, diminutive, racist martinet, Jeff Sessions and amnesiac DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen both deliberately misinterpreted DOJ data in an effort to scapegoat immigrants.  Sessions held a press briefing to trumpet a DOJ Report which allegedly supports the contention that 3 out of 4 people convicted of international terrorism are immigrants.  The report reveals nothing of the kind.    It makes no distinction between immigrants living in the United States and foreign nationals extradited to the U.S. to face trial on terrorism charges.  It only provides a detailed description of eight of the alleged 402 people brought up on charges.  Most importantly though, the DOJ Report completely omits any reference to domestic terrorists who prey upon Black Americans and other people of color in its assessment of who constitutes the greatest threat to our domestic safety and security (Source:  “Justice Department report blames immigrants for terrorism, but doesn’t have the data to prove it,” by Esther Yu His Lee, Thinkprogress.org, 1/16/18).

The coordinated effort by this administration and Congressional Republicans to scapegoat, deport and imprison people of color is straight out of the playbook of Germany in the 30’s and no one should be shy about explicitly calling it that.    We must maintain the energy to attack each fresh outrage and pressure our Democratic representatives in Congress  to not only make emotional speeches, but to stand firm and refuse any budget deal that fails to protect the nearly one million people at risk from the revocation of DACA and TPS status.  We must not be accomplices to their ethnic cleansing .  Let them know there are no Good Germans here.

 

#DREAMActNow

#NoRAISEAct

January 13, 2018

By now, we have all cycled through the stages of collective outrage at Trump’s vulgar, racist comments, condemning Haiti, El Salvador and all fifty-four nations in Africa as “shithole countries,” from which the United States should not receive immigrants. Our initial reaction was fury. Journalists from Joy Reid to conservative Rick Wilson eloquently vented their spleen in segments that instantly went viral. That gave way to an array of commentators citing the facts and figures of immigrant accomplishments, from the disproportionately high percentage of Nigerians with bachelors’ degrees, to the disproportionately high labor participation of Salvadorans and Haitians. It was respectability politics on steroids. Those arguments importuned, “If we prove that we are smarter and more industrious than the average American, will you acknowledge our basic humanity?” Continue reading “The silence of our friends”

January 11, 2018

 

Amid all of the furor over Trump’s contradictory statements during his televised meeting with Congressional leaders to discuss DACA and immigration more broadly, two critical legal developments that strike at the heart of our democracy may have escaped notice.

First, on Tuesday, a federal appellate court struck down North Carolina’s gerrymandered Congressional districts on the grounds that they violated the Constitutional rights of the voters of that state.  In a 191 page opinion, the three judge panel found that the gerrymandered maps violated the Fourteenth Amendment guarantee of equal protection of the law by depriving non-Republican voters of the value of their votes and the First Amendment rights of those voters because the deprivation was based on their “previous political expression,” (Source:  “Federal Court voids North Carolina’s GOP drawn Congressional map for partisan gerrymandering,” by Fred Barbash, The Washington Post, 1/10/18).  The record in the case includes express statements by the Republicans in charge of the redistricting process that they sought to draw maps that would create 10 Republican districts and 3 Democratic ones, despite the fact that Republicans are only 30% of the registered voters in North Carolina! (Source:  “North Carolina Congressional districts struck down as unconstitutional partisan gerrymanders,” by Anne Blythe, The News and Observer, 1/9/18).  Continue reading “The Right to Vote: Use it or lose it?”

January 9, 2018

Americans have a  well-deserved reputation for laziness and impatience.  We seek instant gratification and, in our eternal optimism, disdain the work required to ensure our continued prosperity.  Nowhere has our national character been more on display than in the reaction to Oprah’s speech at Sunday’s Golden Globes.

Oprah’s speech was magnificent.  She spoke movingly of the power of representation as she recounted being a little girl watching Sidney Poitier win the Academy Award for “Lilies of the Field,” in 1964.  Oprah said that she hoped little Black girls watching at home on Sunday night find similar inspiration in seeing her be the first Black woman to win the Cecil B. DeMille Award.  Most impactfully, she thundered, “A new day is on the horizon!  And when that new day finally dawns, it will be because of a lot of magnificent women, many of whom are in this room tonight, and some pretty phenomenal men, fighting hard to make sure that they become the leaders who take us to the time when nobody ever has to say, ‘Me Too’.”  The camera panned an enraptured crowd in the ballroom of the Beverly Hills Hilton, on their feet applauding, many with tears streaming down their faces.  Within minutes, #Oprah2020 was trending on Twitter.  By the next day, Politico had assembled a panel of operatives to assess Oprah’s political odds .  Bill Kristol, (Bill Kristol!!!) was tweeting “I’m with her.” Continue reading “Oprah 2020?”

January 6, 2018

     Like frustrated monkeys in a cage, Congressional Republicans are flinging their excrement in every direction (h/t Mike Schmidt) feverishly working to discredit and destabilize the Mueller investigation, the FBI and the DOJ, as more and more evidence emerges, both that collusion with the Russians to interfere in our elections went to the highest levels of the Trump campaign AND that Trump’s efforts to obstruct that investigation were relentless and widespread. Continue reading “A Three Front War”