Month: January 2019

In Georgia, Happy Days Are Here Again

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img_3076The hopes of many Georgians faded when Brian Kemp stealthy slithered into the Georgia Governor’s Mansion. Minorities shivered, progressives sighed. We came within a hair’s breadth of a future with the state rising above its ranking as 49th-50th worst in a host of quality of life metrics. Stacey Abrams is intelligent, articulate and persuasive, which will be on full display in her response to the State of the Union in February. Or, she could go the way of others undone by a speech in a setting less majestic than the House, untethered to rousing partisan applause reverberating through the chamber. Whatever she says will be a visual comedown watched by few but magnified by the media megaphone. The American public is crippled by an inability to actually know our candidates and leaders rather than their dusted up verbal, visual and written images. “Send in the clowns; we really don’t know them at all.”

One indication of Georgia’s future under the man who campaigned on his “big truck” to “take illegal immigrants back” comes with the ascension to the chairmanship of the House Retirement Committee of Tommy Benton, a committed state representative still fighting the Confederate fight and proud of it. There’s no need to indicate his party affiliation. The committee oversees the teachers and state employees retirement funds representing a larger proportion of Black employees than their 30% of the state’s population, in large part due to low pay scales.

Benton had been frozen out of chairmanships and his spot on the civics education study committee in 2017, after distributing a piece “The Absurdity of Slavery as the Cause of the War Between the States” to his House colleagues. I wasn’t kidding when I said Benton has refused to surrender after the Confederacy lost the Civil War. Imagine Benton, a former high school history teacher, poisoning the minds of Jackson County school children. Is it any wonder that millenials and Gen Xers lack an understanding of civics, citizenship and the government when through no fault of their own, their teachers lie to them about American history. What else do they lie about?

It’s still a mystery why House Speaker David Ralston changed his mind. Ralston demurred that everyone deserves a second chance. Usually, second chances come after someone changes their behavior, not yet evident in Benton’s public persona. We know his private persona hasn’t changed; it’s just a question of whether he can keep his mouth shut. Or could it be that Ralston finds in Kemp’s victory that the overt racism of past Georgia regimes is back in fashion, made even more expansive toward the immigrants of color that have blossomed in the state’s landscape. Georgia is no longer just Black and white; that seems to be complicating retention of GOP political power, hence the rampant campaign of voter suppression. If only politicians would reflect the needs of their electorate rather than their own selfish interests.

The KKK “was not so much a racist thing, but a vigilante thing to keep law and order”. “It made a lot of people straighten up.”

Of course, Benton’s essay on slavery was not his first public exposition of his values; he’s been pretty consistent. He voted against placing the MLK statue on the Capitol grounds. Once the opposition triumphed, he demanded that his name not be included in the list of lawmakers on the statue. Not surprisingly, he has said the KKK “was not so much a racist thing, but a vigilante thing to keep law and order”, demonstrating his personal incarnation of racism. As if vigilante actions outside the law are ever appropriate but most particularly they’re antithetical for the law and order party. “It made a lot of people straighten up,” he said, thinking his avoidance of a reference to the skin tones of those people would add nuance.

It goes without saying that Benton is a staunch defender of the governmentally supported Confederate memorabilia scattered all over the state. He announced his support of a state resolution to a return to observing Confederate Memorial Day as a state holiday, as both Alabama and Mississippi continue to do. Three other states in addition to Georgia, Florida and North and South Carolina celebrate the day but not as official holidays.

He’s also introduced legislation for a state constitutional amendment protecting the consummate Confederate Memorial Stone Mountain and proposed another bill to revert street names changed since 1968 back to their original. Martin Luther King Jr Blvd would cease to exist; Boulevard Ave, in the heart of the Auburn Avenue district would become Gordon Road, named for an early leader of the KKK, Confederate General John B. Gordon. it is not out of the question that some of these bills will pass.

There has always been racism in America, from the moment the first colonists stepped on its shores. Black folk are just lucky that it is no longer the majority opinion of the country, only in what appear to be isolated pockets. Yes, there are still sundown towns in the South; the ones in the North and West do it by action and custom without signs. But the power of racism is that it has always been so thoroughly intertwined with government policies, in the legal structure, in law enforcement, in political discourse, in the media, in social relations, dispersed throughout the culture. It’s in the air we breathe everyday. It’s everywhere. In Georgia, 2019, it continues to be rewarded.

Furloughed Federal Workers Play Musical Chairs

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Your pay for this period is $0.00. Two Fridays ago, the government shutdown plunked into federal workers bank accounts instead of cash. The hopes of over 800,000 workers crashed with no end in sight. Not to mention the 1 in 10 people who work for the federal government as contractors. They will get nothing for the period they are out of work, not ever. The scramble to make mortgage payments, pay rent, school tuitions and daycare bills will continue. Now, the shell game to parcel out credit card payments and charge more purchases to delay payments for another month takes another turn. Payday loans may loom large in the near future.

Some people have more time to play the game than others. Essential personnel have been forced to work, unable to seek alternative sources of income. Furloughed workers would like to get back to their desks, because they believe they are providing much needed services. The work would help keep their minds off the late payments, interests and penalties they will be forced to pay, payments they will never get back. Meanwhile, administration officials and Cabinet members got real numbers in their automatic deposits. Not only have they continued to be paid, they scored an automatic raise which went into effect January fifth when Congress failed to intervene. Trumpism at its finest- the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

Luckily, the shutdown affects only 25% of the government, lessening the impact and overall public reaction. Now on Day 29, the administration has found a slew of workarounds to keep from upsetting the general public. Many have targeted Trump stalwarts. For instance, they’ve extended the deadline for farmers to apply for the subsidies to take the sting out of the Chinese tariffs that tanked US soybean exports. Obviously, the objective here is to keep the rural base squarely in 45’s pocket.

The BullyPresident’s hardline advisors have advanced a narrative that the shutdown can advance the mission to deconstruct the federal government. Even as they’ve waged a war of attrition by leaving positions unfilled, they see the shutdown as a teachable moment for the public to see how unnecessary many government functions are. Essentially, if we can get along without them, why should our tax dollars support them. The administration doesn’t want too much revealed, because environmental and workers’ safety, for example, are areas where the administration has already quietly eliminated regulations or opted not to inspect and they don’t want their actions highlighted.

While the shutdown is providing a magical mystery tour of how integral federal services are to our lives, from safe food and water to safe air travel to craft beers, volunteers, churches, charities, corporations have moved in to provide services. Delta Airlines is even funding the reopening of the MLK Memorial, a National Park and other sites around Atlanta for the King Holiday so that they can showcase them in the run up to the Super Bowl, if the shutdown extends that long. Cynical GOPers contend that’s how it should be. We should leave critical functions to the vagaries of groups or individuals. The variations between locations would be even more vast than they are now from state to state, county to county. We could pick where we wanted to live by water treatment plant rather than school district.

But the long term effect could be far reaching. Beyond the immediate shutdown, the job insecurity of federal employment under a government dominated by a party intent on regularly shuttering services must be causing many to rethink their posts. In a growing economy with a low unemployment rate, job prospects are pretty high.  

But the long term effect could be far reaching. Beyond the immediate shutdown, the job insecurity of federal employment under a government dominated by a party intent on regularly shuttering services must be causing many to rethink their posts. In a growing economy with a low unemployment rate, job prospects are pretty high. This will affect primarily newer employees, who are not yet vested in pension plans. For others with established careers, the decision to leave will be difficult, although the private sector typically has higher pay scales. For those nearing retirement, they are likely to pull the plug when they first become eligible; they can take their pensions with them into the employee hungry private sector. From the administration’s perspective, it will open up more slots that will go unfilled, paring down the federal workforce further through attrition.

Who is an “essential worker” has wavered over time. It could be argued that reclassification is a necessary response to the discovery of new holes in essential services that need to be plugged. “Essential workers” are meant to cover safety; the TSA, Secret Service, FBI, border guards (both north and south), air traffic controllers, etc. What has happened instead is that nonessential workers have suddenly become “essential” as the backlash has boomeranged on Agent Orange’s political standing.

As the shutdown has been prolonged, public disgust has been building. The Oval Office speech was a blip on the radar. For one, it was an eminently forgettable remix of the same drivel the Chief of Misinformation has pumped out before. And it sounded like a dotard stumbling through a teleprompter with none of the usual Trumpian panache. 45 hasn’t been able to move the needle with any subsequent rhetoric. His failure to show empathy for the workers, now lining up for food banks, free meals and getting charitable donations in their local communities, is pushing others into the opposition. Federal employees have turned to GoFundMe pages. Others are growing weary of the country’s ongoing international embarrassment. (It’s lucky that the Brexit debacle in the UK is taking some of the sting out of that. Although the two are not parallel, it’s consuming some media attention and it’s equally dysfunctional.) There is simply no credible reason why funding The Wall is linked with closing 25% of the government. The border security debate could continue off stage with services restored, something Democrats repeatedly suggest.

Agent Orange’s latest tit-for-tat is even sillier. His reaction to Pelosi’s request for him to reschedule the State of the Union address or release a written address because of security concerns was to cancel a scheduled Congressional delegation trip to the Middle East, after the travellers were already loaded on a bus to leave. Ah, SNAP! He looks infantile. 45 ordered that a military transport to carry the delegation to visit troops in Afghanistan be cancelled. The Commander in Chief had made only one visit in 2 years to visit troops in Iraq; he couldn’t be outdone by Democrats.

More seriously, his actions cross yet another line in the separation of powers. First and foremost, he should not have revealed a top secret trip for national security reasons. Second, Congress has a right to oversee and investigate, unfettered by the Chief Executive. This is  more than another embarrassing insult to Congress, one that hopefully, the members will finally grow enough spine to respond to, if only in rhetoric and bills that highlight this latest trespass. If there is some remedy in the courts, they should pursue that as well, although the Trump packed SCOTUS is likely to side with the Chief Executive. The best reaction would be to resurrect the unanously passed bill to reopen the government, send it to 45 to veto and then override the veto. That’s pretty far fetched, given the sycophants in the Senate, but a woman can dream.       

Although the CelebrityPresident has maintained privately that he is winning the propaganda war and the public is with him, his myopic eye, clouded by a cataract of self absorbed egocentricity, is focused on his Fox News subsidiary which confers tunnel vision. So of course he believes that he’s winning even as the polls show something very different. Even acknowledging the legendary limitations of polls, it appears that most people blame the president for the continuing shutdown and don’t support the Wall.

With the president’s “safety” in mind, the processing of income tax refunds has suddenly become a concern and thousands of IRS employees have been recalled from their furloughs. This action was the result of pressure from the big banks on their Congressional representatives to do something about the complete standstill in the mortgage industry. Clearly, corporations have more clout than ordinary employees and citizens.

And on the heels of bacterial disease outbreaks from two romaine lettuce contaminations, the FDA has recalled workers. And the FAA has called back up to 2200 aviation safety workers. The Department of Agriculture found funding to provide SNAP benefits for February. (All good moves.) While many assume SNAP most affects minorities, they’re the victims of Trump propaganda. There are many rural families, white working poor, even military families that use the supplemental food program. This also helps businesses, large and small who are selling fewer groceries as furloughed workers and uncompensated contractors are forced into food banks.

Most recently, the State Department announced it’s found funding in its accounts for one two week pay period and is recalling workers for the next two weeks. They will not get paid for their furloughs, but they will at least have some cash on hand to help with accumulating expenses. Certainly international affairs kept churning but the shelled out State Department is nonessential to the AmericaFirstPresident. Affairs like the ongoing trade negotiations with both China and around the logistics of the USMC trade agreement have come to a dead stop.

As a corollary, the president has cancelled his trip to the World Economic Forum in Davos along with those of Pompeo and Cabinet members. For the first time, the US will have no representation. Trump has smarted at being either laughed at or ignored at global events and he’s in too foul a mood to suffer through the humiliation of ostracism again. He’s already said he wants to bash the other economies with trade wars and he wants to negotiate unilateral deals. He’ll miss a chance to hook up with Putin, but there’s been too much heat over his recently revealed attempts to completely obliterate his previous discussions with the Russian leader  to risk another encounter. We just gotta know that there is something really important in those transcripts that he’s trying to hide. In this, yet another indication of the total absence of a patriotic bone in the AmericaFirstPresident’s body, he has left the country open to whatever Vladimir says to the rest of the world happened. Trump is unlikely to remember as time passes, but even if he does, who can believe him. He seems even less truthful than Putin, primarily because he talks so much and Putin is more restrained. Those sound like treacherous acts endangering the nation.

A typical federal worker has missed about $5000 in pay so far. The shutdown’s impact is spreading concentrically to landlords, merchants, restaurants, airlines, suppliers, etc. According to NBC News, federal workers owe $438 million in mortgage and rent in January.

A typical federal worker has missed about $5000 in pay so far. The shutdown’s impact is spreading concentrically to landlords, merchants, restaurants, airlines, suppliers, etc. According to NBC News, federal workers owe $438 million in mortgage and rent in January. Government contractors could lose $200 million a day. The prospect of further slowing the economy is more collateral damage. Recalculations of the shutdown’s impact on the “booming” economy suggest a larger impact than many expected, doubling its original estimate. The economy seems to be purring more quietly.  Some authorities are predicting negative growth for the first quarter.

In a news cycle hungry for economic data, there isn’t any being analyzed by the Census Bureau. Instead media is using info cobbled together from alternative and private sources. How accurate is it? How can we know? Weather modeling is going undone as well. That affects the ability of locations to prepare for weather events, like the flooding going on now in California from a series of rain storms. Will it affect accuracy of forecasts? The government is the only source of weather data. We shall see.  

Trump has tried to assuage the few government employees he counts as supporters (Trump believes that federal employees are mostly Democrats). He signed an executive order mandating that all furloughed employees be paid when the government reopened. That was pure theater. They would have been paid anyway, unless Congress had intervened to deny payment. Congressional intervention is highly unlikely because 2020 campaigning has already started. An executive order won’t feed your family or pay your mortgage, so how are they better off? But as the shutdown drags on, some agencies may opt to at least give bonuses, as the TSA announced it would do last week. It didn’t help; TSA agents are demonstrating at some airports. Many TSA screeners make minimum wage; they’re leaving to get a paying job and their standards don’t have to be very high.

With all the maneuvering, federal workers have been literally transformed into wage slaves. They can’t protest their status as furloughed workers. They can’t strike or fail to show up to work because they are legally prevented from that. They can only follow orders or quit. Their best option is to “be sick”. The president elected as the voice of working people (or perhaps formerly working?) has exposed his supreme disdain for working people. His political priorities are clearly focused on continuing to delude his Trumpophants and even more narrowly on what he perceives as their voice, Ingraham and Janine Pirro. F*@K the rest of the country.

In a surprise move, 45 presented on Saturday a compromise to Democrats to end the standoff. He offered 3 years of protection from deportation to DACA and immigrants with temporary protected status from some South American and African countries in the form of legislation in exchange for $5.7 billion in border wall funding and thousands of additional agents at the Southern border. Democrats said no because it didn’t offer a pathway to permanent citizenship to DACA recipients. Scattered around the offer were his usual racist anti-immigrant assertions, in essence asking his base to follow him. But he did reconfigure The Wall once again, now as steel slats scattered among areas that have previously been fenced, not stretching from sea to shining sea. He described his offer as a “compassionate response” that had produced a “common sense compromise both parties should embrace”. Earlier in the day, he presided over a naturalization ceremony in the White House trying to indicate that he doesn’t oppose immigration per say, just from what he believes are the wrong countries, all populated by people of color. The restrictions are the core of his message to his Trumpophants but the denial of his prejudice is meant to capture independents, if there are any left and Democrats.

The propaganda mills will keep cranking. Federal employees and contractors will keep striving to live from day to day until the politicians take their heads out of their asses and govern.

Gobsmacked By A Microaggression

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dart pin in the middle of dartboard

Photo by icon0.com on Pexels.com

After 70 years, microaggressions are just part of my life, like all women and minorities. I have come to expect them; I see or hear them; I move on. Sometimes, I challenge the aggressor, depending on how amenable they seem to a teachable moment. Most of the time, I’m too busy with my own stuff to bother with people I’ll never see again. I can’t take care of the rest of the world full time. Most of them won’t get it. They’ll take cover in their intent, call me hypersensitive and avoid apologizing, because my feelings are less important than establishing their innocence. On the other hand, friends merit effort; I don’t have that many. We have a shared history, a relationship on which to build and time to work on it.

It happened on my way to a group event. I saw a woman from the group on the street. We met the night before; we sat around a restaurant table with others and talked over dinner. I waited until I was directly by her side at a traffic light to tap her shoulder and say hi. A penetrating look of terror flashed across her eyes. Her mind was tripping. Her raw instincts were on full display. “What the hell is this big Black person in Times Square gonna do to me?” sparked through her amygdala as if we had been in a dark alley. I’m several inches taller than she is. She was on unfamiliar urban turf.

The look lingered for but a second as I continued to say that I was with the group and we were heading to the same place. It was brief but spectacular. Her eyes refocused to recover the politically correct excuses. I am the only brown face in the group so it wasn’t a stretch. “I didn’t recognize you because you’re all bundled up” she ventured, ringing with the guilt of a white person who’d misstepped. Granted, I wore a big knit hat with a matching scarf tied around my head to cover my ears. Not an image to inspire terror. But maybe she thought I was a man. I wore a shapeless down jacket and pants, although her gaze had not fallen below my chin. As we hurled on through the heavy foot traffic to travel to our destination, we chattered as if the moment hadn’t happened. Some trivial contrasts between the characters in Times Square with those at Disney World, the “real ones” she said. I bantered back that they too were actors in costumes because Disney characters aren’t real. A perfect lead in for her to suggest yet another theatrical credit – paid Disney World character actor, spoken with the proper disdain for “the clowns around us dressed in Halloween costumes”. She had spent much of the previous night establishing that she’s “theatrical”, directing a middle school production back home. She had rattled off a string of Broadway shows to underscore the extent of her expertise.

I too am a practiced actress trained in the many rooms where I have been the lone brown face. I can shuck and jive with the best of them. But I was fuming although I sounded extremely congenial as the wind whipped our words to nearly inaudible. She hadn’t realized that she had displayed her fear so profoundly. She thought it had stayed tucked away in her unconscious. She’s a native of central Florida, a region as Dixie as MIssissippi, so her instincts come naturally enhanced with a more rabid sense of white superiority.

I guess I couldn’t shake it off easily because my nerves had been rubbed raw by the play American Son I’d seen the night before. The drama tackles racial dynamics in the criminal injustice system. An interracial couple recently separated are desperately trying to get information at a police station about their missing teenage son. It is emotionally intense. Conflict explodes like a string of firecrackers, jarring but you can’t take your eyes off them. I marvelled at the truth in the characterizations. Again and again, the play poked at assumptions, essential unravelers of communication. They lead down rabbit holes, marooned far away from what the characters did or thought. The play also catapults police perspectives up against a pile of dead Black boys.

Within the play, there is another narrative of a separated couple, once so in love, now wrenched apart by unspoken dreams and fears integrally tied to the color of their skin. This was particularly personal. Between the two, there were things they never imagined as they assumed their minds were in synch and didn’t talk about. They couldn’t talk about them because they were so integrally infused with racial differences that they couldn’t see. It is only in the hurt and anger of separation that shit spills out all over them.

I had nowhere to put the emotional energy needed to unpack that stuff in the usual way that women do, through talk. The talkback with the cast held after the play was helpful in exploring issues around systemic racial injustice, clearly the politically significant theme for the audience and the production. They wanted to send people out, hungering to do something about it. But the more personal one went unexplored over a glass of wine or two, marooned as I was with a bunch of white strangers. It keeps bubbling up in my mind, nudging resentments forward for stuff that is no one’s fault. I’ve put myself here.

And thus the microaggression knocked me off kilter, perseverating on what should have been dismissed. I realized later that I will not see the woman again; we had no common activities remaining. I can concentrate on shaping or reshaping meaningful relationships and ideas about navigating the world. I’ve righted this ship.

A Manufactured Emergency

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It is the nature of Agent Orange to manufacture data that supports his worldview. It’s not simply his character; it’s his essence. He’s been doing it probably his whole life, but certainly since adolescence. He is currently driven by the constant need to regurgitate propaganda to gin up his base. Like a carnival barker, he must one-up his last fictional assertion with a new one. That’s his political game in a nutshell.

The movie Vice has reminded us of the Bush (actually Cheney) administration’s Big Lie, WMDs, in the crusade to create an international coalition and approbation to take down Saddam Hussein. Remember when people could not trust the government because it kept leading us astray. For some moderates and liberals, Obama reversed that perception, at least some of the time. For conservatives and the racists they inspire, Obama augmented a fury against a government that was attacking their whiteness because the president was a darkie. Fox News swooped into position beside Breitbart, Infowars, Rush Limbaugh and the conservative mediasphere. They let their imaginations run wild, creating conspiracy theories and imaginary connections that revved up to swallow Hillary Clinton who was dragging a goodie bag of her own conspiracies from the Clinton White House onward. If the government was not the purveyor of truth, the conservative mediasphere was. No need to check sources or even listen to anyone else. They found Jesus in the media pronouncements and for that, they needed only faith.

   Now that the Fabricator in Chief is in the White House, his words to the faithful come from God; a capricious God, no doubt, who flip flops from moment to moment just to keep the faithful on their toes. Only the faithful and an entourage of anxious politicians afraid they will lose their chosen profession are buying in. The rest of us, as the cloak around the administration’s action tightens, are desperate to figure out what really is going on and how to counter the endless stream of propaganda. If a man misinforms every minute of the day, how can anyone believe what he says? Ever!

Only a gray haired white evangelist from Indiana who calls his wife mother could imagine that MS-13 was concealed in the middle of the caravan.

In the run up to the midterms, Mike Pence told the Washington Post that it was hard not to imagine that concealed in the middle of the menacing hordes that formed the caravan were MS-13 members. Only a gray haired white evangelist from Indiana who calls his wife mother could imagine that. The women and children sought the safety of the caravan to escape MS-13. MS-13 don’t roll in cognito. Their tattooes scream their identities. There wouldn’t be a caravan if it contained MS-13 members. People running for their lives would have found another way, because any place where MS-13 is, is by definition, hazardous.   

The entire White-Supremacist-in-Chief immigrant confection is a Disney World terror ride, Migrants from the Southern Border. They make Black Jack the Pirate look like a saint. First, it identifies the wrong group of immigrants as the big problem. Actually, immigration is not a problem for the US; it has provided the largest increase of workers in an American labor force that suffers from a low reproductive rate and a bulge in baby boomers leaving the workforce and dying. The problem is an immigration system overburdened with bureaucracy designed to restrict immigration from certain countries to favor immigration of white Europeans. The bureaucracy forced people to immigrate illegally rather than wait through the years long delays imposed by quotas. Depending on the country, waits can be as long as 10-15 years. (Immigrants Must be Meritorious!; Let the Children Cry) 

Illegal immigration has been decreasing for several years. The largest group of immigrants to the US are people who overstay their visas, primarily from Asia. Everyone looks around and sees a bunch of Spanish speaking immigrants and thinks, oh, they must be the problem. And they have come in large numbers in the past. But long before Agent Orange seized the White House, immigration from Mexico was a net outflow and from Central America was rising. Many of those immigrants were seeking asylum, not simply economic opportunity, because of lawlessness in their own countries – kidnapping, rape, extortion, protection rackets, murders, and the collateral murders of bystanders, and executions. Helpless governments made possible the supremacy of drug cartels over police and military forces.

One oft stated problem with a porous border are the drugs and illegal guns that cross the border. That’s a false flag, unrelated to the immigrants seeking asylums. The bulk of the traffic is not from mules but from runners who work for the cartels, crossing back forth. Undaunted by facts, the link between men, women and children crossing the border, they say, is that they are are rapists and murderers. In fact, the BullyPresident has told us that Mexico is sending these immigrants intentionally, clearing their country of undesirables. Of course, government don’t send immigrants. Individuals make their own personal decision to go. But not in DJT’s narratives.

45 conflates illegal immigration with immigrants seeking asylum. These are not the same people. Treatment of asylum seekers is governed by different laws. It is not illegal to cross the US border seeking asylum.

As it happens, there is a crisis at the border, one that Agent Orange created. It began when barring immigration was equated with border security; the two are not synonymous. Then, with conflating illegal immigration with immigrants seeking asylum. These are not the same people. Treatment of asylum seekers is governed by different laws. It is not illegal to cross the US border seeking asylum. Jeff Sessions then declared that it was illegal and therefore, required that everyone crossing the border should be arrested, jailed and taken to court.

Gone ignored were the changes in who was crossing the border. Now it has become primarily women and children, not men and even unaccompanied minors, coming from Central American countries. And while the administration is screaming about the huge numbers, they are nowhere near numbers under the Obama administration. Yes, the system is overwhelmed but that is the result of mandatory arrests and the insistence on holding immigrants in detention, rather than releasing them until their cases can be adjudicated.

And for the large proportion of women and children, there are no facilities. Thus the use of makeshift shopping center buildings with cement floors and fencing, all manned by an expanded number of contractors responsible for transport and supervision and less dependence on county and city jails. The contractors are more concerned with maximizing their profit than providing for their charges. And the stigma of lawbreaker imposed by the administration has led personnel to see them as “less thans”, undeserving of fair treatment.

The most recent tactic of forcing immigrants to incubate in Mexico under even worse conditions while waiting for months to cross the border is yet another humanitarian nightmare.  In other words, the humanitarian crisis lies squarely with the Trump administration’s aggressive inhumane policies. The crisis can just as easily be resolved by ending them and returning to previous policies if the GOP has no other ideas. No state of emergency is required.

Out building support for the Wall become national emergency, Kirstjen Nielsen recently elaborated on the humanitarian crisis at the border by citing 60,000 unaccompanied minors last year, and 30% of women raped on the journey. The 7 of 10 women she cited as victims of violence include many who are fleeing domestic violence and gang related attacks at home. She is simply restating the reasons why these individuals are seeking asylum. They are not new, they have been going on for years. If this represents a crisis, why has Sessions anti-humanitarian response been the elimination of these issues as a basis for asylum.

Moreover, none of these conditions are within the Trump administration’s purview. She made no mention of the inhumane treatment her agency is inflicting on immigrants and asylum seekers alike by warehousing them in overcrowded facilities and jails, separating children and then losing them. The absence of minimal if any health screening and no real medical care, resulting in the death of 2 children, is appalling. Flu season has transformed these facilities into incubators for a public health disaster. The poorly nourished living in unsanitary conditions are a set up for increased flu mortality. Nielsen was so ashamed, she barred the press from her recent border facility tour. The administration speaks with forked tongue.

Conservative propaganda has tried to characterize asylum seekers as sinister operatives seeking to exploit loopholes in the immigration process. But consider, they must be desperate to walk 2880 miles for an uncertain asylum application. Right now, there is a backlog of over 1 million cases  for hearings in the immigration court system. That amounts to about a 5 year wait. In the past, that five years of waiting was spent in the US which meant that people began to establish new lives with the caveat that it might end in deportation if the application was denied. Despite administration hype, the majority of asylum seekers comply with the process because a green card and ultimately citizenship are the brass ring in the end. Now there are months of wait before even beginning the process of a threat interview designed to determine if the applicant is eligible for asylum. Yet, there must be some validity to their claims. If the last caravan is any indication, over 80% of those who applied qualified for consideration, although because Sessions has crafted a shifting sand of criteria, that may no longer be true.

Keep in mind that the vast majority of asylum seekers don’t know any of this. They have little knowledge of what the process is, let alone how to navigate it. Much like us, they haven’t been able to keep up with the policy changes. They know only that if they cross the border, they can surrender to request asylum.

Millions of individuals have been criminalized, just as African Americans were in the Jim Crow South and the Civil Rights Movement. Just as the Japanese were criminalized in WWII. They have been pronounced less than human, because in the US, criminals are less than human. So, the argument goes, they deserve to be vilified at every turn. Their children can be snatched out of the arms. Children can be held in pens with concrete floors. Infants are warehoused in contracted facilities devoid of trained child care personnel. Parents can be jailed, even though seeking asylum is not illegal. Until Sessions came along, crossing the border illegally was a civil, not a criminal offense.  More than that, the US is violating international treaties on asylum.

We know where 45 stands on treaties; just another law to be ignored or broken. Still, despite the steady stream of anti-immigrant propaganda, 45 has yet to convince the majority of the country that the women and children at the border are anything other than just that, desperate immigrants seeking asylum, being held hostage in Mexico. Many are living in deplorable conditions, without clean water, sanitation, little food. Much of the care has fallen to religious groups and nonprofits. Tijuana is beginning to look like refugee camps in Jordan and Gaza. Coincidentally, the crisis is being exacerbated by the government shutdown. The courts are not hearing cases and allotted border crossing have all but disappeared.

While being denied entry at official ports of entry as Homeland has backlogged asylum applications by processing at the slowest pace possible, some asylum seekers have tried to cross at other points, so they can surrender to border agents when caught. Some have taken jobs in Mexico, which could trigger anger among Mexicans who live with high unemployment rates. The intent of the Nationalist-in-Chief is to erect a wall of bureaucracy and mistreatment, if he doesn’t have a concrete one, to discourage asylum seekers. He’s thinking they’ll give up and just disappear. He has no idea that the boulders that he’s thrown up pale in comparison with the broken lives they left behind. None of the maneuvers of past administrations has managed to discourage the flow of immigrants from deplorable conditions in which they survive. The US is the only place on the continent to escape them.

In pursuit of a state of emergency to convince the Democrats to give him now $5.6 billion for The Wall, 45 has ratcheted up his rhetoric. Thugs, drugs, guns, murderers, gangs, rapists were not enough of a threat. The new rabbit out of his hat to document the national security risk is terrorists crossing the border. Presumably, global terrorists, radical Islamists, since he gave no details. Flanked by border security and Homeland officials, they told the press corps that they had documented evidence of terrorists crossing the southern border.

The Justice and Homeland Security departments cooked up a report mingling terrorism with immigration last January that resurfaced as the evidence. The document reports that 75% of 549 persons convicted of terrorist offenses since 2001 were foreign-born. Actually, 100 of those were extradited from foreign countries for trial here after committing their crimes on foreign soil. The remaining convicted group includes legal and illegal immigrants as well as naturalized citizens. The recent cases we’ve seen in the news have included US born citizens radicalized, alone on the internet to commit lone wolf acts.

On previous occasions, 45 has tried to blame “chain immigration” for terrorism. In service to that theme, the report highlights 8 “illustrative examples” of terrorist offenders among the over 400 convictions. Six of them were relatives of green card holders or citizens. These are the kind of numbers that warm 45’s chest cavity so they may resurface during this current battle.  

Officials have acknowledged the report’s misstatements, citing editorial errors, but have not officially retracted it. But once a word is uttered by Agent Orange, the FoxNews/Trump TV Hallelujah chorus launches it into hyperspace. In the meantime, the primary source of terrorist activity in the US is right wing extremists. They have committed 73% of 85 incidents involving murders and injuries while Islamist committed 22.

Undaunted by the skeptical reaction to these cooked up statistics, Sara H tried to spread the impression that nearly 4000 terrorists and suspicious “persons of interest” have come into the country in an interview with Chris Wallace on Fox News. A State Department report in 2017 has refuted the insinuation that some crossed the southern border. It said that there are no terrorists organizations and no credible threats in Mexico.  Wallace responded that he’d studied the numbers and all those guys had come through airports. Sara’s crestfallen face said it all; “WTF, I’m not supposed to get pushback on Fox News; they’re supposed to amplify!” In her shock, she managed to sputter out weakly that they were coming by air, by land and by sea while Wallace stuck to his verbal wall of airports only. In fact, the 7 “special interest aliens” caught from 1975 to 2017, reported by the Cato Institute, a Koch funded conservative think tank, have all come across the northern border with Canada and none of them were successful in their planning.  

The risk of death in the US from right wing extremists is 1 in 43.8 million, which is twice the probability of death at the hands of foreign born terrorists, 1 in 104.2 million.   

In reality, the foreign terrorist threat taps deep into American anxiety but it is miniscule. The risk of death from a terrorist act is 1 in 30.1 million annually, 30 times less than death from an animal attack, itself quite rare. Even more enlightening is the risk of death from right wing extremists is 1 in 43.8 million, which is twice the probability of death at the hands of foreign born terrorists, 1 in 104.2 million. If Agent Orange’s real agenda was to make America safe, a more effective national security strategy to save American lives would be for the FBI, Homeland and Justice to focus on right wing extremists and white supremacist activity. Their efforts could start by reinstituting programs to diminish recruitment and deprogram white supremacists. But law enforcement monitoring of white supremacists is critical. No such monitoring is happening now.

Enter the presidential address from the Oval Office. Agent Orange knows himself well enough to know that that setting is not his best. It is a place for measured speech not the rally harangue that is his forte. He reads badly, sounding more like a dotard struggling to hang on to  the teleprompter screen. In what he said was a speech he wrote himself, he began softly in an apparent sympathetic tone for the suffering of Central American immigrants. But he built to a crescendo of rehashing the usual falsehoods, embellished with new tales of illegal immigrant barbarism, although a couple of those cited were not confirmed committed by illegals. He evoked the terrorists threat and inaccurate statistics on drug trafficking. It is a warped view that extracts some horrific crimes by one or two individuals, as if there aren’t thousands of native born Americans who are capable of vicious crimes. Neither represent the vast majority of their respectives groups; bad people come in all skin tones. If only the Minority Report team was around to eliminate the threat of all criminals.

In the end, 45 brought nothing new to support the Wall or its urgency or its efficacy. As @stuartpstevens tweeted “There are numerous examples of presidential addresses made to calm a frightened public. This will be the first to frighten a calm public.”

45 has not found a response to the characterization of the Wall as a 4th century solution to a 21st century problem. It will not work as a deterrent. Women and children will continue to present for asylum at ports of entry. There are already areas with fencing and that has not proved effective. People will still be able to tunnel under it. A continuous wall is not possible and there will always be spaces in between the “steel slatted” segments. Razor wire isn’t effective either. Advanced surveillance techniques and drones will work just as well without a wall. Building a Wall is great for crony federal contractors but hard on land owners who will lose their properties to eminent domain and on wildlife in the region.  

We all agree that we want border security and we want an immigration policy that works. However, there is considerable disagreement on the goal of an immigration policy. Republicans want to exclude anyone with a hint of melanin in their skin. Democrats recognize that all immigrants have contributed to sustaining American prosperity. Their objective is to create a pathway to continue to reap the benefits of those contributions. There must be a compromise somewhere in the area of policies to limit the number of immigrants without embracing the Make America White vision. But the partisan chasm is too wide for a bridge to be built in the Era of Trump.

As the shutdown continues and effects more of the public, 45 will become even more prickly, lashing out with even more desperate propaganda. The whoppers will grow, as his wooden nose finally hits the Earth’s core. Rumor has it that he thought the Oval Office speech was a waste of time. But he’s got to get more radical to win over nonTrumpophants before he drops his national emergency declaration. According to TV pundits, Agent Orange advisors believe that the longer the shutdown drags on, the more pressure will grow on the Democrats to capitulate. He believes that federal workers are all Democrats, even in the face of media interviews with Republican workers about their financial difficulties. They weren’t on FoxNews/Trump TV, so he probably missed them. But it is his belief that blunts any empathy he might muster, although many believe that well is eternally dry. He’s likely channeling his revenge mojo. Somehow, he thinks workers will pressure Democrats to cave rather than turn their wrath on him and the GOP.  The CelebrityPresident wants to keep the issue going for what he perceives as political capital.

Today, he stormed out of the meet with Chuck and Nancy when Nancy said she would not approve the Wall. Pence and the Trump minions tried again to spin it as Democrats’ refusal to bargain. On the other hand, 45 only had to ask, what would she approve, to keep the discussion going. By picking up his marbles, he was using a negotiating technique that only works if they come after you. They didn’t. It’s back to Pence, Jared and the staff. Or maybe the GOP will be moved to do the right thing and open the government, pass the legislation and overturn the inevitable presidential veto that will follow. Congress is after all, an equal and independent branch of government. The Founders wanted it to be the strongest branch. 

And in the background, the BullyPresident, will leave the threat of a National Emergency declaration dangling from tweet to tweet.