Monday, June 18, 2018

The United States of Child Abuse

At this point it doesn't matter what might be the self-interested motives of the politicians who staged Father's Day protests at the immigration prison in New Jersey and at the pediatric gulags in Texas. They're shining the national spotlight on the latest example of state-sanctioned cruelty.

As much as we might like to turn away, we cannot. When even Laura Bush, wife of war criminal Dubya, is compelled to speak out against the Trump policy of forcibly removing an estimated 2,000 children from their asylum-seeking parents, the teflon coating of the president who once boasted he could shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue and get away with it is starting to lose its nonstick sheen, even among some of his erstwhile tacit supporters in the Grand Guignol Party.

Whether Donald Trump diverts from type and bows to public pressure for one of the few times in his life remains to be seen. But ominously, his base of supporters which agrees with everything he does is growing, and  emboldened by the rhetoric of their leader. Trump's approval rating has now reached the 40 percent danger zone.

So just because the lead human rights official at the United Nations is condemning Trump's actions in no uncertain terms as state-sanctioned child abuse doesn't mean he will have any influence on the regime's draconian policy. After all, Congress refused only a couple of years ago, and not for the first time, to ratify the International Rights of the Child treaty.  The United States is the only country which has officially given the giant middle finger to children, now that even the autocratic regimes of South Sudan and Somalia have become signatories to the treaty.

Trump is no outlier. He is only the latest and the loudest manifestation of the right wing core of Exceptional America.

Children as young as five or six years old were already getting hauled out of their American classrooms in handcuffs long before Trump decided that jailing the "illegal" ones should be the next logical step in the march of cruelty. As the American Civil Liberties Union reports, children are treated as adults in the criminal courts of 14 states. 
 The United States remains the only country in the world to sentence children to life in prison without the possibility of parole, a severe punishment that is categorically prohibited under the Convention on the Rights of the Child. While in recent years the U.S. Supreme Court has limited the application of this life and death sentence to children, around 2,500 people are currently serving this sentence for crimes they were involved in years ago as children.
So that the corporate media are now focused, en masse, on the abuses and deadly antics of the aptly named ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) is really quite remarkable after years of relative avoidance of the issue during the Bush and Obama administrations. Trump, for his part, is no doubt cynically using the child arrests to pressure Congress into allocating him the funds for his precious Wall. And given that this is a midterms election year, he might well succeed in forcing the wishy-washy congress critters to finally pass an immigration reform package, including making permanent the Dream Act.

Meanwhile, here's my New York Times comment to Charles Blow's column
about the individual human beings who are being tragically swept up by the Icemen of Trumpistan: 
Only a few weeks elapsed between Trump calling them "animals" and treating them like animals, yanking kids from parents and jailing them. He literally views refugees as less than human.

His flacks' pleading that they're only following the law hearkens back to the fascist regimes of the last century.

That excuse didn't fly at the Nuremberg trials and it shouldn't fly here, either... although the US has carefully exempted itself from international human rights statutes.

US leaders have never held the family in highest regard. While the entire nation is rightly aghast at what's happening in our own back yard, should we really be shocked?

The Trump regime is also now assisting Saudi Arabia in a genocide in Yemen, attacking and isolating the only port of entry for food shipments.

Here at home, one in three black American males is imprisoned at some point in his life, a de facto policy which also serves to rip families apart. We have more prisons and lock up more people than any country on earth.
We have more guns than any other place on earth.
The students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas have certainly learned the hard way that US leaders don't care a whit about families - unless they're dynasties and billionaires.
It's the all-American norm of state-sanctioned violence with cynical thoughts and prayers, blame and excuses, whenever cruel policies have "shocking" consequences.
So little time, so much to protest against. Let's all wake up, and stay awake this time.

4 comments:

  1. This excerpt adds to the sordid story of our country that has no shame:

    https://www.democracynow.org/2018/6/15/blistering_un_report_trump_administrations_policie
    ...
    AMY GOODMAN: You point out that the life expectancy in the United States, in the most—what many consider the most industrialized country in the world, the life expectancy rates are falling.

    PHILIP ALSTON: Yes. The World Health Organization brought out new statistics just a week or so ago, which showed—and this is a complex figure. It showed that the healthy life expectancy—in other words, the number of years that a newborn can expect to live in health—is now lower in the United States than it is in China. This is a pretty shocking development, because life expectancy is the classic overall indicator of the well-being of a society. It brings together a lot of different factors—why people live long, why they die early and so on. And so, what you’ve got in the United States, despite massive spending on healthcare, etc., is the worst level of healthcare in the Western world, the highest levels of child poverty and so on. And they all manifest themselves in the reducing life expectancy.

    AMY GOODMAN: Philip Alston, the U.S. is the only country in the world not to have ratified the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child?

    PHILIP ALSTON: Yes, the only one.

    AMY GOODMAN: The only country in the world.

    PHILIP ALSTON: It’s quite an achievement.

    AMY GOODMAN: And how does that relate to extreme poverty in the United states?

    PHILIP ALSTON: Well, children, of course, are an essential part of this. Of the 40 million Americans living in poverty, 13 million of those are children. We saw earlier this year in Congress a big battle over the Child Health Insurance Program, which gives—

    AMY GOODMAN: That’s CHIP.

    PHILIP ALSTON: CHIP, exactly—gives Medicaid and other assistance to children. If that had indeed been eliminated, it would have resulted in millions of children being made far worse off. So, the fact that the United States says, “We’re not going to acknowledge that children have rights. We’re not going to acknowledge the universally accepted list of human rights,” then makes it much easier not to single out children, not to try to guarantee minimum levels of well-being to those children. So, I think it is deeply problematic, and I think it would be very good if the United States were to look at itself and say, “Why is that we are the only country in the entire world that doesn’t accept the notion that children have human rights?”

    AMY GOODMAN: And how do migrant children being ripped from the arms of their parents fit into this story?

    PHILIP ALSTON: Well, of course, that’s a violation of the parents’ rights, because there’s a right for a family to remain unified. That right has been upheld across the world in all sorts of courts and jurisdictions. But the other element, obviously, is that the child also has a whole set of rights that are being violated by this sort of conduct.

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  2. For emphasis, underscoring Ms. Garcia's comment to Mr. Blow, and her call to us all:

    “One of the great liabilities of history is that all too many people fail to remain awake through great periods of social change. Every society has its protectors of status quo and its fraternities of the indifferent who are notorious for sleeping through revolutions. Today, our very survival depends on our ability to stay awake, to adjust to new ideas, to remain vigilant and to face the challenge of change.”
    ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

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  3. Trump's approval numbers have risen to the doorstep of 40%. How can it be that his emptiness and style keep winning adherents? Can it simply be that his "base" (only?) who were once quiet in their racism, ignorance and cruelty are now encouraged by Trump's example to speak up and act out? Are crimes against humanity the new normal at home as well as abroad?

    In addition to the rise of true believers, we have seen a rise in the number of non-deplorable righties, liberals and neutrals who keep discovering good reasons to approve the things Trump does, at least some of the things some of the time––and they are no longer toying with irony.

    Dear Gallup, what is the total percentage of the following groups ?

    (1) Americans who support Trump consistently (the "base"), plus
    (2) those who support him selectively (new converts), plus
    (3) the totally neutral who will neither lift a finger in support of Trump nor ever shake a finger in disapproval.

    (When counting resistance, group 3 is as good as group 1, no ?)

    Isn't it likely the total in support of Trump currently adds up to more than 50% of Americans ? Some people fuss loudly, but Trump's plans continue to "go forward." That means those of us who stand in resistance are a minority and, it seems, a feeble, shrinking minority.

    Considering the DNC's expected moves between now and 2020, how soon after Trump's second inaugural address will a high-ranking GOP equivalent of Rudolf Hess salute the little man on stage and declare (with unimpeachable accuracy):

    "The Party is Trump ! Trump is America ! America is Trump ! USA ! USA ! USA !"

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  4. At some point, the attacks on Trump will have converted everybody who is open to conversion by attack tactics. They will have increased intensity enough to get them to the polls. Still the attacks go on. Then what change can they make?

    They can then offend. They'll increase the intensity of Trump supporters too.

    They may also offend some in the middle who were not converted, who then vote for Trump.

    This tactic is not an all purpose answer to just keep doing indefinitely. At some point, something more is needed. I think that we have probably passed that point with this latest manic reaction to the border issue.

    Democrats cannot forever avoid their own divisions, between the sold out corporate types and those who would offer different ideas. To win, Democrats will finally need to offer something more than "Trump is awful." They'll need to offer "Democrats are good because they will do X, Y, and Z." Republican-Lite in contrast is actually undermined by attacks on Republican-heavy. What does it matter to change the flag from R to D on the same thinking?

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