Putting a Humanitarian Spin On Xenophobia

In order to prevent thousands of Central American migrants from making those dangerous journeys from dangerous countries, whose danger to human lives stems in large part from dangerous CIA/Pentagon death squads enabling military right-wing coups and propping up corrupt puppets, the Biden administration is now installing more native police and military guards than there are refugees at various border crossings.

It's a way to "discourage" refugees from ever leaving their climate-ravaged, violence-torn homes in the first place. And let's be honest. It takes the heat off Joe Biden, who is getting lambasted left and right for the abysmal conditions of imprisoned migrants, with the added insult of getting his carefully cultivated neo-progressive persona tarnished. 

Press Secretary Jen Psaki announced on Monday that the White House has made deals with Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras (where a 2009 military coup with the passive-aggressive compliance, if not direct assistance, of the Obama administration, ousted the socialist democratically-elected president) to repel or arrest - if not something even worse - would-be refugees.

Or, as the New York Times spins it, this draconian measure is only being implemented for the good of the refugees, to protect them from "making a dangerous trip North." The Biden administration will beneficently arrange for these desperate people to be turned back, jailed or even tortured or shot at places far, far away from the prying eyes of the American people - who already are getting an eye-full of the shameful conditions in pediatric "detention shelters" on our side of the border.

It's a variation on the solution devised by the kinder gentler administration which had so ostentatiously banned Bush-era torture. The Democrats simply outsourced their own torture to friendly authoritarian countries, and euphemized the outsourcing as "extraordinary rendition." 

And then there were those therapeutic "surgical" drone strikes that made future Abu Ghraib photographic scandals far less likely, mainly because remote-controlled Predators left so few intact bodies around to provide any embarrassing evidence. 

From Monday's Times:

Mexico has informed the United States that it will maintain 10,000 troops at its own southern border, aiming to double the number of migrants that it stops from traveling north, Ms. Psaki said. Guatemala has added 1,500 troops to its border with Honduras and has set up a series of a dozen checkpoints along the route that many migrants take as they head to the United States.

She also said that Honduras recently “surged” 7,000 police and troops to disperse a contingent of migrants that had gathered to make the trip north seeking refuge.

“The objective is to make it more difficult to make the journey, and make crossing the border more difficult,” Ms. Psaki said.

This is the exact same policy continued less than successfully by Donald Trump. However, the announcement that Biden is renewing it is somehow not eliciting anywhere near the same levels of outrage from the corporate press and Democratic lawmakers who decried the cruelty of outsourcing xenophobic US policy to repressive, corrupt regimes and police agencies only a few short years ago. The difference, of course, is that Trump made no effort to spin the cruelty into sanctimony and made no effort to play nice with Mexico. The Democratic side of the duopoly for its own part has always striven mightily to put the humanitarian gloss on the bipartisan, international human rights abuses that this country is so famous for. Trump was more interested in bellowing about "shithole countries" to rile up his base. Democrats talk up a kind, caring  game to placate their liberal base.

For example, Vice President Kamaa Harris is promoted by the Times as  leading a valiant effort to "improve the conditions" in the corrupt, devastated areas from which the refugees are fleeing. At the same time, these refugees are also being denigrated and dehumanized by the Biden administration and friendly establishment press as a militant "surge" that is threatening to breach our suddenly-precious border wall. The bellicose rhetoric is so ingrained in all aspects of foreign policy that there seems to be nothing that they can't or won't append their war jingo to.

The Times article uncritically puts a final spin on what is, essentially, a threat and a warning to an eminently disposable population:

The agreements with the countries are an early test of the cooperation that Ms. Harris will need in order to succeed in that mission.

“These discussions are ongoing, over a period of time and take place at several levels of the government, both here and within these countries, Ms. Psaki said.

Translation: if these violent and historically corrupt regimes don't do what the US imperium orders in order to quell the "surge" of their own people - cast almost as enemy combatants in need of some tough love, rather than as people fleeing for their very lives from violence and famine -  then Uncle Sam won't be forking over any more dollars to prop up their violent and corrupt regimes.

And if people do have to suffer and die, Psaki smarmily dog-whistles, there will be so many players and so many places involved in the abuses that the naming of any individual culprits will be impossible, not to mention unnecessary and undesirable.

This outsourcing of weaponized US immigration policy, moreover, will also make it costly and inconvenient for a US media conglomerate owned by only five or six corporations to bother setting up bureaus in southern Mexico, Honduras and Guatemala in order to cover the plights of thwarted refugees. Covering the occasional Rio Grande drowning and kids sleeping under Mylar blankets behind bars is cheap, it's easy, and it's close enough to home to keep the domestic culture wars alive, and the ratings higher. 

Why else is this whole shameful tale being constantly reported as a "border crisis" rather than the Global South climate disaster and capitalism-spawned human catastrophe that it really is?

(Hint: Follow the money. Remember who sponsors cable news. Here's looking at you, Big Oil, Big Ag, Big Pharma, Big Financialized Capital.)

The Narrow Focus of Democrats' Anti-Trump Ire

True to form, House Democratic leaders quickly abandoned their initial clarion call to censure Donald Trump for his continuing series of vile xenophobic attacks on the Squad of four progressive female members. They instead introduced a motion merely to "condemn" his language while failing to condemn either his continued caging of immigrants at the border or his actual and threatened deportation sweeps. (Update: the condemnation passed, largely across party lines, on Tuesday evening.)

The Democratic leadership's condemnation of Trump's racist demagoguery is not to be confused with any opposition to the Status Quo. The whole purpose of their grandstanding resolution is to unify the Party, not to protect refugees from man-made climate change and regime change. 

 And just so everybody is perfectly and absolutely clear about their limited intent, the resolution condemning his language gratuitously doubles right down on the longstanding "colorblind" racist trope which distinguishes the Able-Bodied Deserving Immigrant from the Weak Undeserving Immigrant.

As reported by the New York Times,

Among other things, the resolution declares that the House “believes that immigrants and their descendants have made America stronger,” that “those who take the oath of citizenship are every bit as American as those whose families have lived in the United States for many generations,” and that the House “is committed to keeping America open to those lawfully seeking refuge and asylum from violence and oppression, and those who are willing to work hard to live the American Dream, no matter their race, ethnicity, faith, or country of origin.”

There is not one word about those fleeing because record drought and heat have destroyed the subsistence farming they depend on to literally survive. There is not one word about changing the law to include impending starvation as a legitimate reason to seek asylum. Only those who are willing to wait in line for years and then work hard for low wages will be welcomed. Humanitarianism is not part of the equation. Political power is.

The Democrats' resolution all about restoring the tone, the civility, the cosmetic diversity, the jolly bipartisanship and intraparty comity among the members of Congress, most of whom have achieved fabulous wealth, or at least achieved the promise of future fabulous revolving-door wealth. The Times approvingly quotes the Resolution's co-sponsor, New Jersey Democrat and former Obama State Department official Tom Malinowski:

“Let’s focus on these comments that the vast majority of Americans recognize to be divisive and racist, that the vast majority of my Republican colleagues, in their hearts, recognize to be divisive and racist.
“We need to move forward with something that can be unifying, and right now, what we can unite around is that what the president said was wrong, un-American, and dangerous.”

Focus on his words, not his xenophobic deeds, in which the Democrats have been all too shamefully complicit.

The nihilistic Republicans, meanwhile, are seeking to shift their own conversation away from addressing Trump's racist rhetoric to caterwauling about the "socialist" danger posed by the squad of progressive women who are the targets of his wrath: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan.

Trump's hurling of anti-racist invective (if you call me a racist that makes you a racist) right back at his critics is nothing new under the ultra-right sun, of course. His defense of Israel while leveling charges of anti-Semitism against, in particular, Somali refugee Ilhan Omar, is simply the transmutation of the Far Right's own historical anti-Semitism into increasingly mainstream Islamophobia. The Muslim refugees of America's wars, and now the Latino refugees from US-sponsored regime change military coups and climate catastrophe are essentially stateless people. And since the historically stateless Jews are now largely assimilated into American and European life, the Muslims and Latinos are simply the new Jews - or the latest convenient scapegoats.

The growing fascism of Donald Trump's Republican party and the neoliberalism of the Democrats are actually closely aligned. Presidential contender Hillary Clinton, for one, recently and bizarrely blamed immigrants themselves for the rise of right-wing populism in Europe and the United States. In a friendly series of November interviews covered by Guardian diplomatic editor Patrick Wintour, Clinton said:

“I think Europe needs to get a handle on migration because that is what lit the flame...
“I admire the very generous and compassionate approaches that were taken particularly by leaders like Angela Merkel, but I think it is fair to say Europe has done its part, and must send a very clear message – ‘we are not going to be able to continue provide refuge and support’ – because if we don’t deal with the migration issue it will continue to roil the body politic.”

It's a somewhat nicer nativistic way than Trump's of telling people to stay in, or go back to, their own countries even if it kills them. She doesn't acknowledge her own role in the growing global humanitarian catastrophes, particularly her dominant role in destroying Libya, whence countless migrants have fled, many of them losing their lives in desperate attempts to cross the Mediterranean to Europe. 

But she was only too happy to Tweet this week against Trump's racist attacks on the Squad, and to join with Nancy Pelosi in glibly advising immigrant families to simply not answer their doors when Border Patrol and ICE agents drop by their neighborhoods in one of those deportation sweeps. The focus of her ire is every bit as conveniently narrow as that of her party. It's not the anti-immigrant policies that have been ramped up with a vengeance, with increasing border militarization and imprisonments and mass deportations. It's the anti-immigrant Trumpian rhetoric attached to these cruel policies that evokes her virtue-signaling wrath. The fake anger is carefully transmuted into the platitudinous anti-Trump statements that her party regularly dreams up as a means to mask its own complicity.

The mask is getting mighty thin and mighty transparent.

The ultimate goal of border walls is not only to "make America white again," but to protect the rich world from the poor world, to protect plutocrats from the victims of capitalistic violence, who must be exiled and their humanity diminished so that the rich can assuage their own guilt as well as protect their hoarded wealth. Just as the Squad is the latest convenient scapegoat for Trump and the Republicans, Trump and the Republicans are convenient scapegoats of their Democratic de facto collaborators.

The never-ending scandals and Tweets and outbursts of outrage in high places is the fuel that feeds the spectacle.

Smart Adult Cruelty

The news that hunger-striking imprisoned migrants in Texas are now being force-fed, in clear violation of international human rights statutes against torture, is being greeted with a collective yawn from the adults in the Bipartisan Caucus For Sadistic Sanity.

It's not about the physical torture, you see. That is something that everyday Americans are not allowed to see on their TVs. Force-feeding is a really disturbing thing to witness, according to Human Rights Watch:

Force-feeding – which involves pushing a feeding tube down a patient’s nose – can be very painful and is inherently cruel, inhuman, and degrading. Medical ethics and human rights norms generally prohibit the force feeding of detainees who are competent and capable of rational judgment as to the consequences of refusing food. A relative of two men being force-fed with nasal tubes by ICE told the AP the men are having persistent nose bleeds and vomiting several times a day.

Even Human Rights Watch is so squeamish that it initially refers to imprisoned migrants as "patients." 

 Meanwhile, the controversy that is truly roiling the media-political complex is the cruel semantics of the Trumpian wall-talk, and how they can overcome it. The obvious profitable solution to the current impasse between Democrats and Republicans over Trump's demand for a wall is simply to use the word "smart" when describing how to punish, track, harass, terrorize, torture, cage and deport brown-skinned people fleeing for their lives from some of the same countries the US has destabilized over decades of regime change and economic plunder. What adult in the room doesn't love technology?

His threats of an emergency declaration to force the military to construct a physical barrier notwithstanding, even Donald Trump is now reportedly eager to jump on the Smart Xenophobe bandwagon in order to save face after his various concrete and steel wall proposals all crumbled into dust last week with the temporary reopening of the government. As The Hill reports:

Tech companies are increasingly bullish on building a "smart wall," which would incorporate new technologies to beef up security on the southern border.
Many firms see a potential windfall with both Democrats and Republicans floating the idea of tech improvements as an alternative to President Trump's call for a steel barrier on the U.S.-Mexico border.
Democrats have said they would back as much as $5.7 billion for a smart wall. Trump himself discussed the idea when announcing the deal to end the recent government shutdown.

Trump ruefully had to admit that walls and moats are medieval, whereas Reaper drones and cameras are modern and efficient and smart. This is especially true since the state of Israel is ready, willing and able to share its own long expertise in controlling the undesirable humans imprisoned in its open-air Palestinian gulag from breaching that border. One such company, Elbit Systems, is eager to line the entire Arizona-Mexico border not with Trump's dumb retrograde wall, but with a virtual barrier of smart modern towers decked out with radar and cameras.

Montana Senator Jon Tester wants to award a contract to a Montana company  for a long, snaking, smart underground wall of fiberoptic cable that would alert the border patrol every time somebody takes a step or even draws a trembling breath. This is not at all the same kind of corrupt bribery scheme as Trump conniving and colluding to build a luxury tower in Moscow. For one thing, it's smart legalized corruption.

The main catch to all this smartness and modernity, according to civil libertarians, is that US citizens will also unavoidably be caught up in the surveillance and the terror. No technology can differentiate upstanding American human citizens in border states from non-US humans, because nationality and race are not biological constructs. 

"Legal" residents of border states, therefore, might not like government drones constantly buzzing above their heads or watching facial recognition technology stations being installed in their backyards, even if it is for the profitable national security of unfettered multinational capitalists.

Smart experts insist it is only what people can actually see that can hurt and scare them and therefore endanger the security and profits of the multinational tech companies. Maybe once the experts can figure out how to make drones and surveillance towers as invisible as their torture chambers they'll have better luck winning over American hearts and minds.

Pitchforks In the Service of Plutocracy

 (updated below)

"My administration is the only thing standing between you and the pitchforks," Barack Obama reassured a group of nervous tycoons in 2009, when the government bailouts of Wall Street were eliciting a tsunami of popular outrage.

Absent a new New Deal and absent any prosecution of said Wall Street bankers, that outrage soon evolved into the Tea Party movement on the right, the ephemeral Occupy movement on the left, and the virtual canonization, via slick corporate media propaganda, of Barack Obama himself as combination martyr, philosopher-king and rock star.

People were carefully taught to despise and fear one another, rather than aim their ire properly at the runaway capitalism that got us all into such a mess in the first place. Home foreclosures, many of them fraudulent, skyrocketed. We were told it wasn't the bankers' fault, but the fault of all those irresponsible people who took on debt they couldn't afford.

 If people didn't lose their jobs outright, often never to work again, their wages stagnated even as the richest Americans sucked back more than 94% of the wealth "lost" due to Wall Street shenanigans and unprosecuted crimes. People were told by one party that their lack of work was due to migrants stealing all the jobs, and by the other party that they had a "skills gap," and needed just a bit more education in order to become the entrepreneurs of their own lives.

People were urged to join the Republicans if they blamed the first African-American "food stamp president" for their troubles. People were urged to join the Democrats to show their love for our first African-American president and to hope for a better life tomorrow.

 Republican leaders, meanwhile, showed their own perverted love for corporations and billionaires. Democratic leaders, despite their own fealty to corporations and billionaires, also graciously expanded their love for the top 10 percent of wealth-holders. They preached to the bottom 90 percent that with enough hard work and grit and education, they too could reach the ranks of the top 10 percent. And if they could not, then their special "identities" would carry them through. If they weren't to be paid a living wage, then at least their identity labels would be recognized and respected. 

It was a dog-eat-dog world then, and it's a dog-eat-dog world now. Competition, not cooperation, is "who we are" in America. That's been true for the past 240 years.  

And ten years after the financial bailouts and the greatest concentration of wealth placed in the fewest hands since the last Gilded Age, people are trapped inside two political parties. There's a civil war brewing. The disposable troops are the hapless draftees of the Duopoly, fighting one another for neither monetary nor spiritual benefit. People are punching down and across, instead of up at the top, where the real culprits and the true enemies are.

"Let them eat resentment!" has long been the unspoken motto of phony Republican populists, riling up the masses in service of the elites.

"Let them eat Trump for breakfast!' has replaced the insipid "don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good" and "when they go low, we go high" platitudes of the corporate Democrats as they rile up the mere aspirants to the upper middle class, and celebrities raise their own social media profiles by appearing at party-sanctioned protest photo-ops.

Going high by espousing policies for the greater good, such as single-payer health care and debt-free education, is simply not an option for professional liberals as they approach yet another lackluster midterm election season. #RussiaGate simply isn't selling any more. But Latino kids getting ripped away from their parents certainly is, all of a sudden, after Latino families getting ripped apart by harsh immigration enforcement for two terms of Obama went virtually ignored.

The enemy is Trump, and nothing but the Trump. And, of course, all his minions.

As I suspected, the corporate media's coverage of the Poor People's Campaign rally in Washington over the weekend turned out to be scanty to nil. Exceptions were the Washington Post and NBC.

When I clicked on the HuffPo this morning, I was momentarily heartened by an oversize photo of Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) raising her fist in the air and firing up an angry progressive crowd.

Unfortunately, the venue was not the Poor People's rally for social and economic justice. It was right in the celebrity heart of LaLa Land. And the ominous headline was a very Trump-like incitement to violence. "Waters Storms: Trump Admin. Not Welcome Anywhere!"

She was referring to recent events at Washington-area restaurants, where Trump officials were either hounded off the premises by activists, or formally asked to leave, as happened to Press Secretary Sarah Sanders and members of her family over the weekend. 

(Waters) warned members of Donald Trump’s cabinet to be prepared for a slew of outraged heckling and public shaming on the streets and in restaurants and stores if they continue to support the president’s controversial “zero tolerance” policy on undocumented immigrants.

“You think we’re rallying now? You ain’t seen nothing yet,” she vowed at an enthusiastic Los Angeles rally Saturday. “Already you have members of your cabinet that are being booed out of restaurants ... protesters taking up at their house saying ‘no peace, no sleep.’”

Waters is giving Trump exactly what he wants. She is feeding his administration's bunker mentality with manna from heaven. And if somebody in his cabinet gets hurt, all the better for him. The sense of mutual persecution which he engenders in his supporters will rise right along with his already-rising poll numbers.

At the risk of being accused of the dreaded "what about-ism," I wonder where Waters was when Obama's ICE and Homeland Security thugs were rounding up undocumented immigrants and deporting record numbers of them. Luckily for her and most of her fellow Democrats, Obama wasn't tweeting out incendiary messages calling them "animals" and "invaders" who don't even deserve due process rights.  Obama made it easier for both liberals and conservatives by simply calling the parents of unaccompanied minor refugees "irresponsible," with his only lofty goal being to send them a stern paternal message from the soft bottom of his heart. He also had a good relationship with Mexico, and very quietly sent Joe Biden to broker a deal for the detention and expulsion - and often imprisonment and torture - in that country, long before Central Americans ever got the chance to reach the United States border. He also bribed offered financial aid to the often corrupt governments of the refugees' countries of origin in exchange for their discouraging potential border-crossers by any means necessary.

In other words, Obama partially outsourced this country's longstanding policy of cruelty to refugees the same way he outsourced to foreign black site prisons the CIA torture he pretended to ban soon after he took his oath of office. 

Much is being made of Trump's weekend tweet calling for an end to due process rights for migrants. But little was made of the Congressional Research Team's 2014 report that the US appropriated more than $100 million to the Mexican government for the purchase of such inhumane anti-immigration enforcement tools as canine teams and electric prods. 

The New York Times, which actually once did quite an admirable job criticizing Obama's harsh immigration policies - including the odious "Secure Communities" dragnet he set up during his first term - has seemingly completely forgotten all about that legacy as it goes about the business of manufacturing anti-Trump outrage in its liberal readership. According to an editorial published on Saturday, the caging of migrants was a magical leap straight from George W. Bush to Donald J. Trump, with nary a Barack Obama in sight, other than his laudable executive order protecting the "Dreamers."

Still, as the editorial correctly notes, Obama actually got a huge break from Republicans when they falsely accused him of being soft on illegal immigration.

Party leaders fanned those flames, accusing Mr. Obama of being imperious and “lawless.” In one bit of twisted logic, Mr. Boehner argued that the House couldn’t possibly take up reform legislation because it couldn’t trust Mr. Obama to carry out said legislation. Thus, the battle lines continued to harden.

Nothing allows unfettered capitalism to continue ruling and ruining the world like accusing a true champion of the free market like Barack Obama of being a Marxist peacenik. It sent, and continues to send, millions of good-thinking liberals straight to his defense. The nostalgia craze for Obama and his no-drama, intellectual, "scandal-free" regime has become something of a cult in its own right. 
 
My (not highly recommended) published response to the Times editorial:

 I was just re-reading some of the NYT's brave editorials (here, here, here) lambasting President Obama's cruel immigration policies, including the Secure Communities initiative which ended up deporting more immigrants than in all previous administrations combined. The reader comments were quite revealing, with the most popular coming from the pro-deportation crowd.

But there was a resistance movement back then, too, especially during his first term. Democratic mayors refused to comply with a directive ostensibly designed to cull "dangerous criminals" and kick them out of the country. The vast majority of deportees caught in the ICE dragnet turned out be upstanding people who'd lived in the US for many years. This was a cruel policy that also ripped families apart.

So I guess it's testament to the divisive politics in the Age of Trump that the editorial board would now opt to completely gloss over this stain on the Obama legacy. To his credit, he did eventually soften his stance and give respite to the "Dreamers" - but only after political pressure from activists and civil rights groups forced him to do the right thing, both morally and in the interests of his party.

So there's that one silver lining to Trump's cruelty. It's making people mad as hell. Polls now show that 75% of the population is against his own "zero tolerance" policy. 

 Do we care? Of course we do. And let's hope that we keep caring, and fighting injustice regardless whether the Dems win back power this year and in 2020.

Update, 6/26: Meanwhile, the corporate Democrats have designated Maxine Waters the "bad cop" for her calls for direct civic action against the Trumpies. The view of party elders, like Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, is that the goading of public officials in public places of food and entertainment will have an adverse effect for liberals at the polls. The elders have therefore "distanced" themselves from Waters's rhetoric. Pitchforks, even if wielded in the ultimate service of plutocracy, have a way of getting out of control and extending themselves to... oh, I don't know... complicit Democrats who have no qualms about gifting the dreaded Trump with billions of dollars in war paraphernalia and personnel?

Maxine Waters did not directly call for violence, of course. But the HuffPo and other organs of professional "resistance" made that goal implicit in their banner headlines, in my humble opinion.

So the question we have to ask is this: what if the public shaming of the Trumpies is so successful that they actually quit their jobs and leave Washington forever? It's who we replace them with that should concern us.

Not one of the Democratic elders who are complaining about Maxine Waters's call to action have given even the slightest lip service to the civil disobedience and nationwide arrests of members of the Poor People's Campaign. Not even Maxine Waters is giving lip service to the Poor People's Campaign. 

Poverty is simply not a part of the official narrative.

The Family That's Jailed Together Stays Together

The nation got a rare peek Wednesday at a softer side of Donald Trump's cruelty. Bowing to pressure from the brand damage being inflicted upon daughter Ivanka by thousands if state-kidnapped and imprisoned migrant children, he reversed a decision he'd again denied making only that morning.

The corporate media shockingly had begun doing some actual reporting for a change, diverting the public's attention away from the president's daily tweet-storm and creating a perfect unified storm of public outrage at Trump's "zero tolerance" immigration policy. 

 Ivanka saw the pictures of the crying children, and she showed the pictures to Daddy, no doubt tearfully informing Daddy that her carefully honed image as DOTUS (daughter of the United States) was being badly, if not fatally, tarnished. Ditto for wife Melania, whose own "Be Best!" public relations gimmick aimed at children's self-esteem was also effectively doomed to fail, given that every future photo op of her interacting in pediatric hospital wards was bound to be juxtaposed with images of children housed in cages at her husband's specific order.

Happy wife, happy life -- so Donald didn't have to think twice about reversing himself. To show what a nice paternal president he is, he's even reverting to the hokey Dad policies of his pretend-nemesis, Barack Obama, and ordering more "family detention centers" to be built to answer the xenophobic demand for mass incarceration of refugees and asylum seekers.

It'll be interesting to see whether there will be a reprise of the famous "Rachel Wept" episode on MSNBC or if the corporate media will document every mother-child reunion occurring behind barbed wire fences, or whether rich celebrities will continue tweeting how sad they feel and how big the checks they're mailing are. Or, will the media revert to type and go back to harping on RussiaRussiaRussia and the brand damage that Trump is doing to America's pristine image as the preeminent political crises of our times?

My hope, if I may be so bold as to harbor one, is an echo of what I wrote earlier this week: that, as a result of this great national awakening to America's state-sanctioned cruelty, the media will cover other stories about oppressed people, such as the Yemenis now being starved to death with the help of the American military and intelligence personnel and billions of dollars in American weapons sales.

Can the media quit their unhealthy addiction to palace intrigues and their relentless pseudo-shock over Trump's narcissistic personality disorder even at this late stage of capitalistic world rule?

We'll see if there's as much coverage of this weekend's Poor People's March on Washington as there is Trump's latest tweets or the Democratic Party-controlled Women's March Against Trump. After all, the feckless Democrats never met a humanitarian crisis or a rag-tag protest movement the party couldn't co-opt -- until such time, that is, as all the liberal candidates are safely re-elected and all the selective outrage can be safely contained.

With so-called moderate Republicans abandoning the GOP for the Democrats in droves, or at least pretending to quit on TV, it is at least more apparent that the Duopoly is exactly as Upton Sinclair described it: one bird of prey with two right wings. The Republican wing, currently befouled with the predator's own crap, is not flying much at all these days. For its part, the Democratic wing is much too weighed down with corporate money to do much more than beat frantically, keeping time with the usual bipartisan preening and scolding and screeching. 

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.

Pre-Existing Conditions

As pathological as it is, the current Trump administration is not operating in a vacuum. Its policies on war, institutional racism, and robbing the poor to reward the rich are part of the grand old capitalistic traditions of slavery, neocolonialism, neoconservatism and neoliberalism.

As I've written many times before, Trump and his cronies are just more upfront about braying out the hatred that the ruling class harbors against the rest of us. They take bad pre-existing things and they make them much, more worse.

Take their latest stunt of ripping immigrant children away from their parents at the border and incarcerating them in an abandoned South Texas Walmart warehouse. Since this facility is already overcrowded to bursting thanks to Attorney General Jeff Sessions's unilateral decision that domestic and gang violence are no longer grounds for getting refugee status, the Trumpies are busily planning tent cities to house the children as they await their unilateral deportation orders from overworked immigration rubber-stampers judges.

Don't get me wrong. It's great that liberals and even conservatives from both corporate parties are raising a ruckus about this cruelty. But where were they a couple of years ago when the Obama administration threatened to seize the children incarcerated at the Berks (Pennsylvania) Family Detention Center because their mothers were staging a hunger strike to protest the abysmal living conditions and the lack of due process? Either the women ate or they would lose their kids. So they chose to eat. Thus was the last ounce of personal agency they possessed to fight the system taken away from them. The system crushed them.

The White House press corps certainly did not appeal to Obama flack Josh Earnest's parental status to express their outrage over that particular atrocity.  Then again, Earnest didn't pull a grotesque Sarah Sanders and fall back on the Bible to explain how any cruelty can be legalized. (see: torture, capital punishment, forced feeding and solitary confinement.)

Now, to be fair, it's not that the public or the press never cared about the plight of "illegal" immigrants in this country. As recently as Memorial Day 2014, the residents of Murrieta, California turned out en mass to protest the housing of refugees in a warehouse. But there was a catch: they weren't angry because the newcomers were about to be locked up in a pre-deportation "processing center". The townsfolk were mad because they didn't want the immigrants in their town, period. They forced the Homeland Security buses filled with refugees to turn back at the town line.

Plus, in that particular well-publicized incident, the ensuing national liberal backlash was aimed not so much at Obama's cruel immigration policies, but against the conservative residents of Murrieta -- who, Trump-like, distastefully wore their xenophobia right on their sleeves.

To their credit, the corporate media are now in the forefront of protesting the Trump version of cruelty toward immigrants and refugees. The New York Times published a righteous editorial instructing readers how to "fight back" -- by calling their congress critters and joining protest marches and writing a check. Oh, and by the way, be sure to vote in those righteous Democrats in November. Because unlike the Republicans, they suddenly care so very, very deeply about refugees and immigrants. 

Meanwhile, the editorial offered absolutely no exploration of the root causes of this exodus from Central America: the poverty engendered by NAFTA; the predatory loans from Wall Street banks and the IMF to corrupt governments, often installed after CIA coups against democratic ones; the DEA-ATF-assisted drug and gang wars.

Still, the coverage is a refreshing departure from a 2012 puff piece about Obama's public relations initiative to make jails for migrants charged with minor civil offenses, like traffic tickets, resemble Holiday Inn Expresses. It was a gesture of his punitive good will. Immigration officials gave the media a guided tour of a prototypical complex in South Texas:

 Detainees will be free to move through much of the center 24 hours a day. Unarmed staff members, dressed in blue polo shirts and khaki trousers, are known as “resident advisers,” not guards....

 The 608-bed center, in Karnes County, Tex., will house male detainees who present minimal safety concerns or flight risk, officials said. The first detainees are expected to arrive in about three weeks.

Spread across 29 acres, the center is designed according to the Obama administration’s new mandates calling for greater unescorted movement and recreational opportunities in a less penal setting.

The gentler approach is immediately evident in the center’s modernist facade, which is painted in bright primary colors — a far cry from the dreary bunkerlike structures that have characterized the system.

This article is a prime example of how even a cruel policy can be effectively masked with just the right amount of pretty liberal window-dressing and sugar-coating. It also helps the cause of making punishment look benign when Republicans then turn around and complain that immigrants imprisoned for jaywalking or speeding are just getting it too good. “The administration goes beyond common sense to accommodate illegal immigrants and treats them better than citizens in federal custody,” Sen. Lamar Alexander fumed at the time.

***

Speaking of pre-existing conditions, Republicans are again making the Affordable Care Act look better than it is by threatening to remove the requirement that private insurers give coverage to chronically sick paying customers as well as healthy subscribers.

It's another made-to-order campaign talking point for corporate Democrats desperately seeking midterm votes. So naturally, neoliberal Times pundit Paul Krugman is happy to carry their outraged water for them. He fumes: 

What may seem puzzling about all this is the cruelty. O.K., Donald Trump is obviously a man utterly lacking in empathy. But don’t other Republicans feel a bit bad about the prospect of taking health care away from millions of Americans who have done nothing wrong besides having past medical problems?

Actually, no. Consider Rick Scott, the governor of Florida (and current Senate candidate), whose attorney general has joined the lawsuit to eliminate protection for pre-existing conditions. While refusing to say whether he supports the suit, Scott declared, “We’ve got to reward people for caring for themselves.” Right, because if you get cancer, or arthritis, or multiple sclerosis — all among the pre-existing conditions for which people used to be denied coverage — it must be your own fault.

It's all according to how the cruelty is marketed. Republicans sell it to their base in the form of resentment against both internal interlopers and enemies at the gate, while Democrats market it as the lesser evil. Things are of necessity unpleasant now, but be patient and all will miraculously morph into the Greater Good at some fuzzy unspecified time but certainly not right this very minute. At least 30 million Americans will have to remain grossly underinsured or completely uninsured, while nearly half the population who literally can't afford to live should write a check to candidates and tide themselves over by hating Russia.

 To expect timely change or relief is to be unhealthily fixated on puppies and unicorns. So give Dems your vote!

But unhealthy obsessive ingrate that I am, I published this response to Krugman:  

The trouble with the GOP opposition to the inaptly named "Affordable" Care Act is that they're opposing a plan originally devised by the conservative Heritage Foundation. In order to distance themselves from anything with the word "Obama" in it, therefore, they have to distance themselves from themselves and move ever farther to the right.

It's the Democratic Party that is now the party of the center-right. The wealthy donors funding it wouldn't have it any other way. With more than half of the US population now favoring single payer health care, what does the DCCC do? They direct midterm candidates to refrain from using the term "single payer" in their campaign ads. They are instead tiptoeing around bait-and-switches, like Medicare buy-ins for a chosen lucky few, or a public "option" - just more opportunity for the GOP to punish the sickest and for private insurers to rake it in.

With friends like the predatory insurance cartel, who needs the GOP? Maybe that's why Nancy "Pay-Go" Pelosi posed with a Blue Cross executive this week, tweeting out: "We're fighting for you!"

Yes, the GOP is every Dickens villain rolled into one. But cathartic as it may feel to rail against the Blob from hell, doing so absent a new New Deal will not win liberals many majorities. I'm even starting to wonder if the corporate Dems are having too much fun being virtue-signaling neoliberal #Resistance fighters to care.

So I'll say it loud, say it proud, say it often: Single Payer Or Bust.

Detainees, Disposables, and DACA

Attorney General Jeff Sessions, famous for his long history of racism and xenophobia, was only too happy to give cover to Boss Trump Tuesday as he announced the end of DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals).

But compassionate sadist that he is, Sessions added that the Death to Dreamers agenda won't be enforced until March, which should give Congress more than (ahem) enough time to do right by the 800,000 people who suddenly find themselves plunked back on the deportation list after being given a respite by the Obama administration. 

The relief granted to the important Latino voting bloc by the former president in an election year (2012) was never designed to be long-lasting. It was largely a result of the immense pressure from immigrant activists who threatened to withhold their votes from the Democratic incumbent unless he put his mouth where his money was. So he picked up his pen and he did the right pragmatic thing.

But, neoliberal stickler for boot-strapperism that he was, Obama made sure that signing up for DACA wouldn't be a walk in the park for the young immigrants. They had to jump through quite a few hoops. First, they couldn't have irresponsibly been born either too soon or too late. Anybody younger than 15 and older than 31 was out of luck. This is because the recipients of his selective mercy had to be either prime fodder for military service or smart enough to be in school full-time or lucky enough to have a job. They also had to have the financial wherewithal to pay a hefty fee for their temporary amnesty. Applications would languish for at least three suspenseful months. And most important, they had to come out of the shadows and admit their illegal status to the government.

So now that Trump's merciless brutality has collided with Obama's brutal mercy, the former president has bravely taken to Facebook to type out his displeasure. It's cruel, he says, to punish these young people who were unwittingly brought to this country by their irresponsible parents (read: sneaky immigrants with heavy accents who have probably not "assimilated".) Nowhere in his maudlin message does Obama explore the reasons why the parents entered the country with their kids in the first place. But that's not his point. His point is dog-whistling the message that some unqualified people still have to be sent a message. Mercy does have its limits, after all.

And therein lies my problem with DACA. It separates  "good" immigrants from "bad" immigrants, just as the "deserving" poor are artificially separated by policy-makers from the "undeserving" poor as an excuse to slash social programs. The liberal media's love affair with Dreamers, as they are dreamily known, helps paper over such horrendous realities as the private prisons where mother and child refugees from Central American government and gang violence are indefinitely detained pending court hearings on their refugee applications.

Rather than grant those detainees a reprieve, right before leaving office Obama made a prisoner exchange deal with the Australian prime minister, involving about more than a thousand Latino migrants currently being held in a US-controlled prison in Costa Rica, and and an equal number of Asian migrants, jailed on a couple of islands in the Pacific Ocean and in Papua New Guinea. These politicians were playing their own cruel game of international musical chairs with disposable human lives, forcing refugees to move even more many thousands of miles away from friends and relatives to gain their alleged freedom. "Transportation" of prisoners, as occurred in the bleak and brutal times of Charles Dickens, is alive and well.

The inmates of the Dickensian Berks County Family Residential Center in Pennsylvania, meanwhile, remain incarcerated for months or even years, pending deportation back to their violence-ridden native countries. They're not included in the Australian/American human refuse swap, probably for fear of any more untoward publicity, such as that arising from the mothers' hunger strike last year. The strike ended only when ICE officials threatened to yank small children away from their desperate parents.

That episode in the annals of American mercy was largely ignored by media. Not so, however, was the story of Donald Trump's crude, rude, and dishonest attempt to renege on Obama's "dumb" deal with Australia - before he eventually went along with it. Or did he?

It seems that the globalized swap of human bodies is running into a roadblock. Trump officials who arrived on the Australian gulag at Nauru in July to "vet" refugees abruptly up and left after only three days of interviews. From Reuters:

“The U.S. deal looks more and more doubtful,” Ian Rintoul from the Refugee Action Coalition said. “The U.S. deal was never the solution the Australian government pretended it to be.”

Former U.S. President Barack Obama agreed a deal with Australia late last year to offer refuge to up to 1,250 asylum seekers, a deal the Trump administration said it would only honor to maintain a strong relationship with Australia and then only on condition that refugees satisfied strict checks.

In exchange, Australia has pledged to take Central American refugees from a center in Costa Rica, where the United States has taken in a larger number of people in recent years.

The swap is designed, in part, to help Australia close both Manus and Nauru, which are expensive to run and have been widely criticized by the United Nations and others over treatment of detainees.

To be fair to Obama, whose administration deported a record number of immigrants before the Latino voting population forced him to change course, he at least was seen as trying to expand DACA in 2015 in order to include the parents of Dreamers in the temporary amnesty scheme. But mercilessly brutal Texas officials sued and won, and the administration's subsequent appeal, all the way to the Supreme Court, resulted in a non-decision. And thus does the game of musical chairs with human lives continue unabated. The people in power are always loath to ever let any divide-and-conquer opportunity go to waste. The wielding of fear and resentment is their most valuable weapon.

 Sessions, for his own part, didn't waste the opportunity Tuesday to again spew the canard that "illegals" are invading our country to steal such wonderful jobs as picking fruit and washing dishes from "real" Americans. (No matter that the Dreamers are mostly educated and "assimilated" - for all intents and purposes, already naturalized citizens.)

As soon as Trump was elected on his anti-immigration platform, the American Civil Liberties Union began advising potential DACA applicants to think twice before signing up, and to also consult with an immigration attorney before doing so. Even under Obama, there were always risks to signing up as a Dreamer. An eventual rude awakening was a given.

But if, as some people hope and predict, the feckless Trump will never actually enforce his decision on DACA absent any congressional action (he will humanely "revisit" the issue in six months), the announcement still serves the purpose of absolutely terrorizing 800,000 potential deportees and their families. Thankfully, they learned how to organize a long time ago. They are visible, and therefore they will ultimately be victorious.

In all likelihood, his threat to the Dreamers is just the stick Trump needs to get Congress to appropriate billions of dollars for his never-ending Nightmare Wall.

***

Update: Due to the nature (downright nasty as in "deport yourself back to Mexico!" to "I'm a progressive, and certainly not a racist, but..."  of comments submitted in the past 24 hours, I've had no choice but to shut down this function for this particular piece.

I've noticed that such websites as Truthout and Naked Capitalism have done away with reader comments on all their articles entirely in recent weeks. and I hope I'm not forced to do likewise. But it's getting uglier than usual out here in cyberspace. Hate speech is not the same thing as free speech. I don't have to tolerate it, and neither should anyone else.

Trump Takes a Dump

Sorely lacking both cajones and intellectual stamina, Donald Trump had to cower behind a hurricane to embrace a bigot after his own heart.

Only when safely esconced in his Camp David retreat on a Friday night - when every professional scold worth his or her oversize paycheck was off the air  - did Trump officially pardon former Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio.

We knew this was coming. The president said as much at his Phoenix rally this week, complaining that he couldn't make his grandiose announcement just yet because "they" had put the kibosh on it. He presumably meant the military junta and the Wall Street executives who are undemocratically running the country in his permanent mental and moral absence.

  So Trump not only dumped on Latinos during the traditional Friday night news dump beloved of all presidents before him, he actually increased the chances that the people running the show wouldn't much notice or even care. That's because the show this weekend is all about another vicious monster, named Harvey, making his landfall in Texas. Still, Trump couldn't leave well enough alone. He had to dig his dull knife in further and twist it by passive-aggressively allowing the immigrant checkpoints on evacuation routes to remain open. This decision both slowed down evacuations for everybody, and ensured that at least some "illegals" would stay behind in harm's way. The only choice offered to the undocumented was between drowning, and being arrested and deported.

The checkpoints will close only when actual highways close. Checkpoints will remain open on all roads not in the direct path of the storm, officials said.

Trump and Arpaio and all their loyal fans must be so proud of themselves. Hopefully, they won't drown in their own tears of joy or worse yet, choke on their spasms of maniacal wind.

Arpaio gained national notoriety by racially targeting people of Hispanic descent and building one of the most inhumane county jails in modern history. He housed inmates in tents in the broiling heat, served them rotten inedible food and humiliated men by forcing them to wear pink underwear. After years of getting away with it, he finally was convicted of criminal contempt last month for his refusal to obey a court order to stop his racial profiling. He had not yet been sentenced when Trump gleefully pardoned him.

But Trump still wasn't done dumping. He also chose the looming hurricane as the most optimal time to officially ban transgender people from joining the military.

He will, however, still allow undocumented immigrants to fight and die for the American imperium as the only fast track to citizenship yet available to them. Trump would never allow his xenophobic principles to stand in the way of endless profits for the perpetual war machine.

Of course, if these immigrant soldiers are unlucky enough to suffer a traumatic brain injury or PTSD during their tours of duty, and subsequently get into trouble with the law when they return home, they can still be deported in a New York minute.

Furthermore, the Pentagon announced plans last month to administer "enhanced screenings" and monitoring to more than 4,000 naturalized troops upon their returns home in order to ensure that they have not become "radicalized" during their military training and service.

The Trump administration has also tightened the screws on new immigrant recruits by delaying their final orders after sign-up and thus opening them up to deportation proceedings in the interim. According to the Washington Post, about a thousand of these recruits have already seen their visas expire as they await their deployment orders.

Trump is nothing if not a consummate bait-and-switch operator. And the military itself has long been in the business of holding out the carrots of citizenship, education, a steady paycheck and free medical care to its desperate recruits from all lower classes from all countries before wielding any number of their heavy sticks - not least of which is permanent physical disability or death.

Trump Admits Military Runs the Place, Deep State Panic Ensues

Donald Trump's minions are once again in damage control mode, forced to rush out some alternative facts and excuses to squelch the inconvenient truths that have an increasing tendency to escape from his big fat mouth.

Trump on Thursday made the big gaffe of claiming that his threatened crackdown on migrants and refugees will be a militarized operation, even though we have laws against that sort of thing in America. On the books, anyway.

"We’re getting really bad dudes out of this country and at a rate that nobody has ever seen before,” Trump boasted to a gaggle of multinational CEOs meeting with him at the White House. "And it’s a military operation because what has been allowed to come into our country—when you see gang violence that you’ve read about like never before and all of the things—much of that is people that are here illegally. And they’re rough and they’re tough, but they’re not tough like our people. So we’re getting them out.”

He couldn't have picked a better time for his bluster, given how the military dude in charge of domestic Homeland Security is just fresh off his stint of running American military operations in huge chunks of Central and South America. Even more awkward, Gen. John Kelly was physically present in Mexico at the exact moment that Trump was thumping his chest. Accompanied by Rex Tillerson, Exxon-Mobil's new Secretary of State, Kelly already was ineffectually trying to convince his Mexican counterparts that America really loves Mexico. He was already trying to do damage control over the Wall business as well as over Trump's threat to send armed troops over the border to "fight the drug war" in a more public fashion than has been heretofore deemed proper by the Deep State/military-industrial complex.

"There will be no use of military forces in immigration,” Kelly insisted in a direct rebuttal of his putative boss. “There will be no—repeat, no—mass deportations.”

There's also the matter of the administration "dumping" immigrants into Mexico who are not even Mexican citizens. Most of those coming across the southern border are refugees from the drug and gang violence in Central American countries.

And that, as the Intercept's Lee Fang puts it, has the private prison industry salivating. If the Mexican government refuses to accept the deportees, they'll have to be locked up somewhere. And there is a shortage of "facilities" to deal with the millions of human beings whom the Trump administration apparently has in mind.

Meanwhile, the corporate mainstream media has chosen to freak out not so much about the deportations per se, but about Trump's semantics on the militarization of the crackdown. Press Secretary Sean Spicer, for his own part, ineffectually tried to explain that his boss was only using the military term as an adjective to describe how "precise" and streamlined the roundups are going to be.

But the alternative reality is that Trump was only speaking the truth in his own usual disjointed, context-free way. 

US law enforcement - and that very much includes the Border Patrol and Immigration enforcement - has been highly militarized for at least the past decade. As Nafeez Ahmed writes in Alternet,

  Under the controversial "1033" program, the Department of Defense (DoD) is able to provide "surplus" military-grade equipment to law-enforcement agencies.

The program, legislated for in the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), provided local police forces access to billions of dollars worth of high-tech military equipment, including armoured tanks, rocket launchers, automatic weapons, night-vision goggles, and other supplies traditionally used by the U.S. Army in foreign war theaters.

The DHS often provided multimillion-dollar grants to law-enforcement agencies to purchase the military equipment.

After criticism of the program in the wake of militarized police force during protests in Ferguson and Baltimore, the Obama administration made some feeble P.R. efforts to rein in the foisting of excess war hardware upon minimally trained local law enforcement agencies.

The truth, though, is that domestic militarization is easier than ever. The only requirement is for the agencies to convince the feds -- specifically, the Pentagon - that such high tech weaponry is needed to control any number of vaguely-defined situations and "threats."

Despite what Obama's public relations offensive claimed at the time, Ahmed continues, 

 The 1033 program’s open-ended carte blanche for domestic law-enforcement agencies to access military-grade equipment has not been repealed, but integrated deeper into the Pentagon bureaucracy.

The new amendments dramatically increase the Pentagon’s powers to scrutinize and supervise the use of military equipment in the homeland. Among their implications, they make DoD-supervised military training mandatory for domestic agencies who receive these weapons.

In effect, this places all domestic law enforcement operations using Pentagon-supplied military equipment under the partial jurisdictional authority of the Secretary of Defense. By making domestic agencies more accountable to the DoD, the revamped 1033 program in effect extends the Pentagon’s jurisdictional authority into the homeland by bureaucratic fiat.

 Trump's military "adjective" is boosted by the fact that the Pentagon is now run not by the traditional civilian, but by an active military man -- Gen. James "Mad Dog" Mattis, who has absolute legal carte blanche to militarize whatever domestic agency he feels like.

Trump's deportation directives are only the culmination of decades of institutional xenophobia and greed.  According to Princeton University sociologists Douglas Massey and Karen Pren, "(...) border enforcement emerged as a policy response to a moral panic about the perceived threat of Latino immigration to the United States propounded by self-interested bureaucrats, politicians, and pundits who sought to mobilize political and material resources for their own benefit. The end result was a self-perpetuating cycle of rising enforcement and increased apprehensions that resulted in the militarization of the border in a way that was disconnected from the actual size of the undocumented flow."

Translation: follow the money.

After 9/11 and the founding of the Homeland Security state, the militarization of the Mexico border took off like a shot. And the very definition of "border" has increased exponentially. For greed and fear purposes, the border is the entire contiguous United States. This is not a new Trump invention, according to the National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights:

The border has become an imagined war zone, where the war on drugs, crime, and aliens are fought. Such arrangements make the border an area where the U.S. constitution has little to no value, a post-constitutional territory that expands across the country. Although there are many ways to assess just how militarized the border has become, one of the clearest ones is looking at the colossal spike in funds funnelled into border security.

And Trump's Wall is also a highly unoriginal concept, given that there is already a huge fence spanning much of the border. In 2006,  the Bush-era Congress (and that included an enthusiastic Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama) approved the construction of the multibillion-dollar Secure Fence, which turned 700 miles of the southern border into a virtual war zone. 

Then during the Obama presidency came the draconian enforcement and expansion of 2008's Secure Communities initiative. It tore apart millions of families whose members were arrested and deported for even very minor traffic infractions, such as an unpaid parking ticket. 

This is the exact same program which Trump now wants to revive, after Obama scaled it back somewhat in 2014, due to legal challenges and electoral pressure from immigration rights activists and Latinos, whose votes the Democratic Party so desperately needs for its continued survival.

And Sarah Lazare explains,

Meanwhile, Obama expanded the 287(g) program, which was authorized in 1996 by former President Bill Clinton. According to ICE, the program “allows a state or local law enforcement entity to enter into a partnership with ICE, under a joint Memorandum of Agreement (MOA), in order to receive delegated authority for immigration enforcement within their jurisdictions.” The program expanded immigration enforcement powers to local police, giving them the authority target undocumented people in the streets and in jails, leading to an escalation in racial profiling. While the Obama administration later partially scaled back 287(g), Trump has referenced this initiative and Secure Communities as models to emulate and “revitalize.”

Still, Obama always kept up his big propaganda show of supporting immigrants, even as ICE continued its cruel - and racist - raids and roundups throughout his tenure. In 2013, for example, under the Criminal Alien Removal Initiative in New Orleans, ICE stalked and arrested people in their Bible Study groups, in laundromats, in apartment complexes with the aid of the same high-tech mobile biometric devices first designed for military use in Iraq and Afghanistan.

McClatchey's James Rosen reported in November that the very authoritarian Obama has actually been unfairly castigated by Trump and other Republicans as a weak little pussycat, given how cruel and right-wing his administration actually was in its accomplishment of more than 2.5 million deported human beings. The record proves it:

David Burnham, co-founder of the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University, said the increase represents a joint crackdown by lawmakers and the Justice Department under Obama.
“This outcome is a combination of policies and actions by a very aggressive Congress and a very aggressive Obama administration both wanting to work the borders – keep people out, as Mr. Trump says,” Burnham told McClatchy.
Obama has long been described as the “deporter in chief” by immigration advocates who dispute President-elect Donald Trump’s characterization of Obama as soft on immigration.
But the new numbers provide the first concrete evidence of how Obama’s record compares with his predecessors’.

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/nationalrticle118022043.html#storylink=cpy

Therefore, if and when he does succeed in revitalizing Obama's cruel agenda, Trump is absolutely right in characterizing this long-standing weaponized American policy of stalking, harassing, terrorizing, fingerprinting, arresting, incarcerating, deporting, wounding, and yes, even killing people as a military operation.

It's a domestic war in every brutal, racist, demeaning and profit-motivated sense of the word. It is what Barack Obama so cloyingly called a "norm" in that self-protective and self-serving farewell speech that he gave to the nation right before jetting off to canoodle with billionaires and raise a billion and half dollars for a museum celebrating his life. 

Trump is simply the first high-ranking American official to call it exactly what it is. His big lie is that more immigrants kill native-born Americans than are injured or killed by American immigration policies.