Chris Hedges's Blog, page 202

Trump Moves to End Asylum Protections for Central Americans

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration on Monday moved to end asylum protections for most Central American migrants in a major escalation of the president’s battle to tamp down the number of people crossing the U.S.-Mexico border.

According to a new rule published in the Federal Register, asylum seekers who pass through another country first will be ineligible for asylum at the U.S. southern border. The rule, expected to go into effect Tuesday, also applies to children who have crossed the border alone.

The rule applies to anyone arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border. Sometimes asylum seekers from Africa and other continents arrive there, but most migrants arriving there are Central Americans.

There are some exceptions: If someone has been trafficked, if the country the migrant passed through did not sign one of the major international treaties that govern how refugees are managed (though most Western countries have signed them) or if an asylum-seeker sought protection in a country but was denied, then a migrant could still apply for U.S. asylum.

But the move by President Donald Trump’s administration was meant to essentially end asylum protections as they now are on the southern border, reversing decades of U.S. policy on how refugees are treated and coming as the government continues to clamp down on migrants and as the treatment of those who made it to the country is heavily criticized as inhumane.

Attorney General William Barr said that the United States is “a generous country but is being completely overwhelmed” by the burdens associated with apprehending and processing hundreds of thousands of migrants at the southern border.

“This rule will decrease forum shopping by economic migrants and those who seek to exploit our asylum system to obtain entry to the United States,” Barr said in a statement.

The policy is almost certain to face a legal challenge. U.S. law allows refugees to request asylum when they arrive at the U.S. regardless of how they did so, but there is an exception for those who have come through a country considered to be “safe.” But the Immigration and Nationality Act, which governs asylum law, is vague on how a country is determined “safe”; it says “pursuant to a bilateral or multilateral agreement.”

Right now, the U.S. has such an agreement, known as a “safe third country,” only with Canada. Under a recent agreement with Mexico, Central American countries were considering a regional compact on the issue, but nothing has been decided. Guatemalan officials were expected in Washington on Monday, but apparently a meeting between Trump and Guatemalan President Jimmy Morales was canceled amid a court challenge in Guatemala over whether the country could agree to a safe third with the U.S.

American Civil Liberties Union attorney Lee Gelernt, who has litigated some of the major challenges to the Trump administration’s immigration policies, said the rule was unlawful.

“The rule, if upheld, would effectively eliminate asylum for those at the southern border,” he said. “But it is patently unlawful.”

The new rule also will apply to the initial asylum screening, known as a “credible fear” interview, at which migrants must prove they have credible fears of returning to their home country. It applies to migrants who are arriving to the U.S., not those who are already in the country.

Trump administration officials say the changes are meant to close the gap between the initial asylum screening that most people pass and the final decision on asylum that most people do not win. But immigrant rights groups, religious leaders and humanitarian groups have said the Republican administration’s policies amount to a cruel and calloused effort to keep immigrants out of the country. Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador are poor countries suffering from violence.

The treaties countries must have signed according to the new rule are the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees, the 1967 Protocol or the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. But, for example, while Australia, France and Brazil have signed those treaties, so have Afghanistan and Libya, places the U.S. does not consider safe.

Along with the administration’s recent effort to send asylum seekers back over the border, Trump has tried to deny asylum to anyone crossing the border illegally and restrict who can claim asylum, and the attorney general recently tried to keep thousands of asylum seekers detained while their cases play out.

Nearly all of those efforts have been blocked by courts.

Meanwhile, conditions have worsened for migrants who make it over the border seeking better lives. Tens of thousands of Central American migrant families cross the border each month, many claiming asylum. The numbers have increased despite Trump’s derisive rhetoric and hard-line immigration policies. Border facilities have been dangerously cramped and crowded well beyond capacity. The Department of Homeland Security’s watchdog found fetid, filthy conditions for many children. And lawmakers who traveled there recently decried conditions.

Immigration courts are backlogged by more than 800,000 cases, meaning many people won’t have their asylum claims heard for years despite more judges being hired.

People are generally eligible for asylum in the U.S. if they feared return to their home country because they would be persecuted based on race, religion, nationality or membership in a particular social group.

During the budget year for 2009, there were 35,811 asylum claims, and 8,384 were granted. During 2018 budget year, there were 162,060 claims filed, and 13,168 were granted.

___

Associated Press writer Michael Balsamo contributed to this report.

The New York Times Sees a ‘Russian-Style’ Conspiracy Everywhere

School’s out for summer, and corporate media are eager to enter their junior year of the Russiagate conspiracy, despite its utter obliteration by Robert Mueller in April. Perhaps some journalists have taken to heart the tips several Russiagate skeptics offered to the media via FAIR on how to avoid further erosion of their credibility,  but the New York Times’ June 29 exclusive is a sign that not all in the media are ready to let go of Russophobic concern-trolling about Putin “sowing discord” among the left with “disinformation.”

This time, however, the sneaky culprit isn’t Russian. His tactics are merely “Russian-style.”

In “Trump Consultant Is Trolling Democrats With Biden Site That Isn’t Biden’s,” the Times revealed that Patrick Mauldin, a Trump re-election media consultant and founder of the Republican consulting firm Vici Media Group, was the independent creator of the parody Joe Biden 2020 campaign website JoeBiden.info, which appeared as one of the first results on various iterations of Google searches for the presidential hopeful—though sometimes below a paid ad for Biden’s legitimate site. Prior to the Times story, the owner of the website, which states at the bottom that it is “political commentary and parody of Joe Biden’s presidential campaign website,” was anonymous. The page only states:

It is not paid for by any candidate, committee, organization or PAC. It is a project BY AN American citizen FOR American citizens. Self-Funded.

The satirical webpage features animated GIFs of Biden’s inappropriate behavior with women and girls, and mocks his “legislative accomplishments,” highlighting among other things his vote against gay marriage in 1996, his authorship of the notorious 1994 crime bill that fueled mass incarceration, and his crusade against school desegregation in the 1970s, for which he recently came under fire from Kamala Harris in the first 2020 Democratic Primary debate.

The Times describes the site as “a slick little piece of disinformation,” but each of the hyperlink citations attached to his political record listed above are featured in that section of Mauldin’s website. See for yourself if Biden didn’t champion the Iraq War, didn’t vote for states’ rights to overturn Roe v. Wade, or didn’t help escalate the war on drugs.

While the presentation of Biden’s positions is perhaps decontextualized, and some of his views have changed—though fighting alongside segregationists for segregation is pretty hard to forgive in any context—nothing on JoeBiden.info appears to be factually incorrect.

The hook, of course, is Russia. The Times’ featured image caption reads:

Armed with bogus websites that mock leading candidates, a Trump campaign worker is exploiting tensions on the left with Russian-style disinformation.

Continuing the thriller, the piece’s author, Matthew Rosenberg, writes:

Yet in anonymously trying to exploit the fissures within the Democratic ranks — fissures that ran through this past week’s debates — Mr. Mauldin’s website hews far closer to the disinformation spread by Russian trolls in 2016 than typical political messaging. With nothing to indicate its creator’s motives or employer, the website offers a preview of what election experts and national security officials say Americans can expect to be bombarded with for the next year and a half: anonymous and hard-to-trace digital messaging spread by sophisticated political operatives whose aim is to sow discord through deceit. Trolling, that is, as a political strategy.

Rosenberg perfectly executes the Russiagate article recipe: adopt sensational language like “armed,” “sow discord” and “deceit”; fall back on unnamed “experts” to ramp up an alleged threat; use an espionage-evoking word like “operative”; resuscitate the 2016 election trigger word “troll”; and imply the useful idiocy of what corporate media tend to call the “far left”—Rosenberg opens the report by coloring Mauldin’s depiction of Biden as “in terms that would warm the heart of any Bernie Sanders supporter” (but surprise! It was a Trump staffer!). It only takes 11 more paragraphs for the Times to mention that Mauldin also created less effective parody sites for Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris.

Putin and any actual Russian involvement are the missing cherries on top. But the damage is done when the association is made. The result is a story that whitewashes a conservative Democrat’s unpopular record. Sound familiar?

It’s important to remember that the so-called Russian Pearl Harbor of our (otherwise ostensibly unmanipulated) social media, as journalist Aaron Maté pointed out before and after the release of the Mueller Report (The Nation, 12/28/18; RealClearInvestigations, 7/5/19), was a dud. The Mueller-indicted Russian clickbait firm whose “disinformation” the Times references—the Internet Research Agency (IRA)—produced mostly non-election content, its scale was minor, its budget was negligible, and its sophistication was … well, unsophisticated. The kicker is it’s not entirely clear the IRA was connected to the Russian government.

Using the same term used to hype the IRA’s vapid memes (NBC News, 12/17/18), the Times described as “sophisticated” Mauldin’s entirely routine buying a web domain, designing a fairly simple webpage, promoting it on Reddit and making T-shirts. You can go make your own website on WordPress with a first-year-free domain name for $5 a month. On the topic of Mauldin’s “digital know-how,” Rosenberg emphasizes that

he also appears to be very much on point in his choice of targets: Mr. Biden is the Democrat polling strongest against Mr. Trump and has been repeatedly singled out on Twitter by the president.

Mocking a frontrunner by pointing out his unpopular political history: ingenious strategy, indeed.

The web analytics firm SimilarWeb says that the fake website had 390,000 unique visitors through the end of May, 80,000 more than Biden’s actual website. It’s definitely problematic that search engines were directing more people to the Trump consultant–made faux site than to the real one. But the serious questions are: What was its impact, and is it worth such a blockbuster, front-page upset?

Facebook general counsel Colin Stretch is the one who fed media the uncheckable yet widely reported estimate of people who mayhave seen IRA content: 126 million. He also said this figure comprises 0.004 percent of content on people’s newsfeed. To put it in perspective, Stretch said, if its platform was TV rather than Facebook, “you’d have to watch more than 600 hours of television to see something from the IRA.” The scary figure the Times is pushing—the fake Biden site’s 390,000 visitors—is less than a third of a percent of the not-particularly-pervasive 126 million.

Lacking evidence that JoeBiden.info will actually affect voter turnout, Rosenberg invokes a study by Tovo Labs, an adtech firm for Democrats, that brags that the company suppressed moderate and conservative Republican turnout in Alabama’s 2017 special Senate election by 2.5 and 4.4 percent, respectively. The Times suggests that Mauldin’s satirical Biden website utilizes a similar divide and suppress strategy, although Tovo ran a much more complex and explicitly manipulative targeted-ad campaign. Republicans were served ads that took them to a website encouraging them to write-in a candidate other than Roy Moore, the far-right contender. Other ads brought them to a curated site with articles opposing Moore by religious and conservative figures.

In other words, Tovo, which boasts on its website “dynamic content, AI and the world’s best adtech to supercharge progressive campaigns and deliver persuasion and action at an unprecedented scale,” went far beyond Mauldin’s laughably fake campaign website. It’s a fear-mongering comparison between apples and oranges.

Just as corporate media sought to distract their audience from the significant failures of their preferred Democratic candidate in 2016 with a collusion narrative that was baloney from the beginning, the Times wants you to be scared of anything and everything except Biden’s actual policy record.

The Russiagate trope allows media to get away with feebly calling the inconvenient facts on JoeBiden.info “less-than perfect moments” (Daily Beast, 6/29/19), “unfavorable policy positions” (Newsweek, 6/29/19), “policies that might not be seen as liberal today” (The Hill, 6/29/19). In the end, the label the Biden campaign hopes you’ll apply  is the Russia-tinged one the Times  (6/29/19) supplies: “disinformation.”

Alan MacLeod (FAIR.org, 7/27/18) astutely characterized the utility of Russiagate after the 2016 election:

For the Democrats, Russiagate allows them to ignore calls for change and not scrutinize why they lost to the most unpopular presidential candidate in history. Since Russia hacked the election, there is no need for introspection, and certainly no need to accommodate the Sanders wing or to engage with progressive challenges from activists on the left, who are Putin’s puppets anyway. The party can continue on the same course, painting over the deep cracks in American society.

As media continue to evince bias against the more progressive ideas and 2020 candidates in the Democratic Party, this Times exclusive smells like Biden-loss excuse preparation. What better seasoning than Russian-style disinformation?

It’s Prime Time to Boycott Amazon

Are you ready to divest from Amazon Prime? How about Whole Foods?

If the idea makes you break into a nervous cold sweat, no worries. You don’t need to divest from either.

Yet.

That’s the idea behind non-profit Threshold’s new campaign, Cancel Prime.

The idea is for people to pledge to cancel their Prime accounts and stop shopping at Whole Foods—when there is a critical mass of people who will divest together.

“It’s a way for people to take collective action, so that it will likely work,” says Kipchoge Spencer, Threshold’s founder.

Founded in August 2018, Threshold has developed a platform that enables people to pledge to take action, and, when enough people pledge, calls upon them to take action.

When a mass of consumers quit Amazon and its subsidiaries together, Amazon will notice—and, perhaps, pay attention to some consumer-demanded changes.

Think of it as a potentially effective replacement for the lone boycott of a particular place, or for online activism that revolves around sharing petitions on Facebook, or airing and sharing daily grievances on Twitter as if every day were Festivus.

“Engaging in activism is so uninspiring and disempowering” these days, says Spencer. “I think there’s this common format with digital activism, which starts with a petition designed to get you angry or sad or donate money. And it’s effective to some degree to build organizational power, to build mailing lists. But it’s cynical because those petitions almost always fail.”

Inspired by the progressive issues of the day receiving support—but not much action—Spencer came up with the Threshold strategy. “More than 50 percent of people think we should do something about climate change, but I wondered why we aren’t able to achieve something supported by the majority of people, especially in a democracy. We wanted to develop a way that would motivate people more and more by inspiration, that this is probably going to work,” says Spencer.

Spencer suggests one of the reasons more action isn’t being taken on climate change is that the user experience of engaging in activism is “so uninspiring and disempowering, that it basically prevents a critical mass of people from taking action. People get burned out and turned off.”

He uses the example of a petition you might receive from a friend, asking you to protest something the EPA is doing. There is a zero percent chance it will inspire change at the EPA, but you still sign, perhaps out of guilt—and that’s your first disempowering action. You’re never told it doesn’t work, but you intuitively know it didn’t. Worse, you’re asked to spam your friends with it, which serves the organization’s purpose to grow its mailing list, and spreads the disempowerment around.

“I don’t want to be broadly critical of the progressive advocacy world, but this is a failure in the system, because people sign a petition, they feel bad, then they feel worse, and then they feel completely disempowered,” says Spencer.

Hence, Threshold, which doesn’t ask you to do anything besides pledge—until a critical mass is reached. If a critical mass isn’t reached, you’re not asked to do anything.

“Many people love Amazon. It’s revered,” he concedes. “They use it all the time and depend on it. Asking them to quit is significant.”

With the Cancel Prime campaign, you’re not asked to “put any skin in the game, unless the game is likely to go your way,” Spencer says. It’s like “Kickstarter for activism.”

What’s really important, says Spencer, is for people to understand that when they’re asked to make a sacrifice, it will work.

Much has been written about the ethical, environmental, and labor horrors of Amazon, and yet it maintains its hold over the lives of Americans. A big part of Cancel Prime is the education component—not just why to divest, but how to divest.

The “why” list is long, and might differ from person to person. Some people who might agree with the principles motivating Cancel Prime may still feel Amazon is a necessary part of their lives and there is no desire to divest. Spencer says, “that’s okay. My perspective on activism isn’t that we need to spend a lot of energy on convincing people. It’s convincing people who already are convinced to take action collectively together.”

For Spencer, among other reasons, Amazon is “morally offensive [because] they make so much money, and some of their workers are living in poverty, with widely reported medical issues that aren’t treated well. You’re one of the richest companies in the history of the universe. You won capitalism. Now start treating people well.”

It’s also appalling they pay no taxes, make $11 billion dollars, and get a tax rebate. “That seems pretty egregious,” says Spencer.

Then there’s Amazon’s “support for infrastructure that supports ICE,” which is currently separating children from their families in the ongoing immigration crackdown. “That just feels completely unconscionable,” Spencer says. “It’s getting uncomfortable to think I’m buying something from Amazon while they support the infrastructure of ICE. It’s not just incidental, but it’s critically important to ICE’s mission. I think there’s a place to take a stand there.”

Amazon also clearly takes advantage of the public’s goodwill to win tax breaks—just look at the massive data grab that the war for HQ2 created. “They should be positive forces in communities instead of wrecking them,” says Spencer. “They have a big opportunity to be a global leader because of how much wealth they have.”

What’s more is Amazon has an opportunity to be a global leader around climate, energy, and plastics. But it’s not. In fact, Amazon is not only failing to fulfill even a quarter of its renewable energy commitment, but actually growing in energy demand.

Over half of all U.S. households are Prime members—more than 100 million Americans. Amazon is also a big player in entertainment, with its hand in film, television and Twitch. Its fingers pull the strings of search engines, digital assistants, the cloud, logistics, pharmaceuticals, banking, fashion, Whole Foods, and real-world retail, in addition to tech and actual book sales (where Amazon got its start), and an overall, overwhelming share of e-commerce.

Considering their reach and wealth, there are countless things the company can do to have a positive climate impact instead of a negative one—yet it doesn’t.

Meanwhile, Amazon keeps growing, aiming to be the infrastructure for all commerce as we know it. Stacy Mitchell at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance calls it the Amazon tax, where if you choose to buy through a third party, it’s still through Amazon.

Amazon, Mitchell told Chris Hayes at NBC, is “like a gatekeeper. Essentially you’ve got to ride their rails to market. They can decide what the terms are, they can use the data they gather on what you’re doing to out-compete you and to undermine you as a competitor. They can levy a kind of tax on your trade. Essentially what Jeff Bezos has set up by owning the pipelines … It’s not just the platform… by owning the pipelines, what Amazon can do is it can decide, okay, here are the most lucrative streams of consumer spending. Then, for all the other stuff in the economy that they don’t really want to deal with or that isn’t that profitable… let other sellers do that. [Amazon will] just levy a tax on their trade. Every transaction they do,” says Mitchell, Amazon gets a cut. As Amazon’s power grows, Amazon is going to get a bigger and bigger cut, she adds.

“That doesn’t feel very safe to have a healthy economy,” says Spencer.

Traditionally in the United States, we’ve valued competition.

Also traditionally, the United States has frowned upon the idea of one entity controlling everything in commerce. If it was the U.S. government, for example, that owned and operated all the platforms Amazon does, people would be outraged, perhaps even shouting words like “communists!” at the government. And yet, it might be argued that even communist countries don’t rely on their governments as heavily as the U.S. consumer has come to rely on Amazon.

Which brings us to another point: Are we citizens first, or are we consumers first?

That might be yet another question America as a nation and as a people need to grapple with.

In the interim, if we do want to take action that Amazon will notice and perhaps even make changes for, the harmonization of consumer action might be key. But what’s a consumer to do when their lives are so intertwined with Amazon’s?

Threshold has a guide online to much of what Amazon owns and alternatives to each one. Some, arguably, have their shortcomings, but switching to them when the time is right might be worth it to make a point. (Spencer hopes this part of the campaign will be crowdsourced, for optimum impact both in terms of divestment from Amazon and reinvestment in healthy companies in line with individual values.)

“It only takes 3.5% of the population to make a change,” says Spencer, referencing a study by Erica Chenoweth, of Harvard Kennedy School. “In every single instance, where it mobilized at least 3.5%, it won.”

“That’s one of the most inspiring pieces of data there is,” he says. “We don’t need 50%. We don’t need 60%. We need 3.5%. Really, that’s what it boils down to in our job as movement organizers. We’re putting it out in front, because we think it’s important for people to know.”

When mass divestment from Amazon does occur, Spencer expects the company to take the issues of the people seriously and do better, online and in the communities in which they operate. “If they were to do that, it would be a victory, in terms of influencing their direction and impact on the world. And it would be a victory for people power.”

Spencer himself hasn’t completely divested from Amazon, choosing to wait until critical mass is reached. “I’ve gone from a very-frequent to an almost-never Amazon shopper. It’s made my life better,” says Spencer. “I think it’s intrinsically valuable to align my values and my lifestyle; not supporting a company that harms so many things I care about is a simple way to do that and feel more whole.”

In addition, says Spencer, “Although I’ve been a longtime critic of consumer culture, the truth is that I found myself pushing Bezos’ ‘buy now’ button multiple times a week. Consumerism is a disease. Buying things gives you a shot of endorphins. The more you do it, the more you need to do it to get the hit. I wouldn’t have easily admitted this was happening to me; but when I started avoiding Amazon so I could research alternatives in earnest, I realized that I had broken a cycle and my overall level of buying dropped significantly.”

There’s no shame in confessing an Amazon habit. With Threshold’s pledge, there’s no reason to give it up cold turkey either. And when it is time to quit, knowing you’re doing it with tens of thousands of other people will create support and inspiration to stick with it.

In addition, by getting off the Amazon habit, “I’m not dealing with the pain of having over-packaged crap show up at my door and triggering guilt about wasting money, abusing the planet, and being a victim of my own base impulses,” says Spencer.

“Instead, I’m back to my old self who normally gives long and due consideration to anything I buy, and that makes me happier.” An interesting personal revelation to have.

Has Amazon changed who you are?

“The dream is this kind of activism will inspire all companies” and politics, to do better, says Spencer. “Amazon is just a stepping stone in our theory of change.”

This article was produced by Local Peace Economy, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Progressive Democrats Answer Trump’s Racist Screed

After President Donald Trump on Sunday directed a series of racist tweets at Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Pressley, the group of freshman congresswomen known as the “the Squad” rebuked the president for his bigoted remarks and vowed to continue fighting his cruel attacks on immigrants and other vulnerable communities.

“This is what racism looks like,” tweeted Pressley, a Massachusetts congresswoman, after Trump said the freshman Democrats should “go back” to the countries “from which they came.”

Trump’s attack was met with a flood of outrage. By Monday morning, the hashtag #RacistPresident reached the top of Twitter’s trending list.

“We are what democracy looks like,” said Pressley. “And we’re not going anywhere. Except back to D.C. to fight for the families you marginalize and vilify everyday.”

THIS is what racism looks like. WE are what democracy looks like. And we’re not going anywhere. Except back to DC to fight for the families you marginalize and vilify everyday. pic.twitter.com/vYzoxCgN0X

— Ayanna Pressley (@AyannaPressley) July 14, 2019

Omar, a Minnesota Democrat and the only member of “the Squad” not born in the United States, said Trump is “the worst, most corrupt and inept president we have ever seen.”

“You are stoking white nationalism because you are angry that people like us are serving in Congress and fighting against your hate-filled agenda,” Omar, a Somali refugee, tweeted in response to the president’s attack.

You are stoking white nationalism bc you are angry that people like us are serving in Congress and fighting against your hate-filled agenda.

“America’s answer to the intolerant man is diversity, the very diversity which our heritage of religious freedom has inspired.” -RFK

— Ilhan Omar (@IlhanMN) July 14, 2019

Trump’s tweets appeared to echo a segment by Fox News host Tucker Carlson last week, in which he accused Omar of showing “undisguised contempt for the United States” for daring to criticize the nation’s systemic inequities.

The president similarly said the progressive congresswomen are “viciously telling the people of the United States, the greatest and most powerful nation on earth, how our government is to be run.”

“Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came,” Trump wrote. “Then come back and show us how it is done.”

Tlaib, a Palestinian-American, was the first of the targeted congresswomen to hit back at the president’s remarks.

“Want a response to a lawless and complete failure of a president? He is the crisis,” Tlaib tweeted. “His dangerous ideology is the crisis. He needs to be impeached.”

Ocasio-Cortez followed Tlaib with a series of tweets blasting Trump for relying “on a frightened America for [his] plunder.”

“Mr. President, the country I ‘come from,’ and the country we all swear to, is the United States,” wrote the New York Democrat. “But given how you’ve destroyed our border with inhumane camps, all at a benefit to you and the corp[orations] who profit off them, you are absolutely right about the corruption laid at your feet.”

“You are angry because you can’t conceive of an America that includes us,” Ocasio-Cortez added. “You won’t accept a nation that sees healthcare as a right or education as a #1 priority, especially where we’re the ones fighting for it. You can’t accept that we will call your bluff and offer a positive vision for this country. And that’s what makes you seethe.”

The Dark Truth Behind Anti-Abortion Laws

I have never said this publicly before, but in December 1974 I had an abortion.

I was 22 years old, living in a cold, dark house in Portland, Oregon, spending my days huddled in front of a wood stove trying to finish my undergraduate senior thesis. I did not want to have a baby. I didn’t know what would come next in my life, but I knew it would not include raising a child. Until the moment the doctor told me I was pregnant — we didn’t have at-home tests in those days — I’d always believed that, although it was perfectly ethical for other women to have abortions, I would never do so. In that electric instant, however, I knew that what I had believed about myself was wrong.

My boyfriend wanted to cheer me up. “Put on your coat,” he said. “We’re going somewhere.” He was a kind guy and we’d bonded over a shared interest in all things mechanical. I’d fallen in love with him a couple of years before when he’d taught me how to replace the ball joints on an ancient Rambler station wagon. I was probably even more in love with his raucous Irish Catholic family, especially his mother, the family matriarch, who’d graduated from Portland State long after giving birth to the last of her own six children.

My boyfriend was sweet, but his emotional imagination was a bit limited. That particular day, his idea of cheering me up turned out to be a visit to a local plumbing store, where we took in the wonders of flexible cables and bin after bin of nicely made solid brass fittings. You won’t be surprised to learn that the excursion left me inadequately cheered.

What he may have lacked in emotional skills, however, he more than made up for in moral sensitivity. Some years later, long after we’d split up and I’d begun my first serious relationship with a woman, I asked him why we’d never talked about the abortion. “I knew it had to be up to you,” he explained, “and I know you usually try to give other people what they want. Once you’d decided, I didn’t want to risk saying anything to change your mind.” Unlike many men, including our current president, my boyfriend believed that decisions about my body were mine alone to make.

Not Bad Luck, But a Bit Sloppy

In some ways, I was lucky. For one thing, early pregnancy made me queasy, so I recognized what was going on soon enough to have a simple termination. That was a piece of luck because I hadn’t menstruated for over a year, so I didn’t figure it out the way most women do — by missing my period.

My gynecologist misdiagnosed my failure to menstruate. He was so fascinated by the fact that one of my parents was of Ashkenazi Jewish descent that he never thought to ask me whether I’d been starving myself to achieve something vaguely approaching Twiggy-like thinness. Being underweight is a much more common cause of missing periods than genetic disease. He blamed my amenorrhea on an obscure condition that afflicts Jewish women with eastern European ancestry and then added, “But I don’t understand it. You don’t have any of the other symptoms.” In any case, he told me that, if I ever wanted to conceive I would probably have to take medication. Or, as it turned out, gain a few pounds.

I was also lucky that it was 1974. Only the year before the Supreme Court had affirmed my right to end a pregnancy in its landmark Roe v. Wade ruling. Overnight, the decision to have an abortion had become a private matter between my doctor and me. Even before Roe, Oregon was one of the few states that permitted abortion with only one restriction — a 30-day residency requirement. As a college dormitory resident assistant, I’d already accompanied a fellow student to the clean, professional clinic in Portland for a pre-Roe abortion.

People in California weren’t so lucky. My present partner who went to the University of California, Berkeley, recalls that her friends had to travel to Tijuana, Mexico, for abortions, where they knew no one, didn’t speak the language, and could only hope that they wouldn’t end up sick, injured, or infertile.

My doctor had privileges at that same Portland clinic and the arrangements were simple. I was less lucky, however, in that my private health insurance, like most then and now, did not cover an abortion. It cost $400 — equivalent to somewhere between $2,078 and $2,175 in today’s dollars. That was a lot of money for a couple of scholarship students to put together. Fortunately, we’d set aside some of what we’d made the previous summer painting houses for my boyfriend’s father.

Why Am I Telling You This?

At this moment in the age of Trump, it’s long past time for people like me to go public about our abortions. Efforts to deny women abortion access (not to mention contraception) have only accelerated as the president seeks to appease his right-wing Christian supporters.

I teach ethics to undergraduates. We often spend class time on issues of sexuality, pleasure, and consent, and by the end of the first class my students always know that I’m a lesbian. I have never, however, taught a class on abortion. In the past, I explained this to friends by saying that I didn’t want some of my students, implicitly or explicitly, to call other students murderers.

But the truth is darker than that. I didn’t want them calling me a murderer. Yet the reason I come out about my sexual orientation applies no less to the classroom discussions I should have (but haven’t) had about abortion. I come out because I want all my students to encounter a professor who’s not ashamed to be a lesbian. Over the years, quite a few LGBTQ+ students have told me how much they appreciated my intentional visibility, how helpful they found it as they were navigating their own budding sexual lives. I think, however, that it’s no less useful for students who identify with the heterosexual majority to observe that a woman like me can be a professor.

If I can come out as a lesbian, why not as a person who’s had an abortion, especially in this embattled time of ours? It’s not that I think abortion is murder. I don’t think that a zygote, an embryo, or even a fetus is a person. It’s easy to get confused about this when opponents of women’s autonomy call the throbbing of a millimeters-long collection of cells a “fetal heartbeat” and use its presence to prevent women six-weeks pregnant or less from securing an abortion. Because many women don’t even know they’re pregnant at six weeks — I didn’t — “fetal heartbeat laws” effectively ban almost all abortions. By the end of June 2019, at least eight states (Arkansas, Georgia, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Dakota, and Ohio) had passed just such a law. So far, none of them has gone into effect. As Anna North and Catherine Kim of Vox report, “The North Dakota, Arkansas, Iowa, Kentucky, and Mississippi bans have been blocked by courts” and, on July 3rd, a federal court issued a temporary injunction on the Ohio law, while the case against it proceeds.

People advocating such fetal heartbeat laws carry with them an image of the developing fetus that reminds me of the seventeenth-century belief that each human sperm cell contains a “homunculus,” a miniature human being, curled up inside it. That’s not actually how a fetus develops. “It’s a process — the heart doesn’t just pop up one day,” as gynecologist Sara Imershein told Guardian reporter Adrian Horton recently. “It’s not a little child that just appears and just grows larger.”

Anti-choice types have introduced another piece of obfuscation with the expression “late-term abortion.” The average full-term pregnancy lasts 40 weeks, as Dr. Jen Gunter, also a gynecologist, explained to Horton. Doctors only call pregnancies that last longer than 40 weeks “late-term.” However, as Horton points out, “Anti-abortion activists twisted the phrase into a political construct understood to be any abortion after the 21st week, late in the second trimester.” In reality, says Gunter of the actual medical definition of the term, “Nobody is doing late-term abortions — it doesn’t happen, but it’s become a part of our lexicon now.”

Smashing the Patriarchy?

There’s another reason why it’s easier these days to be a lesbian in public than a woman who has chosen to have an abortion. While the years since the 1973 Roe decision have seen a profound expansion of legal rights and social acceptance for LGBTQ+ people, the same decades have been marked by periodic sharp declines in access to abortion and a steady, fierce, sometimes even murderous increase in attacks on it and its providers by the evangelical right in particular. This is not, perhaps, as surprising as it might seem. Abortion rights actually present a much deeper challenge to the status quo than gay people marrying or becoming soldiers.

For years I’ve wondered why my gay leaders think the two things I most want in the world are to get married and join the Army. After decades of struggle and litigation, however, gay activists have, in fact, secured both these goals (though President Trump has done his best to keep trans people from serving openly in the military). Neither achievement, however, has proven much of a threat to the cultural or economic status quo.

What could be more American, after all, than joining the imperial forces? While Donald Trump’s Fourth of July “Salute to America” hardly launched the conflation of patriotism and militarism, it certainly reminded us that, for many people, “America” and “military” are two words for the same thing. And what could be more American than marrying and creating another consumption unit — a nuclear family household, complete with children (however conceived)? Nothing about these two life paths turns out to lie far from the mainstream.

Abortion, by contrast, seems to violate the natural order of things. Women are supposed to have children. That’s what women do. That’s who women are. It’s one thing to be childless by misfortune, but deciding to end a pregnancy is another matter entirely. It cuts off a possible future. That’s what the word “decide” means in Latin — “to cut away.”

What I have cut away from my life, both literally and figuratively, is the work of childbearing and childrearing, the two activities that continue to define womanhood in my own and probably most other cultures. And while I believe that this choice was right for me — and was also my right — all these years later, I’m still, as my boyfriend observed, sensitive to the judgment of others. As a woman who never bore children, I’m aware that I’m an outlier even among those who have had abortions, most of whom have or will have children.

Even now, I probably wouldn’t have the courage to tell my story if it weren’t for a young African-American woman named Renee Bracey Sherman. She happens to be the niece of good friends of mine, but more important, she is, as she calls herself, “the Beyoncé of Abortion Storytelling.” For nearly a decade now, she has been telling her own abortion story, training other women to tell theirs, and urging all of us to listen. Pinned to the top of her Twitter feed is this warm greeting: “Daily reminder: if you’ve had an abortion, you don’t need forgiveness from anyone unless you want it. You did nothing wrong. You are loved.”

You can’t imagine the abuse, the death threats she’s received, often from people claiming to know where she lives. “Someone sent me an email,” she told the Association for Women’s Rights in Development, saying “that they hoped that I would get sold into the sex trade and get raped over and over and over again and forced to give birth over and over and over again until I finally died from childbirth.”

Renee sees her commitment to women’s abortion rights as profoundly life affirming — especially for black women who are the most likely among us to choose abortion and the most affected by its increasing unavailability. She is offended by the attempts of white anti-abortion legislators to coopt the Black Lives Matter movement, as for example when Missouri state representative Mike Moon introduced the “All Lives Matter Act” in 2015. (It would have outlawed abortion by defining human life as beginning at conception.) As John Eligon of the New York Times recently reported, even among black evangelicals, there is substantial suspicion of white anti-abortion activists who describe their work as rising from a concern for black lives:

“‘Those who are most vocal about abortion and abortion laws are my white brothers and sisters, and yet many of them don’t care about the plight of the poor, the plight of the immigrant, the plight of African-Americans,’ said the Rev. Dr. Luke Bobo, a minister from Kansas City, Mo., who is vehemently opposed to abortion. ‘My argument here is, let’s think about the entire life span of the person.’”

Why Now?

Why write now about an abortion I had almost half a century ago? At my age, of course, I’ll never need another one, so why even mention such a personal matter, let alone publicize it?

In the age of Donald Trump and Brett Kavanaugh, the answer seems all too clear to me. As we second-wave feminists insisted long ago, the personal ispolitical. Struggles over who cleans the house and who has — or doesn’t have — babies have deep implications for the distribution of power in a society. This remains true today, as state governments, national politicians, and the Trump administration ramp up their campaigns to harness or control women’s fertility, whether to produce babies of a desired race (as Iowa Congressman Steve King has advocated) or to prevent others from being born (as the long history of forced sterilization of women of color and poor women illustrates).

We’ve been going backwards on abortion access for decades. Since 1976, the Hyde Amendment has denied abortion services to women who get their health care through the federal Medicaid program, or indeed to anyone whose health insurance is federally funded. (A few states, like California, opt to pick up the tab with state funds.) But even for women who can afford abortions, options have steadily dwindled, as states pass laws restricting the operations of abortion clinics. Women sometimes have to travel hundreds of miles for a termination. Only a single clinic in Missouri, for example, provides abortions today.

Worse yet, the appointment of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court may well have cemented an anti-Roe majority there. But the Trump administration hasn’t waited for a future Supreme Court decision to move against abortion. It has already reinstated both domestic and international “gag rules” that prohibit federal funding for any nonprofit or non-governmental agency that even mentions the existence of abortion as an option for pregnant women. In the case of that international gag rule, organizations receiving U.S. government funds are not only prevented from providing abortion services or referrals directly, but may not donate money from any source to other organizations that do. Most of these organizations provide many other health services for women from birth control to cancer and HIV treatment. Clearly, preserving the “right to life” doesn’t apply to the lives of actual women in this country or the developing world.

So the current perilous state of reproductive liberty is part of why I’m talking about my abortion now.  But there’s another reason. When I spent time in Central America in the 1980s, I found that the first question women I met often asked me was “Cuantos hijos tiene?” — “How many children do you have?” They assumed that a woman in her early thirties would have children and this was their (very reasonable) way of reaching out across a cultural divide, of looking for commonality with this gringa who’d landed in their community. I was always a little embarrassed that the answer was “none.” I would respond, however, that, although I had no children of my own, I had a compromiso — a commitment — to making the world a better place for children everywhere.

I was certainly telling them the truth then — and I hope my life since hasn’t made a liar of me — but at the time, in some secret part of myself, I also believed that my decision not to have children was a selfish one. There was too much I wanted to do in my own life to voluntarily take on the responsibility for the lives of dependent others. Now, though, as the horrors of climate change reveal themselves daily, I sometimes think that choosing not to bring another resource-devouring, fossil-fuel-burning, carbon-dioxide-emitting American into the world might actually have been the most unselfish thing I’ve ever done.

Worshipping the Electronic Image

Here’s a repost of the Feb. 18, 2019, column of Chris Hedges, who is on vacation. He will return with a new column Aug. 12.

Donald Trump, like much of the American public, is entranced by electronic images. He interprets reality through the distortions of digital media. His decisions, opinions, political positions, prejudices and sense of self are reflected back to him on screens. He views himself and the world around him as a vast television show with himself as the star. His primary concerns as president are his ratings, his popularity and his image. He is a creature—maybe the poster child—of the modern, post-literate culture, a culture that critics such as Marshall McLuhan, Daniel Boorstin, James W. Carey and Neil Postman warned us about.

It is not, as some have suggested, merely that Trump speaks at the level of a seventh-grader or that he harkens back to a preliterate oral culture. He embodies the incoherence of the modern digital age, filled with sudden shifts from subject to subject, a roller-coaster ride of emotional highs and lows punctuated with commercials. There is nonstop stimulation. Seldom does anything occupy our attention for more than a few seconds. Nothing has context. Images overwhelm words. We are perpetually confused, but always entertained. We barely remember what we saw or heard a few minutes earlier. This is by design of the elites who manipulate us.

“It is not merely that on the television screen entertainment is the metaphor for all discourse,” Postman points out. “It is that off the screen the same metaphor prevails.” Americans, because television stages their world, “no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other.” Trump is what is produced when a society severs itself from print, when it pushes art, ethics, classics, philosophy, history and the humanities to the margins of the universities and culture, when its members spend hours sitting inert in front of a screen. Information, ideas and epistemology are, as Postman writes, given form today by electronic images.

It is a mistake to see what is happening as cultural regression. It is worse than that. Oral cultures prized memorization and cultivated the high art of rhetoric. Leaders, playwrights and poets in oral cultures did not speak to their publics in Trump’s crude vernacular. More ominous than the president’s impoverished vocabulary is that he cannot string together sentences that make sense. This replicates not only the shoddy vocabulary of television, but more importantly the incoherence of television. Trump is able to communicate with tens of millions of Americans, also raised in front of screens, because they too have been linguistically and intellectually mutated by digital images. They lack the ability to detect lies or think rationally. They are part of our post-truth culture.

Nearly any tweet or spoken remark by Trump illustrates this incoherence. In a Jan. 31 interview with The New York Times he gave this answer when asked about the gruesome murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul:

Yeah. Khashoggi. I thought it was a terrible crime. But if you look at other countries, many other countries. You look at Iran, not so far away from Saudi Arabia, and take a look at what they’re doing there. So, you know, that’s just the way I feel. Venezuela is very much in flux. We’ve been hearing about it for probably 14 years now, between the two of them. And some terrible things are happening in Venezuela. So, if I can do something to help people. It’s really helping humanity, if we can do something to help people, I’d like to do that.

Electronic images are our modern-day idols. We worship the power and fame they impart. We yearn to become idolized celebrities. We measure our lives against the fantasies these images disseminate. If something does not appear on a screen or is proclaimed on a screen its authenticity is questioned. We fervently build miniature social media platforms where we daily update our “life the movie,” confusing self-presentation with genuine communication and friendship. This yearning to be validated by electronic images and their audiences has made us an isolated, uninformed, alienated and very unhappy people.

“Now the death of God combined with the perfection of the image has brought us to a whole new state of expectation,” John Ralston Saul writes. “We are the image. We are the viewer and the viewed. There is no other distracting presence. And the image has all the Godly powers. It kills at will. Kills effortlessly. Kills beautifully. It dispenses morality. Judges endlessly. The electronic image is man as God and the ritual involved leads us not to a mysterious Holy Trinity but back to ourselves. In the absence of a clear understanding that we are now the only source, these images cannot help but return to the expression of magic and fear proper to idolatrous societies. This in turn facilitates the use of electronic image as propaganda by whoever can control some part of it.”

The fixation on electronic images by Trump means he and millions of other American adults—who, according to a 2018 report by the Nielsen company, on average watch four hours, 46 minutes of TV each day and spend “over 11 hours per day listening to, watching, reading or generally interacting with media”—have severed themselves from complex thought. They have been infantilized. Television, including the news, reduces all reality to a childish, cartoonish simplicity. News as presented on screens “provides degenerate photographs or a pseudo-reality of stereotypes,” James W. Carey writes. “News can approximate truth only when reality is reducible to a statistical table: sport scores, stock exchange reports, births, deaths, marriages, accidents, court decisions, elections, economic transactions such as foreign trade or balance of payments.” News on our screens is incapable of imparting complexity and nuance. It is devoid of historical, social or cultural context. TV news speaks in easily digestible clichés and political and cultural tropes. It is sensational and fragmented. The frenetic pace of TV news means that except when delivering statistics, the programs can trade only in established stereotypes. TV news is, in essence, divorced from the real, mindlessly grounded in the ruling elites’ reigning ideology of neoliberalism, militarism and white supremacy.

Postman, in his book “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” writes that after the development of the telegraph, “News took the form of slogans, to be noted with excitement, to be forgotten with dispatch.” Arguing that the 19th-century invention is the basis for communication in the digital age, he says, “Its language was also entirely discontinuous. One message had no connection to that which preceded or followed it. Each ‘headline’ stood alone as its own context. The receiver of the news had to provide a meaning if he could. The sender was under no obligation to do so. And because of all this, the world as depicted by the telegraph began to appear unmanageable, even undecipherable. The line-by-line, sequential, continuous form of the printed page slowly began to lose its resonance as a metaphor of how knowledge was to be acquired and how the world was to be understood. ‘Knowing’ the facts took on a new meaning, for it did not imply that one understood implications, background, or connections. Telegraphic discourse permitted no time for historical perspectives and gave no priority to the qualitative.”

Those who seek to communicate outside of digital structures to question or challenge the dominant narrative, to deal in ambiguity and nuance, to have discussions rooted in verifiable fact and historical context, are becoming incomprehensible to most of modern society. As soon as they employ a language that is not grounded in the dominant clichés and stereotypes, they are not understood. Television, computers and smartphones have addicted a generation and conditioned it to talk and think in the irrational, incoherent baby talk it is fed day after day. This cultural, historical, economic and social illiteracy delights the ruling elites who design, manage and profit from these sophisticated systems of social control. Armed with our personal data and with knowledge of our proclivities, habits and desires, they adeptly manipulate us as consumers and citizens to accelerate their amassing of wealth and consolidation of power.

“The only people who grasp the distinction between reality and appearance, who grasp the laws of conduct and society, are the ruling groups and those who do their bidding: scientific, technical elites who elucidate the laws of behavior and the function of society so that people might be more effectively, albeit unconsciously, governed,” Carey writes in “Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society.”

Daniel Boorstin in “The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Reality in America” argues that the fabricated, the inauthentic and the theatrical have now displaced the natural, the genuine and the spontaneous. Reality has become stagecraft. We live in a world, he writes, “where fantasy is more real than reality.” He warns:

We risk being the first people in history to have been able to make their illusions so vivid, so persuasive, so ‘realistic,’ that they can live in them. We are the most illusioned people on earth. Yet we dare not become disillusioned, because our illusions are the very house in which we live; they are our news, our heroes, our adventure, our forms of art, our very experience.

Trump is a product of this cultural decay, not an aberration. The way he speaks, acts and thinks is the way many Americans speak, act and think. He will one day disappear, but the cultural degeneracy that produced him will remain. Academic institutions, which should be the repositories of culture and literacy, are transforming themselves, often with corporate money, into adjuncts of the digital age, expanding departments that deal with technology, engineering and computer science—the largest major at universities such as Princeton and Harvard—while diminishing the disciplines that deal with art, philosophy, ethics, history and politics. These disciplines, rooted in print, are the only antidotes to cultural death.

Intellectual historian Perry Miller in his essay “The Duty of Mind in a Civilization of Machines” calls us to build counterweights to communication technology in order “to resist the paralyzing effects upon the intellect of the looming nihilism” that defines the era. In short, the more we turn off our screens and return to the world of print, the more we seek out the transformative power of art and culture, the more we re-establish genuine relationships, conducted face-to-face rather than through a screen, the more we use knowledge to understand and put the world around us in context, the more we will be able to protect ourselves from the digital dystopia.

Pence Blames Democrats for Migrant Detention Horrors

Vice President Mike Pence blamed Democrats on Friday for the overcrowding in camps used to imprison migrants during a visit to the border, an accusation that generated anger from progressives at both the White House and the Democratic congressional leadership.

“You gotta love it when Pence immediately puts complete blame for the horrors he saw on the Dems even after they threw money at monsters,” tweeted journalist Lori Lou Freshwater.

In June, House Democrats passed a bill from the Senate that provided $4.6 billion to fund border security and the prisons. The legislation, which was opposed by left-leaning members of the caucus, has exposed a fissure in the party that continues to grow between the new and old guard of the party.

Conditions at the border, as Common Dreams has reported, are bad and getting worse. During his tour, Pence saw those conditions, including a room where hundreds of men were imprisoned behind fencing.

This image will go down in history. New video shows shows Mike Pence callously observing and turning his back on severe overcrowding of men in cages at a detainment facility in Texas.

pic.twitter.com/ij5Zlt5neV

— Shannon Watts (@shannonrwatts) July 13, 2019

In the room, as The Washington Post‘s Josh Dawsey reported, the “stench was overwhelming.”

VP saw 384 men sleeping inside fences, on concrete w/no pillows or mats. They said they hadn’t showered in weeks, wanted toothbrushes, food. Stench was overwhelming. CBP said they were fed regularly, could brush daily & recently got access to shower (many hadn’t for 10-20 days.) pic.twitter.com/tHFZYxJF7C

— Josh Dawsey (@jdawsey1) July 12, 2019

Just-filed WH Pool report from @jdawsey1, with VP Pence at the McAllen Border Station, is harrowing. pic.twitter.com/maoG2pWOlE

— Niall Stanage (@NiallStanage) July 12, 2019

“I’m embarrassed,” activist Teymour Ashkan tweeted in response to Dawsey’s reporting. “This is cruel and unusual punishment.”

In comments to CNN Friday, Pence said that the conditions were “the reason why we demanded that Congress provide $4.6 billion in additional support to Customs and Border Protection,” and made a distinction between the funding and the origin of the crisis, which he placed, one again, at the feet of the Democratic Party.

“The time for action is now and the time for Congress to act to end the flow of families that are coming north from Central America to our border is now,” Pence told CNN.

Given those remarks, MSNBC personality Chris Hayes mused, the White House might blame Democrats no matter what changes at the border.

“So even thought the House Democrats went along with the McConnell funding bill in the Senate,” Hayes said on Twitter, “Pence is still running around blaming ‘Democrats in Congress’ for not adequately funding their detention camps.”

In a tweet, Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.) made clear that he wasn’t about to accept the administration’s narrative on the border and that the blame did not rest on Democrats.

“We are working to expose and stop human rights violations at the border, but everyone needs to know that Pence and Trump are making these problems much worse on purpose,” Beyer said. “They separate families and detain asylum seekers in huge numbers for political reasons.”

“They could stop it,” said Beyer.

Trump Can’t Get Enough of Terrorizing Immigrants

This piece originally appeared on Truthout.

On July 11, President Trump gave up his fight to ask people about their citizenship on the 2020 census.

The question, which the administration has been trying to add to the census since 2017, would have resulted in a significant undercount by dissuading people in households with undocumented residents from responding to the census. An estimated 6.5 million people could be uncounted if the question were included, according to the Census Bureau.

The census is used to calculate how many seats each state will have in the House of Representatives, the number of Electoral College votes each state will get in the presidential elections beginning in 2024, and how $900 billion in federal funds will be distributed to the states annually for hospitals, schools, health care and infrastructure for the next 10 years.

There is no doubt the administration knew that a question asking about citizenship would result in an undercount of Latinos and benefit Republicans. GOP strategist Thomas Hofeller had urged that the question be included in the census as it would “be a disadvantage to the Democrats” and “advantageous to Republicans and Non-Hispanic Whites” in redistricting.

In finally throwing in the towel, Trump tried to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, stating, “We are not backing down on our effort to determine the citizenship status of the United States population.”

Trump then declared he was ordering federal agencies to immediately provide citizenship information from their “vast” databases, belatedly embracing a suggestion made by the Census Department last year in a memo suggesting that the government could collect citizenship data more efficiently from federal agency records that already exist.

“Trump’s attempt to weaponize the census ends not with a bang but a whimper,” according to Dale Ho, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Voting Rights Project. Ho, who argued the case in the Supreme Court, said in a statement that, “Now he’s backing down and taking the option that he rejected more than a year ago. Trump may claim victory today, but this is nothing short of a total, humiliating defeat for him and his administration.”

Playing to his base, Trump blamed “far-left Democrats” who, he claimed, “are determined to conceal the number of illegal aliens in our midst,” adding, “This is part of a broader left-wing effort to erode the right of the American citizen and is very unfair to our country.”

The Supreme Court Called Trump’s Reason for Adding the Question “Contrived”

It was the Supreme Court that found the Trump administration’s stated rationale for adding the citizenship question deficient.

On June 27, in a 5-4 decision, Chief Justice John Roberts had joined the four liberals on the Supreme Court to halt the administration from adding the question to the census. The Court characterized the administration’s stated reason for wanting to include the question — to better enforce the Voting Rights Act — as “contrived.” Indeed, that reason doesn’t pass the straight-face test given the Trump administration’s attempts at voter suppression.

“Trump may claim victory today, but this is nothing short of a total, humiliating defeat for him and his administration.”

The high court sent the case back to the federal district court to determine whether the administration could come up with an acceptable rationale for adding the question. The administration had urged the district courts and the Supreme Court on numerous occasions to expedite the case because the deadline for completing the census materials was June 30. After the Supreme Court decision, it appeared the administration had capitulated. Lawyers from the Department of Justice told the judge that the government would print the census forms without the citizenship question.

But the following day, Trump tweeted, “we are absolutely moving forward, as we must.” The Justice Department lawyers then informed the judge that they were trying to find a way to add the question to the census. The lawyers who had been handling the citizenship question litigation for the administration sought to withdraw from the case. Two district judges refused to allow their withdrawal.

The administration finally saw the writing on the wall, realizing that the deadline to print the census materials foreclosed a protracted legal battle. After Trump spoke on July 11, Attorney General William Barr said, “The Supreme Court closed all paths to adding the question. We simply cannot complete the litigation in time to carry out the census.”

Trump’s announcement that his administration will instead use information from federal databases to gather citizenship information raises its own civil rights concerns. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is developing the  on both citizens and non-citizens in the United States. DHS plans to share the data with federal, state and local agencies.

The database that DHS currently uses has produced false positives in identifying people violating the immigration laws 42 percent of the time. Moreover, the FBI and Immigration and Customs Enforcement are utilizing driver’s license databases for facial recognition in investigations, without consent. Inaccuracies in this system lead to misidentification and false arrests.

Trump’s intent in pursuing the citizenship question was never about enforcing the Voting Rights Act. “It is clear he simply wanted to sow fear in immigrant communities and turbocharge Republican gerrymandering efforts by diluting the political influence of Latino communities,” Ho said.

The confusing machinations in the case may still deter immigrants from answering the census even though they will not be asked about their citizenship. Moreover, Trump’s retreat on the citizenship question came three days before his administration plans to conduct mass raids on immigrants around the country. In chilling fashion, the Trump administration is reminding us that adding a citizenship question to the census is not its only tool for instilling fear and terror in immigrant communities.

Leave the U.S., Trump Tells Democratic Congresswomen of Color

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump on Sunday assailed a group of Democratic congresswomen of color as foreign-born troublemakers who should go back to the “broken and crime infested places from which they came,” ignoring the fact that the women are American citizens and all but one was born in the U.S.

Trump’s tweets drew sharp rebukes from Democrats, who derided his remarks as racist. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said the president wants to “make America white again.” And Republican Rep. Justin Amash of Michigan, a Trump critic who recently took steps to leave his party, called the remarks “racist and disgusting.”

Trump was almost certainly referring to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and her allies in what’s become known as “the squad.” The others are Reps. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan. Only Omar, from Somalia, is foreign-born.

Ocasio-Cortez swiftly denounced his remarks. “Mr. President, the country I come from, & the country we all swear to, is the United States,” she tweeted. “You are angry because you can’t conceive of an America that includes us. You rely on a frightened America for your plunder.”

With his tweet, Trump again inserted himself into a rift between Pelosi and the liberal congresswomen, after offering an unsolicited defense of the Democratic speaker days earlier. Pelosi has been seeking to minimize Ocasio-Cortez’s influence in recent days, prompting Ocasio-Cortez to accuse Pelosi of trying to marginalize women of color. “She is not a racist,” Trump said Friday.

On Sunday, Trump’s tone turned nativist.

“So interesting to see ‘Progressive’ Democrat Congresswomen, who originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe, the worst, most corrupt and inept anywhere in the world (if they even have a functioning government at all), now loudly and viciously telling the people of the United States, the greatest and most powerful Nation on earth, how our government is to be run,” he said in tweets.

“Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came. Then come back and show us how it is done.”

He added: “These places need your help badly, you can’t leave fast enough. I’m sure that Nancy Pelosi would be very happy to quickly work out free travel arrangements!”

The attacks may have been meant to further the divides within the Democrat caucus, strained over internal debates on liberal policies and on whether to proceed with impeachment proceedings against Trump. Instead, Democrats as one voice denounced the comments, which evoked the old racist trope of telling a black person to go back to Africa.

“Let’s be clear about what this vile comment is: A racist and xenophobic attack on Democratic congresswomen,” tweeted Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a Democratic presidential candidate.

Another 2020 contender, former Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke, tweeted at the president: “This is racist. These congresswomen are every bit as American as you — and represent our values better than you ever will.”

Few Republicans immediately weighed in on the president’s comments. Shortly after the tweets, and a later post defending the harsh scenes at a border detention facility where hundreds of migrant men are being held in sweltering, foul-smelling conditions, Trump left the White House to go golfing at his Virginia club.

It was far from the first time that Trump has been accused of holding racist views.

His political career was launched on the backs of falsely claiming that President Barack Obama was not born in the United States. In his campaign kickoff in June 2015, he deemed many Mexican immigrants “rapists.” And last year, during a White House meeting on immigration, he wondered why the United States was admitting so many immigrants from “shithole countries” like Haiti, El Salvador and several African nations.

Ocasio-Cortez, who is of Puerto Rican descent, was born in the Bronx, New York, and raised in suburban Westchester County.

Pressley, the first black woman elected to the House from Massachusetts, was born in Cincinnati.

Omar, the first Somali native elected to Congress and one of its first Muslim women, was born in Somalia but spent much of her childhood in a Kenyan refugee camp as civil war tore apart her home country. She immigrated to the United States at age 12, teaching herself English by watching American TV and eventually settling with her family in Minneapolis.

Tlaib was born in Detroit.

___

Associated Press writer Hope Yen contributed to this report.

___

Follow Lemire on Twitter at http://twitter.com/@JonLemire and Woodward at http://twitter.com/@calwd

The Top Trump Administration Scandals—Aside From Trump’s

The resignation of Trump’s Labor secretary, Alex Acosta, is only the most recent in a string of such scandals for Trump. In fact, what with all the things Trump himself has done plus those around him, his is surely the most scandal-ridden presidency in history. Let us just review the record, because it gets hard to remember them all after a while.

1. Secretary of Labor Alex Acosta resigned because when he was a South Florida federal prosecutor, he gave accused pedophile and Trump party-buddy Jeffrey Epstein an incredibly soft plea deal in 2008. Also a scandal: he was no friend of labor.

2. Scott Pruitt is former secretary of the EPA (which in the age of Trump does not stand for Environmental Protection Agency but for Environmental Protection Abolition). He accepted a $50 a night sweet condo deal from an oil and gas lobbyist for his pied-a-terre when he was occasionally in DC, and charged taxpayers $4.8 million for his security detail and made it a point always to fly first class on the taxpayer dime, amid other financial irregularities too numerous to mention. Oh, and the real scandal was that he destroyed the environment, including allowing the pesticide chlorpyrifos, even small amounts of which can damage babies’ brains.

3. Former Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke is under scrutiny for a Montana land deal and fully 17 other possibly illegal activities while in office. Oh, and he also helped destroy the environment.

4. Nominee to be secretary of defense, Patrick Shanahan, withdrew over a 2010 domestic abuse investigation launched by the FBI. But the real scandal was that Shanahan had been a career high executive of Boeing and so would have been running the US government agency that buys all those shiny weapons Boeing produces.

5. Not a cabinet secretary, but former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn had to resign over repeated calls before Trump was sworn in to the Russian ambassador to the US, Sergey Kislyak, which he lied about. But Flynn’s security company also developed a harebrained scheme to kidnap Turkish religious figure Fethullah Gulen, who was granted asylum in the US in 1998, and render him back to Turkey. Flynn may also have been an agent of Turkish influence in Ankara’s attempt to help elect Trump and defeat Hillary Clinton.

There is so much more, I just have to go to bed sometime and this subject of Trump administration scandals is fit for a multi-volume book set, not a little blog entry.

And we haven’t even gotten into Trump himself.