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It takes only two things to keep people in chains:
The ignorance of the oppressed
And the treachery of their leaders
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Separating immigrant children from parents: Sessions defends it, but Trump blames Democrats.
Huh?
That’s like the child who denies involvement, “I didn’t do it and I never will do it again.”
In classic Charles Coughlin style, Atty. General Jeff Sessions used quotes from the bible to justify his bigotry:
Sessions says the Bible justifies separating immigrant families.
“Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God” — has been read as an unequivocal order for Christians to obey state authority, a reading that not only justified Southern slavery but also authoritarian rule in Nazi Germany and South African apartheid.
When Southern preachers blasted Northern abolitionists for defying the Fugitive Slave Act in the decade leading to the Civil War, they cited the same lines.
In 1744, clergyman Elisha Williams remarked that the text was “often wrecked and tortured by such wits as were disposed to serve the designs of arbitrary power.” Sessions’s comments yesterday kicked up a similarly intense response.
The same Bible verse was also cited by South Africa’s white Afrikaner minority as the country was locked down under a series of racist laws after World War II.
When you’re a bible thumper, and you use the bible to justify your actions, but your own church says you’re immoral, you know you have a problem.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions pointed to the Bible to defend the separation of children from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border, but in a letter dated June 18, Methodists accused Sessions of child abuse, immorality, racial discrimination and “dissemination of doctrines contrary to the standards of doctrine of the United Methodist Church.”
The charges each relate to Sessions’s “zero-tolerance” border crackdown that has evoked bipartisan outrage, while the last is specifically linked to his use of the Bible to defend the policy.
Sessions’s support and advocacy for “holding thousands of young children in mass incarceration facilities with little to no structured educational or socio-emotional support” and for “directing employees and staff members to kidnap children from their parents” falls in violation of the Methodists’ Book of Discipline, the Methodists contend in the letter.
“While other individuals and areas of the federal government are implicated in each of these examples, Mr. Sessions — a long-term United Methodaist in a tremendously powerful, public position — is particularly accountable to us, his church. He is ours, and we are his. As his denomination, we have an ethical obligation to speak boldly when one of our members is engaged in causing significant harm in matters contrary to the Discipline on the global stage.”
And now that Sessions has taken credit for separating children from their parents, and even has used the bible as his basis, President Trump says it’s all the fault of the Democrats:
“Immigration is the fault, and all the problems that we’re having because we cannot get them (the Democrats) to sign legislation, we cannot get them even to the negotiating table, and I say it’s very strongly the Democrats’ fault.
What’s happening is so sad. It’s so sad,” he said.
Sessions takes “credit,” but it’s all the Democrats’ fault, and it’s “sad, so sad,” but the bible says it’s good.
And the GOP dominated Congress must come up with legislation, and though Trump has no idea what that legislation will be, he wants you to believe the Democrats should sign it.
It gets worse. President Trump, the Thomas Edison of facts (i.e. he invents more of them than anyone) has new facts to back Session’s “zero tolerance” act, (the act that is the Democrats’ fault):
Trump falsely claims Germany has migrant-driven crime wave
President Trump, on Tuesday, insisted that Germany’s crime rate has spiked due to its open-door policy toward migrants, a false claim he has used to bolster his “zero tolerance” stance on illegal immigration.
“Crime in Germany is up 10% plus (officials do not want to report these crimes) since migrants were accepted. Others countries are even worse. Be smart America!” Trump tweeted.
German government statistics for 2017 showed the country had its lowest level of crime in 25 years.
Trump on Tuesday also reiterated his support for the zero-tolerance policy, which has resulted in roughly 2,000 children separated from their families who illegally crossed the United States’ southern border.
Why does Trump support separating children from their parents, though it’s “sad, so sad”?
Politics. He’s pandering to his hard-line, immigrant-hating, brown-skin-hating base.
Majority of Republicans support family separation policy
A Quinnipiac University poll found: Republican voters support the policy 55 to 35 percent. They are the only listed party, gender, education, age or racial group to support the policy, according to Quinnipiac.
Sixty-six percent of American voters oppose the policy, according to the poll.
And then we have excerpts from the following article:
This is what tyranny looks like
Tyrannical rule often begins this way, as something that looks like a mistake–perhaps over-excited law enforcement people or confused bureaucrats.
That’s the way it was in Argentina in the 1970s, when young people began mysteriously disappearing in night-time arrests by paramilitary and secret police.
In Turkey, following a 2016 coup attempt, as the months went by, and the detentions and arrests expanded to more than 100,000 this year–including university professors, journalists, and judges–it became clear that something much more than a response to a coup attempt was occurring.
Unfortunately, America’s sudden fixation on separating migrant children from their parents bears similar hallmarks of tyranny.
Key among these qualities are lots of seeming confusion and double talk by government officials, and finger-pointing about the origination and rationale for the heavy-handed policies.
A major goal of the confusion is to promote secrecy. Reporters don’t know such basics as how many centers there are to house children separated from their parents.
Even prominent politicians seem unable to extract significant amounts of information. Reporters and politicians were allowed a short tour of (presumably) the most attractive facility. Some reporters characterized this model center housing young children as a bunch of “cages.”
NPR: “According to the Texas Civil Rights Project, which has been able to speak with detained adults, multiple parents reported that they were separated from their children and not given any information about where their children would go.
The organization also says that in some cases, the children were taken away under the pretense that they would be getting a bath.”
The secrecy also makes it difficult for Americans to fully appreciate the horror being visited on migrant families.
There is the mother who was separated from her five-year-old son six weeks ago. They still haven’t seen each other, and she’s frantic she’ll be deported without him: “On the afternoon of their second day in detention, two male agents entered the cell. They didn’t say anything. They just walked over and grabbed Jairo. He clung to me, cried and screamed. They had to pull him away.’
She pleaded with the agents to tell her what was going on. In the next few hours, the agents started taking other children, too.”
The contradictory and confusing explanations offered by officials overseeing the entire child-separation horror are also designed to suggest that no one is responsible for the outrage.
That helps communicate that the events are somehow blips, exceptions, not part of any larger goal.
The President has been the master of the double talk going on, seeming to change his tune by the day and hour.
He has blamed Democrats for somehow having made family separations mandatory. Except it is the policy of his own attorney general, which Trump presumably approved.
Then the White House followed yet another path: “The harshest family separation policy is that too many Americans have been permanently separated from loved ones because of crime spilling across our border.”
The larger message inherent in the immigration tyranny is that it could be more widely applied to American citizens regarded as enemies–journalists, university professors, opposition politicians”..the list is endless.
This message becomes clearer by the refusal of the administration to back down in the face of widespread condemnation.
Certainly putting law enforcement people through the repeated heartbreaking exercise of breaking up families and imprisoning children will serve to harden them for the real work that could be coming up before long.
To summarize the Trump/ hard-line, GOP position:
- In April, Sessions announced a zero-tolerance policy on illegal border crossings
- White House budget director Mick Mulvaney defended the “zero tolerance” policy, saying the Trump administration was merely enforcing existing laws (laws that do not mention separating children from their parents).
- Session’s zero-tolerance position is good.
- The bible justifies it, though Session’s Methodists and other religions do not.
- And it’s “sad, so sad”
- But it’s all the Democrats’ fault for not signing the legislation.
- Though Trump has no idea what that legislation says or even exists.
- And though the GOP has a voting majority in both houses of Congress, the lack of legislation is the Democrats’ fault.
- Germany’s crime rate is up, because they let so many immigrants in (though Germany’s crime rate actually is down.)
- Enemies (foreigners we don’t like), even infant children of enemies, are to be treated harshly. Nothing is too cruel. Nothing is too horrifying. We can do whatever we want to those people, because . . . .
- The precedent has been set. If you voice your disapproval, you are an enemy, so you are next, and there is nothing I, the President, can do about it. And remember, it’s all the Democrats’ fault.
Rodger Malcolm Mitchell
Monetary Sovereignty
Twitter: @rodgermitchell; Search #monetarysovereignty
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