tRump's Mental Health

A couple links from this past week: a couple friends linked to this piece from The Onion: Aides Wrestle Drill from Trump's Hands as He Tries to Remove Obama Listening Device from Skull

Another friend linked to this piece about a bus in Denmark that trolls tRump:

Satire Rules!

tRump's Contiunuing Nazi/Fascist Problem

Nazi/Fascists are like cockroaches: they stick around and around and around.

Image by chuckharding53 from Flickr, not used with permission

Well, tRump is either finding that out...or perhaps knew it all along.  As the tRump campaign machinery geared up in 2015, Business Insider reported that in a 1990 interview, Ivana Trump reported that her ex-husband kept a book of Hitler's speeches next to his bed, ostensibly to learn oratory.

Image by frankieleon from Flickr, CC BY

 Then there was tRump's association with and hiring of Steve Bannon, his reluctance to denounce David Duke and the the KKK, and his standing with Neo-Nazis.  All this could be dismissed as posturing and politicking, of course...though that argument rings hollower and hollower with time.  And then there's the bruhaha over Sebastian L. v. Gorka.

Image from Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

Newsweek called Gorka a "second-tier White House foreign policy advisor" who has managed to make a name for himself and get more "facetime" in the media than others in his position in the past.  Gorka is a former employee of Bannon's at Breitbart, a notoriously right-wing so-called news source.  In right-wing circles, Gorka has achieved a reputation as an expert on Middle-Eastern terrorism, despite the fact that he does not speak Arabic and has not studied in the Middle-East, as reported by  Daniel Nexon in a column on the Foreign Policy website.   Nexon, an associate professor in the Department of Governement and  Foreign Service at Georgetown University, offered a critique of Gorka's academic credentials, noting that he is not very well-known in academic circles on terrorism, having only one peer-reviewed article to his credit and his PhD dissertation advisor at Corvinus University in Hungary has expertise in neither national security nor terrorism.

Recently, however, Gorka has been called into the spotlight for something a bit more sinister.  A Jewish publication out of New York, Forward, recently reported that Gorka is associated with Vitezi Rend, a group that collaborated with the Nazis during WWII.  Several pictures have been posted of Gorka wearing a medal from the group.

Gorka at an inauguration ball, with the medal pinned to his traditional Hungarian jacket; image from US Uncut

 A still from an episode of Fox News's Sean Hanity show; image from the Times of Israel

According to a short history on Vitezi Rend, the organization is a nationalist entity formed in 1920 after Hungary fought a series of post-WWI conflicts with Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Romania, as well as fending off a communist revolution--incidentally, the website claims that this revolution "introduced Hungary to the phenomenon of class warfare," a rather audacious claim for a former imperial seat.  Furthermore, the history claims that France and Great Britain backed the Czechs, Yugoslavians, and Romanians, a claim that echoes Nazi sentiments for whipping up their supporters during WWII.  Vitezi Rend can be translated as Order of Knights/Heroes/the Valiant and members were distinguished veterans who were given land claims and inheritable titles signified by appending a "v" before their last names...such as v. Gorka.  When the Soviet Union occupied Hungary after the Second World War, the organization was declared Fascist and outlawed.

The Newsweek article noted the US Memorial Holocaust Museum's claimed that during the war, Vitezi Rend members under the direction of the nationalist, Miklos Horthy, functioned much like the infamous Nazi Einsatzgruppen, paramilitary groups that murdered Jews throughout Eastern Europe and rounded up Jews for deportation to the concentration camps.

Hitler’s chief deportations expert, S.S. Lt. Colonel Adolf Eichmann, "was surprised at how actively and enthusiastically Hungarian authorities collaborated to achieve what was clearly a common purpose...initiating many anti-Jewish measures on their own.”

Nexon noted several strains in Gorka's dissertation that should raise concern.  Gorka claimed that the modern state is not equipped to deal with the threat posed by al Qaeda (it is not a big stretch to insert ISIS at this point) and that

...the ideal solution would involve a tightly integrated supranational security apparatus, but since "we are unable for various reasons (foremostly political) to create supranational solutions," the only viable alternative is for states to develop a "unified multi-agency approach" [that] involves getting rid of the "internal barriers between the police force, the army and various intelligence services," although Gorka implies that constitutional barriers might pose a problem.

Considering the almost seamless integration between the SS and the Gestapo in Nazi Germany, Gorka's claim is chilling.  He essentially called for a totalitarian state that makes war not only on "external enemies," but also its own population.

A 1941 Nazi propaganda poster that translates as, "Day of the German Police"; image from Wikimedia Commons, public domain

In his defense, Gorka said he wears the medal as a tribute to his father, but the group (as reported in the Forward article) claims that the son is also a life-long member.  Gorka himself told Tablet Magazine that he is not a sworn member of Vitezi Rend.  However, Larry Cohler-Esses, the writer of the Forward piece told Amy Goodwin on Democracy Now! that he was told by three sources in Vitezi Rend that Gorka had been inducted into the organization:

Well, the Vitézi Rend has some pretty firm rules. You do not get to wear the medal and use the "v" initial unless you join. And joining involves taking a lifelong oath, a oath of fealty to the organization and its principles and to Hungarian nationalism, which the organization is steeped in. We spoke with a senior member of the group, who took note of the "v" that he used both on his doctoral dissertation in Hungary and when he testified before Congress. And he said, "Of course. No 'v' without the oath." So, under these terms of the organization, if he was trying to honor his father, he was dishonoring the rules of the organization that his father was honored by. And I cannot read his mind. I was not in Hungary. But we then found three separate sources in the organization who said he did take the oath, he was initiated in the formal initiation ceremony into the organization.

Goodman noted that David Duke tried to defend Gorka, tweeting "How is Sebastian Gorka a 'Nazi'? The man is not only pro-[Israel], he is also pro-Jewish. Strange time to be alive–(((they’ve))) truly lost it."  Too bad for Duke that his protestation that Gorka is not antisemitic because he is pro-Israel ignores the fact that the concept of "Semite" includes Arabs as well as Jews (see the entry for Semites in the Encyclopedia Judaica).

I wonder whether Gorka also has a copy of Hitler speeches on his night stand.  I'll bet he either has a copy in his library or a bookmark on Chrome.

Concise Definition of an "Uncle Tom": Ben Carson

Image from http://media3.s-nbcnews.com/j/newscms/2017_10/1924641/170306-ben-carson-hud-washington-750a_16620062097aa057e9d3eff634104db4.nbcnews-fp-1200-800.jpg

“That’s what America is about, a land of dreams and opportunity.  There were other immigrants who came here in the bottom of slave ships, worked even longer, even harder for less. But they too had a dream that one day their sons, daughters, grandsons, granddaughters, great-grandsons, great-granddaughters, might pursue prosperity and happiness in this land.” (from boston.com)

Image from https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/8b/26/f7/8b26f7063dc9ef923fcee47f0683ee11.jpg

Either Ben Carson put a wire in his head and scrambled his own brains or he doesn't seem to have learned anything in history class or from his grandparents...or maybe he's just satisfied with the really strange bone tRump threw him.  Anybody out there know what's going on in Uncle Tom's cranial cavity?  Something's supposed to be in there, right?

Red Herrings and Injustice

While the Russia connection with the tRump campaign is deeply disturbing and disconcerting and his off-the-chain claims about Obama wire tapping tRump Tower are problematic, I wonder if we are falling for the showman's tricks again...petulantly thrown out red herrings.  If they are not his red herrings, then those around them are using his verbal fertilizer that way.

Image by Durova from Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

With all the bluster about Putin, Russia, and tRump's possible/probable paranoia, I'm concerned about some of the behind-the-curtain shenanigans and what they could mean for our future.

Image from Pintrest

This week some of the tRump administration's plans for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) came to light and one of the most heinous revelations is that the administration wants to cut the budget by 24% and staffing by 20%, which includes eliminating the office for environmental justice, which means that environmental racism will be even more unchecked.  For those who may not be familiar with the term--it is not a high traffic term--environmental justice is defined by the office itself as:

...the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of race, color, national origin, or income, with respect to the development, implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, and policies.

Environmental racism refers to the to the fact that marginalized communities comprised of people of color are frequently exposed to much higher levels of pollution, thus exposed to much higher risk than predominantly white communities.  The Goldman Environmental Fund noted that race

...plays a determining role in environmental policies regarding land use, zoning and regulations. As a result, African American, Latino, indigenous and low-income communities are more likely to live next to a coal-fired power plant, landfill, refinery or other highly polluting facility. These communities bear a disproportionate burden of toxic contamination as a result of pollution in and around their neighborhoods. Moreover, these communities have historically had a diminished response capacity to fight back against such policies.

Image by Alfred Palmer from Wikimedia Commons, public domain

One of the most recent devastating examples of environmental racism has been the Flint, MI water crisis.  In this case, the choice to switch the city water supply to the Flint River was pitched as a cost-saving measure, but it was a case of environmental classism and racism because Flint is a very poor city with a high population of people of color.  In a 2016 story for The New York Times, John Eligon starts with an inescapable question: "If Flint were rich and mostly white, would Michigan’s state government have responded more quickly and aggressively to complaints about its lead-polluted water?"  The thousands of emails released about the water crisis show that the population of the city was less important that cost-cutting and so they were deemed to be functionally dispensable, even though race was not explicitly mentioned.  Eligon observed that

Environmental decisions are often related to political power. In some cities, garbage incinerators have been built in African-American neighborhoods that do not have the political clout to block them. In Michigan, where blacks are 14 percent of the population and the state government is dominated by Republicans, Flint has little political power.

 So, while the Flint crisis may not have been an overt gesture of environmental racism, it is an example of systemic or institutional racism, a manifestation of Whiteness.  The dangerous nature of the water was well known, indeed, "years ago ]the river[ was a repository for industrial waste from the city’s once booming, now almost extinct, factories," Eligon wrote, but the people of flint were all but invisible to the state.

Ruth Frankenberg wrote that Whiteness is a "'stand point,' a place from which White people look at ourselves, at others, and at society" and is "a set of cultural practices that are usually unmarked and unnamed" (as cited in DiAngelo, 2011, p. 56).*  DiAngelo expounds on this point when she observed that

Whiteness is thus conceptualized as a constellation of processes and practices [that are] dynamic, relational, and operating at all times on a myriad of levels.  These processes and practices include basic rights, values, beliefs, perspectives and experiences purportedly to be commonly shared by all but which are actually only consistently afforded to white people. (p. 56)

Whiteness is largely invisible to those who benefit from it and thus makes very little sense to them when learning of it, but it can have very real and even drastic effects on people of color.  In the case of Flint, the environmental racism manifested itself in that decision makers completely ignored the health risk for the sake of finances.  Profits over people.

A young woman in Louisiana's Cancer Alley, image from Pintrest

Another maddeningly tragic example is Louisiana's infamous Cancer alley on the Delta, where largely African-American communities are constantly exposed to carcinogens from "over 150 petrol companies and 17 refineries," according to a 2015 article on The IND Monthly website, leading to unusually high rates of cancer in an 85 mile stretch aling the Mississippi River.  (For a fuller description of Cancer Alley and other instances of environmental racism, see Dr. Robert Ballard's Dumping in Dixie.)

If tRump's proposed cuts to the EPA hold up, there are sure to be at least dozens of more Flints and Cancer Alleys in our future.

* DiAngelo, R.  (2011).  White fragility.  International Journal of Critical Pedagogy, 3(3), 54-70.

Today's Word: Anachronism, or History -2.0

Betsy De Vos.  It would be nice if we could laugh at her foibles without anvils falling on our toes.  But alas, we cannot.  Yesterday, she gave a wonderful example of an ANACHRONISM when, at a White House luncheon with leaders of  historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs), she showed an amazing lack of historical understanding and a gaudy lack of empathy.

Betsy DeVos,  image from nbcnews.com

In that meeting, and in a statement published on the US Department of Education's website, she claimed that HBCUs are "real pioneers when it comes to school choice."  Here is a screen shot of the paragraph from the website...never know when it will be taken down:

Usually, anachronism occurs when we recognize language or ideas that are "old fashioned" in contemporary discourse or situations.  In DeVos's case, however, the poles have been switched.  She applied a contemporary idea to the past in a way that only highlights her amazing lack of qualification for her position.  Yes, HBCUs have been very effective educational institutions for African-Americans...better than other institutions who are not historically black.

The Educational Trust, a Washington D.C. non-profit organization that advocates for education issues, published a report today, entitled "A Look at Black Student Success: Identifying Top- and Bottom-Performing Institutions."  The authors note that while graduation rates at HBCUs vary and are low enough for concern (reflecting concerns of non-HBCU schools), they are better at serving the needs of black students from low-income families, graduating 37.8% of these students compared to 32% at other institutions (p. 7).  Over all African-American and Native-American students have the lowest graduation rates of each of the racial categories used by the US Department of education at 40.9% and 41% respectively (p. 1).

So, the two racial and ethnic groups in the United States who have endured the most violence and degradation, or maybe the most programmatic violence and degradation might be a bit more accurate, have the lowest graduation rates.  Coincidence?  Probably not.

If we think of this historically, it makes better sense.  For African slaves and the generations that followed them, their "place" was the lowest possible place on the proverbial ladder--in some cases, Southern plantation owners openly valued their horses over their slaves.  Native Americans were on the same level, by the way.  Once slavery was outlawed, African Americans (particularly in the South) had to figure out a new place for themselves economically and socially.  Legally, they were no longer property and were given a small degree of agency in their own lives and the lives of their families.  They knew the value of reading and writing--it is very worth the time to look at Frederick Douglass's account of how he learned to read and write--but, of course, white schools, colleges, and universities were almost universally closed to people of color (even up to the 1960s).  This lack of systemic educational opportunities kept them at the very margins of society, kept them from productively participating in the the social and economic system they had been born into.  So what did African Americans have to do?  Found their own schools, colleges, and universities...the HBCUs.  For African-Americans, creating their own schools was NOT a matter of CHOICE, but a matter of ADAPTATION and SURVIVAL.  (Native Americans had schools funded by public money, but their whole purpose was to drive the "native" out of them...another rather dismal story.)

A class at Hampton Institute (now University) in Virginia, image from Wikimedia Commons

Coming back to Betsy DeVos's statement, to equate HBCUs with school choice is ludicrous.  Few African and Native Americans had any choice at all.  For many years, a smart articulate African-American young woman in the Washington D.C. area could not ask herself, "Should I go to Georgetown or Howard?"  Georgetown was simply not an option, so, if she was to more fully participate in economic and social relationships, she had to go to Howard--which is a well-respected HBCU.  The school choice movement (problematic as it is) holds that parents should be able to choose among several educational options for their children, but for most of our nation's history the idea of choice for African and Native Americans has been an insanely cruel "useful myth" for white men and women to maintain their sense of power and privilege.  Even today, "choice" for African and Native Americans is a far more complicated issue than it is for white middle-class Americans.

DeVos's statement betrays a PROFOUND LACK of understanding, both of history and of education.  She showed, again, just how unqualified she is to lead the Department of Education.  To her credit, the day after she made this ridiculous claim, in response to severe criticism she has backpedaled a bit.  The point is, though, she should not have pedaled there in the first place.

NOTE: This is a shorter version than the original post.  Cleaned up clutter and a half-developed direction.

Oxymoronic

Today's vocabulary is oxymoron, which occurs when we put two words together that seem to contradict one another, e.g. "The tRump administration is a 'fine-tuned machine.'"

from: https://i.imgflip.com/149bi1.jpg

Well, today's entry in the tRumpsicon is probably more technically a case of contradiction, than an oxymoron...but the moron aspect can't be ignored.

During the Adolescent-in-Chief's low-cost reality show, a.k.a. campaign, he boasted about deportations.  Lots of deportations.  Yuge numbers of deportations.  A week after the election, while he was still in victory-lap mode, he announced a goal to deport two to three million people, stipulating that he would concentrate on those "that are criminal and have criminal records, gang members, drug dealers" (I suppose his rapists were implied in there, somehow).  Administrative actions since then have underscored this claim, from high-profile ICE raids in major cities (as opposed to lower-profile raids under the Obama Administration) to newly-announced loosening of policies under the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and "tripling the number of removal agents at Immigration and Customs Enforcement, by adding 10,000 agents."

According to a column by Dara Lind at Vox, the head of the DHS, John Kelly, issued memos that pave the way for broader detention and deportation of undocumented persons in the US.

Kelly’s memos direct Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to treat most unauthorized immigrants currently in the US as “priorities” for deportation. They direct the government to dramatically increase its capacity to detain immigrants, and dictate that it should detain nearly all immigrants caught near the US border. They instruct ICE to work aggressively deputize local law enforcement agents to arrest unauthorized immigrants. And they make it much easier to deport children who come to the US alone to reunite with their parents — and the parents they’re reuniting with.

She notes that these memos were drafts and subject to review, but doubts that they will change much in later versions.  They are likely to continue to call for strengthening the tRump administration's "massive immigration 'machine'" which will be expected to "have nearly free rein to arrest, detain, and deport unauthorized immigrants wherever it finds them."

In yesterday's Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), tRump's chief puppeteer...er chief strategist, Steve "I look like Goering, but think like Goebels" Bannon, added weight to these concerns by claiming, "All [tRump is] doing right now is he laid out the agenda with the promises that he made [on the campaign trail]...He's maniacally focused on that."  An adjective like maniacally when applied to tRump is disconcerting, indeed, especially when on the same day he characterized his plans as a "military operation."

ICE agents in their militarized regalia.  from: https://i1.wp.com/www.vivaliberty.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/ICE-Raids.jpg?fit=1200%2C630

And yet, on the same day in Mexico City, the same John Kelly who issued the DHS memos, assured the Mexican public that there would be "no 'mass deportations'" and that there would be "No, repeat, no use of military force in immigration operations.  None." Of course the always-good-for-a-cringe Sean Spicer tried to pitch tRump's use of military operation as metaphorical.  Yet, at this point, Spicer and the boys have played the outrage card often enough that they might as well be saying, "Wolf!"  So it's an operation being carried out by a militarized law enforcement agency but not a military operation?

Now, in all fairness in Obama's eight years, he deported millions of people as well, with numbers ranging from 2.5 million to 3.1 million, compared George W. Bush's "just over to 2 million," according to Snopes.com; so tRump's claim is actually rather consistent with recent precedent.  Incidentally, Snopes also reports that between 1892 and 1997, the US deported 2.1 million people, so the last two presidents have at least doubled that number in sixteen years.  The new DHS policies, however, weaken a number of guidelines that were put in place by Obama and open the door for more deportations.

In any case, yesterday's messages were contradictory...and oxymoronic.

Chilling Vocabulary, part 2

Yesterday was the 75th anniversary of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's infamous Executive Order 9066, the document that lead to the internment of around 120,000 persons of Japanese descent, more than half of which (70,000) were American citizens--as well as some Germans and Italians.  If the tRump administration has its way, something like this may happen again.

Image from the Library of Congress, public domaim

The internment of Japanese Americans has taken its place as one of the low points in American history and culture.  Above is a photograph of a processing station at the Santa Anita Race Track in Los Angeles, CA, just east of Pasadena.  This morning, George Takei, famous for his portrayal of Lt. Sulu in the Star Trek TV series and subsequent films and also for his vigorous activist efforts for the gay community and other causes, spoke on Democracy Now! about his childhood in the camps.

As a matter of fact, his family was processed and held at the Santa Anita Race Track.  In the interview, he recalled being woken up by his parents and then his family of five being forced at gunpoint from their two-bedroom home.

Well, we were first taken to the horse stables at Santa Anita race track. We were taken there in a truck with other families that had been rounded up. And there, they herded us over to the stable area, and each family was assigned a horse stall, still pungent with the stink of horse manure, to sleep in. For my parents, it was a degrading, humiliating experience to take their three children and arrange the cots for us to sleep in.

He noted that for him, at five years old, it seemed like a kind of adventure at first.  That wore off, though.  It is bad enough that this whole episode even took place, but what makes this anniversary even more problematic is the fact that the Japanese internment camps have been cited by tRump and Co. as justification for their proposed measures against Muslims in the US.  In the video clip above, starting at the 1:18 mark is a clip of then-candidate tRump defending his proposed ban specifically citing FDR's actions as a president.  Shortly thereafter, a tRump surrogate, Carl Higbe, used the same kind of language on Fox News.

Several days later, he tried to walk back the language of his original statement without denying the proposed action of keeping a Muslim registry nor denying the slippery slope between that action and camps.

This slippery slope showed up again and was called out on Democracy Now! earlier this month when the tRump administration announced plans to publish a weekly list of crimes committed by undocumented immigrants, a practice of the Nazi regime used as a prelude to the Konzentationslagern.

What might be more disturbing is the fact that in the US, such lists were also published.  Andrea Pitzer, an independent journalist, spoke about a similar American practice around the same time.

So this preoccupation with focusing in on one subset of the population’s crimes and then depicting that as somehow depraved and abnormal from the main population is something we’ve seen quite a bit in the past, even in the U.S. Before Japanese-American internment, you had newspapers like the San Francisco Chronicle running about the unassimilability of the Japanese immigrants and also the crime tendencies and depravities they had, which were distinguished from the main American population.  (from the Democracy Now! interview transcript)

 Between the last post and this one, I have tried to show that American concentration camps--whether we call them internment camps, detention centers, or, in the case of Guantanamo Bay, prisons--are a real part of our national culture that must be challenged.  They run inherently counter to the best principles of our country.  Takei pointed out in his Democracy Now! interview that the invoking of these strategies and this history is calculated to create fear to mobilize support or action...psychological terrorism.

Well, on so many issues, not just the Muslim travel ban, but issue after issue has been a failure...You know, the real terrorist is Donald Trump. Donald Trump is the terrorist president of the United States.  (from the interview transcript)