Donald Trump | Void Network

Introduction to the 21st century- Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi

crystalzero72 — Tue, 21 Jan 2025 23:12:19 +0000

A South African racist named Elon Musk, whom newspapers call the richest man in the world, recently earned another, more interesting, nickname: “an agent of chaos”, the Guardian called him on December 20, echoing a definition that the New York Times had already proposed in 2022.

I think this is an imprecise definition, or at least too simple. I don’t think Musk has the historical function of promoting chaos, except apparently. His political activity, starting with the purchase of Twitter, is aimed at the destruction of the State and public structures built during the modern era. From this point of view, Musk’s project meets that of Steve Bannon and in general of the Trump Administration.

But Musk’s multifaceted activity, in addition to this definitive destruction of the modern order (i.e. the completion of the work begun by Thatcherite liberalism), includes a constructive part: the construction of a system of total control of the global telecommunications system (Starlink), and the creation of interfaces between biological and digital that will make the creation of fully intelligent automatons possible (Neuralink).

A few days ago, the South African racist took a stance on the upcoming German elections in a commentary in Welt Am Sonntag, supporting the Alternative fur Deutschland party. This is not a Nazi party, Musk said, arguing as follows:

“The portrayal of AFD as a far-right party is clearly false, considering the fact that Alice Weidel, the party’s leader, has a same-sex partner who comes from Sri Lanka. Does this sound like Hitler to you?”

The issue deserves to be explored further. It is true that individuals like Donald Trump, or parties like the German ADF appear very different from the Nationalistic Socialist German Workers’ Party. And they are: for starters, Trumpism has erased every reference to socialism, which Hitler had instead preserved, not only in the name of his party, but also in some of the social policies of the Third Reich.

Furthermore, the entire imaginary world that formed the backdrop to Hitler’s regime (the dark colours of the uniforms, the rigidity of the poses, and so on…) has been replaced by the explosion of colour and the carnivalesque excitement of the MAGA crowds.

The severe Gothic style of the territorialised and Protestant industrial bourgeoisie is replaced by the astonishing Baroque of the lumpen-mafia bourgeoisie which, from Berlusconi to Trump, has re-founded power on the spectacular cosmovision.

Should we therefore abandon the assimilation of global Trumpism with Hitler’s Nazism, which the left has perhaps used to frighten the electorate that has gradually become accustomed to not being impressed by the bogeyman of Nazism?

Yes and no.

No, because the revival of the colonialist racial supremacism of the white West is, in fact, the long-term historical function played by the global reactionary movement, of which Trump is the symbol and Musk the main instrument.

The enemy to be exterminated for Hitler were the Jews, while for contemporary racist supremacism the enemy to be exterminated are the immense masses of colonised people who, although incapable of an internationalist political offensive, constitute a danger to Western stability by their mere existence, with their migratory movements, and with their claims for redistribution of global wealth.

The Israeli military, and the Israeli people themselves, appear very different from Hitler’s SS from an aesthetic and political point of view, but they perform the same function as Hitler’s SS when it comes to exterminating the enemies of Western civilisation, which for Hitler were the Jews, and for Israel are instead the colonised who claim the right to survival and possibly to a territory.

The regime that is now unstoppably asserting itself throughout the West is, moreover, the consequence and the full implementation of the economic liberalism that has asserted itself since the 1980s, with the very active collaboration of the European left in its generality.

Liberal democracy has now been swept away everywhere, but the fundamental rule of the destruction of rules (and their replacement with the /absolute rule/ of maximum profit) is confirmed and exalted by those who have made the word ‘freedom’ their slogan, only that it is the freedom of slave-holders.

The left was a dependent function of liberalism in the past phase, when the workers’ movement had to be liquidated. This function was carried out by the left and the Democrats, and for this reason they are and will forever be objects of contempt.

But now the left is disappearing and what is emerging is a regime that no longer has much to do with the fascism of the past. I have long decided to adopt the definition of /Nazi Liberalism/.

The liberal devastation of the social system is the origin of Trumpist racist nationalism, but it is also its North Star.

The declared intention of the most aggressive Nazi Liberals, like Javier Milei, or like Steve Bannon and Elon Musk, is the definitive demolition of public structures (healthcare, education, transportation, etc.) that made social survival possible.

This naturally entails a social extermination, which is already underway and which we will see worsen frighteningly in the coming years. But the social extermination underway within Western countries is only part of the global genocide that is taking place on the border between the North and the South of the world, and which has its bloody symbol in the genocide of the Palestinians.

The era we have entered after October 7 is the era of global genocide — and this era is naturally characterised by the multiplication of chaotic precipitation points. It is evident that the global reactionary movement of which Musk is an expression causes chaotic ruptures in an ever greater number of points on the planet.

But this is only one step in the process that has been set in motion in recent decades, which is both the proliferation of chaos and the creation of a higher Order, which is the order of the Automaton.

The global reactionary movement is today engaged in the devastation of the human world, which is the world of indeterminacy, approximation, analogy and conjunction.

But beyond the chaotic action of the reactionary movement there is a deterministic, digital and connective objective: the Cognitive Automaton is destined to take the place of living chaos.

Musk, if we want, is an agent of political chaos, but political chaos has the function of making possible, in two logically successive (but chronologically contemporary) movements, the elimination of the Human: Genocide of the marginal and mutation of the collective mind for its submission to the Automaton, therefore the establishment of the Automatic Order.

In some programming languages, taking up a concept of the neo-positivist philosopher Rudolf Carnap, we speak of a “functor” as a variable dependent on a mathematical sequence

Outside the computational metaphor, the functor is an agent perfectly compatibilised and synchronised with the global cognitive automaton.

In the first decades of the twenty-first century, the Automaton operated the formatting and synchronisation of the individual minds of individuals belonging to the first connective generation.

Humans have been essentially subjected to the digital order, progressively deprived of characteristics and drives incompatible with the Automaton (such as erotic desire, critical capacity, and essentially expressive singularity).

This mutation cannot occur without enormous suffering, dysphoria, depressive or aggressive psychopathies.

But a part of the human race cannot be formatted and synchronised, and remains on the margins of the production process and the privileged territory.

The unformatted-unsynchronised (which a science fiction writer whose name I will not tell you called daisies) will be progressively exterminated with the instruments of war, hunger, submission to slave labour rhythms impossible for the human organism and with other termination techniques…

This process is the horizon of the twenty-first century, and we already see it clearly outlined in the political lines of Trumpism and in the techno-totalitarian action of which Elon Musk is the linchpin.

A race of functionally superior and emotionally sterilised white males is taking over the levers of technical, economic and military power. No political force can oppose this seizure of power, for the simple reason that it is not a political process, but a techno-cognitive mutation.
Cognitive mutation and genocide are the two decisive processes of this transition.

Cognitive mutation is achieved by subjecting the human mind to a formatting that aims to synchronise the mind’s activity to the rhythm of the automaton.

Inevitably this process of mutation involves suffering.

Think of pathologies such as ADHD, or attention deficit disorder: it is not a pathology, but rather an attempt to adapt and synchronise the mind to the ten thousand times accelerated rhythm of the Infosphere.

Ethical consciousness and erotic sensitivity are remnants of pre-formatted humanity that are rapidly disappearing in the emerging connective generation.

Another emerging characteristic of mutants is the imperception of the pain of others, the effect of the continuous exposure to flows of simulated nervous stimulation, so that the mind tends to no longer distinguish simulations from organisms, and tends to consider suffering bodies as little green men in video games, who do not suffer and if they die can always get back on their feet a moment later.

This is the horizon of the twenty-first century, this is the trend that is unstoppably unfolding.

Climate collapse, geopolitical collapse, social collapse are the ideal environment for this process of mutation, formatting and elimination of residual daisies .

But there is also the possibility (very likely) that the combination of these three collapses will produce the definitive extinction of the human race.

In this case, everything human would finally be erased, and this would allow the realisation of the perfect ideal of the Muskian Order: the unlimited reproduction of the automaton in a territory that has finally been purged of every chaotic and unpredictable element.

That said, we (deserters) know that the unpredictable is not yet erased.

But whereof one cannot speak, it is better to remain silent.

_____________

SOURCE: https://freedomnews.org.uk/2025/01/10/introduction-to-the-twenty-first-century/

The post Introduction to the 21st century- Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi appeared first on Void Network.

The Fools and the Wise- Jacques Ranciere

crystalzero72 — Sat, 23 Jan 2021 18:17:47 +0000

Jacques Ranciere reflects on the end of the Trump presidency and asks how this decline into unreason reconstructed what democracy means

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Witnessing the assault on the Capitol, it may seem surprising to see Trump’s supporters relentlessly denying the facts to the point of sinking into fanatical violence. Some see them as gullible spirits deceived by fake news. But how can we still believe in this fable when we live in a world where there is an overabundance of both news and commentaries that ‘decipher’ the news? In fact, if people reject what is obvious, it is not because they are stupid, it is to show they are intelligent. A sign of a perversion inscribed in the very structure of our reason.

It is easy to make fun of Donald Trump’s follies and wax indignant at the violence of his fanatics. But the unleashing of the purest irrationality at the heart of the electoral process, in the country best set up to manage alternation in a representative system also raises questions about the world we share with it: a world that we thought was the world of rational thought and peaceful democracy. And the first question is of course: how can people stubbornly refuse to recognise the best attested facts, and how can this refusal be so widely shared and supported?

Some people still cling to an old lifeline: those who do not want to acknowledge the facts are seen as misinformed ignoramuses or gullible spirits deceived by fake news. This is the classic idyll of a good but simple-minded people who are taken in, but who only need to learn to inform themselves about the facts and judge them with a critical mind. But how can we still believe this fable of popular naivety when we live in a world where means of information, means of verifying information, and commentaries that ‘decipher’ all information, are abundantly available to all?

The argument must then be reversed: if people reject the obvious, it is not because they are stupid, it is to show they are intelligent. And intelligence, as is well known, consists in being wary of facts and questioning the purpose of the enormous mass of information unleashed on us every day. To which the answer is, quite naturally, that it is to deceive people, because what is displayed in plain sight is generally there to cover up the truth, which we need to be able to discover – hidden under the false appearance of the facts presented.

The strength of this answer is that it satisfies both the most fanatical and the most sceptical at the same time. One of the remarkable features of the new far right is the place held by conspiracy and negationist theories. These theories have delusional aspects, such as the theory of the great international paedophile conspiracy. But this delirium is ultimately only the extreme form of a type of rationality that is generally valued in our societies: one that demands that we see every particular fact as the consequence of a global order, placing it in an overall connection that explains it and shows it to be ultimately very different from what it seemed to be at first.

We know that this principle of explaining everything by the sum of connections also works the other way round: it is always possible to deny a fact by invoking the absence of a link in the chain of conditions that make it possible. This, as we know, is how certain radical Marxist intellectuals denied the existence of Nazi gas chambers, since it was impossible to deduce their necessity from the overall logic of the capitalist system. And, again today, some subtle intellectuals have seen coronavirus as a fable invented by our governments to better control us.

Enrique Tarrio, leader of the Proud Boys, center, and demonstrators wearing Proud Boys attire gather in Freedom Plaza during the “Million MAGA March” in Washington, D.C., U.S., on Saturday, Dec. 12, 2020. Photographer: Graeme Sloan/Bloomberg via Getty Images

The logic underlying conspiracy and negationist theories is not peculiar to simple minds and sick brains. Their extreme forms testify to the share of unreason and superstition present at the heart of the dominant form of rationality in our societies, and in the ways of thinking that interpret how they work. The possibility of denying everything is not the kind of ‘relativism’ challenged by serious minds that see themselves as guardians of rational universality. It is a perversion inscribed in the very structure of our reason.

It might be said that for people to deny everything it is not enough to have the intellectual weapons. It is also necessary to want to. That is absolutely right. But we need to examine the content of this will or affect which leads to believing or not believing.

It is unlikely that the seventy-five million voters who cast their ballots for Trump are weak minds convinced by his speeches and the false information they convey. They don’t believe in the sense that they take what he says to be true. They believe in the sense that they are happy to hear what they hear: a pleasure that may be expressed in a ballot paper every four or five years, but much more simply every day in a simple ‘like’. And the peddlers of false information are neither naïve people who imagine it to be true nor cynics who know it to be false. They are simply people who want it that way, who want to see, think, feel and live in the community of sentiment that these words weave.

How should we understand this community and this desire? This is where another lazy notion lies in wait, that of populism. Instead of a good and naive people, this conjures up a frustrated and envious people, ready to follow someone who knows how to embody their resentments and point out their cause.

Trump, we are told, is the representative of the distress and anger of underprivileged white communities: those left behind by economic and societal transformation; those who have lost their jobs with deindustrialisation and their identity markers with the new forms of life and culture; those who feel abandoned by remote political elites and despised by educated elites. The song is not new: this is already how unemployment served in the 1930s as an explanation for Nazism and is repeatedly used to explain any advance of the far right in our countries. But how can we seriously believe that the seventy-five million Trump voters all fit this profile of victims of crisis, unemployment and downgrading? It is then necessary to abandon the second lifeline of intellectual comfort, the traditional figure of a people cast in the role of irrational actor: a frustrated and brutal people who are a counterpart to the good and naive people.

More profoundly, we need to question this form of pseudo-scholarly rationality, which seeks to turn the political forms of expression of the people-subject into features belonging to this or that social stratum in ascent or decline. A political people is not the expression of a sociological people that pre-exists it. It is a specific creation: the product of a number of institutions, procedures and forms of action, but also of words, phrases, images and representations that do not express the feelings of an existing people but create a particular people, by creating a specific regime of affects for it.

Trump’s people is not the expression of social strata in difficulty and in search of a protector. It is, above all, a people produced by a specific institution in which many stubbornly see the supreme expression of democracy: that which establishes an immediate and reciprocal relationship between an individual deemed to embody the power of all and a collective of individuals deemed to recognise themselves in him. It is also a people built by a particular form of address, the personalised address made possible by the new communication technologies, where the leader speaks every day to each and every one, both as a public and a private man, using the same forms of communication that allow each and every one to say daily what is in their mind or in their heart.

It is, finally, a people built by the specific system of affects that Donald Trump has maintained through this system of communication: a system of affects that is not intended for any particular class and which plays not on frustration but, on the contrary, on satisfaction with one’s condition, not on a feeling of inequality to be repaired but on a feeling of privilege to be maintained against all those who would want to attack it.

There is nothing mysterious about the passion Trump appeals to, it is the passion for inequality, the passion that allows both rich and poor to find a multitude of inferiors over whom they must at all costs maintain their superiority. Indeed, there is always a superiority in which you can participate: superiority of men over women, of white women over women of colour, of workers over unemployed, of those working in the occupations of the future over others, of those with good insurance over those who depend on public support, of natives over migrants, of nationals over foreigners, and of citizens of the mother country of democracy over the rest of humanity.

The co-presence, in the Capitol occupied by Trumpian thugs, of both the flag of the thirteen founding states and the flag of the slave-owning South illustrates very well this singular montage that makes equality a supreme proof of inequality and the ‘pursuit of happiness’ a hateful affect. But the ethos of a particular nation cannot be equated either with this identification of the power of all with a countless collection of superiorities and hatreds, or with a particular social stratum. We know the role played in our own country by the opposition between a ‘hardworking France’ and a ‘scrounger France’, between those who forge ahead and those who remain dependent on archaic systems of social protection, or between citizens of the country of the Enlightenment and human rights and the backward and fanatical populations that threaten its integrity. And we can see, every day on the Internet, the hatred of all forms of equality that is stoked to boiling point by the comments of newspaper readers.

Just as stubborn denial is not the mark of backward minds but a variant of the dominant rationality, so the culture of hatred is not the product of underprivileged social strata but of the functioning of our institutions. It is a way of ‘people-forging’, a way of creating a people that belongs to the logic of inequality. Almost two hundred years ago, Joseph Jacotot, thinker of intellectual emancipation, showed how anti-egalitarian folly was the basis of a society in which every inferior was able to find someone inferior to them and enjoy this superiority. Only a quarter of a century ago, I suggested for my part that the identification of democracy with consensus produced, in place of a people of social division, now declared archaic, a much more archaic people based solely on the affects of hatred and exclusion.

Rather than the comfort of indignation or derision, the events that marked the end of Donald Trump’s presidency should prompt us to take a somewhat closer look at the forms of thought we call rational and the forms of community we call democratic.

___________

this post was originally published in French on Analyse Opinion Critque here and in English translation on Verso

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Capitol Riot: The Grambling of Democratic Imagination

crystalzero72 — Thu, 07 Jan 2021 17:18:18 +0000

1.

These events were not an aberration from democracy, because simply the USA were never democratic in the first place. They weren’t democratic when they had slaves, they certainly weren’t democratic when the segregation laws were in place, the separation of normal citizens and Others due to the Color of their skin and of course they remained un-democratic when the Jim Crow laws withdrew and the ugly systemic racism was swept under the rag.
Some, let’s say, unrelated numbers to keep in mind. USA at the moment is the country with the largest prisoner population, over 2,5 millions. Over 2/3 of those people are people of colour and the vast majority of them remain imprisoned for non violent crimes or inability to pay their fees. So this was not an aberration, because Uncle Sam was never democratic to begin with, at best USA could be categorised as a capitalist oligarchy. What happened yesterday, was the crumbling of this democratic imagination in the eyes of the people. It was shown what actually happens when the settlers get mad. And what happens is that they are able to storm the Capitol, with of course let’s not forget this, the tolerance ( some might say help even) of elected “democratic” government officials.

2.

This brings us to the next point. United States of America have been constructed as country, a nation, since the beginning under very strict rules regarding class and race. It’s not as simple as to just say that what happened yesterday was solely due to the colour of the protestors skin. Surely the case would be different if we were talking about Black Lives Matter activists, but that’s not all there’s to it.
The head of the Proud Boys, who were among the initiators of yesterday’s events, is as you know, Enrique Tarrio, who became the leader, after founder Gavin McInnes ( also one of the founders of VICE) stepped down. Enrique is non white. He is of Cuban heritage. He is what many latino activists call a “gusano”, a worm, a reactionary. And as we learned from Scarface, gusanos were the Cubans that left Cuba after Castro took power. Why? Because ideology, that’s why. Because they were power hungry reactionaries, ultra conservative anti-communists, owners of land, who in more than one cases worked with either Batista or the American Secret Services.

Similar cases have been in found, in the face of Rafael Cruz for example, Republican Ted Cruiz’s father, who is also a big time conservative and a pastor.
Likewise in the case of Mark Rubio, who in a bizarre twist, originally said that his parents were exiled from Cuba from Castro, however it was later revealed that this happened during Batista’s regime.
It’s not the first time after all that reactionary Cubans are used for Uncle Sam’s dirty work.
The decade of the ‘60s is full of examples, as we read from Mike Davis, were Cuban paramilitaries carried out bombings on leftists, anti-war activistes, latino activists and feminists. We should bear in mind that one the people arrested for the Watergate case, was a Cuban ex patriate, who also server in the CIA.
So let’s not be so surprised when non white folk support either Trump or the far right in general. It’s not only about colour, it’s also about ideology and class.

3.

True enough, as I said earlier, if instead of white MAGA’s we had BLM activists in yesterday’s events, the National Guard would have descended upon with heaven’s fury, as of course they did earlier this year. Rubber bullets would rain upon the protesters. And, if by any miraculous chance, some made inside the Capitol Building, the Secret Services would have executed them on sight. And of course the very next day, on CNN, on FOX, on MSNBC, we would hear tales about violent extremists, totalitarian ideologies, communist terrorists, Russia, China and cultural marxism, by Republicans and Democrats alike. These are all very true. And some of those commentators, feeling emboldened by the prevailing hate, would even resort to the old familiar Nixon and Reagan rhetoric, about vicious black criminals and super predators.

Because this kind of rhetoric is not a privilege only to Republicans. It’s also part of the Democrats. Because it’s as American as apple pie and it goes back to the colonial era, where colonisers needed to dehumanise the slaves, the Others, in order to justify the unspeakable brutalities they inflicted upon them. And these brutalities carried on until the 60’s. We’ve all heard about the trees baring strange fruit after all. And we should also bear in mind that this all started because the colonisers wanted to rob Africa and the Americas, from spices and gold. The cheap labor in the form of slaves was the fat bonus that came later. How could the colonisers say no to unpaid labor, the bloody labor that would later create the Land of Liberty.
And this is why we say, that class and race, are inseparable.

4.

The basic reason that there was no heavy repression yesterday, has also a lot to do with the demands of the protestors. Trump is not an anomaly. He is not an aberration. He is a systemic symptom. He is a billionaire, right from the belly of the beast. The government officials yesterday would not green light an operation because they thought that Trump is one of them. What drove them in the end, to call on law enforcement, was the fact that this was public. It was because CNN was broadcasting, in a sense. Because we also know, that the USA have no problem with coup d’etats, as long as they are happening on the other side of the iron curtain or under the guise of the night. If a coup happens in broad daylight, with national television on it, it has failed.

The demands of protests during 6/1/2021 in Washington, as it seems are demands that the Police likes as well. And we can tell this, from the hundreds of selfies, cops took with protesters on the Capitol Building. The National Guard didn’t seem to mind a lot, as well, since it’s head, personally appointed by Trump, was holding them on position.
On the other hand, demands from protests like the ones for social equality and justice, for defunding or abolishing the police, that came from the racist murder of George Floyd, are demands that no government official wants. Democrat or Republican. And this was obvious as soon as Biden was elected. It was also clear from Obama’s words that “ slogans like Defund The Police are snappy and polarising”
This is something we’ve said for a long time, that Democrats and Republicans are two sides of the same coin. They both serve this capitalist oligarchy to the letter. As long as our analysis doesn’t factor in accounts of race, class and gender ( who I didn’t mention because I don’t think it’s relevant to this specific event, but is essential in the larger picture) then we are doomed to watch history repeat itself.

5.

Α lot of non white American folk, even black, supported Trump. Apart from the gusanos, there is another important factor. Ever since the 70’s, politically speaking, race was disconnected from class. The general idea that, in the Land of Opportunities you could make it, regardless of race, gender, religion and what not, became prevalent, as a direct result of the New Deal hegemony. From then on, we came to today, where we learn that race is a different thing from class and from gender. We also learn that these 3 things have nothing to do with each other. But a look again, the numbers will prove us wrong.
The prison numbers don’t lie. The ones that suffer come from a specific class and have a specific colour. Also we look at the numbers of police killings. The ones who are being eaterminated in alarming rates, come from a specific class and have a specific colour ( or the absence of it, they are not white).

Constantly referring to class, while avoiding all other issues, is class reductionism and wrong. Constantly referring to race and gender while overlooking class is liberal identity politics and also wrong. Lets try intersectionality for a change, it might work for us. Otherwise we can’t see the forest for the trees.

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written by Kostas Savvopoulos (phd Candidate of Political Science)

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Do Americans Get That Trump is Instituting Martial Law?

crystalzero72 — Sat, 25 Jul 2020 14:00:32 +0000

Trump Wants to Use Martial Law to Terrorize Americans — and Steal the Next Election

by Umair Haque

_______________________

Yesterday, the Mayor of Portland was gassed by the secret police of storm troopers that Donald Trump has sent to occupy the city.

Wait. What? Let’s read that sentence again.

Yesterday, the Mayor of Portland was gassed by the secret police of storm troopers that Donald Trump has sent to occupy the city.

If I wrote that sentence five years ago, you would have laughed at me. It would have seemed impossible. Inconceivable. Outlandish. And yet here we are.

Shortly before that, Trump announced that he was sending his new secret police’s shock troops…men in camouflage body armor, carrying machine guns, abducting people off the streets, and now gassing mayors…nationwide.

If I wrote that sentence five years ago, you never would have read another word I wrote. And yet here we are.

Where is this, though, this strange new territory America finds itself in? What’s really happening here?

Something that those of us who’ve lived through — and survived — authoritarian-fascist collapses know all too well. We’ve seen it before, maybe, like me, several times over. We know how it begins, and how it ends — usually — too. None of that’s to be a know-it-all blowhard. It’s to warn, as seriously as I can. You probably have an inkling of what I’m about to say, but your rational side denies it. Your gut is right, and your brain — which has never lived through this kind of collapse before — is wrong.

Trump is instituting martial law. Yes, really. That is what sending a secret police of shock troops across America is. No, not suddenly, all at once, in a kind of sweeping and obvious way. But rather, in the time-honored way that authoritarian-fascists do. One step at a time. A process. A creeping martial law. One which is all too easy to normalize and accept, because it proceeds in slow steps. Martial law isn’t declared like in the movies, usually. More often, it happens like this.

Step by step. Town by town. City by city. This shock troop added to that one. Their powers expanded, to take away your freedoms, one by one. An occupying force whose power is always growing, and never really goes away. And before anyone really knows it — they’re living in a police state, an authoritarian society. Nobody can really remember how it ended up this way. It seems to have happened in a kind of slow-motion suicide of a democracy.

It happens that way because every good authoritarian knows that’s how you normalize it, how you minimize resistance, how you create that strange mix of apathy, bewilderment, and fear all at once, by getting people to ignore what their gut is shouting at them. A mind always says: “Come on! It’s not that bad. Those troops aren’t on my streets yet, and even if they are, they’re still pretty friendly, aren’t they? Stop imagining the worst! Everything will be fine!” The unthinkable isn’t thought fast enough, widely enough. And so one small step at a time, martial law spreads like a black veil across a society, replacing civil society, democracy, decency, and a modern society.

It’s hidden in plain sight. Predictably, funnily, sadly — nobody much is seeing it, because the demagogue’s magic is blinding. Trump is instituting martial law now.

So let me put it another way — which is more accurate still.

Just before a crucial election — one which will decide if democracy lives or dies — a President who would be dictator, like America’s Gaddafi or Saddam Hussein, feels he’s on the ropes. So he’s beginning to institute martial law: the rule of an occupying paramilitary force over and above civil law and everyday democratic norms.

If you doubt that — as your rational side still might — let’s think about it for a moment.

What is “martial law”? Here’s a definition which will do just fine: “Martial law is the imposition of direct military control of normal civil functions or suspension of civil law by a government, especially in response to a temporary emergency where civil forces are overwhelmed, or in an occupied territory.”

Let’s take that step by step. The imposition of direct military control. The “federal agents” that Trump is sending to occupy America’s cities and towns aren’t part of the Army or Navy or Air Force — but they are a part of the ominously named “Homeland Security.”

If you doubt they’re a “military”, what else do you call men wearing camouflage body armour, festooned with heavy weaponry, carrying machine guns? If that’s not a military — or in this case, a paramilitary — surely the word holds no meaning whatsoever.

What are they there for? “The suspension of civil law.” Trump’s shock troops are shredding the Constitution. Not in some abstract, theoretical, Ivy-League-Debate-Club kind of way — but with violence and brutality on the ground. They wear no badges, are unaccountable to anyone, have the power to abduct people off the streets for no rhyme or reason, and take them to God only knows where. The right to free speech? Assembly? Association? Privacy? Peaceful protest? To just walk down a street with your friends, carrying a banner? Bang — gone. They gassed the Mayor of a major American city.

Civil law doesn’t matter to Trump’s army of shock troops. If it did, they wouldn’t be gassing mayors, who are elected public officials. What does matter to Trump and his shock troops? Why are they there?

Because there’s a “temporary emergency.” Which one? Could it be the lethal pandemic — which Trump’s stunning negligence allowed to explode, and become the worst outbreak in the world? How about the 18th straight week of more than a million people filing for unemployment? Or the death rate of that pandemic beginning to skyrocket back up? Maybe the millions of Americans who now find themselves falling into disease, poverty, and despair? Those emergencies?

Nope, the emergency that Trump calls “law and order.” Only there is no breakdown of law and order in America — at least not at the level of people peacefully protesting in the streets for the causes of equality and justice. The breakdown of law and order in America is a demagogue President who’s instituting martial law.

What those of us who’ve survived authoritarianism and studied it know — and need to share with you — is this. If you want to kill a democracy dead, first you chop off its limbs. Then you slowly, slowly suffocate it. You deprive it of the air it breathes.

First you chop off the limbs — you appoint “acting directors” who are your cronies in the extremist projects of ethnic supremacy and racial cleansing to head most of the major offices of government. You purge government of every last decent civil servant you can, so nobody much is left to stand in the way. You stack the courts with unqualified extremists, too, so that you’re protected from legal challenges. Check, check, check.

At this point, the stage is set. For what? For you, the authoritarian, to begin suffocating a democracy to death. That means: one by one, taking away people’s basic rights. You don’t send a hundred thousand shock troops to every small town. You just send a few hundred to the cities — especially where people resist your brutality and violence and supremacism.

You use those shock troops to make an example. This mayor resisted me. He got gassed. These people thought they could resist me. They got beaten. These people thought they could express their voices in opposition to me. They got abducted. This group of mothers thought they could link arms and oppose me. They got disappeared. You make an example, as loudly and publicly and visibly — and violently — as possible.

This is what happens when you cross me. You pay the price. The price is a heavy one. It’s not one that anyone in a decent society is used to paying — beatings, abductions, disappearances, gas attacks, and so forth. This is the price you pay for crossing me.

A society descends into an atmosphere of fear and panic, usually. People do what they tend to do when they’re threatened by overwhelming force: they get frightened. The intimidation and brutality serve their purpose. The point of a secret police is now made real — to keep people in check with the authoritarian’s wishes, to stifle dissent, to silence and frighten.

You suffocate a democracy by denying it of the air it breathes. The sweet and pure air of freedom. Where people express can themselves, especially if they’re critics and opponents and dissidents. Instead, the poisonous miasma of terror becomes a grim daily reality.

“Are you going to that protest?,” says one friend. “Of course!,” replies the other. Neither shows up — because who will look after their families if they’re abducted, disappeared, gassed, wounded?

A society has been terrorized into submission. The authoritarian is now free to obtain what they’ve always really wanted. Power. The next election? People stay home. Not enough votes are cast. That atmosphere of fear has never gone away. The authoritarian wins it. And that’s it — game over. The last election that country is to have — at least for a generation.

Those of who’s studied and lived through authoritarianism have seen this before — and it’s our basic duty as decent and sane human beings to warn you. But it’s your duty to heed the warning, this time. Not to ignore it, like the last four years. That’s how we got here, to a place where a lunatic demagogue is destroying America before the eyes of a baffled, shocked, horrified world.

Heed the warning this time, because this is the last time. The last chance.

Trump is declaring martial law. The way authoritarians do. Stepwise. One small step at a time. Just like you’d choke the life out of someone you really hated if you were a sociopath — slowly, to make sure, to watch the light go out of their eyes, and revel in it.

How do authoritarians win? By making the abnormal seem normal, by transgressing so often and so frequently, it all comes to seem plain, by making each transgression worse than the last, so yesterday’s seems like old, small news. But it isn’t. All those transgressions — camps, bans, raids, purges — are a pattern. Leading up to this.

The imposition of a creeping kind martial law, just before a crucial election. One city at a time. A group of shock troops added to the last, one at a time. One set of new powers for them to abuse people with at a time. Until anyone barely remembers a time when people weren’t being disappeared off the streets, beaten, gassed, thrown into the camps.

It’s not me telling you. It’s history. It’s the ghosts of Orwell, Camus, Arendt, Frankl, Malala, all the people in all the nations who’ve been through this before, and know. How it ends. They are the ones trying to tell you, in a desperate whisper, that barely pierces the veil of time.

Heed the warning.

This is your last chance.

Umair
July 2020

SOURCE: Medium

The post Do Americans Get That Trump is Instituting Martial Law? appeared first on Void Network.

How the FEDS failed to track thousands of separated children – by ISSIE LAPOWSKY

crystalzero72 — Sat, 19 Jan 2019 03:29:20 +0000

THEY KEPT THE kids in cages. And Excel spreadsheets. And more than 60 other government files and databases that made it nearly impossible to track the thousands of children who have been separated from their parents by the Trump administration while trying to enter the United States.

This is according to a new report released Thursday by the Department of Health and Human Service’s Office of Inspector General, which finds that, since 2017, the Trump administration has separated thousands more children from their parents than it previously disclosed and that it tracked these kids in ad hoc, disparate databases, including Excel spreadsheets and Microsoft Sharepoint accounts, further complicating the already tortured process of figuring outwhere those children are today.

These border separations dominated headlines last spring and summer when then-attorney general Jeff Sessions announced a so-called “zero tolerance” immigration policy at the border, leading to a spike in children being taken alone into the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement. At the time, some former HHS employees and legal minds worried that existing governme nt technology was incapable of adequately keeping track of these kids and their parents. The inspector general report not only suggests that those concerns were valid, it also finds that these separations have been going on for almost the entire duration of the Trump presidency, without sufficient technological processes in place to manage them.

“The total number and current status of all children separated from their parents by [the Department of Homeland Security] and referred to ORR’s care is unknown,” the report reads. It lists the “lack of an existing, integrated data system to track separated families” as a central obstacle to reunification.

The report was triggered in part by a court ruling last June as part of a class-action lawsuit, Ms. L v. ICE, which ordered the government to identify and reunite children who had been separated from their parents by DHS and were in ORR’s custody at that time. The order included an exception for parents who were deemed “unfit or present[ed] a danger to the child.” Around the same time, the public outcry over the Trump administration’s zero tolerance policy was mounting, adding to the inspector general’s decision to investigate the issue.

Without so much as a unified database in place, the government was left scrambling to meet the court ordered deadline. Finding these children at all required a crisis management task force at the Office of Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response to mine dozens of systems for adults and children with the same last name, who were apprehended at the same place on the same day. Government staffers manually reviewed the case files of the roughly 12,000 children in ORR’s custody at the time of the court order, and relied on shelters to report any children they believed were separated and within their care.

In July, ORR told the court that 2,654 children fit that description. The OIG’s report finds that even at that time, staffers believed another 50 to 100 children were, in fact, eligible, and decided not to include them in their count in order to meet the court deadline. That number continued to fluctuate through December of 2018, as officials discovered additional kids to be added to the list.

The number currently stands at 2,737. According to the report, 159 of those children remained in ORR custody as of last month. Of that group, 28 have parents who the office considers unfit or dangerous, another 28 were determined not to have been separated from a parent, and 95 have parents who declined to be reunified. (Reports have surfaced of parents saying they were coerced into giving up their rights to be reunified.) Now, ORR is working to reunify or “discharge” the eight remaining children.

But even these numbers don’t tell the whole story. According to the report, ORR staffers started informally tracking separations in 2016, enough to notice a spike in the number of separated children being referred to them by DHS in the summer of 2017, nearly a year before the zero-tolerance policy was introduced. The percentage of unaccompanied minors who’d been separated from their parents rose from .3 percent in 2016 to 3.7 percent in August of 2017. This runs counter to President Trump’s claims that President Obama “had the exact same policy.” In addition, these children were, according to an email reviewed by the inspector general, often very young and needed to be placed in specially licensed facilities, which sometimes resulted in a shortfall of available beds.

And yet, the court in Ms. L v. ICE didn’t require the government to count any of these children as qualifying for family reunification, the report says. That means that the estimated thousands of children who were sent to and released from ORR custody before the court case have gone unaccounted for in this national conversation. The report also notes there is no fixed legal definition for what constitutes “separated children,” making it too easy for kids to fall through the cracks.

The report lays bare the glaring lack of administrative preparation that went into a sweeping policy change that would come to affect thousands of families. This haphazard system resulted in children who were eligible for reunification being identified some five months after the original court order. Stories have abounded over the last year of separated children suffering psychological trauma. Now it appears that the scope of the problem is even larger, and has been going on for far longer, than was previously known.

ORR modified its case management system in July so that staff can now indicate whether a child was separated. But, according to the report, “It is not yet clear whether ORR’s recent changes are sufficient to ensure consistent and accurate data about separated children, and the lack of detail in information received from DHS continues to pose challenges.”

In a letter responding to the report, Lynn Johnson, the assistant secretary of the Administration for Children and Families, said the agency “generally agrees with OIG’s findings” regarding the number of children eligible for reunification under the court order. But Johnson pushes back against its assertions about the thousands of children who went largely uncounted prior to the court order, saying that ORR has no requirement to track those children. “Even if ORR were to invest a substantial part of its limited resources in a count of prior DHS separations, the count would not fulfill any current operational needs or enable HHS to provide any form of relief to discharged children,” Johnson writes.

The United Nations’s high commissioner on human rights has described the border separation policy as an “unconscionable” violation of the rights of children.

ISSIE LAPOWSKY

source: WIRED

Nazi Govern USA: 10,000 migrant children at 100 concentration camps in 14 states

https://voidnetwork.gr/2018/06/26/nazi-govern-usa-10000-migrant-children-100-concentration-camps-14-states/

The post How the FEDS failed to track thousands of separated children – by ISSIE LAPOWSKY appeared first on Void Network.

Inside Bannon’s Plan to Hijack Europe for the Far-Right

crystalzero72 — Mon, 30 Jul 2018 12:30:10 +0000

LONDON—Steve Bannon plans to go toe-to-toe with George Soros and spark a right-wing revolution in Europe.

Trump’s former White House chief advisor told The Daily Beast that he is setting up a foundation in Europe called The Movement which he hopes will lead a right-wing populist revolt across the continent starting with the European Parliament elections next spring.

The non-profit will be a central source of polling, advice on messaging, data targeting, and think-tank research for a ragtag band of right-wingers who are surging all over Europe, in many cases without professional political structures or significant budgets.

Bannon’s ambition is for his organization ultimately to rival the impact of Soros’s Open Society, which has given away $32 billion to largely liberal causes since it was established in 1984.

Over the past year, Bannon has held talks with right-wing groups across the continent from Nigel Farage and members of Marine Le Pen’s Front National (recently renamed Rassemblement National) in the West, to Hungary’s Viktor Orban and the Polish populists in the East.

He envisions a right-wing “supergroup” within the European Parliament that could attract as many as a third of the lawmakers after next May’s Europe-wide elections. A united populist bloc of that size would have the ability to seriously disrupt parliamentary proceedings, potentially granting Bannon huge power within the populist movement.

After being forced out of the White House following internal wranglings that would later surface in the book Fire and Fury, Bannon is now reveling in the opportunity to plot his new European empire. “I’d rather reign in hell, than serve in heaven,” he said, paraphrasing John Milton’s Satan in Paradise Lost.

The Movement’s headquarters are expected to be located in Brussels, Belgium, where they will start hiring staff in coming months. It is expected that there will be fewer than 10 full-time staff ahead of the 2019 elections, with a polling expert, a communications person, an office manager and a researcher among the positions. The plan is to ramp that up to more like 25 people post-2019 if the project has been a success.

Bannon plans to spend 50 percent of his time in Europe—mostly in the field rather than the Brussels office—once the midterm elections in the U.S. are over in November.

The operation is also supposed to serve as a link between Europe’s right-wing movements and the pro-Trump Freedom Caucus in the U.S. This week Paul Gosar (R-AZ) was its envoy to Bannon’s operation in London.

Bannon and Raheem Kassam, a former Farage staffer and Breitbart editor, set up shop in a five-star Mayfair hotel for a week while Donald Trump was visiting Europe. Between TV appearances as Trump surrogates, they hosted a raft of Europe’s leading right-wingers at the hotel.

“It was so successful that we’re going to start staffing up,” said Bannon. “Everybody agrees that next May is hugely important, that this is the real first continent-wide face-off between populism and the party of Davos. This will be an enormously important moment for Europe.”

Having seen the shock right-wing victory with the Brexit referendum and Matteo Salvini’s electoral success in Italy, which were achieved on relatively tight budgets, Bannon sees the opportunity to boost radically disparate nationalist parties by deploying a well-financed centralized operation intended to blow local opponents out of the water.

Up until now insurgent populist groups across Europe have often suffered from similar problems: lack of expertise and finances. Le Pen’s party was kept afloat by Russian loans back in 2014, when French banks refused to extend lines of credit for the Front National. Le Pen was back in Moscow shaking Putin’s hand before last year’s French elections, which the NSA subsequently revealed had been hacked by the Russians.

The Movement plans to research and write detailed policy proposals that can be used by like-minded parties; commission pan-European or targeted polling; and share expertise in election war room methodology such as message discipline, data-led voter targeting and field operations. Depending on electoral law in individual countries, the foundation may be able to take part in some campaigns directly while bolstering other populist groups indirectly.

“I didn’t get the idea until Marine Le Pen invited me to speak at Lille at the Front National,” recalled Bannon. “I said, ‘What do you want me say?’”

The response came back: “All you have to say is, ‘We’re not alone.’”

Bannon was stunned to discover that the nationalist movements in Europe were not pooling skills and sharing ideas with populist parties in neighboring countries—let alone on a global scale.

Bannon said the Front National recognized that he was “the guy that goes round and understands us as a collective.”

Up on stage he told the crowd: “You fight for your country and they call you racist. But the days when those kind of insults work is over. The establishment media are the dogs of the system. Every day, we become stronger and they become weaker. Let them call you racists, xenophobes or whatever else, wear these like a medal.”

The former Trump campaign manager believes the fuse for the global populist revolt—now led from Washington, D.C. by his former boss—was lit 10 years ago during the financial crisis and President Barack Obama’s bailout of the broken financial sector. With income inequality growing, Bannon first championed Sarah Palin and then Donald Trump as vanquishers of the establishment elite who were capable of turning traditional politics on its head.

His next populist heroes can be found in Europe.

He sees Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, as the perfect foil to help accelerate that dynamic in Europe.

Noting Trump’s controversial decision to call out Merkel over her gas pipeline deal with Russia last week, Bannon said: “This is the lie of Angela Merkel. She’s a complete and total phony. The elites say Trump is disruptive but she’s sold out control to Russia for cheaper energy prices.”

He describes Merkel and Emmanuel Macron, the French president who crushed Le Pen in a runoff election last year but has since flagged in the polls, as vulnerable figureheads of establishment Europe. With Britain voting to quit the E.U., Merkel and Macron’s vision of a united continent will be put to the test at next year’s elections.

Bannon is convinced that the coming years will see a drastic break from decades of European integration. “Right-wing populist nationalism is what will happen. That’s what will govern,” he told The Daily Beast. “You’re going to have individual nation states with their own identities, their own borders.”

The grassroots movements are already in place waiting for someone to maximize their potential. “It will be instantaneous—as soon as we flip the switch,” he said.

The sight of Brexit virtually upending the entire European Union with a campaign spending cap of £7 million ($9 million) was a great inspiration. “When they told me the spending cap was £7 million, I go, ‘You mean £70 million? What the fuck?!’ £7 million doesn’t buy anything. It doesn’t buy you Facebook data, it doesn’t buy you ads, it doesn’t do anything.”

“Dude! You just took the fifth largest economy in the world out of the EU for £7 million!”

This week, British officials ruled that the Brexit campaign had not stuck to the legal limit—overspending by more than $600,000. There were also unofficial campaigns which spent additional millions arguing that Britain should leave the E.U.

Nonetheless, Britain’s GDP is around $2.6 trillion and leaked government figures estimate that Brexit could wipe 10 percent off that figure, meaning the impact of the democratic decision vastly dwarfs the scale of the investment by the campaign.

“The first thing they teach you at Harvard Business School is operating leverage,” said Bannon. With his expertise, contacts and financial backing, he is convinced that he can have an outsized impact all across Europe.

Bannon went to Italy to observe the campaign earlier this year as populist parties surged in the polls despite their tiny operations. “Look at Five Star and the Northern League,” he said. “They used their own credit cards. They took control of the seventh largest economy in the world—on their credit cards! It’s insane.”

The two anti-establishment parties reached a coalition agreement that made Matteo Salvini deputy prime minister and put him in charge of the interior ministry two months ago. He has since shut Italy’s ports to NGO ships carrying rescued migrants and called for a census of the Roma community that may lead to mass deportations. Last year, he called for a radical crackdown on immigrants. “We need a mass cleansing, street by street, piazza by piazza, neighborhood by neighborhood,” he said.

Bannon sees Salvini as a model for his future Movement partners to follow. “Italy is the beating heart of modern politics,” he said. “If it works there it can work everywhere.”

He admitted that the scale of his right-wing coalition could be limited by the extreme positions of some of The Movement’s potential partners. “Some people may opt out because they think some of the guys may be too immigrant focused,” he conceded.

“We’re not looking to include any ethno-nationalist parties in this although guys like the Sweden Democrats or the True Finns are perfect casting.”

Kent Ekeroth of the Sweden Democrats was one of those who met Bannon in Central London in the last week. The party, which had its roots in the Neo-Nazi and white supremacist movements of the 1980s, has shot up to almost 20 percent in recent polls after adopting a more conventionally populist, anti-immigration message.

Jérôme Rivière of Marine Le Pen’s Front National (Rassemblement National since June) also made the pilgrimage to London’s Mayfair, as did Mischaël Modrikamen of the People’s Party of Belgium, Nigel Farage of UKIP and Filip Dewinter of Vlaams Belang, a Flemish nationalist party formed in 2004 when its predecessor was found to be in breach of a Belgian law on racism and xenophobia.

Bannon said Farage and Le Pen would take the lead in figuring out the logistics of creating a new European parliamentary grouping that could be home to all of these parties and more.

Gosar, the Republican congressman, also stopped by Bannon’s London hotel. He was in Britain to attend a rally for the street protester and alt-right provocateur Tommy Robinson, who was recently jailed for contempt of court for breaching reporting restrictions on a trial. During his trip, Gosar accused the British government of jailing Robinson as part of a cover up of rapeperpetrated by “disgusting and depraved individuals” from Muslim immigrant communities, which he described as a “scourge.”

Bannon’s ambition is no less than to take a stranglehold on Europe in the same way that he believes Soros has been able to dominate proceedings in recent decades.

“Soros is brilliant,” he said. “He’s evil but he’s brilliant.”

Bannon wants to fulfil that role on the right and he is not ashamed to assert his objectives. “I’m about winning. I’m about power,” he said. “I want to win and then I want to effectuate change.”

He is not afraid of being caricatured in the way that Soros has been vilified by the right. He compared it to the fallout from the Cambridge Analytica scandal. “Look at Chris Wylie [the Cambridge Analytica whistleblower]. He is saying ‘Bannon made psychological weapons.’ He’s literally made me the most brilliant evil genius. I’m a Bond villain. I kind of dig it.”

Kassam, who worked closely with Bannon at Breitbart and followed him out the door of the populist news site, said The Movement was shaping up as a force that would subsume national politics.

“Forget your Merkels,” said Kassam. “Soros and Bannon are going to be the two biggest players in European politics for years to come.”

___________________________________________

written by NICO HINES

source: https://amp.thedailybeast.com

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Thousands protest against Donald Trump in London – 13 July 2018 (video)

crystalzero72 — Fri, 13 Jul 2018 13:07:28 +0000

More than 40.000 people protest against the three-day visit of US President Donald Trump to the United Kingdom takes place in London on Friday, July 13. Protesters have called on the government to revoke the invitation for Donald Trump to visit the UK Demonstrators accused the US President of scapegoating Muslims with his 90-day travel ban. Marchers called on Theresa May to withdraw her controversial invitation of a state visit to Mr Trump and denounced his travel ban as ‘racist’.

Similar protests were held in cities across the UK, and thousands rallied against the US President in Paris and Berlin.

The demonstration starts outside the BBC’s headquarters and finishes at Trafalgar Square where thousands are expected to attend. It is organised by a collective identified as ‘Together Against Trump,’ which includes several trade unions and campaign groups, such as Stop the War, Friends of the Earth and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.

The post Thousands protest against Donald Trump in London – 13 July 2018 (video) appeared first on Void Network.

Nazi Govern USA: 10,000 migrant children at 100 concentration camps in 14 states

crystalzero72 — Tue, 26 Jun 2018 11:05:39 +0000

We try to follow the news but its not easy. Nazi govern USA and the federal government using police and the army for building concentration camps all over AmeriKKKa. For one more time in history as in in previous decades in Africa, in Australia (with the Aboriginals) and in Europe (with Roma, communists, anarchists, disabled people and Jews) the USA government take the kids of the people in custody, steal the children from the mothers, separate families, giving drugs to the kids to keep them calm and imprison the adults . Immigrant Children Separated From Parents At The Borders? This is genocide! We Will STOP USA NAZI Government. Smash the Borders! Smash the detention centers- Void Network

_____________________________________________________-

Over 10,000 migrant children are now in US government custody at 100 shelters in 14 states

The number of migrant children held without their parents by the US government has surged 21% since last month to 10,773 children, the Washington Post reported.
The uptick comes after the Trump administration imposed a new “zero tolerance” policy to prosecute migrants who cross the US border illegally.
The policy means that migrant parents who cross the border with their children are forcibly separated while they await criminal prosecution.

The Trump administration’s new “zero tolerance” policy toward migrants who cross the US border illegally has driven up the number of migrant children held in government custody without their parents, the Washington Post reported Tuesday.

The US Health and Human Services Department said it was holding 10,773 migrant children in custody as of Tuesday — up 21% from the 8,886 it was holding a month earlier.

The surge comes in the wake of the Trump administration’s new tactic to criminally prosecute every person who crosses into the US illegally, which requires them to be separated from any children they brought with them while they’re detained.

But it’s unclear exactly how many of the 10,773 children being held in government custody were actually forcibly separated from their parents — a Customs and Border Protection official told lawmakers at a hearing last week that 658 children had been separated from 638 adults between May 6 and May 19 under the new zero tolerance policy.

Many of the other children may have arrived at the border unaccompanied. They’re typically held in government custody briefly before being placed with “sponsors,” who are usually parents or immediate relatives of the children.

The shelters the children are staying in are at 95% capacity and are expected to add thousands of bed spaces in the coming weeks, one HHS official told the Post.

To house migrant children, HHS relies on “an existing network of approximately 100 shelters in 14 states.”

HHS has also reportedly weighed housing migrant children on military bases, but the HHS official told the Post that measure is being considered only as a “last option.”

The Trump administration has come under fire in recent weeks for its policies toward migrant children. The family separation policy sparked an uproar, particularly after the White House chief of staff John Kelly dismissed concerns that the policy was “cruel” during a recent interview with NPR.

“The children will be taken care of — put into foster care or whatever,” Kelly said. “But the big point is they elected to come illegally into the United States and this is a technique that no one hopes will be used extensively or for very long.”

Anger over the issue reached a boiling point last week, when a month-old piece of news resurfaced, prompting Trump critics to assail the government for losing track of 1,475 immigrant children who arrived at the border alone.

But both the Trump administration and immigration advocates have sought to tamp down concerns about those children, many of whom may have deliberately chosen not to tell the federal government where they are.

Michelle Mark May. 30, 2018

source: http://www.businessinsider.com

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Trump Administration And Advocates Clash Over What’s Next For Migrant Children

June 11, 2018

There are now more than 10,000 migrant children in U.S. government custody.

These are teenagers who fled violence in Central America. And children who were separated from their parents after they crossed the U.S.-Mexico border illegally.

How the children should be cared for and what happens to them is part of a growing clash between the Trump administration and advocates.

One of these young migrants made the long trek from El Salvador last year and turned herself in to U.S. authorities at the border.

She wanted to live with her aunt in Texas. She always believed that’s what her mother would have wanted.

Her mother died when she was nine months old, and her grandparents raised her. She’s 17 years old now.

“She’s a very intelligent girl,” says her aunt, who asked that we not use their names. She worries that speaking out could hurt her niece’s asylum claim.

“She always goes to church,” the aunt added, as she sat in her small apartment in San Antonio, describing the many months she spent trying to win her niece’s release.

Typically, children asking for asylum are held by the Office of Refugee Resettlement for less than two months. Then they are released to a sponsor. That can be a parent, a close adult relative, or foster parents.

Her niece didn’t have an official birth certificate, so she was detained for 16 months.

“I gave them every proof that I could, everything they asked for,” says the aunt.

The aunt says she provided U.S. authorities with proof that she and her niece were related, including fingerprints, many documents from El Salvador and even a DNA test.

The niece’s lawyers say they got the runaround. The lawyers also say they’re not alone and that other kids have been detained longer than necessary. The lawyers say the delay violates rules on how the children should be treated.

Those rules are contained in what’s known as the Flores settlement, a federal court agreement dating back to 1997, said Leecia Welch, an attorney with the National Center for Youth Law based in Oakland, Calif.

“At its core, the Flores case stands for the common sense proposition that children should be raised by families and not government facilities,” said Welch.

Her legal group is one of two California nonprofits fighting in court to make sure the Flores settlement is followed.

Under the settlement, the government agreed to release migrant children from custody “without unnecessary delay.” Until then, the government agreed to detain them in the “least restrictive” setting possible.

But Welch said the government isn’t living up to these promises. She said children are being detained too long and that too many are being detained in secure, jail-like settings, even psychiatric facilities.

“We’re also seeing the Office of Refugee Resettlement place some children in facilities where they’re administered very powerful psychotropic medications for weeks, months or even years without first obtaining parental or judicial authorization,” Welch said.

In court declarations, some children said that they have been told they have to take the medications if they ever hope to leave detention. Others claimed they have been forcibly injected.

In a legal response, the government said children can be sent to more secure facilities if they are a danger or an escape risk. It also said psychotropic drugs, or medications used to treat mental illness, are used in compliance with state laws and regulations.

Meanwhile, in Washington, the Trump administration has made it clear that it wants to end the protections laid out in the Flores settlement.

“We urgently need Congress to pass legislation to close legal loopholes that are being exploited to gain entry into our country,” Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen said on Capitol Hill last month.

“We need to get rid of the Flores settlement,” she added.

Nielsen and others in the administration believe that the current system creates a magnet for migrant children, including members of the violent MS-13 gang. They say the kids know they can come to the U.S. illegally, get released in short order, and then disappear to live here undocumented.

“I think this is essentially disinformation that’s being put out,” said Bob Carey, who directed the Office of Refugee Resettlement during the Obama administration. It is the agency that runs the shelters and detention centers for migrant children.

“Disinformation to state that the Flores agreement in any way, that it’s bad law or that it compromises security when it largely relates to how children in custody are cared for,” he added.

A court hearing on the future of the Flores settlement and the rules for treating migrant children is scheduled for later this month.

RICHARD GONZALES

source: National Public Radio

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Trump Admin to Indefinitely Detain Migrant Families Together; No Plan to Reunite Separated Children

Undocumented Mother: Stop Separation of Migrant Children by Dropping Charges Against Their Parents

best source for following the news: Democracy NOW:

https://www.democracynow.org/topics/immigration

The post Nazi Govern USA: 10,000 migrant children at 100 concentration camps in 14 states appeared first on Void Network.

“Oh, my Trump! On the figures of the global civil conflict” by Void Network

crystalzero72 — Mon, 20 Feb 2017 15:29:02 +0000

Oh, my Trump! On the figures of the global civil conflict (Announcement in English / intro in Greek) While protests and riots may not be unheard-of phenomena in the history of presidential inaugurations in the US, there is something distinct in the mass anti-Trump protests and the violent clashes that accompanied them (no matter how small the latter may have been).

Η εκλογή του Ντόναλντ Τραμπ δημιούργησε σε παγκόσμιο επίπεδο ένα φάσμα αισθημάτων: μούδιασμα, οργή, φόβο, ανασφάλεια. Με τον έναν ή τον άλλο τρόπο, υπάρχει μία γενικευμένη αίσθηση ότι συνέβη κάτι το οποίο μπορεί να έχει πολύ άσχημες επιπτώσεις για το μέλλον του κόσμου. Την ίδια στιγμή, η ορκωμοσία και οι πρώτες μέρες διακυβέρνησης του νέου προέδρου των ΗΠΑ συνοδεύονται από σημαντικές αντιδράσεις, τόσο στο επίπεδο των επίσημων θεσμών όσο και σε αυτό του δρόμου. Χωρίς καμία υποτίμηση του συναισθηματικού επιπέδου εμπλοκής με τα γεγονότα είναι απαραίτητο να επιχειρηθεί μία θεωρητική κατανόηση όλων αυτών των συμβάντων – της εκλογής του Τραμπ και των αντιδράσεων ενάντια σε αυτή – στην ενότητα τους. Μόνο έτσι μπορούμε, αφενός, να εκτιμήσουμε τους κινδύνους και τις δυνατότητες που ελλοχεύουν στην παρούσα ιστορική συγκυρία και, αφετέρου, να συμμετέχουμε θετικά στον διεθνής κλίμακας αγώνα που διεξάγεται. Το κείμενο που ακολουθεί είναι μία μικρή συμβολή προς αυτήν την κατεύθυνση.

“Oh, my Trump! On the figures of the global civil conflict”
by Void Network

There is no reason goodness cannot prevail over evil, so long as the angels are organized as the mafia

– KurtVonnegut, Cat’sCradle

While protests and riots may not be unheard-of phenomena in the history of presidential inaugurations in the US, there is something distinct in the mass anti-Trump protests and the violent clashes that accompanied them (no matter how small the latter may have been). Surely, Trump’s personality has played its part, but there is much more at stake in the ongoing protests than the reaction to a person who deliberately chose to be vulgar and to provoke to get elected. Indeed, it is in thevery fact of the election of a person like Trump – which proves the success of his electoral campaign – that we get a glimpse of the significance of the anti-Trump protests. To put it briefly, the protests are not a response to who Trump is, but an expression of the division that Trump represents.

In the same way that Trump’s personality is insufficient as a cause, the importance of the protests cannot also be measured simply by analyzing the reasons motivating the mobilizations, although it is evident that no serious analysis can ignore this factor. Even if we add upthe individual intensions of all those who go to the streets to declare that Trump is “not my president”, or more recently to protest against his decrees, we would still not come up with the“message” or “meaning” of the demonstrations.Rather,it would be theirheterogeneity that would shine through, which, perhaps, may not be so easy to reconcile. The fact that some tendencies are dominant and others are marginal hardly changes this verdict.

Where is the significance of the anti-Trump protests if not (not primarily at least)in Madonna’s insults, in Charlize Theron’s tears,in Michael Moore’s self-righteous indignation or in the windows smashed by the Black Block? It is in the event, that is always more than the sum of its parts: in the fact that mass protests took place (and continue to occur) as a reaction to the election of the president of the United States of America.

If we conceive of democracy, or more specifically, of modern democracy, simply as the form of capitalist rule, as some Marxists do, or as a façade of domination, as some anarchists do, we will have missed something fundamental about it (it is no accident that Marxist and anarchist critiques, for all their merits, have a difficulty coming to terms with the capacity of modern democratic systems to absorb the tremors caused by crisis and unrest). The definition of democracy as “government by consent”, while very partial and inadequate if taken alone, grasps at least one essential element of modern democracies (perhaps of every type of democracy worthy of the name, but this is not an issue to enter in this article). Modern democracy has evolved as a pragmatic system of mediating social antagonisms and managing difference in a consensual way. For sure, the archives of liberal democracies, even in countries with a long democratic tradition like the United States, are littered with repression, violence, exclusion, discrimination, marginalization etc. Still, wherever functional representative democracies have been established, institutional inroads have been created which, for considerable periods of time and to a sufficient degree for the functionality of the system to be ensured, manage to channel collective interests and desires in non-violentforms of expression.Indeed, from a certain functional perspective, whether this aspect is“ideology” or “fact” is secondary; what matters is its presence which, even in its failures, allows democratic systems to function.

Associated to this consensual mediation of difference, although not identical to it, is another aspect of modern democracy, the generation through elections of legitimacy, or to be more precise of legitimate power and government. Once again, critiques of elections that concern the extent which they truly represent the will of the people, or their failure and inability to act as means of genuine democratic accountability, are beside the point (something of course that does not strip these critiques ofthevalue of being true).Through multiparty elections, modern democracies not only integrate and recognize political opposition, in a way that civil conflict is suspended; they also make representation “representative” and, thus,legitimate. In this sense, acceptance of the electoral process and of the majority principle on which it rests is essential to the stability of a democratic regime. This dimension of democracy as a process that generates legitimate government is what attaches it to the modern state, or to put it a bit more technically, this dimension concerns democracy as a state form (“democracy-state”).

These fundamental aspects of modern democracy are precisely what the anti-Trump protests challenge. To declare that Trump “is not my president”,although he has come to office through free elections, is much more than the expression of a personal sentiment about Trump (no matter how much he is resented as an individual); it is to subvert one of the essential principles and aspects of modern democracies. At the level of analysis that we are concerned, it is not crucial if this is a conscious act by those who protest, though, of course, it makes a huge difference if such subversion becomes a political agenda with hegemonic aspirations. In the case at hand, it is more than likely that most protesters do not want to challenge the American democratic state, much less democracy as a form of government or regime. They instead want to defend it from what they perceive to be a threat to it, Trump. On the other hand,it is no accident that Scarlet Johansson pleaded with Trump to prove worthy of his title so she can recognize him as “her president”. Neither is it out of idiosyncrasy that Moore felt compelled to stress that the protesters are the “real majority”. Of course, in this case the implication is that the electoral system may not be adequate to express the majority, which would simply imply the need for a better electoral system. In all cases, however, a certain anxiety is evident to defend the democratic credentials of the protests. Part consciously, part unconsciously, the act of challenging the President the day (after) he was inaugurated is taken for what it is: a subversion of an essential aspect of modern democracy. It is this subversive attitude that becomes manifest also in the pledge to become “ungovernable” that seems to be gaining ground.

One may question here whether the assertion above does not risk vindicating the supporters of Trump, who depict those who refuse to acknowledge him as antidemocratic elitists or, in the case of anarchists, antidemocratic vandals. The misgivings are legitimate. Having stated the thesis in a strong manner, it is imperative to modify it. After all, it would be unwise, both from a theoretical and from a political perspective, to ignore the widespread feeling among protesters that they defend democracy or, indeed, that they practice a more genuine democracy, a “real democracy” as the slogan of the squares-movement had it. If the protests and the calls to become ungovernable constitute a practical challenge to the capacity of democratic elections to generate legitimate government, they bring to the fore another dimension, which is attached to democracy not as a state form but as a movement from below: the critical capacity to generate rupture and dissent, what Jacque Rancièrehas called “dissensus”.[1] Democracy, in this historic configuration of the concept, expresses the social division that inheres in society, and more precisely, for class-society, the tensions and antagonisms that cannot be totalized in a harmonious order of representation, even a nominally democratic one.

From this angle, the protests are instances of a typical phenomenon, given that democracy as a movement of dissent is a frequent feature of modern societies. And yet, there is a crucial element that differentiates the anti-Trump protests and resistance movements from other recent democratic movements, like “Occupy!” and its European counterparts, the Indignados and the Aganaktismenoi. The ongoing protests and resistance respond, but also are a continuation, of the “dissensus” expressed already in the elections. That is to say, the pragmatic dimension of democracy, as a mediating principle of social difference,has been practically questioned in Trump’s victory. For sure, the latter at the same time manifests the power of modern democracy to absorb dissent and to promise change. But it must not be underestimated that Trump was elected by making the divisions that cut through American society into a programmatic principle. This is,ultimately, what Trump’s victory represents: a division and a tension that, as a result of the ongoing crisis, have reached sufficient intensity to assume the form of a political agenda capable of winning elections in the world’s (waning) superpower.

Conceptualizing Trump’s election in this manner also makes possible its contextualization. Staggering as it is for taking place in the “belly of the beast”, the United States of America, Trump’s victory is representative of a wider trend, of a crisis of political representation that spreads over many countries of the capitalist world-system, especially at its “center” (or at any rate its more developed parts). This crisis, in turn, is the current form that the more general crisis of capitalist relations has assumed, the previous expression being the wave of international struggles that reached a climax in the years 2010-2012.

For at least two decades, representative democracies in the more advanced capitalist states were functioning under a peculiar single-party system: no matter which was the specific electoral system, governmental power was shared and exchanged between two political parties that agreed on the essential direction that societies had to take, as epitomized in the system of neoliberalism, financialization and globalization. In the United States this role was played by the two parties which composed its traditional political class, while in Europe the two traditional political familiesof social-democracy andthe center-right (in its various subtypes, Christian-democracy, British conservatism etc.) played an equivalent role. From one election to the next, including the various referendums that have taken place recently, the waning influence of these parties and the correlative crisis of representation becomes manifest. For sure, in the United States, due to its deeply consolidated two-party system, the crisis could not take the form of a collapse of the Republicans and the Democrats but of the ascendancy within these two parties of underdogs coming from their margins, like Bernie Sanders and, of course, Trump. No matter its specific manifestations in each different state, the overall trend is clear and while, so far, it has not acquired the character of a crisis of the democratic state, the argument that voting as an act increasingly becomes an expression of crisis and a reaction to the present political system may prove to be all the more salient.

Along with the crisis of political representation, Trumps victory expresses the parallel phenomenon of the rise of far-right politics. Usually, the latter is designated under the banner of “populism”, a term that is deployed with the explicit intention to conceptualize together the far-right parties with leftwing powers that also arose to prominence because of the crisis, like Podemos and Syriza (until of course the latter assumed office, now Syriza belongs to the “responsible” political powers). The dominant use of the term and its political functions have severely limited the analytical value that populism once may have had. Yet, it may still be preferable than seeing Trump and his European equivalents in France, Austria etc. as a triumph of fascism. Not that they lack fascist elements. But these are tendencies that have still not taken the shape of an identifiable fascist politics, although this is one of the historical possibilities that open in front of us.

No matter how we call it, what is the essence of this ascendancy of the far-right and its “fascistic populism”? Judith Butler, in the article cited previously, correctly points out that there may not be a single reason, and that those who believe who have the answer, may be deluding themselves. For one, the victory of Trump does not mean that millions of Americans turned racist or even fascist. On the other hand, to identify in Trump simply a symptom of the economic crisis is to downplay that rightwing populism (or however else we wish to call it) is not simply an expression of the crisis but one of its political mediations. In simple words, American or French workers who vote for Trump and Marine Le Pen may not have become irremediably racist and fascist but they still invest in an explicitly nationalist and xenophobic vision, which entails a very aggressive policy towards the multinational proletariat of today’s world. This, to be sure, certainly does not justify the high-frowned and self-righteous dismissal that some leftists and anarchists commit. Still, from an internationalist, leftwing perspective, it can hardly be an occasion for jubilation.

What has historically defined leftwing politics of any kind, from the more radical to the more moderate, is that it promoted changes which were thought to be progressive (and perhaps part of the reason for the crisis that the Left finds itself is its failure to move beyond struggles of preservation, or indeed of restoration). In contrast, what distinguishes (far)right populism is that its critique of the elite, of corruption, etc.is not attached to a politics of transformation but a politics of restoration. That is to say, Trump and his likes do not promise to change the capitalist system, but to give to the present order it’s just, true, form. The fact that this form is identified with national sovereignty and glory gives to new far-right politics its full color: Trump’s version of isolationism is just one type of the many neo-archaisms that are in vogue, another example being of course the rise of ISIS (and with the “neo” being as crucial as the “archaic”, since we are concerned with truly [post]modern phenomena). In the face of a crisis which affects all aspects of their lives – their material wellbeing, their identity, their psychic balance – thousands of people invest on the restoration of familiar figures from the past. It is this essentially conservative psychosocial state that makes them receptive to the deeply reactionary rhetoric and political agenda of people like Trump.

It is on such a level of an economy of desire that we may also understand the forms that political antagonism assume nowadays and of the division that Trump stands for and aggravates. Those who oppose Trump, on the level of a mobilization from below, are the most forward looking and dynamic groups, who invest on progress, mobility and are ready to embrace change (at least to a certain degree). Not accidentally, most of them belong to the new middle class, which embodies all these qualities: educated and skilled, open minded in terms of social norms and human rights, mobile etc. To be sure, we most certainly do not deal with a unitary group, whether sociologically, politically, or ideologically. Some of the protesters are affluent and react to Trump mainly for identity issues, others have been hard pressed by the crisis, others belong to the youth who feels a lack of prospect, differences which can be traced also in the diverse political agendas and levels of radicalism. The picture becomes even more complicated when we broaden our scope to include in the anti-Trump camp members of the political and economic elite, who are fearful of the adverse economic consequences that Trump’s political agenda may have. Thus, parts of the progressive middle-class found themselves making a common cause – the election of Hilary Clinton – with parts of the political and economic establishment, whose essential aim and desire is to conserve the current neoliberal structures of governmentality and accumulation.

The substantial inference here is that the blocs which form political antagonism currently are not stable. They are fluid assemblages which may easily decompose and reassemble in a different configuration. It is certainly not wild imagination to conceive that parts of the working class who voted Trump could be drawn to an alternative left radical politics, just like it is far from being inconceivable to expect that an upsurge of radicalization and political instability could make parts of the middle-class who now oppose Trump to conceive him as the lesser evil and as a guarantee of stability. In this context, we cannot but note the absence, as a collective force, from the anti-Trump protests of the marginalized proletariat which has recently revolted in the ghettos of US. This social group cannot be accommodated in the liberal progressivism that stars of Hollywood embody, other than as an object of sympathy and welfare, instead of a subject of change. How could it be otherwise, given that its main modality of struggle is the riot,[2]which is almost by definition excluded from the liberal catalogue of legitimate political action?[3]

If we add all the pieces together: of the various (and antagonistic to each other) neo-archaisms that promote change through the aggressive restorationof an idealized past; of the movements that appear and disappear only to reappear again, in their struggle for a better future; of the riots that continue to erupt from one place to the other; of wars that, along with displacing millions of people, form an explosive global geopolitical configuration; of the new economic crisis that is lurking behind every new “bubble”; of the ever-growing inequality; all these make for a very volatile situation. It does not make much sense to evoke some unproblematic universal figure as a remedy to this extensive fragmentation, since the latter does not come in spite but because of theone only truly actualized universality, that of capital. To be sure,the fluid nature of political antagonismdoes not also imply political relativism; the antagonisms, the hopes, the anxieties, the fantasies of today continue to be haunted by familiar, age-oldspecters: justice, freedom,democracy, equality, popular power. Rather, however, than being a struggle for the realizationofperennial ideals, the ongoing globalcivil conflict is a struggle over their content.

In this context, Trump’s election is certainly a reason to worry. Not only he deploys notions like popular power in a way that drives them from their emancipatory content and potential; healso expresses and represents the truly fascist potential of turning division into the principle of an authoritarian and racist totality. For all that, we are not quite yet at the doorstep of doom. The recent elections are also the expression of a potential that is reflected negatively in the figure of Trump. It is this potential that becomes manifest in the streets, in the demonstrations, in becoming-ungovernable, in the little graffito of the torched black limo: “we the people”.

[1]J. Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, trans. S. Corcoran, London and New York: Continuum, 2010.

[2] J. Clover, Riot. Strike. Riot: The New Era of Uprisings, London and New York: Verso, 2016.

[3] Sadly, for the most part, neither the more radical political currents fare any better on this score, although they are more ready to recognize subaltern riots in a positive manner. Hard as it may be, the establishment of political forms, infrastructures and processes that can embrace the marginalized proletariat and its forms of struggle remains a crucial stake that the current conjuncture posits. For all its shortcomings, the anarchist movement in Greece provides here an interesting and promising experience.

text written by George Sotiropoulos from Void Network / athens group

VOID NETWORK [Theory, Utopia, Empathy, Ephemeral Arts] https://voidnetwork.gr

The post “Oh, my Trump! On the figures of the global civil conflict” by Void Network appeared first on Void Network.

In Trump’s America, ‘Felony Riot’ Charges Against Inauguration Protesters Signal Dangerous Wave of Repression by Sarah Lazare

crystalzero72 — Mon, 23 Jan 2017 13:02:03 +0000

More than 200 people mass arrested in Washington, D.C. facing up to 10 years in prison.

More than 200 people who were mass-arrested at the Washington, D.C. protests against the inauguration of Donald Trump have been hit with felony riot charges that are punishable by up to 10 years in prison. Those picked up in the sweep—including legal observers and journalists—had their phones, cameras and other personal belongings confiscated as evidence, a lawyer confirmed to AlterNet.

Demonstrators warn that the crackdown signals a new wave of repression against the protesters, whose mass mobilization was met with riot police violence, National Guard and Department of Homeland Security deployments, heavy surveillance and law enforcement snipers positioned on rooftops.

“These charges are absolutely horrifying. They are just trying to stop any resistance to the Trump administration,” Samantha Miller, an organizer with the Disrupt J20 Collective, told AlterNet. “Many of these demonstrators were showing rage and fear of what’s coming. It’s going to take a lot more than asking nicely to create change and stop the threats from the Trump administration.”

The vast majority of the roughly 230 people who were kettled and mass-arrested at the anti-capitalist bloc during Friday’s protests have been charged under the felony riot act, said Mark Goldstone, a National Lawyers Guild-affiliated attorney who has defended protesters in Washington, D.C. for more than 30 years. Washington, D.C. authorities put this number at 217. Goldstone confirmed to AlterNet that legal observers and journalists were among those detained in the sweep, explaining that, throughout his career in Washington, D.C., he has never seen mass charges of this kind.

Jeffrey Light, a Washington, D.C.-based lawyer who provided legal support to the Disrupt J20 Collective, agreed with this assessment. “I have been representing protesters for 13 years now, and I have never seen felony rioting charges in Washington, D.C. It is not one of the standard laws that they tend to use. This is unusual. It is rare to use that charge.”

“Across the board, all phones and cameras are being held as evidence, and they are also detaining gloves and cell phone chargers as evidence,” said Light. “They are giving people their wallets back generally, but that’s it. It is extremely troubling.”

According to a class-action lawsuit filed by Light on Friday, those picked up in the sweep and hit with felony riot charges already endured abuse at the hands of the police. “Our class action lawsuit charges that the police were rounding up everyone on the street without warning and putting them under arrest and using excessive force,” said Light. “There were a number of weapons we haven’t seen Washington, D.C. police use in recent memory, flash bang grenades and tear gas. In addition to chemical irritants, they were assaulting people with batons. They were beating people.”

Those kettled by police were forced to wait for hours in the street and on school buses, many of them going untreated for injuries, say supporters. “They are trying to set a tone to chill further demos of this nature, and I don’t think it’s going to work,” Bob Hayes, a Washington, D.C. resident who is helping coordinate legal support, told AlterNet. “They are trying to put pressure on individuals to collaborate with the investigations.”

Light emphasized that, while the riot felony charges are new, the mass arrests are not. Acting DC Police Chief Peter Newsham, who oversaw this weekend’s crackdown, was the assistant police chief who presided over another mass arrest more than a decade ago. In the fall of 2002, the Metropolitan police department mass arrested hundreds of people at a World Bank protest in Washington, D.C.’s Pershing Park and hogtied them for up to 24 hours while in detention, before dropping all charges. In a 2015 settlement, the city was forced to pay $2.2 million to nearly 400 protesters.

Newsham, who ordered the mass arrests in 2002, oversaw the police crackdown against inauguration protesters.

Friday’s crackdown came as mass protests erupted across Washington, D.C. and the world, overshadowing the inauguration of Donald Trump, who rose to power on a tide of white nationalism and fascism. On Friday morning, social movements including the Movement for Black Lives and groups centering Muslim, Jewish and immigrant resistance, converged at 14 different “security” checkpoints, to shut down, slow and disrupt the presidential inauguration of Donald Trump. “We stand in solidarity with everyone who challenges oppression in all of its forms, everywhere around the world, in favor of dignity, self-determination, and defending our collective well-being,” reads a statement from the anti-capitalist, anti-fascist bloc circulated ahead of Friday’s protests.

Those arrested in Washington, D.C. faced an outpouring of public support. Ryan Harvey, an activist and musician with Firebrand Records, told AlterNet that hundreds gathered outside the jail on Saturday to show their support for those being released. “Every time people came out, the crowd would cheer and chant,” with the term “anticapitalista” an oft-repeated refrain. “For many, it was like a surprise birthday party, and their faces lit up. Street medics were on-scene, and many supporters brought food, clothes, coffee, tea and water.”

Harvey emphasized that the support is important because it “defends the rights of these people to fight against fascism” and “combats the narrative that there is something more problematic about their protest than their is about the inauguration.”

Washington, D.C. residents say that the state violence on display this weekend extends far beyond the individuals hit with felony riot charges.

“A mother carrying her toddler was pepper sprayed in the face,” said Miller. “An elder from Standing Rock was sprayed in her face. A woman with crutches tried to intervene, and she was sprayed.”

“We faced the Department of Homeland Security, the National Guard, riot police, surveillance, snipers on rooftops, and Trump supporters,” Darakshan Raja, founder of the Muslim American Women’s Policy Forum and co-director of the Washington Peace Center, told AlterNet. “Just to walk around and see that, have them watch you as a target.”

“For weeks, the ‘alt right’ has been attacking us,” Raja continued. “They have sent death threats to the protesters of J20, attacked our organizations, reported us for false things to the city government, harassed all our partners, including the spaces we are housed. Their violence against us can’t be lost in this moment.”

Sarah Lazare is a staff writer for AlterNet. A former staff writer for Common Dreams, she coedited the book About Face: Military Resisters Turn Against War. Follow her on Twitter at @sarahlazare.

source: AlterNet

Black Bloc Smashes Inauguration from subMedia.tv on Vimeo.

Black Bloc Trashing Bank Windows at 2017 Inauguration from brandon jourdan on Vimeo.

The post In Trump’s America, ‘Felony Riot’ Charges Against Inauguration Protesters Signal Dangerous Wave of Repression by Sarah Lazare appeared first on Void Network.