The Stephen Miller Presidency

On April 8, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

Stephen Miller is winning. In recent days, President Donald Trump’s senior adviser for policy has overseen a purge of officials who were seen as insufficiently extreme on immigration. Homeland Security chief Kirstjen Nielsen was pushed out on Sunday. Two days earlier, Miller persuaded Trump to cut ties with Ronald Vitello, the president’s nominee to lead Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “Ron’s a good man but we’re going in a tougher direction,” Trump told reporters.

And Miller’s not done. On Monday, CNN reported that Miller also wants the president to fire two more high-ranking immigration officials. “He’s actively trying to put in place people who have very different points of view than the current leadership within the agencies,” a former DHS official told Politico, referring to Miller. “His idea is basically [to] clean house.” Trump reportedly has informed aides that the 33-year-old Miller will oversee all immigration initiatives.

In a White House defined by dysfunction and turnover—the departments of justice, defense, and veterans affairs are all led by acting directors—Miller is the thriving cockroach. It’s no secret why: He has shown an unwavering commitment to Trump’s toxic immigration agenda, perhaps even more so than the president himself. Miller’s expanding influence and seemingly permanent tenure suggest that Trump’s immigration policies will become even more radical than those he implemented during his first two years in office.

Prematurely balding, with a somewhat vampiric face, Miller is an experienced troll after Trump’s own heart. In high school, he would try to own his liberal classmates by railing against feminism and bilingualism, and in college he accused Maya Angelou of exhibiting “racial paranoia.” Over the past two years, he has been one of Trump’s most vociferous defenders, shouting at any TV host who dares to criticize the president.

In the White House, Miller has been the architect of many of the administration’s most extreme policies. Just days after Trump’s inauguration, he and then-adviser Steve Bannon crafted an executive order that banned travel into the U.S. from seven Muslim-majority countries, resulting in massive protests across the country. Over the next two years, Miller would play a prominent role in the firing of FBI Director James Comey, Homeland Security’s child separation policy, and the GOP’s racist midterm message.

Miller has defended this approach on political grounds. “You have one party that’s in favor of open borders, and you have one party that wants to secure the border,” Miller told The New York Times. “And all day long the American people are going to side with the party that wants to secure the border. And not by a little bit.” But Miller’s favored policies have been enormously unpopular. A majority of Americans consistently opposes the wall. Voters rejected Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric by delivering a historic midterm defeat for the Republicans last November.

And yet, as Trump has become more frustrated with the situation at the border—and with his political failures more broadly—he has further embraced Miller’s far-right agenda. According to The New York Times, Trump had previously castigated Nielsen over her reluctance to implement his most severe, sometimes illegal, policies, like family separation, blocking migrants from seeking asylum, and closing the southern border. With Nielsen gone, the administration is considering further restrictions on asylum seekers and reinstating child separation.

Again and again, Trump has responded to crises and defeat by embracing extreme immigration policies, which have always backfired. This underlines his weakness as a president. He has so few allies that he dares not risk alienating the base that helped him win the White House. But this also speaks to his actual political philosophy, which elevates cruelty—often misconstrued as “strength”—into a perverse virtue. Those who express uneasiness about this approach are dismissed as weak. Miller only advocates for the cruelest available options, and therefore rises in Trump’s favor.

This does not bode well for the nation as Trump flails through the remainder of his first term. His political fortunes, which have been wobbly since Day 1, are threatening to tumble over the next year as the economy slows and Congress accomplishes little now that Republicans have lost their unified control. As these problems mount, and the 2020 election nears, he will double down (or rather, quadruple-down) on his signature issue—and Homeland Security will be led by officials who will do the president’s bidding, without question or conscience.

I know: It’s hard to imagine how Trump could be any more extreme on immigration than he already is. But rest assured, it’s not hard for Miller to imagine.

Pardon the Confusion! Aid to Central America and the “Crisis” at the Border

On April 8, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

The Trump Administration says there is a crisis at the U.S. border with Mexico. The President is frustrated with the governments of Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador because they have not done enough to stop emigration from their countries, despite U.S. aid. The State Department announced that it will stop some U.S. aid to these countries. News reports indicate that the aid to be cut is economic and humanitarian, but that “security”aid (to police and military) will be maintained. In fact, just before the State Department announcement, the U.S. Homeland Security Secretary signed a joint agreement with the governments of Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador to increase cooperation and support around “security”issues.  Many Republicans and Democrats in Congress and many private humanitarian and economic aid agencies argue that more aid, not less, is needed to improve conditions in these Central American countries.

Other Members of Congress see this whole issue somewhat differently. Some are sponsoring and supporting a bill (the Berta Cáceres Act) that would review and stop “security”aid to these countries because that aid goes to police and military that governments use to forcefully repress popular peaceful protest and for human rights violations. The Act was introduced in the last Congress, but it is being re-introduced now with a Democratic majority in the House. So is aid to Central America a solution to the crisis of migration from Central America? Confusing! Some realities to consider.

The number of people who arrived at the U.S.  southern border during February 2019 numbered around 60,000, according to official estimates. The number for March alone is now reported to be over 100,000. Almost half of these people are fleeing Guatemala, most of the rest are Hondurans, with a smaller percentage of Salvadorans.  And another “caravan”of migrants that is expected to number as many as 20,000, is already forming in Honduras and setting out for Mexico and the U.S.

These numbers are indeed overwhelming, and from the perspective of U.S. immigration officials, the asylum seekers themselves who are forced into dire conditions for weeks at the border, and the border communities that must accommodate such an influx of humans, this is indeed a “crisis.”But most of these migrants and asylum seekers are fleeing what is, from their perspective, a much greater crisis in their home countries—a combination of dire poverty, constant insecurity, and violence from gangs, drug trafficking, and government sponsored or condoned violence to repress dissent, on top of a rapidly deteriorating economy.

The old distinction between economic immigrants seeking jobs and opportunity and asylum seekers fleeing violence and threat does not apply so clearly for these Central Americans. In Honduras, the official poverty rate is expected to reach 70 percent this year, with “extreme poverty”(defined by international economic institutions) at over 45 percent. But in Honduras, conditions of poverty make people also much more vulnerable to violent abuse from anyone more powerful or wealthy—gangs, drug lords, police, military, large landowners. A policy of impunity protects powerful individuals from prosecution for crimes against the poor, while the poor themselves are subject to criminalization for any attempt to defend themselves. In most recent years, less than10 percent of violent crimes against poor people in Honduras have even been investigated, much less prosecuted. Honduras, along with El Salvador and Guatemala, continues to have one of the highest murder rates in the world. When Hondurans say they come to the U.S. seeking economic security, they usually also mean they are seeking relief from violence.

For years, both the U.S. and the Honduran governments have claimed that U.S. aid is essential to strengthen police and government institutions, provide security, and promote economic development in order to keep people from fleeing. This would be a reasonable policy if the governments and the security forces were ‘clean”and reliable stewards for all their people, and if lack of development were the root of the problem. But in fact, development itself,as it is currently carried out in Honduras IS the problem.

The economic development model pursued by the Honduran government with the active prompting and support of the United States is based on extraction of basic resources for the U.S. and the world market—mining, logging, large-scale agro-industry and, to a lesser extent, tourism. All of these are carried out without the consent of local communities. There are literally hundreds of examples in which whole communities have been either forcibly removed from their lands by military or police to make way for mining or agro-industry. or have been forced to abandon the land and their way of life as extractive projects pollute their rivers and soils beyond use. This situation is extant in both Honduras and Guatemala. What do you do if you are forcibly turned from a self-reliant farmer into a landless job seeker and your community is dispersed?

In the 1980s, the Reagan Administration urged this development model on the Honduran government (“Reaganomics for Honduras”it was sometimes called), and since the 1990s it has been upgraded and pursued with increasing intensity, especially in the last few years. In the early 1980s the Honduran Catholic Bishops Conference and even some Honduran government economists issued warnings about where this extractive development model would lead. Their warnings have proven prescient. In these decades, thousands of rural farm families—poor peasants and Indigenous communities—have been displace, migrated to cities, failed to find employment, and sunken into urban poverty. The assembly plant industry relies on these displaced people and it provides some low paying jobs, but never enough. Large numbers of children and families have grown up in urban poverty, susceptible to emerging gangs and all forms of violence, in a country where the police themselves are often corrupt and involved in violence and the courts seldom protect ordinary people. Under this sort of development, poverty and violence have not decreased but rather increased in the past decade, according to international agencies and Honduran economists.

It is worth remembering frequently that this situation has its roots in the development model that successive U.S. and Honduran governments have pursued in Honduras for the past thirty years. The fruits of this misguided model are now apparent in countries like Honduras and Guatemala and at the U.S. southern border. More such “development”is likely only to perpetuate the crisis. More security aid to police and military without thorough political reform is likely to perpetuate repression. Despite U.S. and Honduran government statements, the voices of ordinary people and the statistics of human rights organizations indicate little progress, and even a worsening situation. So all the aid has not resolved the conditions that force people to flee Central America for the north. The caravans are stark symptoms of this failure. The extractive, privatized model of development that ignores with impunity the basic rights of people and communities is a root cause.

Many U. S. citizens—including the Vice-President, the Secretary of State, and the Chief of Mission at the U.S. embassy in Honduras—say that these Central Americans should stay home and solve their own problems. This opinion ignores the fundamental role the U.S. is playing in encouraging and supporting a model of economic and social “development”and a political situation in Central America that perpetuates these problems. It also conveniently ignores the reality that we benefit from the products derived from such violent extractive projects—antimony for our cellphones, other important and precious metals, raw materials for paper products, agricultural products, and much more.

As for the gangs and the drug traffickers that plague Central American countries—at least some of these stem from U.S. employment of drug lords and gangs in drugs-for-arms deals to supply the Contras trying to overthrow the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua in the 1980s (the subject of a U.S. newspaper exposéand a feature movie); and U.S. deportation of Latino gangs that were home-grown in the U.S. The militarization of the region since the 1980s has also introduced a huge supply of arms from the U.S. and elsewhere that continue in circulation. “Security aid”adds to this. The problems that Central Americans are fleeing now are not entirely, or even mostly, of their own creation.

Aid that is really humanitarian and goes directly into supporting people’s needs may be helpful in the short run, but in the present economic and political context even that is often a band aid rather than a cure unless it actually helps to empower people to change their country’s current economic model and political context—something that both the Honduran and the U.S. governments resist.  “Security aid”(to police and military) is a key part of the problem when it tramples on human rights to enforce a model of development that enriches a few at the cost of misery for the many. But for now, the Trump Administration seems likely to continue  that kind of aid.

Central America does need “development”but of a different kind and within a different political context. This also requires that U.S. citizens press changed and enlightened, not reactive, polices toward Honduras and other Central American countries. The Berta Cáceres Act now in Congress is a step toward that change in policy. It is only a beginning, but an important one.

Michael Bennet Says Cancer Has Persuaded Him to Run for President

On April 8, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

NASHUA, N.H.—Some people respond to being told they have cancer with tears, or by scaling back plans. Michael Bennet responded to his prostate-cancer diagnosis, announced last week, by planning trips here to New Hampshire and to Iowa on Monday, redoubling his interest in a presidential campaign few observers right now say they see any path for.

The Colorado senator says his own health helped persuade him to run, and to lean in on talking about health care. While he hasn’t filed any paperwork yet, Bennet told me on Saturday that he is running, unless his treatment produces some sort of bad surprise.

“It’d be a great excuse not to run if I didn’t want to run—this would be the best excuse you could ever have, and from that point of view, it’s been very clarifying, because I haven’t had that feeling at all,” Bennet said, speaking after an hour-long session with about 30 people at a coffee shop in the center of this small city late Saturday afternoon. “It only underscores how infuriating it is that we have a guy in the White House who’s made a mockery of dealing with the problems in our health-care system.”

[Read: The Democrat who wants to stop the rage]

Bennet will have surgery at the beginning of the upcoming Senate recess, and he says he’s not thinking much about the diagnosis, thankful to have insurance and optimistic that everything will proceed according to plan. Bennet, Denver’s former superintendent of schools, was appointed to the Senate in 2009 and has twice won the seat, in 2010 and 2016. His brother, James, is a former editor in chief of The Atlantic and the current editorial-page editor of The New York Times. That his cancer was caught despite a lack of symptoms, he said, underscored to him the importance of screening and preventative medicine.

Bennet said his conservation with voters at the coffee shop reinforced why he reintroduced his Medicare-X bill, which provides a Medicare option. But unlike the Bernie Sanders’s Medicare for All bill that has become popular in the Democratic primary field, his plan would not eliminate all private insurance.

That, Bennet said, would be the wrong way to go. But for whatever internal disagreements Democrats may have over a plan, he added, at least the debate makes clear that his party is for helping people with health care and the Republicans are not. The GOP solution, he said, is “just a bunch of gibberish.”

[Adam Serwer: The Delusions and Realities of the Immigration Debate]

He’s clearly been paying attention to the dynamics of the primary race, though. At one point at the coffee shop, Bennet jumped up on a bench and waved his hands for a few seconds, imitating the stand-on-things-and-gesticulate stumping style of Beto O’Rourke that has become an internet meme and a running joke among several Democratic candidates.

As for how the cancer is affecting  his presidential run, Bennet acknowledged that it’s slowed him down, and may get in the way of his making the stage for the first Democratic debates at the end of June, for which candidates need to meet a minimum threshold of 1 percent in polling or having 65,000 donors.

“We won’t have to stop. We’re going to continue to talk to staff,” Bennet said. “At some point it could have an effect on whether we get to the debate stage or not, but I think we have a good chance to get there.”

[Read: Michael Bennet Wins His First Race]

At the direction of the White House chief of staff, the Justice Department has now signed onto a lawsuit filed by Republican states to repeal Obamacare in its entirety. Trump himself as recently as 11 days ago was promising a new health care plan, saying the GOP would soon be known as the party of great health care, though he pulled back from that after opposition from Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. Now, he says he’s delaying releasing a new health care plan until after the 2020 election, even as his  chief of staff held meetings over the weekend to continue exploring how to move forward and try to come up with the replacement to Obamacare that Republicans have been promising for almost a decade without ever coming up with more than a slogan.

Bennet says he’s eager to take that on the principle of fighting partisan gridlock and restoring functional government, which is  at the heart of the campaign he wants to run. And now he’s got a more personal stake in the health care debate. “When you have something like this, it seems even more outrageous,” Bennet told me, referring to Trump’s recent gyrations on health care. “But it’s not like I have to look very far to find people in my state whose lives are being turned upside down because of the unpredictable nature of Donald Trump’s lack of health care policy.”