"The ICE man cometh"!
Humans have the great ability to compartmentalize.
This is how I can be an Agnostic and my sweet cousin can be a
Lutheran, and we can both shake our heads over just how stubborn the
other one is. .
Or how Mostafa is able to sound just like a raving Red Neck White
Supremacist, even as he criticizes their inability to see the Truth,
as Mostafa sees it.
Add to our clever ability to twist reality, our ability to justify our
behavior based upon that which motivates us. If I want to keep my job
and enjoy the level of life I now experience, then I will need to
figure out how to keep separate my life and that of the people I am
herding into holding pens. Think of how many Jews were sent to their
death during WW II, by young German family men.
As a young man, I might have resigned from the IL Program. If I had
nothing to lose I could see myself organizing a group of blind people
who were receiving far too meager services through this poorly funded,
poorly staffed Program. But here I am, signing another inadequately
funded contract. I defend my decision by telling myself that at least
we are providing some assistance, as well as making a critical contact
with people who might otherwise never become connected.
Could I take a job that called for me to take children from their
parents, put them in cages and feed them garbage? I like to think I'd
never stoop to such a low, self-serving level.
Carl Jarvis
On 6/20/18, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
But I wonder about all the ICE employees who have been involved in this
atrocity. What kind of people would separate babies and toddlers from their
parents? Before the spate of articles and discussions of this appeared, my
lovely young home health aide asked me if I could see a picture on her phone
if she showed it to me. I said that unfortunately, I couldn't, but she
should describe it. What she described was the cages in the converted
Walmart warehouse with children in them, and the children had these mylar
blankets which, I gather, look sort of metallic. She didn't know what they
were called. I read about them later that day. So there were pictures of
children in cages and there's an audio of them crying and screaming. And of
course, Donald Moore, our blind arch conservative whose a member of the
ACBNY list, asserted in response to someone writing about the children that
quote, those photos were found to be from 2014, unquote. He discovered this
non fact from Fox News. So then there are people saying that the list
shouldn't be discussing the matter because it's unrelated to the aims of the
organization. I wonder if they'd continue to feel that the list should only
concentrate on business as usual if there were videos of children being
gased to death.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Wednesday, June 20, 2018 8:41 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: It's All About the Midterms: Trump Took Those
Children Hostage to Stoke His Base
It's all about Greed. Greed has been with the Human Race since the biggest
and strongest Neanderthal boinked his neighbor over the head and stole his
woman.
With the adaptation of Man, replacing Neanderthal, Greed simply switched
horses...as they say. For thousands of years Man has been driven by Greed,
regardless of national, religious or political titles. Greed is also a liar
and a coward, never taking responsibility for its actions. Through its
Human Puppets, like Donald Trump or Jeff Sessions, Greed shoves the blame on
everybody else.
The closest examination shows no redeeming virtues for Greed...unless you
enjoy grabbing that which belongs to others.
Carl Jarvis
On 6/20/18, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
It's All About the Midterms: Trump Took Those Children Hostage to
Stoke His Base By Juan Cole, Informed Comment
20 June 18
Journalists have almost certainly misunderstood the Trump White House
when they pen this morning's flurry of articles and television
commentary about the White House abruptly being "worried" about the
fall-out of the Family Separation Policy announced in May by John
Kelly and reaffirmed this month by Attorney General Jeff Sessions and
Eminence Grise Jr., Stephen Miller.
This "worry" is said to have impelled Trump and his aides to have
Department of Homeland Security head Kirstjen Neilsen fly up Monday
from New Orleans to tell lies about the policy instead of Sarah
Sanders (this move, despite what some reports speculate, almost
certainly had nothing to do with Sanders being reluctant to go on
lying about the Trump policy and attributing it to the Congressional
Democrats, which is a lie.)
Here is an alternative scenario. This crew are psychopaths and, as
their attempt to blame the Democrats for their own policy shows,
unrepentant professional prevaricators. They don't have a kind bone in
their bodies, and on the contrary, spontaneously orgasm at the thought
of the opportunity to be sadistic to others. The Family Separation
Policy is not something they regret or worry about, it is something
that gets them off.
But it can't be explained entirely by mere sadism, though the policy
certainly wells up from that motivation.
The Trump White House is still being advised by Steve Bannon, and
Bannon is on record that immigration is a winning issue for Trump-
that whenever and however it becomes a headline, Trump wins and the
Democrats lose.
Trump desperately needs to have the GOP do well in the November midterms.
Those midterms are a big question mark. Trump has an advantage
inasmuch as voters in off years when the presidency is not being voted
on tend to be whiter, richer and older than the voters in presidential
election years.
Laid against that general advantage is the tendency for the
president's party to lose seats in the midterm. American voters,
whether they strategize this issue or not, appear to like split
government and don't usually like to put all their eggs electorally in
the basket of one party. Election years in which one party does well,
such as 2004 or 2008 or 2016, are usually followed by years in which
voters put the opposite party to the one in the White House in charge
of Congress.
What Trump needs to win the midterms is for his base to be exercised
and excited, and for the Democratic base to be prevented from voting
through various forms of voter suppression. These include voter i.d.,
purging rolls of voters in good standing, and spreading fake news
about Democratic Party candidates and policies.
Ripping infants out of the arms of their mothers excites Trump's base.
Some 46% of Republicans approve of the policy, according to an Ipsos
poll done for the Daily Beast. And only 32% of Republicans disagree.
Trump's base has been primed to believe that undocumented immigration
into the United States is suddenly a huge crisis. It isn't. More
Mexican-Americans, for instance, leave annually than come in. There
may have been a problem in the 1980s and 1990s. But not now. The
reason we should not call the policy Zero Tolerance is that the Bush
and Obama administrations deported some 400,000 persons a year. There
was already zero tolerance.
What
changed was the charging of asylum seekers and economic migrants as
criminals and the consequent removal of their children to
concentration camps. His base will likely agree that the situation was
created by the Democrats.
If Trump's policy is overturned, he can use that action to expand his
base, by playing the martyr to liberal perfidy. He can also accuse
Democrats of letting criminal gangsters (never mind that they are two
years old) into the country. Trump has drunk the Bannon Kool-aid.
So while it may be, as corporate media tells us, that only a third of
Americans agree with the Family Separation Policy, that statistic is
irrelevant. In a typical midterm, only about a third of the electorate
comes out to vote. If 46% of Republicans come out, but, as in Ohio and
elsewhere, democratic votes can be suppressed by purging the voting
registration rolls, then Trump wins. After all, that is how he got
into the White House in the first place.
Trump's base comprises Evangelicals and others who often have an
authoritarian mindset, who will likely believe his lie that Family
Separation is a Democratic project, and based on Democratic legislation.
Fox
will help spread this monstrous falsehood. Nothing in the law requires
Trump to prosecute refugees who seek asylum in the US for criminal
misdemeanors (which triggers the family separation, since children are
not allowed to accompany parents into a Federal penitentiary.)
So far from fretting or regretting, Trump is using the immigration
issue to whip up sentiment in his base, in hopes that it will turn
into a strong showing in the midterms and allow Trump to keep control of
Congress.
You might say, America is better than this.
And I will say, the proof is in the pudding.
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