15 Actions That Can Shut Down Trump’s Assault on Immigrant Families
Stymieing Trump’s plan means throwing a lot of sand into the gears. Here are some actions you can take, whether from the comfort of your phone or at the front lines of this crisis.
Month: June 2018
China’s Bigger Economic Threat
Source: The Nation
America should worry less about China’s economic success and more about a potential Chinese financial implosion.
Conventional wisdom holds that China is on the ascent and the United States is in decline, that China’s economy is roaring with raw energy and that Beijing’s “Belt and Road” mega-project of infrastructure building in Central, South, and Southeast Asia is laying the basis for its global economic hegemony.
Some question whether Beijing’s ambitions are sustainable. Inequality in China is approaching that in the United States, which portends rising domestic discontent, while China’s grave environmental problems may pose inexorable limits to its economic expansion.
Look Deeper: Child Detention and the US’s Paramilitary Politics Abroad
Source: Informed Comment
Attorney General Sessions didn’t lose any sleep over those children forcibly separated from their parents. He maintained most of the asylum seekers will be denied because “many of them . . . like to make more money . . .” Unfortunately, however, when children are used as bargaining chips we may never know the conditions these families have experienced. As Daily Kos argues, “sign here and get your baby back” is hardly a way to elicit accurate information.
Trump’s hard right base imagines hordes of greedy, poorly educated workers eager to steal our well- deserved prosperity. Unfortunately, amidst the justifiable horror evoked by US authorities’ criminal treatment of these children there is too little examination of the conditions that spur many of these mass migrations. Nor is this an accident. US policy has played a major role in fostering or sustaining the violence that impels many to flee. Admitting that role by implication challenges the legitimacy of those policies.
Refugee Planet: A Record-Breaking 68 Million People Now Displaced by War and Persecution
The number of people forced to flee their home countries reached 68.5 million at the start of 2018. Never before has the world registered a larger number of people displaced by war and persecution. Turkey, Bangladesh and Uganda alone received over half of all new refugees in 2017. Turkey was the country that received most new refugees last year – 700,000 people. In comparison, the US received about 60,000.
Hungering for Nuclear Disarmament
In the state of Georgia’s Glynn County Detention Center, four activists await trial stemming from their nonviolent action, on April 4, 2018, at the Naval Submarine Base, Kings Bay. In all, seven Catholic plowshares activists acted that day, aiming to make real the prophet Isaiah’s command to “beat swords into plowshares.” The Kings Bay is home port to six nuclear armed Trident ballistic missile submarines with the combined explosive power of over 9,000 Hiroshima bombs.
What It’s Like Inside a Border Patrol Facility Where Families Are Being Separated
Source: The Nation
The dog kennel: That’s how the Border Patrol processing facility in McAllen is known, because of the chain-link fencing penning more than a thousand migrants inside. The 77,000-square-foot facility—often called “Ursula,” because of the street it’s on—lies just a few miles north of the US-Mexico border in the Rio Grande Valley, the busiest corridor for unauthorized migrants. Ursula is one of the first places immigrants are taken to after being apprehended by Border Patrol—and now, the facility is the epicenter for the family separations that are occurring because of the Trump administration’s “zero-tolerance” policy towards border crossers.