TBR News July 1, 2018

The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness, Isaiah 40:3-8

Washington, D.C. July 1, 2018:”Rioting, large protest meeting, violence are increasing in the United States, thanks solely to the inflammatory deeds and actions of President Trump. Instead of seeking peace, Trump is seeking to use the sword and the polarization of the American public can produce nothing but civic violence and the cultivation of the violence that is endemic in all purportedly civilized societies.”

 

 

 

The Table of Contents

• Is Trump really winning? The truth about the president’s popularity

• Thousands march against Trump and family separations policy
• Riot in Portland as far-right marchers clash with anti-fascists
• The Neo-Nazi Renaissance
• The Trump Administration’s MEK Fan Club
• Demonising children at US and European borders
• How Conservatives Weaponized the First Amendment
• The American theft of German gold

Is Trump really winning? The truth about the president’s popularity

US voters remain deeply skeptical of political polling. But Trump’s approval rating so far has been ‘incredibly stable’

July 1, 2018

by Tom McCarthy in New York

The Guardian

Six hundred days after the 2016 election, many US voters remain deeply skeptical of, if not hostile to, political polling.

The national polls in 2016 were actually fairly accurate: Hillary Clinton was supposed to win the popular vote by about three points and she ended up winning by two.

But election models portraying Clinton as a sure thing left her supporters feeling betrayed when, thanks to the electoral college, the presidency fell to Donald Trump. For those voters today, mistrust of surveys can take on an almost spiritual vehemence.

Yet while Americans who feel that Trump is harming the country can be leery of any survey that seems like good news for their side, the same voters might be too quick to believe numbers that look good for Trump but which upon closer scrutiny exaggerate the strength of the president’s political position.

When Trump hit a personal best 45% overall approval rating last week in Gallup’s weekly tracking poll, boosted by a 90% approval rating among Republicans, a chorus of anxious Trump detractors asked: “How can this be?”

Easy come, easy poll: on Monday, Gallup had Trump back down at 41%, as Americans learned more about his policy of separating migrant families at the US border. In fact, Trump’s approval rating during his first term has been “incredibly stable” within a band from about 36% to 43%, polling analyst Harry Enten and others have pointed out.

Under normal circumstances, an overall approval rating much under 50% would spell doom for an incumbent president, ruling out re-election. And 90% in-party support is not unusual in recent presidential cycles.

“Don’t listen to the polls,” cautioned a 55-year-old army veteran and Clinton supporter from central Florida who tweets @politicalppatty and who did not want to give her name for fear of losing her Veterans Administration benefits.

“Even if they say Trump is going down, that he’s going to be impeached – don’t listen. Democrats don’t get out the vote. We do not band together. We don’t have a playbook like them [Republicans]. So don’t listen to the polls. Unless we show up, we’ll lose.”

Some voters find it hard to understand how Trump could maintain such strong support from Republicans. But while Trump is an unusual president, in terms of his political style and conduct, certain features of his presidency, such as his robust party support, are true to historical patterns, said Lynn Vavreck, a professor of political science at the University of California-Los Angeles.

“I think the problem is that people want to think that Trump should be different, and that he shouldn’t have the same approval rating as a ‘typical’ Republican president,” Vavreck said.

“But he is the president, he is a Republican, so it’s a little bit like the counter-question is: ‘Why would we expect him to look different?’ The answer to that is that he behaves differently. But that party label is still really important to people.”

In positive news for critics of the president, robust support from the Republican party might not be what it used to be, as the party shows signs of shrinkage. Democrats have built a seven-point advantage in registered voters, according to Gallup’s tracking poll, up from two in November 2016.

And Republicans are suffering high-profile defections, recently including Steve Schmidt, who ran the 2008 John McCain presidential campaign and worked in George W Bush’s White House. In his most recent Washington Post column, the renowned conservative commentator George Will urged fellow Republicans to vote Democratic in the midterm elections.

“In today’s GOP, which is the president’s plaything, he is the mainstream,” Will wrote. “So, to vote against his party’s cowering congressional caucuses is to affirm the nation’s honor while quarantining him.”

But if critics of Trump who remain poll-curious wonder how to gauge what they hope is the building opposition, Republican defections might not be the place to focus. Probably more important to the defeat of the Trump bloc in future elections, analysts say, will be factors such as turnout among minority voters, whom Trump lost in 2016 by a whopping 53 points.

Another important group are the white, working-class Americans who voted for Barack Obama. A New York Times analysis of official voter files in three states found that almost one in four white working-class voters who supported Obama switched to Trump in 2016.

Will those voters stick with Trump? An Economist/YouGov poll released this month of people who voted in the last presidential election suggested that the 2016 electorate has soured on Trump somewhat. The president’s approval rating in the poll was seven points underwater, 41-48, a significant slide from his 46-48 popular vote loss to Clinton.

Vavreck described a paradox of Trump that makes it hard to gauge the political winds swirling around him. As an unusual candidate in 2016, Trump made an election look unusual when it was in fact quite usual, in terms of partisan voter behavior.

“The 2016 election did look in a lot of ways like typical presidential elections – the problem was, we couldn’t appreciate that while it was happening, because all you could see was how different and unusual it was – and it was,” Vavreck said.

“But to say now, ‘Anything that looks unusual, we should discount that’ – I don’t think we want to do that. I don’t think the lesson to learn from 2016 is, ‘When you see something really outside the equilibrium, forget it, because it’s just like being in the equilibrium.’

“No, that’s exactly wrong. If you see things that are outside the historical norm, I think you do have to pause and say, ‘Wait, what does this mean for what we know?’”

For some American voters across the political spectrum, the answer is simple. No matter what the numbers say: ignore the polls and vote.

Thousands march against Trump and family separations policy

• Protests against Trump staged across the US – live coverage
• President defends Ice agency while mulling supreme court pick

June 30, 2018

by Martin Pengelly and Jessica Glenza in New York and Lucia Graves in Washington

The Guardian

Mass protests against Donald Trump and his immigration policies were held across the US on Saturday, in cities from Los Angeles to Boston and in state capitals and smaller towns between.

As large parts of the country sweltered beneath a heatwave, marchers braved the blistering sun to express fierce opposition to the president’s policy of separating undocumented immigrant families at the southern border. They also voiced concern over Trump’s forthcoming supreme court pick.

The president, who was playing golf at his club in New Jersey, attacked what he called “radical left” Democrats, who he said were behind calls to disband Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice), the agency central to his hardline immigration approach.

“To the great and brave men and women of Ice,” Trump tweeted early in the day, “do not worry or lose your spirit. You are doing a fantastic job of keeping us safe by eradicating the worst criminal elements. So brave! The radical left Dems want you out. Next it will be all police. Zero chance, It will never happen!”

Immigration policy is a central pillar of Trump’s appeal to his supporters ahead of November’s midterm elections. It is also key to motivating opposition to the president, particularly among the surging progressive wing of the Democratic party..

In Washington on Saturday, protesters gathered in Lafayette Square, close to the White House. Organised by MoveOn, the American Civil Liberties Union and dozens of other groups, the Families Belong Together march featured star speakers Lin-Manuel Miranda, Alicia Keys and America Ferrera. Miranda sang a lullaby, Dear Theodosia, from his hit musical Hamilton.

John Holland of Takoma Park, Maryland, was among a group of Buddhist-affiliated protesters who held hands, sang and played a Tibetan singing bowl as an early speaker described the “amazing effect it can have on everyone if we move slowly”. Asked why he had decided to brave the 95F (35C) heat, he quipped: “Peer pressure.”

Like many present, Holland attended the Women’s March on the National Mall in January 2017. The capital has turned into a site of major protest, including the March for Science last year and more recently a student-led gun control effort, the March for Our Lives.

On Saturday New York also saw a major rally, as did Los Angeles, Dallas, Denver, Chicago, Boston and other big cities. Senior Democratic figures addressed crowds; in Boston, speakers included the possible 2020 presidential candidate Senator Elizabeth Warren and the congressman Joe Kennedy III. In LA, Senator Kamala Harris, another potential 2020 pick, spoke after John Legend performed. Smaller protests were staged at federal facilities in Texas and outside Trump’s New Jersey club, where around 200 people gathered.

Trump was expected to begin interviewing candidates to replace Anthony Kennedy, the supreme court justice who announced his retirement this week. The protests were also focusing on that choice, which is expected to turn the court sharply right, placing in jeopardy rulings such as Roe v Wade, the 1973 opinion which guarantees the right to abortion. This week, the court upheld Trump’s travel ban against Muslim-majority countries and dealt a heavy blow to unionised labour.

“This is an all-hands-on-deck, stop-the-madness moment,” national protest organiser Ai-jen Poo told the Guardian. “It’s not a red or blue thing … what you are seeing is the downright refusal to accept this administration’s policies.”

This month, Trump stopped the separations policy, after intense public outcry over images and recordings of children held in cages at federal facilities. But his order was unclear and the administration has been criticised for the lack of a plan to reunite around 2,000 children with their parents. The administration is now claiming the right to detain families indefinitely, ignoring a 1997 court settlement that limits how long children can be held.

At the Washington protest on Saturday, Kate Earle of Maryland held a sign that said: “Make The Handmaid’s Tale fiction again.” She said: “Reunification of families is a start but locking them up together is not a solution.”

In Indianapolis, thousands gathered outside the seat of government in the home state of Vice-President Mike Pence. As people cheered, Mahri Irvine, a 35-year-old anthropologist, spoke to the Guardian by phone.

“Our country is really, really close to the edge of the abyss of just committing some serious human rights violations,” she said. “In fact, we have already. To me, it’s upsetting if people don’t have that level of imagination to think, ‘How would I feel if I had to flee a violent country, and I was incarcerated, and my children were taken away from me?’”

From Eau Clare in Wisconsin, 22-year-old Victoria Duarte said the rally there had been heartening, despite starting with a man yelling: “If you cant speak English, get out of the country.”

“I was out there today for so many reasons,” she said, “but mainly because us young people feel a lot of anger and a lot of frustration. We want to put it into the community in action.”

Trump’s reference to “radical left Dems” may have been inspired by the surprise victory in a New York Democratic primary this week of young activist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The 28-year-old, who shocked party stalwart Joe Crowley, describes herself as a democratic socialist and campaigned on a platform that included the abolition of Ice.

Pressure on Ice has also come from within. Nineteen senior agents sent an open letter to Kirstjen Nielsen, Trump’s homeland security secretary, saying it should be disbanded. The investigators said the immigration crackdown was interfering with the agency’s work against transnational criminal groups.

At the New York march, Lorette and Tim Maxwell had brought their five year-old daughter. “We’ve been trying to teach Penelope but it’s difficult to explain to her,” Tim said. “Like if a cop knocked on the door and took away mommy … How do you explain that to a child?”

Lorette said: “Everybody thought Trump was a joke but he is not a joke.”

 

Riot in Portland as far-right marchers clash with anti-fascists

Police use pepper spray and non-lethal ammunition on rival protesters after rally

July 1, 2018

by Jason Wilson

The Guardian

A riot was declared in downtown Portland, Oregon on Saturday evening as the city exploded into its worst protest violence of the Trump era.

More than 150 supporters of the far-right Patriot Prayer group fought pitched street battles with scores of anti-fascist protesters. In total, nine people were arrested.

The far-right march had started near Schrunk Plaza in the city centre, where the rightwing group had held a rally, led by the Patriot Prayer founder and Republican US Senate candidate Joey Gibson.

As soon as the group left the plaza, they clashed with anti-fascists who had been waiting across a heavily barricaded street nearby.

As the two groups came to blows, Department of Homeland Security officers fired non-lethal ammunition towards the counter-protest.

Later the groups met on another street nearby, where the worst of the violence took place.

Patriot Prayer supporters – many of whom wore the colours of a rightwing fraternity called Proud Boys – were seen hitting counter-protesters with flagpoles, trash can lids, and their fists.

One Proud Boy was seen to floor an anti-fascist protester with a single punch. Later in the day he was seen being cuffed by police officers.

Counter-protesters, some clad in “black bloc” clothing and masks, released deafening fireworks, and punched back at Patriot Prayer supporters.

While anti-fascists used pepper spray, Patriot Prayer members had been unable to take theirs into a federal park. The melee lasted several minutes before Portland police revoked the permit for the march and cleared the street. The groups clashed again soon after and police used pepper spray to separate them and declared a riot at 6.15pm local time.

People in both groups suffered head and facial wounds in the fighting.

Patriot Prayer protesters made their way back to Schrunk Plaza and vented their rage in speeches.

Regular Patriot Prayer rally attendee Katherine Townsend told the group that Portland police had “set us up”, and accused them of “disarming us and herding us towards antifa”.

Townsend said: “It’s not Portland any more, it’s Portlantifa.” But she and other members of Patriot Prayer said they would come back to the city to assert their message of “freedom of speech”.

Gibson said they would “storm city hall” if necessary to get their message heard.

On Facebook, Gibson echoed Townsend’s remarks, writing that: “Portland police allowed criminals to charge our permitted march then declared our march a riot and revoked our permit.”

Unlike recent protests, many participants on the Patriot Prayer side had travelled from around the country, after Gibson issued a national call for assistance.

In a statement, Portland police’s deputy chief, Bob Day, said: “Portland police planned for today’s protest so that people could exercise their first amendment rights to speech and assembly.

“However, once projectiles, such as fireworks, eggs, rocks, bottles and construction equipment were thrown and people were injured, we ordered people to disperse.”

A spokesman for the groups organising the counter-protest, Rose City Antifa, said they were “not surprised by the level of violence, given Patriot Prayer’s rhetoric on social media in the lead-up to the rally”.

 

The Neo-Nazi Renaissance

July 1, 2018

by Christian Jürs

In the main, fraud, counterfeiting and deceit are certainly immoral and very often felonious but in some instances, the essential ludicrous nature of some frauds manages to overcome the gravity.

Such is the case of the enormous industry devoted to the creation, manufacture and sale of faked items of German militaria and elevated personality items from the Third Reich period, purporting to belong to such people as Hitler and Hermann Goering.

There is an abiding fascination with the trappings of the Third Reich but the number of actual and original relics is much smaller than a burgeoning demand. Nature abhors a vacuum and if original pieces are no longer available, the vacuum is filled with creations to satisfy the demand.

Not only are legitimate pieces of German militaria copied and marketed, a number of outrageous fantasy pieces have also been created and merchandised like the Reverend Ernie’s Holy Healing Cloths on Christian television stations.

There is an interesting parallel here between the manufacture and sale of Nazi relics and the manufacture or misidentification of relics of the Catholic Church.

In the latter we can find the knuckle bones of a pig being passed off as having once been a part of Saint Rosa of Compostella or the ever-popular St. Nicholas. Expert study has proven that the notorious Shroud of Turin is a 13th Century fake and it has been said that there are enough pieces of the True Cross around to build a small hotel.

Fraud and chicanery are the hallmarks of any marketplace, be it Wall Street, Carnaby Street or the Internet auctions.

It is amazing that so many of these neo-Nazi fraud merchants are able to find either end of themselves in a dark room or, as the author’s sainted Granny used to say, ‘Too lazy to work, too stupid to steal and completely unable to walk and chew gum at the same time.”

The hallmark of the German military and personality collectors is, in the main, a fascination with a period they are constantly reminded is the very essence of terrible evil. In spite of countless reams of utter nonsense produced about German wickedness (as opposed to American, British or Russian asocial behavior) German items are far more in demand that anything else and of all the items most sought after and commanding the highest prices are relics of the awful SS.

So much for failed propaganda which has only made its sworn enemy so attractive.

One dealer bought the iron gates of the Auschwitz concentration camp from a Polish scrap dealer and tried to sell them to the American Holocaust Museum. They were most eager to obtain this dubious relic but on principle (or perhaps because of a lack of it) absolutely refused to pay for the massive entrance to the netherworld.. A tax-free gift would be much more to their liking but the greedy and uncharitable dealer merely cut the gates into small pieces and sold these off like souvenirs of the Berlin Wall (or fragments of the True Cross).

The author once spoke with a very wealthy dealer in Nazi fakes and he said, with some humor, that when he has had occasion to visit various highly prestigious military collections in the past as he walks down the line of glass cases filled with the cream of Third Reich militaria, such as Hitler’s dinnerware or Goering’s swords, he keeps hearing tiny voices that say, “Papa, papa!” as he passes.

Items which are purported to have belonged to Adolf Hitler are quite naturally, worth a great deal of money and Hitler fakes abound in the market place. It should be noted that Hitler wrote very few personal letters and signed almost nothing at all after the outbreak of the war. Such items as original caps, uniforms and the like are non-existent because Hitler ordered their destruction at the end of the war and in the main, this order was faithfully executed.

Hitler was 5 foot, 8.5 inches in height and weighed in the vicinity of 150 pounds. Any uniform alleged to be the property of Hitler would conform to these requirements. On the Party uniforms, the buttons on all items were silvered, but on the post-1939 uniforms, the buttons were gold.

Until 1938 Hitler wore the Iron Cross First Class and the black wound badge on the left hand pocket and, on some occasions (such as the ceremonial march in Munich on 9 November of each year) the Blutorden on the flap of the right breast pocket. After 1938, Hitler discarded the Blood Order ribbon and medal and added the Gold Party Badge on the left breast pocket, above the Iron Cross.

Hitler’s visor cap had a long, brown leather visor (worn because he was very sensitive to light) and the top piping of the cap was twisted gold cord. The lower two pipings were white, the cap band brown velvet and the cap cords in gold. The eagle was always embroidered directly into the cap as was the wreath, which was added after 1938.

Hitler’s uniforms were made by the Berlin military tailoring firm of Wilhelm Holters and his caps were made by Robert Lubstein of Berlin under the trade name of eReL. Contrary to amusing myths circulating after the war, Hitler did not wear a bullet-proof vest nor was there a steel liner in his cap.In the First World War, Hitler won the Iron Crosses 1st and 2nd Classes, the Bavarian service medal, fourth class, and the wound badge in black. As a member of the Bavarian army, Hitler did not wear any Austrian army decorations.

Hitler wore French-cuff shirts with gold links depicting the civic arms of the city of Danzig, the swastika motiv picked out in diamonds. Before the war, he wore a party eagle on his tie in solid gold, no wristwatch and no other jewelry.

Occasionally, gaudy pictures of Hitler’s mother, grotesque «ruby” rings and the like show up, allegedly Hitler’s property but all of these were birthday gifts and in all probability, never even seen by him. An alleged suicide pistol which has appeared in several publications is a fake. The Walther with the ivory grips once had the maker’s name, Carl Walther, and their post-war address in Ulm/Donau on the slide but this has since been replaced with the proper wartime address in Zella-Mehlis. This piece was made by the Walther factory for Colonel James Atwood in the early 1960s as the still-extant serial number proves. It has been seen in many post-war militaria publications but its present whereabouts is unknown.

Hitler carried a Belgian Browning 7.65mm pistol in his pant’s pocket and the right hand pocket of all of his trousers had a leather lining to hold the gun.

There are no surviving original Hitler paintings and sketches “from veterans.” Everyone from Konrad Kujau to Alfred Speer took a hand at copying Hitler’s style, with various degrees of success. Speer’s sketches come much closer to the mark as he was an architect and very familiar with Hitler’s style.

An example of the Speer drawings can be seen in a biography of Hitler by British writer, David Irving.

A book edited by Billy Price of Texas on Hitler’s artwork (Hitler as Maler und Zeichner) is crammed to the plimsoll line with fakes but is quite valuable in that it shows a very few known original Hitler pieces (those he himself authenticated before the war and marked as being from the NS archives. In the Price book, original Hitler pieces have the BA or Bundesarchiv numbers) with fakes. Hitler’s style is most distinctive and anyone with an eye for design can easily spot the hundreds of fakes.

Aside from some items held by the U.S. Army, no known original Hitler pieces exist in the United States and one of the largest collections in England is stuffed with fakes.

When Hitler joined the D.A.P. in 1919, his party number was 555, there being fifty five members and the numbers starting at 500 for propaganda reasons. When the Party was reorganized in later years, Hitler carried the number one and no medal or pin with the number seven is original.

In “Mein Kampf” Hitler indicates that he was the seventh member of the central committee and stupid forgers have seized on this to assume that he carried the party number of seven.

“Hitler silverware” was made up in some quantity and exists in two patterns; so-called formal and informal. This silver, which bears the state eagle and the letters A H was actually state silver and was used in governmental cafeterias. Reichskanzelei silver was marked R K.

It should be noted that all manner of State silver existed. One dealer in militaria claims to possess “Adolf Hitler’s” silver cigarette case. The price for this relic is somewhat less than the national debt of Mexico but since Hitler was a vehement non-smoker, the attribution is sadly in error.

Aside from personality items, yards of fake tapestries are offered, claimed to be from Hitler’s house or from Heinrich Himmler’s office and huge eagle and swastika bronze table decorations, jostle the auction house catalogs, cheek by jowl with oil paintings made in China of top level Nazi officials, fake dinnerware, honorary citizens awards, napkin rings engraved with Eva Braun’s initials, lavishly embroidered Hitler standards, copies of Mein Kampf with fake dedications and on and on.

Jewish holocaust professionals and other left-wingers spend a good deal of time informing anyone bored enough to listen, that Hitler was an evil monster. And in spite of these fulminations, dealers and auction houses worldwide, many of which are Jewish-owned and operated, are reaping a huge profit from selling his counterfeit possessions

 

The Trump Administration’s MEK Fan Club

June 28, 2018

by Daniel Larison

The American Conservative

Nahal Toosi reports on the Mujahideen-e Khalq (MEK) fans with ties to the Trump administration:

Two close confidants of President Donald Trump are scheduled to speak Saturday before a controversial Iranian opposition group previously designated as a terrorist outfit, raising fresh questions about the group’s Washington influence as Trump pursues a pressure campaign against Tehran.

Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani and informal adviser Newt Gingrich are listed as headliners for Saturday’s “Free Iran” conference in Paris, organized by the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq and its affiliates.

The MEK is a deranged totalitarian cult with no support inside Iran and a record of killing Americans and committing acts of terrorism. It is an ongoing disgrace that American politicians and officials lend this group support and help them to push their dangerous regime change fantasies. It might be tempting to dismiss the MEK’s fans as disreputable opportunists out to make a quick buck (and there is some truth to that), but the problem is that their public embrace of this group has aided the MEK in selling itself as a legitimate opposition group. National Security Advisor John Bolton has been a regular attendee at these events for many years, and while he apparently won’t be attending this year there is no question that he is still on board with the MEK’s goal of regime change.

Far too many people with close ties to the president have been and continue to be vocal shills for an awful organization that is widely loathed in Iran for siding with Saddam Hussein in the Iran-Iraq war. Pro-MEK boosterism in Washington has been a problem for years, but now that the group has the ear of some of the president’s confidants and advisers it makes it even worse. The fact that some of the president’s top advisers and allies back the MEK just confirms that this administration has nothing but contempt for the Iranian people and proves that its Iran policy is horribly misinformed.

 

 

Demonising children at US and European borders

The US government’s tried to deflect criticism of its family separation policy by presenting children as a threat.

July 1, 2018

by Lewis Turner

AlJazeera

On June 30, thousands marched in 700 cities across the United States to demand the end of the Trump administration’s deplorable immigration policies. The protests came after images and audio recordings of small children being separated from their parents and being kept in cages were circulated in the media and caused nation-wide outrage.

As the media storm was picking up, the US government tried hard to push a different narrative. It released photos and footage from one of the detention centres where children are kept, foregrounding teenage boys and rendering girls, younger boys, and toddlers much less visible.

By doing so, the government sought to break down “children” into two categories – those who deserve sympathy and those who do not because, in fact, they are “grown-up” boys. It also sought to deflect the public debate from the issue of human rights and humanity to the issue of national security.

In a June 18 press conference, Kirstjen Nielsen, the US Secretary of Homeland Security, was challenged on the problematic nature of the imagery released by her government. A Politico reporter asked why they were only releasing images of boys; where were the pictures of girls and toddlers? Nielsen obfuscated repeatedly and eventually declared “I’ll look into that,” before moving on to another question.

This strategy of pushing “threatening” teenage refugees or migrants to the foreground in order to diminish public sympathy is not exclusive to the US government.

In October 2016, a similar kind of imagery was being circulated in the UK media: the pictures of children who had been living informally near the French city of Calais and were entering the UK to join their families. These were again pictures almost exclusively of teenage boys – or “burly lads” as they were called – many from Syria and Afghanistan.

In the anti-immigration press, the images were accompanied by suggestions that these boys were not children at all and that they should be subjected to dental tests to “prove” they were in fact under 18.

While (white) childhood is often seen as a paragon of innocence, non-white teenagers, it has been suggested, could potentially be a threat. We have been invited to read them as independent and intimidating, and not in need of care and protection. Somehow it was the US and UK that needed protection, rather than the children stranded at their borders; the feminised US and UK were threatened by the presence of these hyper-masculinised youths.

Foregrounding non-white teenage boys in both the US and the UK was employed to justify the separation of children from their families. But it’s not just anti-immigrant governments and media outlets that are perpetuating these narratives, which relegate refugee and immigrant teenage boys to a place outside of childhood.

Even humanitarian organisations seem unsure of how to work with non-white teenagers and men. They are often deemed “less vulnerable” and, therefore, less deserving of care and protection.

This idea has affected how some refugee camps have been set up in Greece, for example, where single refugee men and teenage boys are kept separate from families and under heavier police presence. As a result, young boys often experience violence, being victimised by older men, while their requests to be moved to the family sections are denied.

These practices of separating children from families and keeping teenage boys isolated, both in the US and Europe, are the continuation of long-standing colonial policies. They reflect deeply-ingrained, well-established patterns of politics far older than President Donald Trump’s and Prime Minister Theresa May’s policies.

In the US, not that long ago, African American and Native American children were being separated from their families as part of slavery and forced assimilation policies. And even under the much-celebrated Obama administration, family separation was also being practised; in 2013, for example, some 72,000 families were torn apart due to deportations.

The UK has a similar colonial legacy. Apart from playing a major role in the slave trade, it also brought tremendous suffering to the Middle East and South Asia through its colonial partition practices which to this day keep many families apart.

More recently, UK immigration policies were on the verge of ripping apart British families as members of the “Windrush generation” were threatened with deportation. While May promised to resolve the issue, other UK citizens are still struggling to bring their families to the country as stringent income requirements prevent them from obtaining visas for their non-EU spouses and children.

In this sense, claiming that Trump’s and May’s policies are “un-American” or “un-British” is clearly false and they should not be kept separate from their historical and racist context.

And today, as people rightly rush to protest, raise awareness, and gather resources to challenge the separation of families and the incarceration of children and adults for crossing borders, we must stay alert to the damaging narratives being pushed by the government in the US and elsewhere.

We must make sure that it is clear we are standing up for all children, regardless of their gender and age and for all adults, regardless of their race and religion, to be able to cross borders and seek asylum in a safe and dignified way.

 

How Conservatives Weaponized the First Amendment

June 30, 2018

by Adam Liptak

The New York Times

WASHINGTON — On the final day of the Supreme Court term last week, Justice Elena Kagan sounded an alarm.

The court’s five conservative members, citing the First Amendment, had just dealt public unions a devastating blow. The day before, the same majority had used the First Amendment to reject a California law requiring religiously oriented “crisis pregnancy centers” to provide women with information about abortion.

Conservatives, said Justice Kagan, who is part of the court’s four-member liberal wing, were “weaponizing the First Amendment.”

The two decisions were the latest in a stunning run of victories for a conservative agenda that has increasingly been built on the foundation of free speech. Conservative groups, borrowing and building on arguments developed by liberals, have used the First Amendment to justify unlimited campaign spending, discrimination against gay couples and attacks on the regulation of tobacco, pharmaceuticals and guns.

“The right, which had for years been hostile to and very nervous about a strong First Amendment, has rediscovered it,” said Burt Neuborne, a law professor at New York University.

The Citizens United campaign finance case, for instance, was decided on free-speech grounds, with the five-justice conservative majority ruling that the First Amendment protects unlimited campaign spending by corporations. The government, the majority said, has no business regulating political speech.

The dissenters responded that the First Amendment did not require allowing corporate money to flood the political marketplace and corrupt democracy.

“The libertarian position has become dominant on the right on First Amendment issues,” said Ilya Shapiro, a lawyer with the Cato Institute. “It simply means that we should be skeptical of government attempts to regulate speech. That used to be an uncontroversial and nonideological point. What’s now being called the libertarian position on speech was in the 1960s the liberal position on speech.”

And an increasingly conservative judiciary has been more than a little receptive to this argument. A new analysis prepared for The New York Times found that the Supreme Court under Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. has been far more likely to embrace free-speech arguments concerning conservative speech than liberal speech. That is a sharp break from earlier eras.

As a result, liberals who once championed expansive First Amendment rights are now uneasy about them.

“The left was once not just on board but leading in supporting the broadest First Amendment protections,” said Floyd Abrams, a prominent First Amendment lawyer and a supporter of broad free-speech rights. “Now the progressive community is at least skeptical and sometimes distraught at the level of First Amendment protection which is being afforded in cases brought by litigants on the right.”

Many on the left have traded an absolutist commitment to free speech for one sensitive to the harms it can inflict.

Take pornography and street protests. Liberals were once largely united in fighting to protect sexually explicit materials from government censorship. Now many on the left see pornography as an assault on women’s rights.

In 1977, many liberals supported the right of the American Nazi Party to march among Holocaust survivors in Skokie, Ill. Far fewer supported the free-speech rights of the white nationalists who marched last year in Charlottesville, Va.

There was a certain naïveté in how liberals used to approach free speech, said Frederick Schauer, a law professor at the University of Virginia.

“Because so many free-speech claims of the 1950s and 1960s involved anti-obscenity claims, or civil rights and anti-Vietnam War protests, it was easy for the left to sympathize with the speakers or believe that speech in general was harmless,” he said. “But the claim that speech was harmless or causally inert was never true, even if it has taken recent events to convince the left of that. The question, then, is why the left ever believed otherwise.”

Some liberals now say that free speech disproportionately protects the powerful and the status quo.

“When I was younger, I had more of the standard liberal view of civil liberties,” said Louis Michael Seidman, a law professor at Georgetown. “And I’ve gradually changed my mind about it. What I have come to see is that it’s a mistake to think of free speech as an effective means to accomplish a more just society.”

To the contrary, free speech reinforces and amplifies injustice, Catharine A. MacKinnon, a law professor at the University of Michigan, wrote in “The Free Speech Century,” a collection of essays to be published this year.

“Once a defense of the powerless, the First Amendment over the last hundred years has mainly become a weapon of the powerful,” she wrote. “Legally, what was, toward the beginning of the 20th century, a shield for radicals, artists and activists, socialists and pacifists, the excluded and the dispossessed, has become a sword for authoritarians, racists and misogynists, Nazis and Klansmen, pornographers and corporations buying elections.”

Changing Interpretations

In the great First Amendment cases in the middle of the 20th century, few conservatives spoke up for the protection of political dissenters, including communists and civil rights leaders, comedians using vulgar language on the airwaves or artists exploring sexuality in novels and on film.

In 1971, Robert H. Bork, then a prominent conservative law professor and later a federal judge and Supreme Court nominee, wrote that the First Amendment should be interpreted narrowly in a law-review article that remains one of the most-cited of all time.

“Constitutional protection should be accorded only to speech that is explicitly political,” he wrote. “There is no basis for judicial intervention to protect any other form of expression, be it scientific, literary or that variety of expression we call obscene or pornographic.”

But a transformative ruling by the Supreme Court five years later began to change that thinking. The case, a challenge to a state law that banned advertising the prices of prescription drugs, was filed by Public Citizen, a consumer rights group founded by Ralph Nader. The group argued that the law hurt consumers, and helped persuade the court, in Virginia State Board of Pharmacy v. Virginia Citizens Consumer Council, to protect advertising and other commercial speech.

The only dissent in the decision came from Justice William H. Rehnquist, the court’s most conservative member.

Kathleen M. Sullivan, a former dean of Stanford Law School, wrote that it did not take long for corporations to see the opportunities presented by the decision.

“While the case was litigated by consumer protection advocates,” she wrote in the Harvard Law Review, “corporate speakers soon became the principal beneficiaries of subsequent rulings that, for example, struck down restrictions on including alcohol content on beer can labels, limitations on outdoor tobacco advertising near schools and rules governing how compounded drugs may be advertised.”

That trend has continued, with businesses mounting First Amendment challenges to gun control laws, securities regulations, country-of-origin labels, graphic cigarette warnings and limits on off-label drug marketing.

“I was a bit queasy about it because I had the sense that we were unleashing something, but nowhere near what happened,” Mr. Nader said. “It was one of the biggest boomerangs in judicial cases ever.”

“I couldn’t be Merlin,” he added. “We never thought the judiciary would be as conservative or corporate. This was an expansion that was not preordained by doctrine. It was preordained by the political philosophies of judges.”

Not all of the liberal scholars and lawyers who helped create modern First Amendment law are disappointed. Martin Redish, a law professor at Northwestern University, who wrote a seminal 1971 article proposing First Amendment protection for commercial speech, said he was pleased with the Roberts court’s decisions.

“Its most important contributions are in the commercial speech and corporate speech areas,” he said. “It’s a workmanlike, common sense approach.”

Liberals also played a key role in creating modern campaign finance law in Buckley v. Valeo, the 1976 decision that struck down limits on political spending by individuals and was the basis for Citizens United, the 2010 decision that did away with similar limits for corporations and unions.

One plaintiff was Senator Eugene J. McCarthy, Democrat of Minnesota, who had challenged President Lyndon B. Johnson in the 1968 presidential primaries — from the left. Another was the American Civil Liberties Union’s New York affiliate.

Professor Neuborne, a former A.C.L.U. lawyer, said he now regrets the role he played in winning the case. “I signed the brief in Buckley,” he said. “I’m going to spend long amounts of time in purgatory.”

To Professor Seidman, cases like these were part of what he describes as a right-wing takeover of the First Amendment since the liberal victories in the years Chief Justice Earl Warren led the Supreme Court.

“With the receding of Warren court liberalism, free-speech law took a sharp right turn,” Professor Seidman wrote in a new article to be published in the Columbia Law Review. “Instead of providing a shield for the powerless, the First Amendment became a sword used by people at the apex of the American hierarchy of power. Among its victims: proponents of campaign finance reform, opponents of cigarette addiction, the L.B.G.T.Q. community, labor unions, animal rights advocates, environmentalists, targets of hate speech and abortion providers.”

The title of the article asked, “Can Free Speech Be Progressive?”

“The answer,” the article said, “is no.”

Shifting Right

The right turn has been even more pronounced under Chief Justice Roberts.

The Supreme Court has agreed to hear a larger share of First Amendment cases concerning conservative speech than earlier courts had, according to the study prepared for The Times. And it has ruled in favor of conservative speech at a higher rate than liberal speech as compared to earlier courts.

The court’s docket reflects something new and distinctive about the Roberts court, according to the study, which was conducted by Lee Epstein, a law professor and political scientist at Washington University in St. Louis; Andrew D. Martin, a political scientist at the University of Michigan and the dean of its College of Literature, Science and the Arts; and Kevin Quinn, a political scientist at the University of Michigan.

“The Roberts court — more than any modern court — has trained its sights on speech promoting conservative values,” the study found. “Only the current court has resolved a higher fraction of disputes challenging the suppression of conservative rather than liberal expression.”

The court led by Chief Justice Earl Warren from 1953 to 1969 was almost exclusively concerned with cases concerning liberal speech. Of its 60 free-expression cases, only five, or about 8 percent, challenged the suppression of conservative speech.

The proportion of challenges to restrictions on conservative speech has steadily increased. It rose to 22 percent in the court led by Chief Justice Warren E. Burger from 1969 to 1986; to 42 percent in the court led by Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist from 1986 to 2005; and to 65 percent in the Roberts court.

The Roberts court does more than hear a larger proportion of cases concerning conservative expression. It is also far more likely than earlier courts to rule for conservative speech than for liberal speech. The result, the study found, has been “a fundamental transformation of the court’s free-expression agenda.”

In past decades, broad coalitions of justices have often been receptive to First Amendment arguments. The court has protected videos of animal cruelty, hateful protests at military funerals, violent video games and lies about military awards, often by lopsided margins.

But last week’s two First Amendment blockbusters were decided by 5-to-4 votes, with the conservatives in the majority ruling in favor of conservative plaintiffs.

On Tuesday, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote for the majority that requiring health clinics opposed to abortion to tell women how to obtain the procedure violated the clinics’ free-speech rights. In dissent, Justice Stephen G. Breyer said that was a misuse of First Amendment principles.

“Using the First Amendment to strike down economic and social laws that legislatures long would have thought themselves free to enact will, for the American public, obscure, not clarify, the true value of protecting freedom of speech,” Justice Breyer wrote.

On Wednesday, in announcing the decision on public unions, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. said the court was applying settled and neutral First Amendment principles to protect workers from being forced to say things at odds with their beliefs. He suggested that the decision on public unions should have been unanimous.

“Compelling individuals to mouth support for views they find objectionable violates that cardinal constitutional command, and in most contexts, any such effort would be universally condemned,” he wrote. “Suppose, for example, that the State of Illinois required all residents to sign a document expressing support for a particular set of positions on controversial public issues — say, the platform of one of the major political parties. No one, we trust, would seriously argue that the First Amendment permits this.”

In response, Justice Kagan said the court’s conservatives had found a dangerous tool, “turning the First Amendment into a sword.” The United States, she said, should brace itself.

“Speech is everywhere — a part of every human activity (employment, health care, securities trading, you name it),” she wrote. “For that reason, almost all economic and regulatory policy affects or touches speech. So the majority’s road runs long. And at every stop are black-robed rulers overriding citizens’ choices.”

 

The American theft of German gold

 

Since before World War II, Fort Knox, America’s delegated repository for gold, served as the safe haven for much of the gold legally belonging to foreign nations.

In the 1930s, fears that Europe would be overrun by Hitler’s Wehrmacht sent the gold from Eastern Europe, France, and Great Britain to Fort Knox for safekeeping.

Those same fears mounted during the Cold War era.

There was exactly the same scenario with the German, French, Dutch, British or Belgian gold during the created threat of Soviet military units overrunning Europe.

This gold was sent across the Atlantic for safekeeping by the US Treasury.

However, instead of storing it in Fort Knox secure vaults, the American

Treasury gave it instead to the Federal Reserve as collateral for the loans (currently $19.5 trillion) which the private Federal Reserve Corporation made to the US Treasury, in exchange for which the Treasury issued IOUs in the form of T-Bills to be held by the Federal Reserve.

The bullion vault at Fort Knox, Kentucky, an American military installation, has indeed held a large amount of the U.S. gold reserves in the past, but now the Federal Reserve Bank of New York holds the prize as the world’s biggest known stockpile of gold, some 550,000 bars, buried deep into the bedrock of lower Manhattan. That’s $203.3 billion worth of gold in a single place.

Just 2% to 5% of it is owned by the U.S. government, though. The rest is owned by foreign countries.

The New York-based, privately owned, Federal Reserve has been acting as the guardian and custodian of the gold on behalf of account holders, which include the US government, foreign governments, other central banks and official international organizations.

Federal Reserve is not an official American government bank but is an amalgam of twelve private banks.

America’s private central bank began taking foreign gold deposits when it opened in 1924.

Gold custody is one of several financial services the Federal Reserve Bank of New York provides to central banks, governments and official international organizations on behalf of the Federal Reserve System.

Currently, The Federal Reserve is holding 7.4 million ounces, or $6.8 billion, worth of gold and 134.9 million ounces, or $2.2 billion, of silver in storage.

None of the gold stored in the vault belongs to the New York Fed (or the Federal Reserve System.) The New York Federal Reserve acts as the guardian and custodian of the gold on behalf of account holders, which include the U.S. government, foreign governments, other central banks, and official international organizations. No individuals or private sector entities are permitted to store gold in the vault.

Holdings in the gold vault continued to increase and peaked in 1973, shortly after the United States suspended convertibility of dollars into gold for foreign governments. At its peak, the vault contained over 12,000 tons of monetary gold. Since that time, gold deposit and withdrawal activity has slowed and the vault has experienced a gradual but steady decline in overall holdings. However, the vault today remains the world’s largest known depository of monetary gold.

98 percent of Gold at Federal Reserve Bank of New York is owned by central banks of foreign nations and 2 percent is owned by United States of America.

As of 2017, the vault houses approximately 508,000 gold bars, with a combined weight of approximately 6,350 tons.

The vault is able to support this weight because it rests on the bedrock of Manhattan Island, 80 feet below street level and 50 feet below sea level.

The largest foreign gold holder at the New York Federal Reserve gold vaults is the International Monetary Fund, with a holding of over 2,000 tons.

The next largest gold holder has been the Deutsche Bundesbank, which at the end of 2015 reported that it held 1,347.4 tons in the New York vaults.

After this, the Banca d’Italia says that it holds a substantial amount of gold in New York, estimated to be over 1,000 tons.

The Dutch central bank, De Nederlandsche Bank, holds 190 tons of its gold with the New York Federal Reserve.

In total, the IMF, Bundesbank, Banca d’Italia and De Nederlandsche Bank officially could hold more than 4,700 tons of gold in New York, which would account for approximately 80% of the total gold held in the Federal Reserve Bank vaults.

As to whether all of this gold is actually in the main and auxiliary vaults is another matter entirely.

In November 2014, the Dutch central bank, De Nederlandsche Bank (DNB) announced that it had repatriated approximately 122 tons of its gold from the New York Fed. This would leave the DNB with approximately 190 tons of gold still left in New York.

Other central bank gold customers of the New York Fed include the following.

• The Swedish Riksbank holds 13.2 tons of gold (10.7% of its 125.7 gold reserves) at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
• The Central Bank of Finland holds 8.8 tons of its gold reserves (18% of its 49,5 tons total) with the New York Federal Reserve.

Other gold account customers of the FRBNY include

• the Bank of Greece
•  the Bank for International Settlements (BIS),
• the European Central Bank (ECB),
• Banque du Liban (Lebanon),
• Central Bank of Afghanistan,
• and the Bank of Ghana.

As a result of increasing concerns expressed by a number of German politicians and Germany’s financial policeman, its National Audit Office, the Bundesbank is to check up on Germany’s gold reserves, an estimated two-thirds of which are stored outside Germany. The Bundesbank has also revealed that a physical check of Germany’s gold has never been carried out.

A large proportion of Germany’s gold reserves is stored abroad in vaults in the US, Britain and France. The gold bars have not been inspected by German officials for decades, prompting German federal auditors to call for a long overdue stock-take.

As the European single currency zone crisis rumbles on from one summit to the next with no resolution in sight, Germany’s National Audit Office and some of the country’s politicians have become increasingly edgy about the country’s gold serves, nearly three quarters of which are held outwith Germany.

There are historical reasons for Germany not having its own Fort Knox. The quid pro quo for (West) Germany was allied troops being stationed in West Germany long after the Second World War had ended.

With only about 30% of Germany’s gold reserves being held in German custody and the remainder far away from Frankfurt, Germany’s National Audit Office – the organisation independent of government that keeps an eye on Germany’s finances – has queried whether the German central bank, the Bundesbank, has been regularly keeping tabs on German gold bullion.

The National Audit Office is concerned that no physical checks have been carried out.

The Bundesbank reacted to the National Audit Office’s demands emphasizing it does not doubt ‘the integrity, reputation and safety’ of foreign storage sites, relying on documentation and procedures in place to provide proof and traceability of German gold reserves stored abroad over past decades.

Nonetheless, to allay audit office concerns, the Bundesbank made arrangements to repatriate some of Germany’s gold reserves and test the gold for purity. The Bundesbank had agreed to ship 150 tons of gold currently stored at the New York Federal Reserve to Germany.

German concerns mounted after a delegation of German federal politicians requested an inspection of German gold reserves stored at the Banque de France, France’s central bank, in Paris. The group were turned away by officials who said there were no visiting facilities at their vaults.

Now, the official view in Germany is that the Bundesbank has no reason to doubt that all German gold reserves stored in foreign countries can be properly accounted for.

On January 16, 2013 Germany’s central bank, the Bundesbank, said it would ship back home all 374 tons it had stored with the Banque de France in Paris, as well as 300 tons held in Manhattan by the US Federal Reserve, by 2020.

That having been said, the Federal Bank of Germany has only managed to bring home a paltry 37 tons of gold.

And only 5 tons of that came from the US, the rest coming from Paris. The US Fed holds 45% or roughly $635 billion of the total 3,396 tons of gold Germany has in reserve, the world’s second largest hoard.

Needless to say this prompted renewed questions as to whether Germany’s gold still exists in those Manhattan vaults or if it has been sold to others.

Ending talk of repatriating the world’s second-biggest gold reserves removes a potential irritant in U.S.-German relations.

It’s also a political rebuff to critics including the anti-euro ‘Alternative for Germany’ party, which says all the gold should be returned to Frankfurt so it can’t be impounded to blackmail Germany into keeping the currency union together.

As an enforced NATO partner of the U.S. during the Cold War, many German institutions were heavily infiltrated by American agents, such as CIA personnel, and the current German government does not wish to create serious problems by antagonizing the United States.

In sum, the Merkel government is willing to cover up the theft of their gold by the Americans for political reasons.

German gold is also held at The Bank of England which stores 13% in London, while the Bank of France in Paris has 11% in total and the remainder is held at the Bundesbank’s headquarters in Frankfurt.

The gold that was claimed to have been returned to Germany at Frankfurt was never shown to the public but was said to have been melted down immediately to  “bring the bullion to the current bar standard.” Germany holds more than 3,000 tons of gold bullion, which represents more than 75 percent of its foreign currency reserves.

It is well-known in the American banking community that the U.S. Treasury will never be able to repay $19.5 trillion which is owes to the Federal Reserve banks for loans, based on the gold the Federal Reserve has held as security for their loans to the U.S. government. Because the U.S. Treasury was unable to repay these loans the Federal Reserve sold all the gold to the Chinese government and they regard the the promissory notes from the Treasury (the T-Bills) as so much worthless paper.

The US Government will most certainly never have the money to redeem $19.5 trillion out of the taxes it collects, so the only way to repay the Federal Reserve is to borrow more money from the Federal Reserve to repay the older loans, with, of course the interest.

Thus, the Federal Reserve will never have to give back the gold to the Treasury, and has paid the U.S. Treasury debt and has kept some of the gold to cover itself.

When the foreign depositors, such as Germany, come to the US Government Treasury and ask for their gold back, the US Government does not have it, and has not had it in its possession in Fort Knox since soon after the end of WWII.

The final conclusion is that the U.S. Government has converted hundreds of trillions of other nations’ gold to act as collateral for its own borrowing and profligate spending, on endless wars, political corruption, bribery, and baldfaced theft.

 

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