Let's remind ourselves what empire-building-----global labor pool slave trading distribution----and Foreign Economic Zones policies have had as a goal during these few decades of REAGAN/CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA keeping in mind that REAGAN/CLINTON/OBAMA are far-right wing global 1% Wall Street as is BUSH neo-conservatives-----we have watched very,very, very, very far-right wing policies on immigration killing these few decades centuries of left social democratic immigration policies. Trump is MOVING FORWARD from what OBAMA'S immigration policies installed----and OBAMA MOVED FORWARD what Bush's immigration policies installed----then the same from CLINTON/ REAGAN. To understand goals of far-right immigration we must look at them as TAG-TEAM and ask where do they go from here?
The idea that a raging far-right global 1% Wall STreet Clinton neo-liberal is in tears over Trump's immigration plans is RIDICULOUS. Global Wall Street is simply restructuring immigration policy around building global corporate campuses in the US cities deemed Foreign Economic Zones and their wanting to bring only the BEST OF THE BEST IN THE WORLD----meaning the global 1% and their 2%----with 99% of global citizens as global sweat shop slave labor. These few decades has seen immigration policy take these stances------
Global citizens are selected to come to US if they have wealth----if they work to install global Wall Street policies in their nations undermining the 99% in their countries-----or if they have family or strategic connections global Wall Street wants to exploit. THAT IS FAR-RIGHT WING IMMIGRATION POLICY.
TRUMP is taking these first weeks to cater to CONSERVATIVE REPUBLICANS so they think his later policies are good for them when they kill right wing conservative Republicans as much as left social Democrats. Making white citizens think a TRUMP is going to protect 99% of white citizens is FANTASY ISLAND.
TRUMP WAS INSTALLED ONLY BECAUSE THE NEXT STAGE OF MOVING FORWARD ONE WORLD IS CREATING CIVIL UNREST INSIDE US CITIES DEEMED FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONES----THIS IS WHAT HE IS DOING.
The abuse of EXECUTIVE ORDER has been happening these few decades with silence and complicity by our Congress and courts----Trump is simply creating that image of dictator that comes in all installations of Foreign Economic Zones overseas.
If Schumer was really distraught he would not have worked these several decades to build that global slave trading human capital distribution system.
Politics People
Schumer breaks down in tears while denouncing Trump’s travel ban
Dylan Stableford
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer broke down in tears on Sunday as he announced that Democrats are considering legislation to overturn President Trump’s controversial executive order temporarily banning immigration from seven predominantly Muslim countries.
“This executive order was mean-spirited and un-American,” Schumer said at a press conference in New York City, where he was surrounded by families affected by the ban. “It was implemented in a way that created chaos and confusion across the country, and it will only serve to embolden and inspire those around the globe who will do us harm.”
On Friday, Trump signed an executive order barring people from seven countries — Syria, Sudan, Yemen, Iran, Iraq, Libya and Somalia — from entering the United States for 90 days. It also stopped all refugees from entering the U.S. for 120 days and indefinitely suspended the entry of refugees from Syria.
But lawmakers, including several Republicans, criticized Trump for issuing the travel ban without warning.
“It is clear from the confusion at our airports across the nation that President Trump’s executive order was not properly vetted,” Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said in a joint statement. “We are particularly concerned by reports that this order went into effect with little to no consultation with the departments of State, Defense, Justice and Homeland Security.”
On NBC’s “Meet the Press,” White House chief of staff Reince Priebus said the administration’s lack of advance notice was by design.
“I don’t think you want a grace period,” Priebus said. “Because then people who want to do bad things to Americans would just move up their travel date two days in order to get into the country before the grace period is over.”
In an appearance on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said he’s concerned the travel ban may have gone too far.
“I think it’s a good idea to tighten the vetting process,” McConnell said. “But I also think it’s important to remember that some of our best sources in the war against radical Islamic terrorism are Muslims, both in this country and overseas.
“I think we need to be careful,” McConnell added. “We don’t have religious tests in this country.”
McConnell stopped short of declaring his opposition to the order. But it’s clear Senate Democrats are ready to push back.
“We’re demanding the president reverse these executive orders that go against what we are, everything we have always stood for,” Schumer said. “We’re here today to deliver a vociferous ‘no’ to the president and the misguided executive orders that are shocking to a majority of Americans and are inflicting wounds on this country.”
On Saturday night, a federal court in Brooklyn issued an emergency stay temporarily blocking part of the order amid a wave of protests at airports around the country.
The court’s decision, which affects people who have been detained in airports, came after the ACLU and other activist groups filed a class action lawsuit on behalf of two Iraqis who were held at New York City’s John F. Kennedy International Airport.
More than 100 people, including some with current visas, were detained or turned around at airports as a result of the temporary ban.
Earlier Sunday, a defiant Trump took to Twitter to address the backlash
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Connect US immigration policy these few decades to what is happening in Syria----the same happened in Asian nations several years ago----as with Latin American nations. A brutal dictator is installed----brings in a minority to be that 5% to his 1% ------the Assad's brought Alawite Muslims from Saudi Arabia to be his administration killing the 99% of Syrians. Saddam Hussein did the same with the Sunnis in Iraq-----and MAO did the same in China during the GREAT LEAP FORWARD---MOVING FORWARD by the same global 1%. The tensions in Syria stem from sovereign citizens having lived many centuries in Syria being repressed and impoverished by IMMIGRANTS TO SYRIA. The Alawite citizens are not bad ----they are simply being USED BY GLOBAL 1%.
We have shouted that all installations of Foreign Economic Zones start this way----a nation is filled with NGOs and CIA creating civil tensions and unrest. ASSAD was never the target for removal by global Wall Street----the war was about displacement of global citizens inside Syria-----many centuries-old sovereign Syrian citizens are those pushed to refugee camps and global labor pools around the world.
'The differences between Alawites and Sunnis in Syria have sharpened dangerously since the beginning of the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad, whose family is Alawite. The reason for tension is primarily political, rather than religious: top position in Assad’s army are held by Alawite officers, while most of the rebels from the Free Syrian Army come from Syria’s Sunni majority'.
After these few years of civil war it is time to bring in WORLD BANK----IMF----to build Foreign Economic Zones inside Syria. This further isolates IRAN---and PALESTINIANS. While Obama simply allowed all this to play out---it is now Trump's turn to call for peace and building Syria's economy. All NGOs know this is the same game plan over several decades and it has NOTHING TO DO WITH RELIGION.
"Whatever you think about President Assad, the fact is that he is the president of Syria,” Tulsi replied. “In order for any peace agreement, in order for any possibility of a viable peace agreement to occur, there has to be a conversation with him,” Gabbard said'.
Just Back From Syria, Rep. Gabbard Brings Message: 'There Are No Moderate Rebels'
By Susan Jones | January 26, 2017 | 5:43 AM EST
Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) meets with Syrian religious leaders in Aleppo, led by Archbishop Denys Antoine Chahda of the Syrian Catholic Church of Aleppo, and joined by Archbishop Joseph Tabji of Maronite Church of Aleppo, Rev. Ibrahim Nseir of the Arab Evangelical Presbyterian Church of Aleppo, and others. Each called for peace, and an end to foreign support of terrorists who are trying to rid Syria of its secular, pluralistic, free society. (Photo from Gabbard's website, courtesy of Abraham Williams)(CNSNews.com) - Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, a Hawaii Democrat, says she made a secret, four-day trip to Syria -- meeting with ordinary people and even President Bashar al-Assad -- because the suffering of the Syrian people "has been weighing heavily on my heart."
"I wanted to see if there was in some small way, a way that I could express the love and the aloha and the care that the American people have for the people of Syria, and to see firsthand what was happening there, to see that situation there," Gabbard told CNN's "The Lead" with Jake Tapper on Wednesday.
She returned with a message:
"I'll tell you what I heard from the Syrian people that I met with, Jake, walking down the street in Aleppo, in Damascus, hearing from them.
“They expressed happiness and joy at seeing an American walking through their streets. But they also asked why the U.S. and its allies are providing support and arms to terrorist groups like al-Nusra, al-Qaida or al-Sham, ISIS who are on the ground there, raping, kidnapping, torturing and killing the Syrian people.
"They asked me, why is the United States and its allies supporting these terrorist groups who are destroying Syria when it was al Qaida who attacked the United States on 9/11, not Syria. I didn't have an answer for them,” Gabbard said.
“The reality is... every place that I went, every person that I spoke to, I asked this question to them, and without hesitation, they said, there are no moderate rebels. Who are these moderate rebels that people keep speaking of?
Regardless of the name of these groups, the strongest fighting force on the ground in Syria is al Nusra, or al Qaida and ISIS. That is a fact,” Gabbard said.
“There is a number of different, other groups -- all of them essentially are fighting alongside, with, or under the command of the strongest group on the ground that's trying to overthrow Assad.
“The Syrian people recognize and they know that if President Assad is overthrown, then al Qaida -- or a group like al Qaida, that has been killing Christians, killing people simply because of their religion, or because they won’t support their terror activities, they will take charge of all of Syria.
“This is the reality that the people of Syria are facing on the ground, and why they are pleading with us here in the United States to stop supporting these terrorist groups. Let the Syrian people themselves determine their future, not the United States, not some foreign country.”
Gabbard said initially, she didn't plan to meet with President Assad: "When the opportunity arose to meet with him, I did so because I felt it's important that if we profess to truly care about the Syrian people, about their suffering, then we've got to be able to meet with anyone that we need to if there is a possibility that we could achieve peace, and that's exactly what we talked about."
Tapper noted that Assad is responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths and millions of people being forced from their homes and even their country during the five-year civil war:
"Did you have any compunctions about meeting with somebody like that, giving him any sort of enhanced credibility because a member of the United States Congress would meet with someone like that?" Tapper asked.
"Whatever you think about President Assad, the fact is that he is the president of Syria,” Tulsi replied. “In order for any peace agreement, in order for any possibility of a viable peace agreement to occur, there has to be a conversation with him,” Gabbard said.
“The Syrian people will determine his outcome and what happens with their government and their future, but our focus, my focus, my commitment is on ending this war that has caused so much suffering to the Syrian people.”
In a speech on the House floor earlier this month, Gabbard criticized America’s “interventionist wars.”
“Our limited resources should go toward rebuilding our communities here at home, not fueling more counterproductive regime change wars abroad.”
She urged her fellow lawmakers to support her bill, the “Stop Arming Terrorists Act,” legislation that would stop the U.S. government from using taxpayer dollars to directly or indirectly support groups allied with terrorist groups such as ISIS and al Qaeda in their war to overthrow the Syrian government.
“The fact that our resources are being used to strengthen the very terrorist groups we should be focused on defeating should alarm every American,” Gabbard said.
I urge my colleagues to support this bipartisan legislation and stop this madness.”
Gabbard supported Sen. Bernie Sanders for president, but after the election, she was one of many people invited to meet with President-elect Donald Trump at Trump Tower in New York.
"President-elect Trump asked me to meet with him about our current policies regarding Syria, our fight against terrorist groups like al-Qaeda and ISIS, as well as other foreign policy challenges we face," Gabbard said about the meeting.
“I felt it important to take the opportunity to meet with the President-elect now before the drumbeats of war that neocons have been beating drag us into an escalation of the war to overthrow the Syrian government -- a war which has already cost hundreds of thousands of lives and forced millions of refugees to flee their homes in search of safety for themselves and their families.”
____________________________________________
Some Americans over these few decades have though all this empire-building was PATRIOTIC------what WE THE PEOPLE must do is look at what was done OVERSEAS---and see how global Wall Street policies are doing the same thing today in the US-----our US cities deemed Foreign Economic Zones......and think about far-right immigration policies installed through CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA now Trump moving forward these same goals.
Left social Democrats were always shouting against these deliberate instability/occupation policies while right wing voters tended towards thinking it was patriotic........well, now it is right wing voters thinking these same policies brought back to US are bad. OF COURSE THEY ARE BAD---THEY ALWAYS WERE.
Did Reagan Finance Genocide in Guatemala?
Ronald Reagan (left) was a close ally of Efrain Rios Montt (right), the former Guatemalan dictator who was recently convicted to 80 years in prison for the genocide of the Ixil people. As U.S. president Reagan provided military aid to Guatemala, in spite of warnings of human rights violations in the Central American country.On Monday, a Guatemalan court ordered the country's government to apologize to the Ixil population for the crimes of José Efraín Ríos Montt, a dictator who was sentenced to 80 years in prison for his role in war crimes committed between 1982 and 1983.
The verdict concluded that the army, under the command of Ríos Montt, had engaged in a campaign of genocide against the Ixiles, a small Mayan ethnic group. In that sense, it finally offered an answer to the thousands of victims' families who had pleaded for justice since the 1980s.
The trial did not answer all questions, however. For example, it did not place much attention on the extent of U.S. involvement in Guatemala during the 17 months of Ríos Montt's regime. That's in spite of the fact that America reached out to the Central American country offering military aid to combat left-wing guerrillas.
THOSE LEFT WING GUERRILLAS ALWAYS THE REASON FOR US MILITARY WEAPONS TO FLOW INTO NATIONS.
"U.S. military and intelligence units worked closely with the Guatemalan army over the decades of Guatemala's civil war," said Geoff Thale, Central America Program Director at the Washington Office for Latin America (WOLA). "Direct U.S. military aid was suspended during the Carter Administration, but then restored by the Reagan Administration, whose Cold War worldview clearly prioritized the fight against insurgents and their civilian supporters over respect for human rights."
Indeed, declassified documents and various reports by human rights organizations depict a story that was widely ignored during the trial, and that raises questions about U.S. foreign policy and the role the country played during the Ixil genocide.
A Bum Rap: Reagan and Guatemala
In 1966, the U.S. trained Guatemalan forces in counterinsurgency operations to fight the growing numbers of left-wing guerrillas that were slowly taking over rural areas of the country. Like many other South and Central American countries, Guatemala was in the midst of a civil war that pitted communist guerrillas against right wing governments helped by brutal armies. The origins of the conflict, which would ultimately total nearly 200,000 deaths, were in part caused by a CIA-backed coup that removed Jacobo Árbenz, a progressive president that intended to promote a full-fledged land reform.
Árbenz was replaced by a military junta led by Coronel Castillo Armas in 1954. The coronel was killed three years later, and replaced by a series of military officers who gradually continued to escalate the violence against guerrillas and indigenous populations.
In 1977, the U.S. State Department published a human rights report that ended military aid to Guatemala. The document detailed abuses and acts of violence that forced the Carter administration to cut direct security assistance. Previously pledged direct or indirect aid, however, was not forbidden, according to Memoria del silencio, a 1999 report written by Guatemala's truth commission. Despite mounting concerns about human rights abuses, between 1978 and 1980, the military received $7.9 million through the State Department's Military Assistance Program and Foreign Military Sales program.
"The main way that Guatemala used to obtain dual use military equipment and technology (for military and non-military purposes) during the period of 1978 to 1982 was though the United States," the report concludes.
Ríos Montt became the country's leader after a bloody military coup in March 1982. He set up a military junta, suspended the constitution, and began a crackdown on violence that was initially praised by the United States. U.S. State department officials highlighted the end of the feared death squads that roamed Guatemala City, and said that the general was doing a good job handling the country.
Meanwhile, journalists, human rights activists, and opposition leaders warned international observers about massacres and war crimes in the mountainous regions of Quiché and Chimaltenango. The army was targeting the Ixil and other indigenous groups, killing them indiscriminately, whether they had helped the guerrillas or not.
Ríos Montt, an evangelical Christian known for his supposed piety, repeatedly denied the accusations, labeling the reports as acts of propaganda from left-wing groups. "There is no repression by the army," he told documentary filmmaker Pamela Yates in 1982. "Our strength lies in our capacity to make command decisions. That's the most important thing, because if I can't control the Army, then what am I doing here?"
In the meantime, the Reagan administration had tried to improve its ties with Guatemala. In various news shows, officials proclaimed the possible arrival of a new era for the country. By November, Reagan's administration proposed renewed arms aid, citing an improvement in the human rights situation.
The following month, Reagan met with Ríos Montt, "a man of great personal integrity and commitment," according to the president. When Reagan was asked about human rights violations in Guatemala he said, ''I am inclined to believe they've been getting a bum rap.''
Several months before the meeting, the CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency had already concluded otherwise, according to declassified documents compiled by the George Washington University's National Security Archive. And, according to forensic archivist Kate Doyle, by that October, the U.S. embassy was investigating credible reports of numerous massacres involving the Guatemalan military.
Reagan's administration ultimately decided to ignore the warnings, and indirect assistance was secretly resumed through the CIA. "Overall, U.S. intelligence, training, political support and assistance to the Guatemalan government and military in the early and mid-1980s uncritically supported counter-insurgency strategies that targeted civilians, in the cities and in rural areas like the Ixil Triangle," Geoff Thale said. "U.S. policy makers of that era bear some responsibility for the human rights abuses that took place."
Ríos Montt was overthrown in August 1983 in yet another military coup. Nevertheless, he maintained an active public life. He founded a political party called the Guatemalan Republican Front in 1989 and ran for the presidency, despite a constitutional ban. He also served as a congressman from 1995 to 2004, and then from 2008 to 2012. While he was in Congress, his office gave him immunity from prosecution. In January 2013, when the immunity finally expired, a Guatemalan judge charged him with genocide and war crimes (a Spanish court had done the same years earlier).
In the past few months, 96 witnesses testified against him in court and his conviction raised hopes of similar proceedings in Guatemala and across the globe.
"The trial of General Rios Montt is a victory for human rights activists in Guatemala and internationally," Thale said. "It shows that societies that have been deeply scarred by massive human rights abuses do not have to simply bury the past."
________________________________________________
Accepting Syrian refugees was never the question in immigration. The problem is global Wall Street's part in creating these sovereign instabilities over and over and over globally then fixing that problem by sending citizens as refugees and it has been documented---many end in Foreign Economic Zones as global sweat shop labor.
What is the next stage here in the US in bringing America to ONE WORLD ONE GOVERNANCE FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONES? Creating these same instabilities in our US cities-------that is what drove CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA and its supposed liberal stance on immigration----they EXPLOIT AND ENSLAVE GLOBAL LABOR POOL----because they are far-right wing so the intent was never to integrate our immigrant citizens with justice. REAGAN/BUSH did not open Texan and CA borders to Latin American floods of immigrants because they are kind people----they did it to exploit and destabilize US economies. Again, it is not the immigrant families fault that REAGAN/CLINTON have made their nations unlivable-----and are now doing the same in US cities deemed Foreign Economic Zones.
'Why aren't Gulf states taking them in?'
The Gulf states partnered with global Wall Street-----Saudi Arabia----Bahrain----Qatar-----Jordon----have spent several decades getting rid of their sovereign citizens by pushing them into the global labor pool so NO, THEY DON'T WANT TO TAKE more citizens in. These middle-eastern nations tied to global Wall Street have a super-majority of global immigrant population in their nations. They are the global 1% and their 2%-----
These kinds of civil unrest are now coming to US and it will be the same far-right wing MARXISTS and NGOs creating the same instabilities in our US cities----all for no reason other than our government has been hijacked and we simply need to GET RID OF THE GLOBAL WALL STREET PLAYERS----no violence needed.
Syrian refugees: Which countries welcome them, which ones don't
By Michael Martinez, CNN
Updated 5:22 PM ET, Thu September 10, 2015
A cold reception: Gulf states shun Syrians 01:52Story highlights
Some 4.1 million Syrians are fleeing a homeland riven by more than four years of civil war. Some countries have taken in so many migrants it's caused a population spike, while others have done little or nothing at all.Here's a country-by-country look at what is being done to address the worst refugee crisis since the Rwandan genocide more than 20 years ago, according to experts.Which countries take in the Syrian refugees?
Turkey: 1.9 million
Remarkably, this country now shelters almost half of the Syrian refugees and clearly has more than it can handle.
It's the No. 1 destination for displaced families.
Erdogan: 'Western world to be blamed' for migrant crisis 03:12
Geography explains much of it: Turkey and Syria share a border.
The masses are so vast that 14% of them are sheltered in camps, U.S. figures show.
A staggering share of them are children and teens: More than half are under age 17, according to U.N. figures.
Lebanon: 1.1 million
The influx is so profound in Lebanon that the 1.1 million Syrian refugees mark a 25% increase in the country's 4.4 million population.
Those figures make Lebanon the country with the highest per capita concentration of refugees, the United Nations says. It also shares a border with Syria.
"The influx of a million refugees would be massive in any country. For Lebanon, a small nation beset by internal difficulties, the impact is staggering," U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres said last year.
Jordan: 629,000
Jordan provides shelter to a large number of refugees from Syria, Iraq, Somalia and Sudan, but Syrians constitute the majority of Jordan's refugee population, the United Nations says.
Jordan has a history of taking in refugees. Nearly half of its 7 million population is of Palestinian origin.
The Syrian arrivals, however, strain resources and "could have a negative impact on Jordanian public opinion of refugees and make preserving the country's asylum space in the country challenging," the United Nations says.
About 20% of the Syrian arrivals live in camps.
Iraq: 249,000
Like Syria, Iraq has been torn by attacks launched by ISIS, the extremist Islamist group that has captured portions of both countries for what it calls its Islamic caliphate.
Not surprisingly, most of the Syrian refugees have settled in northern areas such as Irbil, Duhuk and Nineveh, which are among the closest to the Syrian border and have large Kurdish populations, the United Nations says.
The notion of Syrian refugees in Iraq may strike some as ironic, if not absurd, because Iraq has deteriorated under sectarian strife and ISIS assaults, producing a sizable population of Iraqi refugees.
Photos: Destination unknown: The struggle of refugees at Keleti station
"As Syria's civil war has dragged on, the direction of forced migration for many Iraqi refugees has reversed. Tens of thousands of Iraqis who sought refuge in Syria between 2003 and 2011 have returned home, joining about a million Iraqis who were already internally displaced," Refugees International said.
About 38% of the Syrian refugees live in camps in Iraq, the U.S. State Department says.
Egypt: 132,000
Egypt rounds out this look at how the Mideast hosts most of the Syrian refugees.
No refugees live in camps there.
In fact, Egyptian billionaire Naguib Sawiris, one of the region's wealthiest men, has offered to buy an island for refugees. He would like to buy an isle from Greece or Italy. His name for the proposed island home: Hope.
Which countries are getting Syrian asylum requests?
Germany: 98,700
As Germany faces the largest share of Syrian requests for asylum in Europe, Chancellor Angela Merkel called for quotas to be set for each country to take a share of displaced people, including from Syria.
Germany expects the overall asylum requests to soar above the current U.N. count of 98,700 from Syrians alone.
A Syrian family arrives at a train station in Saalfeld, Germany.
There could be 800,000 applications for asylum in Germany this year, and the country could take 500,000 refugees annually for several years, Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel has said.
Sweden: 64,700
Sweden joins Germany in demonstrating a high standard of responsibility in the refugee crisis, and Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Lofven joined Merkel at a press conference this week in urging a Europe-wide solution for hosting refugees.
In the 1990s, Sweden accepted 84,000 refugees from the Balkans.
"We accept that every person has a right to seek asylum," Swedish Foreign Affairs Minister Margot Wallstrom said. "This also puts the European solidarity to a test. I think it's important that we signal being a community that rests on common values of democracy and defense of human rights."
France: 6,700
The number of asylum requests has been relatively low.
But they will surely increase now that French President François Hollande has said France is ready to take on more responsibility and host 24,000 refugees over the next two years.
The French leader said this number would be France's share under a proposal by the European Commission for EU nations to take in 120,000 refugees over the next two years.
"We will do so because it is the principle to which France is committed," Hollande said.
United Kingdom: 7,000
The United Kingdom will likely see an upswing in asylum requests now that it has said it will take up to 20,000 Syrian refugees over the next five years.
British PM says UK will resettle 20,000 new refugees 02:47
But Britain will focus on resettling vulnerable refugees from camps in countries bordering Syria, not those who have already entered Europe, Prime Minister David Cameron said Monday.
"This provides refugees with a more direct and safe route to the United Kingdom rather than risking the hazardous journey to Europe, which has tragically cost so many lives," he said.
The refugees will receive a five-year humanitarian protection visa, Cameron said. Britain has been the second largest provider of humanitarian aid to Syrian refugees within the Middle East region, according to U.N. figures.
Denmark: 11,300
Denmark has received a relatively large number of Syrian asylum requests but has sought to discourage the arrival of more migrants.
On Wednesday, Danish authorities tried to restrict migrants from crossing into the country from central Europe. Danish police said via Twitter it blocked access to some highways and suspended some international railway traffic.
The country earlier had paid for ads in Arabic in four Lebanese newspapers to get the word out about its new, tightened restrictions -- such as reducing social benefits -- to try to prevent refugees from getting into the Scandinavian nation.
"We cannot simply keep up with the present flow," Immigration and Integration Minister Inger Stojberg, a member of the right-wing Venstre Party, said on Facebook. "In light of the huge influx to Europe these days, there is good reason for us to tighten rules and get that effectively communicated."
Hungary: 18,800
Many Syrian refugees are reluctant to register an asylum application in Hungary.
Having traveled north through the Balkans, those arriving on the country's border with Serbia have had police greet them, and they've been forced to wait, sometimes for days, in holding areas and transit camps, where conditions are said to be poor.
Tensions flare along Serbia-Hungary border 02:17
Many migrants would prefer to register as refugees in countries such as Germany, Sweden and Austria, continuing their journey through Hungary to Northern and Western Europe.
Hungary's right-wing government, which has been trying to stop the flood of migrants, has erected a barbed wire fence along its more than 160-kilometer (100-mile) border with Serbia to prevent them from crossing there.
Serbia, which has received 49,500 asylum requests from Syrian refugees, is not a member of the European Union.
Other European countries
Syrian refugees have made a wide range of requests for asylum in other parts of Europe, including -- between April 2011 and this July -- 5,500 in Spain, 14,100 in the Netherlands, 18,600 in Austria, 8,300 in Switzerland and 15,000 in Bulgaria, according to the United Nations.
Italy, where many migrants who've made the perilous Mediterranean crossing from North Africa first land, had received 2,143 asylum applications as of July, the United Nations said.
Greece, which lies on a popular transit route from Turkey north through the Balkans to Northern Europe, has seen more than 250,000 people arrive on its shores this year, according to the International Organization for Migration. It had received 3,545 asylum applications as of July, U.N. figures show.
What's North America doing?
United States: 1,500 resettlements
About 1,500 Syrian refugees have been admitted to the United States since the start of the conflict in 2011, the vast majority of them this fiscal year.
Here's a breakdown: 23 in 2011, 41 in 2012, 45 in 2013, 249 in 2014 and 1,199 so far this fiscal year, which ends September 30, according to the State Department.
About 300 more refugees are expected to be admitted by the end of this fiscal year. This equates to a grand total of about 1,800 refugees from Syria's four-year civil war being admitted to the United States by October 1, according to U.S. officials.
In the face of growing questions about such small numbers, President Barack Obama ordered his administration to "scale up" the number of Syrian refugees -- at least 10,000 in the next fiscal year, a White House spokesman said Thursday.
The proposed resettling of at least 10,000 Syrian refugees would be allocated out of a U.S. quota of 75,000 refugee admissions slated for next fiscal year, beginning October 1, a senior administration official said.
That quota applies to refugees from all over the world and is determined at the beginning of the fiscal year, but Obama can raise that quota if there's a crisis. Secretary of State John Kerry has already indicated to lawmakers that such an increase is in the works.
Should the U.S. be doing more to help Syrian Refugees? 05:01
The United States has given the largest share of aid to the Syrian refugee crisis, more than $574 million, or 31% of total aid donated, the United Nations said.
Opinion: Why U.S. should do more for refugees
Canada: 10,000 resettlements
More than 2,370 Syrian refugees have resettled in Canada since January 2014, and the government promised in January to accept 10,000 Syrian refugees over a three-year period, the Toronto Sun reported.
Since that pledge, 1,074 Syrian refugees arrived in Canada, the newspaper said.
What about other wealthy nations?
Australia: 12,000 resettlements
Prime Minister Tony Abbott said his country would take in an extra 12,000 migrants fleeing conflict in the Middle East.
The intake almost doubles the number of people currently allowed into Australia through its humanitarian program, which is capped at 13,750 each year.
Photos: 24 hours of Europe's migration crisis
Priority would go to persecuted minorities -- especially women, children and families -- who are in camps in Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey, Abbott said.
Canberra also plans to spend $44 million on food, blankets and emergency supplies to support 240,000 people in UNHCR camps as part of its $230 million aid program
Amnesty International said other high-income countries -- specifically Russia, Japan, Singapore and South Korea -- have offered zero resettlements to the Syrians.
Are countries obligated to take in refugees?
How many refugees are Gulf countries taking in?
Saudi Arabia: 0
Kuwait: 0
Qatar: 0
Bahrain: 0
United Arab Emirates: 250,000
They are collectively known as the Persian Gulf states, and even though they share a language and the Arabian Peninsula with Syria, the Gulf nations are among the few nations that haven't participated in the 1951 U.N. treaty on refugees, the agreement that energizes the West's efforts to provide asylum to refugees from far-flung corners of the globe.
A cold reception: Gulf states shun Syrians 01:52
In short, the Gulf nations aren't legally obligated to provide refuge or asylum.
Nadim Houry, Human Rights Watch deputy director for the Middle East and North Africa, has called those wealthy countries' inaction in the Syrian crisis "shameful."
The United Arab Emirates would seem to be the exception.
The UAE has received more than 100,000 Syrian nationals since the Syrian crisis began in 2011 and extended residency permits to them, bringing the number of Syrians living there to almost 250,000, a UAE government source told CNN.
"We would like to see the Syrian refugees stay close to their homeland and to support them while they are there, so they can eventually return to their homeland," the source said, adding that most refugees fleeing to Europe will likely never return to Syria.
The source said the UAE also is financing al Mreejab Al Fhood refugee camp in Jordan, contributing some $72 million over two years for camps elsewhere in that country and in Lebanon, Iraq and Turkey.
The Gulf nations have said each has given millions of dollars to help the refugees, amounting to more than $500 million over 2½ years, according to the United Nations.
The Gulf states also say that Syrians have entered their countries on visas and continue living there.
Why aren't Gulf states taking them in?
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Throughout Obama was saw FRACKING CORPORATIONS moving in across Eastern Europe under the guise of helping those sovereign citizens while simply maximizing wealth----who owns the fracking natural gas industries-----the same global 1% owning the oil and gas industries. Russia and Putin stood with Assad in Syria while the people having installed the Assad family----global Wall Street pretended to be concerned about these wars and atrocities. Geopolitics does see Russian rich wanting to keep global Wall Street at bay----but the Gorbachev RUSSIAN OLIGARCHS are global 1% ONE WORLD ONE GOVERNANCE.
Trump used the ending of war in Syria to install his EXXON-MOBILE GLOBAL 1% into Russia ----so Foreign Economic Zone building will begin in Syria with Putin saying little.
IT IS ALL TEAM GLOBAL 1%-----IT IS BAD FOR SYRIAN PEOPLE -----IT IS BAD FOR AMERICAN PEOPLE.
These oil corporations are all the same global 1%--------Bush/Koch-----and all want Syria as a Foreign Economic Zone----
Gabbard is simply that step-----bring peace with the sale of WORLD BANK/IMF building of Foreign Economic Zones to create jobs.
Dec 15, 2016 @ 03:10 PM
Exxon's Sanctioned Russian Oil Deal Threatens Rex Tillerson As Trump's Secretary Of State
Kenneth Rapoza ,
Contributor
I cover business and investing in emerging markets.
Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.
Russia's President Vladimir Putin (R) and ExxonMobil Chairman and CEO Rex Tillerson (L) attend at the ceremony of the signing of an agreement between state-controlled Russian oil company Rosneft and ExxonMobil in the Black Sea port of Tuapse back in June 2012. A joint venture with Rosneft has been on hold because of sanctions against Russia. (Photo by MIKHAIL KLIMENTYEV/AFP/Getty Images)
President-elect Donald Trump wants him. But many Russia-phobic Republicans and arguably not a single Democratic in the Senate will vote for Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State.
Tillerson announced his retirement Wednesday as CEO of Exxon after 41 years at the oil giant following Trump's nominating him to replace John Kerry at the State Department. Tillerson brings years of experience in dealing with foreign leaders in oil rich nations, including unsavory ones in the Middle East. But of most concern is likely to be Tillerson's relationship with Vladimir Putin. Exxon has a $720 million joint venture with Rosneft, run by Putin's friend Igor Sechin. That deal has been put on ice since the White House sanctioned Russian oil and gas companies in July 2014.
In 2013 and 2014, both Rosneft and Exxon established various entities to conduct exploration and research activities throughout Russia. Each joint venture remains on hold based on rules and regulations set in the sectoral sanctions policies of both the U.S. and E.U. Exxon says that its maximum before-tax exposure to loss from these joint ventures as of December 31, 2015, was $1 billion.
Exxon is not commenting on Tillerson's nomination.
Anti-Putin Republicans led by John McCain will likely vote against Tillerson's appointment in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. No date has been set for that vote. McCain's office did not return requests for comment either. But Republican Senator and Chairman of the Committee, Bob Corker, called Tillerson "a very impressive individual" who "has an extraordinary working knowledge of the world. I congratulate him on his nomination and look forward to meeting with him and chairing his confirmation hearing." Corker was also in the running for cabinet post.
While Corker's nomination may be Trump transition team's way of buttering up the Senator to get their man through committee, Corker will have to do the same with McCain and another Putin skeptic, Lindsey Graham. Both may put the position on hold in committee, meaning it never gets to the Senate floor.
"Tillerson's nomination reflects Trump's comfort with top tier CEOs and other business people. He is a great example of the businessman-statesman," says Ariel Cohen, a senior fellow for the Atlantic Council in Washington. "He succeeded in cutting an unprecedented oil deal with Rosneft and has an outstanding working relationship with the Kremlin. But his nomination may run into some headwinds," he says. "Some Republicans on the Hill are concerned about the perceived threat of Russia. They may oppose his nomination precisely because of his business dealings with the Kremlin."
Tillerson has a long history in Russia. He was involved in negotiating the sale of exiled Russian oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovosy's Yukos Oil in a bidding war with Chevron. The Rosneft joint venture to drill in the Kara Sea made sense at the time when oil was $85 a barrel, but drilling through ice and rough, cold northern seas for hydrocarbons may not look as attractive with oil in the $50s.
It is not unheard of for the Senate to reject a president's nomination for a cabinet position. In 1989, George H.W. Bush's candidate for Secretary of Defense, John Tower, was blocked in a senate vote for serving under the president. It was the first time the senate blocked a presidential nominee in 30 years. Tillerson could face a similar fate because of the Russia factor.
If Tillerson is not confirmed, then it will be back to the drawing board for Trump.
Generally speaking, the President of the United States has the authority to impose and remove sanctions using the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. According to the State Department, the President can delegate administration of a sanctions regime to State or Treasury to determine which individuals and organizations meet the criteria for sanctions. But congress also has the authority to legislate sanctions and despite it being a Republican congress, it is more or less a Cold Warrior congress that considers Russia a natural enemy. George W. Bush and Russia had good working relations and Obama called for a reset of Russia relations in his first term.
Oil Markets Waiting
Tillerson's appointment was applauded by Russian fund managers and some oil industry investors who are hopeful that sectoral sanctions get removed at some point next year.
"I think sanctions will be lifted within one month after inauguration of Trump," says an overly optimistic Arent Thijsen, CEO and partner at Blauwtulp Wealth Management in The Netherlands. Thijsen invests in the Russian market. "It feels to me like Trump has made his geo political analysis and has concluded that Russia will never be able to compete with the U.S. as superpower. The might of Russia is based on the past, Soviet nuclear weapons. Their economy is small and there is messy leadership. The only country which can really U.S. power is China."
Oil industry investors and physical oil traders in Russia say that Tillerson provides more hope of sanctions relief sooner rather than later. On the margins, if Tillerson is sworn in, which is not necessarily a given, a less antagonistic attitude towards Moscow could lead to a re-pricing of Russian assets.
Market consensus is that sanctions are retained next year, and that an Executive Branch controlled by Trump wouldn't give Russia sanctions relief without getting something in return.
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AND HERE IT IS---------same game plan over these several decades in Asia and Latin America----same global 1% players as religious leaders---as NGOs---pretending to help citizens while building structures of extreme wealth and extreme poverty with global human capital distribution systems. Our national media these few decades has been pure propaganda on all this-----baby boomers remember when our media used to out all these right wing polices as BAD.
This is why Clinton global Wall Street sent GABBARD in to pretend to be FEELING THE BERN---with a Trump appointing her as Defense Department head-----Trump wants Syrian people/American people to think this is all good----
This is why Clinton global Wall Street sent GABBARD in to pretend to be FEELING THE BERN---with a Trump appointing her as Defense Department head-----Trump wants Syrian people/American people to think this is all good----
This is the Clinton global Wall Street 5% to the 1% of women players -----they like calling themselves NASTY WOMEN----and they are the one's leading these MARCH ON WASHINGTON PROTESTS never protesting REAL ISSUES FOR WOMEN.
Business News | Tue Apr 12, 2016 | 10:15am EDT
World Bank urges reconstruction strategy as way to foster peace in Syria
Development organizations should support an ambitious reconstruction plan in order to help foster a sustainable peace in Syria, the World Bank said on Tuesday.
Reconstruction and peace in Syria "are two sides of the same coin," the World Bank said in its short-term economic outlook report on the Middle East and North Africa.
"A credible reconstruction strategy, therefore, can be used as an instrument to bring warring parties closer to a peace deal in the first place," the report's authors said.
Syria has been ravaged for the past five years by a civil war, which has killed more than 250,000 people, displaced about half the population and caused a refugee crisis in neighboring countries and throughout Europe.
Growth in the Middle East and North Africa region will average 3 percent for 2016, according to the World Bank's latest predictions.
The World Bank did not spell out how substantial development aid could be made available. A ceasefire in place since last month between the government and rebel forces is near collapse, with more peace talks planned in Geneva this week.
Syrians lack access to basic services such as clean water, reliable electricity, healthcare and education and there is a need for development institutions to immediately work "more actively" with neutral and well-established local groups outside of the Syrian government, the report said.
"By securing grant funding and technical assistance, international organizations can provide needed relief in the country while engaging in a knowledge generating process," the report said. "This would allow the international community to gradually scale up its assistance once peace is reached."
More than 70 percent of Syrian refugees want to return home when fighting stops, the report said, adding that the international community, including the World Bank, can make future reconstruction commitments an instrument for peace negotiations.
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Here is the raging global 1% Wall Street DAILY BEAST-----again making sure 99% of citizens are looking at the WRONG QUESTIONS regarding policies around immigration. Is the issue the cost of the wall? Is the issue the blocking of immigrant travel?
The issue is this-------the 1% and their 2% Latin American citizens are OLD WORLD SPANISH EUROPEAN families who have these several decades literally cleaned house on sovereign Latin American citizens. CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA saw not only open borders to low-income Latino immigrants but to those global 1% and their 2% old -world Spanish rich controlling Latin American nations. There are already plenty of global Latin American rich in America -----there is no need for more migrations from the south. Latin American 1% don't want it-----American global Wall Street doesn't want it. We have around a 30-30-30 of white/Latino/black ----that is generalized----now the emphasis is growing the Asian/Arabic/South Pacific populations and a WALL will be needed for that.
Global labor pool distribution in Foreign Economic Zones around the world have as a goal of filling these factories and global campuses with people from all over the globe---not because they are the BEST OF THE BEST----but because they do not want one culture or nationality to gain power of association. That is what ONE WORLD IS----breaking down global citizens' ability to organize as a group to fight enslavement.
This coming decade is about flooding US Foreign Economic Zones with Asian immigrants---Asian foreign corporations----just as Latinos have had these few decades. It brings no value to 99% of global citizens trapped in these human capital distribution systems----it only maximizes wealth and power for the global 1%.
Latino rich don't care ----they already have their businesses and LATINO IMMIGRANT human capital labor pool inside US.....the goal is not to implode the American society and economy. THE WALL works for all global 1%. Meanwhile national media is selling this as a conservative right wing policy promise on immigration.
OH, NOW THE 99% OF WHITE CITIZENS ARE BACK IN CHARGE----WAKE UP white citizens are MOVING FORWARD to this same enslavement as fast as any population group.
GONNA BE BEAUTIFUL
Donald Trump Can Build His Wall—But Will It Work?
If Congress agrees to fund it up front, Trump can get his wall built, and he even has ways to make Mexico pay. But absent a change in U.S. hiring practices, will it work?
Ruben Navarrette Jr.
01.18.17 1:00 AM ETAt the center of the newly reignited national dialogue over Donald Trump’s campaign promise to build a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border, you’ll find three major questions:
Is Trump going to keep his promise and build some sort of barrier on a border that spans roughly the full 2,000 miles? Will it be a real “wall” made of brick, stone, and mortar, or the much cheaper alternative of fencing? And will Mexico really pay for it?
These questions are fueled by more than idle curiosity. If Trump doesn’t keep the promise to build the wall, or builds something that appears to be more “fence” than “wall,” or cannot get Mexico to pay either directly or indirectly for whatever he builds, then the new president will have failed at what seems to be the major component of his immigration agenda.
Trump had the chance to answer all three queries on the wall at last week’s news conference in response to a single question from a reporter that went like this: “With the border fence, it now appears clear U.S. taxpayers will have to pay for it up front. What is your plan to get Mexico to pay for it?”
That’s a fair question. After all, according to House Republican officials, members of Trump’s transition team have told Republicans in Congress that the president-elect wants to pay for the border wall upfront through the appropriations process and then later seek reimbursement from Mexico.
This would mean that the more than 73 million people who voted for Hillary Clinton, Gary Johnson, Jill Stein or the multitude of names written in by mischievous or disgusted voters would have to pay for a border monstrosity they never supported or wanted. That would be a tough pill to swallow, and so we can expect pushback from the states and even a lawsuit or two.
Although I have to say, the whole idea of paying for something you oppose should give liberals a new appreciation for the complaints of conservatives who have to fund organizations whose mission they disagree with, such as Planned Parenthood. Elections have consequences, folks.
It was back in October that Trump first floated the idea that the United States would foot the bill for the wall and then recoup its investment from our neighbor in one form or another.
Trump began his answer by making clear that he intends to build some barrier, and describing what it would look like.
“On the fence—it’s not a fence,” he said. “It’s a wall. You just misreported it. We’re going to build a wall.”
Trump argues that it’s just faster and more efficient for the United States to pay the costs of the wall. “I could wait about a year-and-a-half until we finish our negotiations with Mexico, which will start immediately after we get to office,” he said. “But I don’t want to wait… We’re going to start building.”
Then Trump repeated his vow to stick Mexico with the tab.
“Mexico in some form, and there are many different forms, will reimburse us and they will reimburse us for the cost of the wall,” he said. “That will happen, whether it’s a tax or whether it’s a payment—probably less likely that it’s a payment. But it will happen.”
As far as some Trump voters are concerned, it had better happen. The president-elect acknowledged that the idea of forcing Mexico to pay for the wall was a real crowd-pleaser during the election. His supporters loved hearing this line, and not just because they’re probably not so eager to pay the cost of the structure itself — which Trump estimates could be $12 billion, and an independent study by The Washington Post found could run as much as $25 billion.
It’s about more than that. For many of them, making Mexico pay for the wall is a matter of fairness. The current arrangement is a sweetheart deal for our neighbor, which gets rid of uneducated low-skilled workers that its economy has no room for anyway and then makes a profit in the form of remittances that start off in private hands but quickly circulate through the Mexican economy. Mexico should have to pony up something in return, the argument goes.
Finally, as he tends to do after delivering a kick in the shins, Trump heaped on some flattery.
“And by the way, Mexico has been so nice, so nice,” he said. “I respect the government of Mexico. I respect the people of Mexico. I love the people of Mexico. I have many people from Mexico working for me. They’re phenomenal people.”
But with Trump, flattery often comes with a side of insult or a dash of provocation. So he ended the answer like this.
“The government of Mexico is terrific,” he said. “I don’t blame them for what’s happened. I don’t blame them for taking advantage of the United States.”
But who is taking advantage of whom? In conversations about the wall, or stopping illegal immigration, Americans somehow never acknowledge how much illegal immigrants contribute to the bottom line and increase profits for U.S. industries like agriculture, hotels, restaurants, construction, and others. Nor will they admit how having a supply of cheap and available immigrant labor benefits the U.S. economy.
Meanwhile, some in the media characterized Trump’s pivot on the funding issue as a flip-flop and a broken promise. The president-elect responded in a tweet: “The dishonest media does not report that any money spent on building the Great Wall (for sake of speed), will be paid back by Mexico later!”
As House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Michael McCaul (R-TX) told the hosts of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” last week, the United States has options when it comes to squeezing cash out of Mexico after the fact. As McCaul noted, the United States could increase the fee for visa applications, charge a hefty toll for the thousands of people who cross the border each day from Mexico to work or shop in this country, or levy taxes on the estimated $25 billion worth of remittances sent into Mexico annually from expatriates on this side of the border.
McCaul also brought up NAFTA. The North American Free Trade Agreement — which was signed by President Bill Clinton in 1993, and intended to spur trade between Canada, Mexico, and the United States — is likely to be renegotiated during the Trump presidency. This will happen with Mexico’s blessing given that the Mexicans are also unhappy with aspects of the agreement, including provisions that Mexicans blame for decimating its corn industry. Those trade talks could give the United States leverage to get Mexico to pay for the wall, McCaul said.
So it would seem, at least from last week’s news conference, the major questions about the proposed border wall have been asked and answered. But that isn’t so. The skeptics and opponents of the project are just getting started. And here’s the one question that no one ever seems to ask Trump about his beloved, “big, beautiful wall”:
Without changing the behavior — namely the hiring practices — of those on this side of the border, will it do any good?
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THIS IS WHERE GLOBAL WALL STREET BRINGS IN ITS FAR-RIGHT MARXISM
please think how America is full of these same groups-----ready to create these same conditions in our US cities deemed FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONES.......
'Similarly, Honduras has been transformed into the U.S. military’s primary foothold in Central America. U.S. Coordinator of the National Popular Resistance Front (FNRP) and Refoundation Party (LIBRE) Lucy Pagoada explained in a 2015 interview that “[Honduras] has turned into a large military base trained and funded by the U.S. They even have School of the Americas forces there.”
“There have been high levels of violence and torture since the [2009] coup,” Pagoada continued'.
All of these elements of civil instability have been filling our US cities these few decades waiting for an ECONOMIC CRASH FROM MASSIVE BOND MARKET FRAUD AND A TRUMP TO GIVE EXTREME AUSTERITY.
Obama’s Legacy In Latin America: Militarization, Right-Wing Coups, & The Rule Of Wall St.
With just hours left for the Obama administration, independent geopolitical analyst Eric Draitser reviews the president’s legacy of destabilizing, militarizing, and exploiting Latin America.
By Eric Draitser @stopimperialism | January 20, 2017
Magnets for sale decorate a tourist shop, one showing an image of U.S. President Barack Obama smelling a cigar, at a market in Havana, Cuba, Monday, March 16, 2015. (AP/Ramon Espinosa)
“Tis now the very witching time of night,
When churchyards yawn and hell itself breathes out
Contagion to this world”
– William Shakespeare, from “Hamlet”
NEW YORK — (Opinion) It seems we have arrived at the witching hour of Obama’s presidency, when corporate media ghouls continue to breathe out the infectious contagion of liberal lies and half-truths about the Great Dissimulator and his accomplishments.
Whether it’s The New York Times’ opinion pages hailing Dr. Changelove as “The Most Successful Democrat Since F.D.R.,” or the noxious nostalgia for the present injected into the public discourse like so many palliatives into the bloodstream of a terminal patient, the true history of Obama’s presidency is being veiled behind a mask of delusion.
Maybe it’s the Orange-Headed Hydra assuming power in Washington that gives the outgoing administration that air of dignity and grace. Maybe it’s the desire to craft a narrative in which “Hope” and “Change” were something other than hollow campaign slogans deftly employed by a charlatan of the first order. Or maybe it’s just business as usual in the heart of the U.S. Empire. No matter the reason, Barack Obama’s media-induced sainthood is now all but complete in liberal America’s collective psyche.
But the United States is not the only “America.”
Indeed, crossing the southern border and entering into that mysterious place called “Latin America,” one encounters a very different Obama legacy, one that is defined by the same policies that Yankee imperialists have employed for more than a century: destabilization, militarization, and exploitation.
Yes We Can!…continue to pursue a neocolonial agenda in Central and South America.
Obama’s love affair with the right wing
An artist who prefers to remain anonymous for security reasons pastes up one of his “interventions” that shows President Barack Obama at a podium surrounded by Honduran politician in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, Thursday, Nov. 21, 2013. (AP/Eduardo Verdugo)
A mural in Lithuania depicting Russian President Vladimir Putin and President-elect Donald Trump embracing in a passionate kiss has gone viral. The meaning of the image is about as subtle as a sledgehammer to the skull, but it is no less perspicacious for its lack of subtlety. And while Russia has indeed tacitly, and rather shamefully, supported far-right candidates and causes for its own coldly pragmatic political reasons — Brexit, Trump, Le Pen, etc. — the truth is that Obama’s administration has also backed right-wing reactionaries and extremists where it has suited its interests.
Throughout Latin America, President Obama has been a driving force behind the resurgence of right-wing forces that have rolled back the gains of socialist and social democratic governments, targeted indigenous and African diaspora communities, assassinated activists, and toppled governments where they could.
So, yes, let’s talk about “legacy.”
In Honduras, Obama’s legacy was cemented from the very beginning of his presidency. In the summer of 2009, Manuel Zelaya, the country’s democratically-elected left-wing president, was removed from power in a midnight coup orchestrated by then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her cronies in Washington and in Tegucigalpa. And while Obama’s tepid condemnation of the coup elicited cheers from many liberals in its contrast to the Bush administration’s loving embrace of the coup against Hugo Chávez in Venezuela in 2002, the reality is that, as with all things Obama, it was mere words. The support of the president and his henchwoman was the driving force behind the coup.
Clinton is never one to shy away from an opportunity to boast about the amount of blood on her hands. In a passage which removed from later editions of her book “Hard Choices,” she rather brazenly admitted:
“In the subsequent days [after the coup] I spoke with my counterparts around the hemisphere, including Secretary [Patricia] Espinosa in Mexico. We strategized on a plan to restore order in Honduras and ensure that free and fair elections could be held quickly and legitimately, which would render the question of Zelaya moot and give the Honduran people a chance to choose their own future.”
Obama’s top diplomat was instrumental in installing a right-wing government backed by the wealthiest business interests in Honduras and powerful players in Washington. As Clinton bagman Lanny Davis openly stated in an interview just weeks after the coup:
“My clients represent the CEAL, the [Honduras Chapter of] Business Council of Latin America. … I do not represent the government and do not talk to [interim] President [Roberto] Micheletti. My main contacts are [billionaires] Camilo Atala and Jorge Canahuati. I’m proud to represent businessmen who are committed to the rule of law.”
OH, REALLY?????
Indeed, Davis quite candidly exposed himself as an agent of powerful oligarch financiers and landowners who, until the election of Zelaya, had always maintained firm control of the reins of government in Honduras. These are precisely the people, backed by the Obama administration, wielding power in Honduras today through a violent right-wing government that assassinates indigenous leaders and human rights defenders such as Berta Cáceres, Margarita Murillo, and many others for the sake of investors who seek to develop indigenous, Afro-Caribbean, and peasant lands for massive profits.
Student protesters clash with police over the president’s decision to run for re-election in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, a year after a controversial Supreme Court ruling voided a longtime constitutional ban on presidential re-election, Thursday Nov. 10, 2016. (AP/Fernando Antonio)
Beyond the killings of activists and the political backing of a right-wing coup government, Obama’s legacy in Honduras is also one of militarization. In 2014, The North American Congress on Latin America reported:
“The steady increase of U.S. assistance to [Honduran] national armed forces has, if anything, been an indicator of tacit U.S. support. But the U.S. role in militarization of national police forces has been direct as well. In 2011 and 2012, the Drug Enforcement Administration’s Foreign-deployed Advisory Support Team (FAST)—which had previously carried out military-style missions in Afghanistan—set up camp in Honduras to train a local counternarcotics police unit and help plan and execute drug interdiction operations …
Supported by U.S. helicopters mounted with high caliber machine guns, these operations were nearly indistinguishable from military missions, and locals routinely referred to the DEA and Honduran police agents as “soldados” (soldiers).”
The NACLA report further noted that the Obama administration deployed at least five “commando style squads” of FAST teams across Central America. It added that, in Honduras, U.S. and Colombian special forces units have been training, equipping, and deploying with a new “elite” police unit called the Intelligence Troop and Special Security Group, or TIGRES (Spanish for “tigers”), which human rights groups argue is military in nature.
Ultimately, the man who rode the crest of a wave of “Hope” and “Change” not only brought more of the same to Honduras, and Latin America generally, he actually accelerated the re-conquest of the region by the forces of the military-industrial complex and finance capital.
Obama’s rightward push in South America
Demonstrators march with a sign that says in Portuguese “Get out Temer” and a drawing of Cuba’s late President Fidel Castro, as they demand the impeachment of Brazil’s President Michel Temer in Sao Paulo, Brazil, Nov. 27, 2016. (AP/Andre Penner)
Another example of this confluence between Obama’s right-wing fetish and Wall Street’s boot on the neck of Latin America came last year in Brazil, when Dilma Rousseff’s democratically-elected government was removed from office in what can only be described as a parliamentary coup.
In mid-April of 2016, Reuters published a story exposing Michel Temer, the right-wing vice president at the time and the current president, as preparing the shortlist of his presumptive cabinet months before the Rousseff government had been toppled.
Temer tapped Paulo Leme to serve as either finance minister or head of the Central Bank. Leme is the chairman of Goldman Sachs’s operations in Brazil, making him perhaps the preeminent representative of Wall Street in the country. While his appointment may have been perceived as too brazen, the trend of Wall Street representatives steering the ship of Brazil’s economic and political life is impossible to ignore.
Perhaps it is no coincidence that the Obama administration, too, has been dominated from the beginning by the same types of financiers — often from the very same companies such as Goldman Sachs — that control the coup government in Brazil. The not-so-invisible hand of finance capital is now tightly coiled around the neck of Brazil. Another feather in Obama’s legacy cap.
Of course, there’s Obama’s graceful tango with the new right-wing government in Argentina led by Wall Street darling Mauricio Macri. While Obama was wining and dining the neoliberal reactionary, Macri was busy loading his new government with Wall Street insiders and representatives of Big Oil and other major industries.
This was the real Obama, the one who will not be paraded before Americans as the revered dear leader already missed before he’s left the stage. Rather, this was the man who, without conscience or compunction, ushered in a wave of right-wing reaction throughout the Western hemisphere.
And he did it with a smile.
Obama’s quiet militarization of Latin America
President Barack Obama, left, talks to Colombia’s President Juan Manuel Santos before the start of their meeting at the Casa De Huespedes during the sixth Summit of the Americas, in Cartagena, Colombia, Sunday April 15, 2012. (AP/Carolyn Kaster)
One of Obama’s great accomplishments in the service of the military-industrial complex was his below-the-radar militarization of the region. The pervasive myth of Obama as distinctly different from George W. Bush lives on in the diseased minds of liberal sycophants, but the facts tell a different story.
Obama represented continuity with, and an expansion of, the worst policies of George W. Bush and Bill Clinton when it came to Latin America. Plan Colombia, the broad heading for the billions of dollars spent on U.S. military engagement and cooperation in Colombia begun by Clinton and expanded by Bush, was further expanded under Obama.
Just totaling the military, police, and economic aid to Colombia for 2010 to 2015, the United States has given nearly $3 billion to Colombia in the form of “aid” to fight the so-called “War on Drugs,” widely seen as merely a cover for U.S. military power projection in South America. Add to that the fact that during Obama’s tenure, and under former commander of the U.S. Special Operations Command William McRaven, special forces troop deployments ballooned to more than 65,000, with many spread throughout Latin America.
In an eerily similar fashion, Obama expanded funding and scope for the Mérida Initiative, a project launched by Bush in 2008 which essentially makes Mexico’s military and law enforcement into a de facto arm of the U.S. military and government. As with Plan Colombia (and AFRICOM), even though Obama did not launch this initiative, he expanded it significantly, providing more than $2.5 billion since 2008.
But if liberals want to soothe their broken hearts with the fact that Obama did not actually launch these programs, they might want to consider the Central American Regional Security Initiative, created by Obama in 2011.
According to a March 2014 report from the Igarapé Institute, an independent security and development think tank based in Brazil, CARSI and Mérida alone received nearly $3 billion (2008-2013). It is an open secret that the massive funding has been channeled primarily into military and paramilitary programs. Though the United States touts these programs as success stories, their expansion has coincided with increased militarization in every country where U.S. funds have been provided.
In El Salvador, the government led by President Mauricio Funes consolidated military control of law enforcement in the interests of its U.S. backers. These changes took place simultaneous to the implementation of CARSI, and should be seen as an outgrowth of U.S. militarization. In Guatemala, the government of Otto Pérez Molina, a former military leader with a record of atrocities and genocide, further militarized the country before being imprisoned for corruption in September of 2015.
Similarly, Honduras has been transformed into the U.S. military’s primary foothold in Central America. U.S. Coordinator of the National Popular Resistance Front (FNRP) and Refoundation Party (LIBRE) Lucy Pagoada explained in a 2015 interview that “[Honduras] has turned into a large military base trained and funded by the U.S. They even have School of the Americas forces there.”
“There have been high levels of violence and torture since the [2009] coup,” Pagoada continued.
Of course, no discussion of Obama’s actions in Latin America would be complete without an examination of Washington’s attempts to reassert its influence in the region with the simultaneous thaw in relations with Cuba and the destabilization of Venezuela.
Obama signed an executive order on Jan. 13 declaring both Venezuela and Cuba “national security threats” despite no evidence of any such threat. Isn’t it interesting that the president being lauded as the man who sought to normalize relations with America’s long-standing foe in Cuba still manages to not only classify the country as a threat, but to expand that same status to another geopolitical and strategic enemy in the region?
The Obama administration has attempted to undermine and destabilize Venezuela using as pretexts everything from a border dispute with neighboring Guyana to artificially created scarcity of staple goods and speculation against the currency by elites who control commodity distribution networks in the country, and whose backers reside in Madrid, Miami, and Washington. Julio Escalona, an economist and former Venezuelan ambassador to the United Nations, told me in Caracas in 2015: “Our currency is not being devalued by speculation, but by hyper-speculation.”
And, in signature Obama style, Washington has backed the right wing, including many far right fanatics, in an attempt to wrest political control of the country away from the ruling Socialist Party (PSUV) led by President Nicolás Maduro (and in spirit by Hugo Chávez).
Perhaps the best example is the targeted assassination of numerous prominent members of the PSUV, including the 2014 killing of Robert Serra, an up-and-coming Chavista legislator seen by many on the Venezuelan left as the “next Chávez.” Serra was assassinated by individuals connected to Álvaro Uribe, the former president of Colombia and long-standing U.S. proxy.
Similarly, the well-respected journalist and prominent Chavista Ricardo Duran was murdered outside his home in Caracas in January of 2016. Likewise, Fritz St. Louis, international coordinator of the United Socialist Haitian Movement and secretary general of the Haitian Cultural House Bolivariana de Venezuela, was assassinated in March of 2016. In all these killings, the hidden hand of the right wing and its backers in the United States has been an open secret.
And where is the outcry from the liberals who continue to laud Obama? Perhaps now that a Republican is in office they might soon dust off their political consciences to raise their voices against continued U.S. neocolonialism and imperialism in Latin America? Apparently, their interest in human rights and peace is dependent on the color of the tie worn by the man or woman in the Oval Office.
Obama’s legacy in Latin America is, like that of all other U.S. presidents of the last century, one of profit and exploitation, death and destruction. This is surely no secret in Latin America, where millions have raised, and will continue to raise, their voices in opposition to the Yankee Empire.
Unfortunately, the myth of the Nobel Peace Prize winner has become stronger than the reality of lived experience.
In this witching hour, the twilight of Obama’s presidency, let us not be entranced by spells cast by the coven of corporate media warlocks. Let us instead remember Obama’s legacy in Latin America not as “Hope” and “Change,” but as “More of the Same.”
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We have been shouting since 2010 how bad this coming economic crash will be---it was designed to be bad by Clinton Congress and Obama at the same time they were loading our US cities with immigrants from around the world. Now we will see a TRUMP make sure all population groups are largely unemployed AND ANGRY---WANTING TO FIGHT----CREATING CIVIL UNREST. Who knew this would occur? All Wall Street Baltimore Development 'labor and justice' organizations --those pesky 5% to the 1% creating these condition for civil unrest. A WALL CONTAINS THAT CIVIL UNREST.
CLINTON/OBAMA created the conditions for tension----Trump will light the fire---global right wing NGOs will see it ends with WORLD BANK/IMF taking control of our sovereign governments to install FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONE ONE WORLD ONE GOVERNANCE.
There are still those US citizens both right and left thinking these groups are working for them and not just the global 1% .
Politics | Fri Dec 2, 2016 | 1:14pm EST
Trump's dilemma: slower job growth or rising rates and inflation?
By Howard Schneider | WASHINGTON
A drop in the U.S. unemployment rate last month to a 9-year low signals the risk of a collision between President-elect Donald Trump's plans to goose the economy and the Federal Reserve's efforts to tap the brakes with higher interest rates.
Since Trump's election, officials at the U.S. central bank have cautiously introduced the possibility that his spending and tax cut plans could prompt a faster pace of rate increases than the two hikes currently foreseen in 2017.
An increase is already expected when the Fed meets in two weeks. Fresh economic projections, the first since the election, will also be issued and Fed Chair Janet Yellen will hold a news conference when the meeting concludes on Dec. 14.
With November's decline, the jobless rate is now already below the most optimistic projections from Fed policymakers for where it would stand at year end.
If it keeps moving lower, Trump's spending and tax cut plans may be adding fuel to a tank that's already brimming. Possible new trade or immigration restrictions could make markets even tighter, and switch the Fed from worrying about the risk of deflation to fighting price rises before they get out of hand.
"There is much more than the Trump election driving the ... rally that started the day after the election," Bank of the West chief economist Scott Anderson wrote. "We are seeing signs of a synchronized rebound in the global economy."
When Fed policymakers issued their last projections in September, the lowest level predicted for the unemployment rate at the end of the year was 4.7 percent. In November, it fell three-tenths of a percentage point to 4.6 percent.
The decline was partly due to a drop in the labor force participation rate, which officials have expected to begin falling again because of an aging population with more retirees. In general, the lower the unemployment rate, the slower the pace of job growth the economy can sustain without pushing up wages and prices too quickly.
Policymakers insist they still have time to move rates higher to keep price increases under control. Several officials feel it may even help fix some of the damage from the 2007-2009 recession if inflation moved above the Fed's 2 percent target for a while. That might, for example, allow steady wage increases to restore some of the ground lost by workers.
However, in recent months even ostensibly dovish officials, like Boston Fed President Eric Rosengren, have cautioned that steady rate hikes might be needed to avoid the need for even faster increases that could trigger a recession.
"I view a small step up in interest rates as appropriate, not because I want to curtail the expansion, but because I believe it will help prolong the expansion," Cleveland Federal Reserve Bank President Loretta Mester said on Wednesday..
Trump's victory gives that debate more urgency. His plans for a big infrastructure spending package, tax cuts and tighter controls on immigration could test the limits of what the economy can absorb before overheating.
For a year now, Fed officials have said they expect job growth to slow as the economy nears full employment. It hasn't happened, meaning Trump will take office at what may be a tough point of inflection: either job creation slows or inflation jumps.
Jed Kolko, chief economist at the Indeed job site, said the current pace of job growth and low unemployment rate "sets a baseline for the Trump administration."
"Recent wage gains and unemployment declines make this a tough economy to improve on," he said.
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For those not following GLOBAL STARBUCKS it indeed is that same global corporation tied to ONE WORLD ----we have heard for decades the connections of Starbuck's logo to old world global 1%-----the far-right global Wall Street have now captured the policies of left immigration to being the global human capital distribution system----they say we only want to help global citizens trapped in global Wall Street instability and war==== now they use this to hire global labor pool. As a former Seattlite having sat in these fledgling Starbucks coffee shops when they were really artisan fair trade coffee houses----they long ago went bad BECAUSE they went global. If the left social Democrats keep protesting FOR GLOBAL LABOR POOL----FOR GLOBAL FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONES-----they are protesting for
FAR-RIGHT WING HUMAN CAPITAL DISTRIBUTION AND GLOBAL WALL STREET WARS AND CIVIL INSTABILITY.
Do we hear ANY OF THESE SUPPOSED IMMIGRANT PROTECTING GROUPS------saying 'the US Constitution requires immigrants be protected in workplace having same rights as US citizens in wages and rights if working in US? DO WE HEAR THAT FROM OUR ACLU? This is a basic civil liberties stance that never is mentioned because ACLU is staffed with Clinton global Wall STreet far-right Libertarian civil liberty lawyers---not left social Democrat.
Americans now have global Amazon.com BEZOS telling us who our left populist leaders are owning the Washington Post ----and global STARBUCKS telling us what our left immigration policies are-----both are far----far-----far right wing global Wall Street.
U.S. | Mon Jan 30, 2017 | 10:16am EST
Starbucks CEO Schultz plans to hire 10,000 refugees after Trump ban
Starbucks Corp Chief Executive Officer Howard Schultz said on Sunday that the company planned to hire 10,000 refugees over five years in 75 countries, two days after U.S. President Donald Trump's executive order banning refugees from certain countries.
Trump on Friday put a four-month hold on allowing refugees into the United States and temporarily barred travelers from Syria and six other Muslim-majority countries, saying the moves would help protect Americans from terrorist attacks.
The order sparked widespread international criticism, outrage from civil rights activists and legal challenges.
Starbucks in a letter from Schultz told employees it would do everything possible to support affected workers. (bit.ly/2kIFjLE)
The hiring efforts announced on Sunday would start in the United States by initially focusing on individuals who have served with U.S. troops as interpreters and support personnel in the various countries where the military has asked for such support, Schultz said.
Starbucks Corp Chief Executive Howard Schultz, pictured with images from the company's new ''Race Together'' project behind him, speaks during the company's annual shareholder's meeting in Seattle, Washington March 18, 2015. REUTERS/David Ryder Schultz has been outspoken on various issues and has put Starbucks in the national spotlight, asking customers not to bring guns into stores and urging conversations on race relations.
Schultz said on Sunday that if the Affordable Care Act is repealed and employees lose healthcare coverage, they would be able to return to health insurance through Starbucks.
Trump and a Republican-controlled legislature are seeking to undo much of the Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare.
Schultz will step down as CEO in a few months to focus on new high-end coffee shops, handing the top job to Chief Operating Officer Kevin Johnson, a long-time technology executive. He will become executive chairman in April.
Schultz also affirmed the company's commitment to trade with Mexico, another subject that has been front and center of Trump's campaign.
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It would be the US ACLU fighting these few decades against global labor pool being installed in the US knowing these citizens were being staged for the same extreme exploitation as seen in Asia and Latin America. ACLU knows this----they know all Foreign Economic Zone nations have that same 1% gaining all the wealth with extreme poverty. Having an ACLU that protects those global 1% and their 2% at the expense of global 99% IS NOT LEFT IMMIGRATION POLICY-----it is far-right wing Libertarian soon to be MARXISM.
To pretend these global human capital distribution systems were NOT BUILT BY CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA but rather simply a byproduct of globalization is a DISGRACE.
The REAL American left immigration stance is ENDING FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONES AND GLOBAL LABOR POOL policies.
Please glance through this long article------remember most American colonists came to US as slaves and/or indentured servants-----European KINGS AND QUEENS regularly shipped their citizens off to colonial outposts so this is not only global black or brown citizens---this is ALL CITIZENS----and contrary to what is THE ATLANTIC trying to downplay US involvement or Obama's support-----global Wall Street and Foreign Economic Zone policies have driven this these several decades and have been installing this in the US.
Slavery's Global Comeback
150 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, buying and selling people into forced labor is bigger than ever. What "human trafficking" really means
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Slaves pan for gold in Accra, Ghana. Some have children with them as they wade into water poisoned by mercury used in the extraction process. (Lisa Kristine)
RANGOON, Burma — Earlier this year, Ko Lin, 21 at the time, left his hometown of Bago, 50 miles northeast of Rangoon, with a friend to look for work in Myawaddy, near the Thai border. The two found jobs there as day laborers loading and offloading goods, anything from rice to motorcycles, being illicitly transported by truck in and out of Thailand. After a month, Ko Lin had saved up the equivalent of about US$150 and decided to rejoin his family in Bago. Stopping first to pray at a local pagoda with, he and his friend met a super-amiable young woman who ended up pitching an opportunity to work in Thailand. Her uncle, she said, could arrange great jobs for them there.
Ko Lin was reluctant but bent to his friend's enthusiasm. The uncle turned out to be a trafficker who sold the two into forced labor in Chonburi, a city 60 miles east of Bangkok. They were taken there by an irregular route that involved walking through the jungle for eight days. Several weeks after arriving in Chonburi, Ko Lin was told he'd now be working at sea. When he resisted, he was knocked unconscious and woke up separated from his friend on a fishing boat in the Gulf of Thailand. From this point on, for months, he rarely if ever had more than two hours of sleep a night, always on a shared, cramped bed; he was given three meals only on days when the captain felt he'd pulled in enough fish to earn it; and when he was fed at all, it was always dregs from a catch that couldn't be sold on the market. His arms regularly became infected from the extended exposure of minor wounds to sea water. If he complained that he was feeling unwell, the crew would beat him. He was injured multiple times by heavy blocks or booms, once having to tend to a head wound with a handful of wet rice. Three months out, Ko Lin was rescued in a police raid.
There are now twice as many people enslaved in the world as there were in the 350 years of the transatlantic slave trade.Ma Moe, 34, and her husband lived in a suburb about an hour outside Rangoon, poor enough that on some days they had nothing to eat. A friend offered her a job as a domestic worker in China where, she was told, she could make between $100 and $200 a month. Despite her husband's objections, she decided to go. Near the border, her friend told her the trip would soon get rough and she should take some pills so as not to get carsick. The pills knocked her out almost immediately. When she came to, she was in a small village in China; she still doesn't know where. Kept with a few other women in a small house, Ma Moe was then taken around to different villages where she was offered up for sale as a "wife." After a failed escape attempt, when she was beaten by local police, a man from northern China bought her. By now, having spent a month-and-a-half as a Burmese commodity on a Chinese black market, she could hardly eat from the stress and was emaciated. Her owner was concerned—he wanted a child—so he had Ma Moe's blood tested; the results showed that she's HIV-positive; and he ended up abandoning her at the bus station. With no hope of being able to get back to Burma, she prayed to die. But a young newspaper seller, fending off an attempt by another apparent trafficker to get Ma Moe to go with him, called a police hotline for trafficking victims. The police coordinated Ma Moe's transfer to a Burmese anti-trafficking task force, and they ultimately took her home.
There's a plain-language word for the horror stories that Ko Lin and Ma Moe have survived, as anachronistic as it might sound: slavery. Though now universally illegal, slavery still exists, and it's common—here in Burma, across Southeast Asia, and around the world.
The leading demographic accounts of contemporary slavery project a global slave population of between 20 million and 30 million people. The highest ratios of slaves worldwide are from South and Southeast Asia, along with China, Russia, and the former satellite states of the Soviet Union. There is a significant slave presence across North Africa and the Middle East, including Lebanon. There is also a major slave trade in Africa. Descent-based slavery persists in Mauritania, where children of slaves are passed on to their slave-holders' children. And the North Korean gulag system, which holds 200,000 people, is essentially a constellation of slave-labor camps. Most of the world's slaves are in sedentary forms of servitude, such as hereditary collateral-debt bondage, but about 20 percent have been unwittingly trafficked by predators through deception and coercion. Human trafficking is often highly mobile and dynamic, leveraging modern communications and logistics in the same basic ways contemporary business does generally. After the earthquake of 2010 devastated Haiti, Hispaniola was quickly overrun with opportunistic traffickers targeting children to sell into forced domestic work or brothels.
As pervasive as contemporary slavery is, it's remained marginal as a global issue until relatively recently. There are a couple of big reasons why—one having to do with the scale of the problem, the other with the idea of slavery itself.
The Scale
The International Labor Organization (ILO) estimates the number of slaves in the world today at around 21 million. Kevin Bales, of Free the Slaves—the U.S. affiliate of the world's oldest human-rights organization, the U.K.-based Anti-Slavery International—(and the author of Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy) puts it at 27 million. Siddharth Kara of Harvard's Carr Center for Human Rights Policy says more than 29 million.
That range represents a tightening consensus. In the 1990s, some accounts had the global slave population as high as 100 million; others had it as low as 2 million. "It was nuts," says Bales. "I traced all these numbers back. The 100-million number, I finally found this guy in India who'd said it at at UN conference. I asked him, 'How did you get that?' And he said, 'I don't know, it was just a guess.' So nobody had the number."
Bales's 27 million—which as a statistician he considers a "conservative estimate" —is derived from secondary-source analysis. "It's still not great," he says, "in the sense that it's not based on random-sample surveys at the grass-roots level. We're doing that now, though, building much sounder numbers, and they're still coming out in the same range. ... So we're getting closer."
In which case, assuming even the rough accuracy of 27 million, there are likely more slaves in the world today than there have been at any other time in human history. For some quick perspective on that point: Over the entire 350 years of the transatlantic slave trade, 13.5 million people were taken out of Africa. That's equal to just half the the world's slave population today.
The Idea
Some of what's obscured contemporary slavery, then, has been a matter of quantitative analysis; but some has been conceptual: In the West, and particularly in the United States, slavery has long settled in the public imagination as being categorically a thing of the past.
One consequence of this is that when people apply the idea of slavery to current events, they tend to think of it as an analogy. That is, they tend to use the word to dramatize conditions that may be exploitive—e.g., terrible wages or toxic working environments—but that we'd never on their own call "slavery" if the kind of forced labor we used to call "slavery" still existed. "In 1994, when I was in the United Nations Working Group on Contemporary Forms of Slavery," Bales recalls, "a group came in and said they wanted the UN to declare incest a form of slavery. And we were like, incest is incest; you don't have to call it slavery."
But there's an inverse consequence to seeing slavery as a thing of the past, too: It can mean having a harder time recognizing slavery when it's right in front of us.
A slave in Kathmandu, Nepal, stacks 18 bricks at a time, each weighing four pounds, carrying them to nearby trucks for 18 hours a day. (Lisa Kristine)
Right after the end of the Cold War, people in Western cities—in Berlin, Paris, Amsterdam, London, New York—started noticing something pronounced about migration patterns out of the just-collapsed Soviet Bloc: The "immigrants" were disproportionately young women and girls. It took no one long to understand that these were prostitutes—or much longer to understand that they weren't operating freely; criminals were trafficking them out of Eurasia effectively as black-market goods, like opium or Kalashnikovs.
The dominant rhetoric that the coalition of Christian conservatives and anti-prostitution feminists who took the lead on this issue used at the time wasn't "slavery" but "trafficking for sexual exploitation." Around the same time, a movement started against sweatshop labor that developed its focus not broadly on the issue of forced labor but narrowly on the conditions of the sweatshops themselves, sometimes even just on safety issues within them.
Luis CdeBaca, the U.S. ambassador at large to monitor and combat trafficking in persons, sees both of these frameworks as inhibiting and, intentionally or not, ways to feel too comfortable about addressing the issues in question. "If we say the problem with domestic servants is that they're not covered by the Fair Labor Standards Act, and so let's just go out and make sure they get covered by labor laws around the world, we get to ignore, for example, the fact that domestic servants are being locked in and raped. It's not a wage issue; it's a crime issue. If we look at prostitution and we devolve back to the old debates about whether prostitution should be legal and regulated, should it be illegal and criminalized, we won't say, '... hey, why doesn't the 13th Amendment apply to a woman in prostitution just as much as to a woman on a farm?' Then we end up missing the reality of modern slavery."
Pattern Recognition
CdeBaca thinks we've been using euphemisms about slavery in our recent history scarcely less euphemistic than were "servant" or "peculiar institution" before the U.S. Civil War, noting current preferences for "gender-based violence" or "rape as a weapon of war" to describe what goes on in eastern Congo. "If rape becomes the more comfortable word than slavery," CdeBaca says, "you know slavery is a highly emotive term."
But if the president of the United States has nevertheless embraced the term "slavery," as Barack Obama now has with his speech at the Clinton Global Institute in September, you know it's also an emotive term whose time has come—or come again. The State Department, meanwhile, answers the question "What is modern slavery?" by implying, virtually to the point of stating, that it now considers "slavery" the umbrella term for crimes of "trafficking":
Over the past 15 years, "trafficking in persons" and "human trafficking" have been used as umbrella terms for activities involved when someone obtains or holds a person in compelled service.
The United States government considers trafficking in persons to include all of the criminal conduct involved in forced labor and sex trafficking, essentially the conduct involved in reducing or holding someone in compelled service. Under the Trafficking Victims Protection Act as amended (TVPA) and consistent with the United Nations Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children (Palermo Protocol), individuals may be trafficking victims regardless of whether they once consented, participated in a crime as a direct result of being trafficked, were transported into the exploitative situation, or were simply born into a state of servitude. Despite a term that seems to connote movement, at the heart of the phenomenon of trafficking in persons are the many forms of enslavement, not the activities involved in international transportation.
(Emph. added)
CdeBaca understands the Trafficking Victims Protection Act and the Palermo Protocol that State mentions here, both dating from 2000, to be crucial preconditions for the change in social conceptions about human trafficking and forced labor that have followed. Usually the dynamic is the other way around, CdeBaca says: A social movement grows and, if it's successful, after 10 years or so, Congress passes legislation or the UN (or some other international body) passes a resolution. With contemporary slavery, more than a decade of governmental and trans-governmental initiatives have seeded the social conversation, which has in turn articulated an emerging consensus around the language of slavery.
CdeBaca thinks this consensus is hugely consequential, not just domestically in the U.S.—where Obama has now both embraced the term "slavery" and issued an executive order to remove human trafficking and forced labor from federal contracting—but globally. "The fact that we're able to come into a place like Burma, which has come so far so fast just in the last 10 or 12 months, with this unified message is wonderful," he says, "because the government here isn't going to have to unlearn those differences. When we talked to the government [on Friday], they were talking about forced labor and forced prostitution as though they're the same concept. We didn't have to talk through 'here's why you need to care about forced labor as much as you care about forced prostitution,' or 'here's why the girls in the brothels matter.' They got it. And I think it's because they come into this at this moment, now."
The New Abolitionism
It's to the not-modest credit of modern civilization that the awareness of slavery has always given rise to anti-slavery movements. Abolitionism today may be more complex than what went before it only because it has to be. Contemporary slavery is, as Ethan Kapstein wrote in Foreign Affairs back in 2006, "a product of the same political, technological, and economic forces that have fueled globalization"—or as Andrew Forrest, the chairman of Fortescue Metals Group and founder of the anti-slavery group Walk Free, has it, "Slavery is the dark side of globalization."
In essence, organizations like Walk Free, or the Global Business Coalition Against Trafficking (gBCAT), want to harness the good, or at least potentially good, aspects of globalization to eliminate its most evil aspect. Forrest believes that it now makes maximum sense for global big businesses to integrate their risk-management strategies with their corporate-social-responsibility strategies and their procurement strategies, cleaning their supply chains of any involvement with forced labor once and for all. Forrest believes in the constructive power of potential shame, too, being focused currently on a campaign to recruit major corporations around the world to sign Walk Free's "zero tolerance for slavery pledge."
Slavery today is driven by the same political, technological, and economic forces as globalization itself.Projects like this won't necessarily be easy; in fact, their success will necessarily be a tough question. There are certainly precedents for it: Nike may be one of the most slave-free garment manufacturers in the world today, because it got hammered for its labor practices in the 1990s by a very successful campaign against it as a brand—brand equity being a very important, very bottom-line issue for a company like Nike. But what if we're looking instead at a mining company that needs to procure concrete for railway tracks to get its materials out, and the best-deal concrete is made by slave labor in Abu Dhabi by some nameless supplier? There's no brand equity at stake there. Mineral extraction is a similarly faceless industry. We all know who makes our cell phones; few of us know who makes the tantalum and coltan that go into them. That doesn't have to be note of cynicism, but it does get at the complexity of the challenge in leveraging global business's better angels against its worst instincts.
There will meanwhile be new opportunities for political will against slavery, particularly now that Obama has used the word—new legislative efforts, new instruments of international cooperation—and there will be new opportunities to build important anti-trafficking capacities, with law enforcement, with victim care and rehabilitation, and so on.
And then there will be social-awareness campaigns—which may represent the one strand of the contemporary anti-slavery movement skeptical observers are more inclined to be cynical about than they are about the leadership of global business. If you're tempted to think that way, consider before anything else that here in Rangoon, it's not only perfectly reasonable but a vital public-service announcement to say, "Kids, this is how you recognize it if someone's trying to trick you into slavery, and this is what you do about it ...." When I asked Ma Moe, who'd been sold into slavery by a friend, what was the most important thing she wanted people to understand about her experience, she lit up emotionally in a way she hadn't up to then, insisting emphatically on how crucial it is that people in Burma—especially young people—get the coaching they need to insulate themselves and their families against the risk of being trafficked, particularly given how sophisticated traffickers are at profiling victims and preying on trust.
Neither is any of this the hard part compared with the complex task of changing or putting an end outright to kinds of social norms that heighten the risk of capture by traffickers, particularly in contexts governed by the caste system or other forms of entrenched social hierarchy. Which aren't uncommon across South and Southeast Asia, and which can create barriers to human empathy every bit as powerful as what morally and psychologically enabled the open slave trade of the 16th-19th centuries.
Precedents
On the global level, there are historical reasons why a heightened social awareness of slavery could prove more effective than we might first be inclined to think.
"Stowage of the British Slave Ship 'Brookes' Under the Regulated Slave Trade, Act of 1788" (Thomas Clarkson)
As Bales likes to remember, there have been three major anti-slavery movements in the modern era prior to the nascent contemporary one. The first was started in 1787 by Anti-Slavery International—or as it was called at the time, the Society for Effecting the Termination of the Slave Trade—in London. Twenty years later, the slave trade in the British Empire was finished. This movement worked entirely through social mobilization; in fact, it was one of the first major social movements in the West. The Society inundated parliament with huge petitions against slavery, 517 altogether. It passed around anti-slavery cameos that fashionable women wore in bracelets and pins. And it disseminated Thomas Clarkson's drawing of the Liverpool-based slave ship Brookes, illustrating the horrible reality that slaves were forced to cross the Atlantic packed together like sardines, lying in their own excrement and vomit, for months. This picture was extremely shocking—and effective.
The second anti-slavery movement was marked by some of the most pivotal moral leadership in U.S. history, but it was also thwarted by a virtually total social division between the North and the South, and it culminated an enormous war that resulted in upward of three-quarters of a million deaths and new troubles for the United States' former slaves that have cast long shadows since.
Hierarchical societies still create empathy barriers as powerful as what enabled the open slave trade of the 16th-19th centuries.The third movement is less well known but offers a precedent for contemporary abolitionism that may be in some ways as compelling as the first. This was a global movement, which included luminaries like Mark Twain and Sarah Bernhardt, against the enslavement of between 5 and 10 million people in the Congo as the personal property of King Leopold II of Belgium. The purpose of this enslavement was to feed new technologies, particularly pneumatic rubber tires. But the breakthrough for this movement was also thanks to new technologies: portable cameras that enabled abolitionists to do magic-lantern shows in big theaters across Europe and America—a kind of documentary film before documentary films—graphically demonstrating the routine physical mutilation of Congolese slaves who failed to meet their "rubber quotas," which truly freaked viewers out and helped mobilize the public broadly. After this anti-slavery campaign was able to show the photos it had captured, social indignation turned to outrage, and Leopold, who'd completely denied everything until then—he could, because there was no proof of what he was doing—gave up, ended the enslavement, and, in 1908, relinquished the Congo to the Belgian government.
Let's see what the fourth one does. The most optimistic view says that as massive as slavery is today, it's also on the edge of its own extinction, needing only the right push. If the global slave population is 27 million, it's still 27 million out of a total of 7 billion, making it—and here's the paradox—the smallest fraction of the global population to be enslaved ever. If slavery generates between $30 billion and $45 billion a year to the global economy, it's a big industry, but it also amounts to the smallest ratio of the global economy ever represented by slave labor and slave output. While slavery has grown in absolute terms, it's shrunk in relative terms, and so, the theory goes, it's increasingly vulnerable.
A possibly less optimistic but still hopeful variation on this theme—well clear of the most pessimistic view, at any rate, which would be that slavery is simply endemic to global capitalism—is that slavery isn't just growing more slowly than the rest of the world is; it's also increasingly toxic to the rest of the world; and it's increasingly toxic in ways that the rest of the world will be forced to defend itself against. The same interests responsible for human trafficking and forced labor are, after all, also responsible for fostering other types of crime, as well as the kinds of corruption that slave-labor operations need for survival. If developed countries let slavery go unchecked, it will threaten to corrode the bilateral and multilateral agreements, and the international rule of law, that the whole global economy depends on. If developing countries don't check it, it may or may not mean slower short-term growth, but it will definitely complicate long-term growth growth, or stunt it altogether, as outside investors bring more scrutiny and demand more transparency. In the meantime, the more visible an issue slavery becomes globally, the less inclined I'd be to forget some of the most consequential uses that mobile technology and social media been put to around the world in the last two years—or to ignore the analogies between these uses and the tactics of the first and third modern anti-slavery movements.
The relationship between a country's tacit willingness to abide slavery and that country's risk of being left behind by the currents of global civilization isn't one that Burmese officials are necessarily inclined to discuss candidly. When I asked Brigadier General Khin Maung Si, chief of police and head of the human-trafficking office in the ministry of home affairs, about his government's emerging commitment to eliminating forced labor, he spoke only of poor economic conditions as a cause of slavery, not of slavery as a cause of economic stagnation. But it's a relationship that his government's new commitments acknowledge implicitly.
It's also a relationship that the leading exponents of the second modern anti-slavery movement were emphatic about and staked their political reasoning on. As The Atlantic's first editor, James Russell Lowell, wrote in the magazine's endorsement of Abraham Lincoln for president in 1860:
The inevitable tendency of slavery is to concentrate in a few hands the soil, the capital, and the power of the countries where it exists, to reduce the non-slaveholding class to a continually lower and lower level of property, intelligence, and enterprise. ... We do not, of course, mean to say that slaveholding states may not and do not produce fine men; but they fail, by the inherent vice of their constitution and its attendant consequences, to create enlightened, powerful, and advancing communities of men, which is the true object of all political organization.
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CLINTON/OBAMA create the conditions for harming the 99% by PRETENDING TO BE WORKING FOR THEM----Bush/Trump are installed to make the harm as bad as they can. TAG TEAM The posers are those at the lowest level of HADES because they are that knife in the back player.
Once the 99% sees this TAG TEAM pattern they know when they are being played---------stop allowing global 1% create factions when it is a 5% to the 1% who are the problem-----around the world and inside America-
'Growing Civil Unrest in the United States
October 18, 2016 Brandon
Social Divide
social-unrest-1
This last one is a bit of a blanket statement. Sure, it encompasses the last two divides but also a bit more. Similar to the political aspect of the divide, social divisions seem to have hit between party lines. Traditionalists are clashing with progressives and vice versa over how our society ought to operate. The downside is the progressives (who by definition support a larger government) have the government on their side. Of course politicians are going to lean towards the progressive side because it means more stuff they can justify getting paid for'.
I wanted to post the above article title------GROWING CIVIL UNREST IN THE UNITED STATES for this-----this article was written by that far-right wing MARXIST-----look at how they claim PROGRESSIVES are large government-----we all know Clinton global Wall Street ECONOMIC PROGRESSIVES are small government and have worked to build small government with Republicans. The big government is the connection of global corporate tribunals----NOT LEFT SOCIAL PROGRESSIVE----- we should be able to see when a BRANDON is setting us up................nothing says far-right than our survivalists!
'Brandon
Brandon is a survivalist from the U.S.’s North-east. He’s been an active camper and survival enthusiast since a young age and began TheSurvivalist.net with the hopes of sharing knowledge and bringing preppers together'.
10 Signs That Economic Riots And Civil Unrest Inside The United States Are Now More Likely Than Ever
By Michael Snyder, on August 14th, 2011
You should let the video footage of the wild violence that just took place in London burn into your memory because the same things are going to be happening all over the United States as the economy continues to crumble. We have raised an entire generation of young people with an “entitlement mentality”, but now the economy is producing very few good jobs that will actually enable our young people to work for what they feel they are entitled to. If you are under 30 in America today, things look really bleak. The vast majority of the good jobs are held by people that are older, and they aren’t about to give them up if they can help it. It is easy for the rest of us to tell young Americans to “take whatever they can”, but the reality is that there is intense competition for even the most basic jobs. For instance, McDonald’s recently held a “National Hiring Day” during which a million Americans applied for jobs. Only 6.2% of the applicants were hired. In the old days you could walk down to McDonald’s and get a job whenever you wanted to, but now any job is precious. The frustration among our young people is palpable. Most of them feel entitled to “the American Dream” and they feel like the system has failed them. Unfortunately, many of them are already turning to violence. But the economic riots and the civil unrest that we have already seen are nothing compared to what is coming. Americans are angry, and as the economy continues to collapse that anger is going to reach unprecedented heights.
In recent days, even many in the mainstream media have been openly wondering if the riots that happened in London could happen here too. There is a growing acknowledgement that this country is headed down a very dark path.
The sad thing is that these riots accomplish absolutely nothing. The recent London riots did not create any jobs and they certainly did not solve any economic problems. Instead, they actually hurt the economy even more because a huge am0unt of property was destroyed and people are even more afraid to continue with business as usual.
But when people get to the end of their ropes, most of the time they are not thinking rationally. When frustration erupts, the results can be very, very messy.
All over the United States we are already seeing some very troubling signs of the violence that is coming. The following are 10 signs that economic riots and civil unrest inside United States are now more likely then ever….
#1 Going to the state fair used to be such a fun thing for American families to do. But now no place is safe. The following is how one local ABC News affiliate described the “flash mob” attacks that took place at the Wisconsin state fair recently….
Milwaukee police said that around 11:10 p.m., squads were sent to the area for reports of battery, fighting and property damage being caused by an unruly crowd of “hundreds” of people. One officer described it as a “mob beating.”
Police said the group of young people attacked fair goers who were leaving the fair grounds. Police said that some victims were attacked while walking. They said others were pulled out of cars and off of motorcycles before being beaten.
One eyewitness said that the flash mob attacks at the Wisconsin state fair absolutely overwhelmed the limited police presence that was there….
When I saw the amount of kids coming down the road, all I kept thinking was, ‘There’s not enough cops to handle this.’ There’s no way. It would have taken the National Guard to control the number of kids that were coming off the road. They were knocking people off their motorcycles.
#2 According to a new Rasmussen survey, 48% of Americans believe that reductions in government spending are “at least somewhat likely” to result in civil unrest inside the United States. Unfortunately, perception often greatly influences reality.
#3 U.S. consumer confidence is now at its lowest level in 30 years.
#4 Joblessness among young Americans is at an epidemic level, and when rioting does break out it is usually young people that are leading the way. That is why the following statistics from an article in The Atlantic are so troubling….
One in five Americans are between 15 and 29-years old. And one in five of those Americans are unemployed. For minorities and the under-educated, the picture is much worse. Black teenagers have an unemployment rate of 44 percent, twice the rate for white teens.
#5 We are starting to see mindless violence in a lot of areas that used to be considered safe. In Kansas City on Saturday night, three young people were hit with bullets as they walked the streets of the Country Club Plaza. Mayor Sly James was about 50 yards away when the gunfire erupted. Authorities in Kansas City are considering a stricter curfew for that area.
#6 “Flash mobs” have become such a problem in Philadelphia that the mayor has imposed a strict curfew on young people. Now all teens between the ages of 13 and 18 must be indoors by 9 o’clock at night. The mayor also says that teens need to start pulling up their pants….
“Pull your pants up and buy a belt ’cause no one wants to see your underwear or the crack of your butt.”
#7 All over the United States we are seeing that many struggling Americans will do just about anything for money. For example, in Detroit recently three masked men crashed a vehicle through the entrance of a gas station and took off with an entire ATM machine.
#8 Desperate people do desperate things. Many of America’s “forgotten poor” are trying to survive any way that they can. For instance, a group of vagrants recently set up “a makeshift camp” near Prospect Park lake in Brooklyn. According to the New York Post, many nearby residents have been disturbed by what these “drifters” are doing to survive….
The drifters have been illegally trapping and cooking up the critters that call the park home, including squirrels, ducks and swan-like cygnets.
They used crude tactics to hunt their prey, including barbed fishing hooks that ripped off the top half of one poor gosling’s beak. They then cooked the meat over illegal fires. Some of the animals were eaten raw.
#9 According to CNN, sales of safes and vaults are absolutely soaring right now. One store owner told CNN that she believes that she is selling a lot more safes now because people are scared that civil unrest could be coming….
“Folks are worried about the decreasing value of the dollar, burglaries on the rise in their neighborhoods … and even the possibility that the unrest we are seeing in other parts of the world slipping over to our country.”
#10 Over the past 100 years, the American population has moved steadily into our big cities and the surrounding suburbs. This has created virtual “ghost towns” in our rural areas from coast to coast. Back in 1910, 72 percent of Americans lived in rural areas. Today, only 16 percent of Americans live in rural areas. But when you crowd huge masses of people close together that makes riots and civil unrest much more likely.
Most Americans are already fed up, and the economy is not even that bad yet. One recent survey found that 73 percent of Americans believe that the nation is “on the wrong track”. Another recent poll found that only 17 percent of Americans now believe that the U.S. government has the consent of the governed.
Millions of very frustrated young people believe that the economic system has failed them and that the political system no longer holds any answers.
America is rapidly approaching a breaking point. I have written previously about the collapse of society that we are already witnessing all over the United States. When the economy totally breaks down, most Americans are not going to be able to handle it.
Sadly, instead of coming together and trying to do something productive, many Americans will resort to rioting, looting and civil unrest. We have already seen this during local emergencies such as Hurricane Katrina.
But mindless violence accomplishes absolutely nothing positive. It just always makes things worse.
Unfortunately, logic and reason are not going to be enough to stop the gigantic wave of frustration that is coming. For most of the rest of us, it will be hard enough to get out of the way and protect our own families from the economic riots and the civil unrest that are coming.
The thin veneer of civilization that we all take for granted is starting to disappear. Hatred and anger are growing by the day. The United States is becoming a very frightening place.
So get ready. Our politicians certainly don’t have any answers for us. The debt ceiling deal was a complete and total joke, and corruption is absolutely rampant in Washington right now. Barack Obama is getting ready to leave for yet another vacation, and most of our politicians are only focused on the next election.
So don’t expect a “miracle” from those that are supposed to be leading us.
They don’t care about you.
You need to take care of yourself and your family and your friends.
A massive economic collapse is coming, and most Americans are going to be totally blindsided by it.
Don’t let that happen to you.
The idea that a raging far-right global 1% Wall STreet Clinton neo-liberal is in tears over Trump's immigration plans is RIDICULOUS. Global Wall Street is simply restructuring immigration policy around building global corporate campuses in the US cities deemed Foreign Economic Zones and their wanting to bring only the BEST OF THE BEST IN THE WORLD----meaning the global 1% and their 2%----with 99% of global citizens as global sweat shop slave labor. These few decades has seen immigration policy take these stances------
Global citizens are selected to come to US if they have wealth----if they work to install global Wall Street policies in their nations undermining the 99% in their countries-----or if they have family or strategic connections global Wall Street wants to exploit. THAT IS FAR-RIGHT WING IMMIGRATION POLICY.
TRUMP is taking these first weeks to cater to CONSERVATIVE REPUBLICANS so they think his later policies are good for them when they kill right wing conservative Republicans as much as left social Democrats. Making white citizens think a TRUMP is going to protect 99% of white citizens is FANTASY ISLAND.
TRUMP WAS INSTALLED ONLY BECAUSE THE NEXT STAGE OF MOVING FORWARD ONE WORLD IS CREATING CIVIL UNREST INSIDE US CITIES DEEMED FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONES----THIS IS WHAT HE IS DOING.
The abuse of EXECUTIVE ORDER has been happening these few decades with silence and complicity by our Congress and courts----Trump is simply creating that image of dictator that comes in all installations of Foreign Economic Zones overseas.
If Schumer was really distraught he would not have worked these several decades to build that global slave trading human capital distribution system.
Politics People
Schumer breaks down in tears while denouncing Trump’s travel ban
Dylan Stableford
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer broke down in tears on Sunday as he announced that Democrats are considering legislation to overturn President Trump’s controversial executive order temporarily banning immigration from seven predominantly Muslim countries.
“This executive order was mean-spirited and un-American,” Schumer said at a press conference in New York City, where he was surrounded by families affected by the ban. “It was implemented in a way that created chaos and confusion across the country, and it will only serve to embolden and inspire those around the globe who will do us harm.”
On Friday, Trump signed an executive order barring people from seven countries — Syria, Sudan, Yemen, Iran, Iraq, Libya and Somalia — from entering the United States for 90 days. It also stopped all refugees from entering the U.S. for 120 days and indefinitely suspended the entry of refugees from Syria.
But lawmakers, including several Republicans, criticized Trump for issuing the travel ban without warning.
“It is clear from the confusion at our airports across the nation that President Trump’s executive order was not properly vetted,” Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said in a joint statement. “We are particularly concerned by reports that this order went into effect with little to no consultation with the departments of State, Defense, Justice and Homeland Security.”
On NBC’s “Meet the Press,” White House chief of staff Reince Priebus said the administration’s lack of advance notice was by design.
“I don’t think you want a grace period,” Priebus said. “Because then people who want to do bad things to Americans would just move up their travel date two days in order to get into the country before the grace period is over.”
In an appearance on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said he’s concerned the travel ban may have gone too far.
“I think it’s a good idea to tighten the vetting process,” McConnell said. “But I also think it’s important to remember that some of our best sources in the war against radical Islamic terrorism are Muslims, both in this country and overseas.
“I think we need to be careful,” McConnell added. “We don’t have religious tests in this country.”
McConnell stopped short of declaring his opposition to the order. But it’s clear Senate Democrats are ready to push back.
“We’re demanding the president reverse these executive orders that go against what we are, everything we have always stood for,” Schumer said. “We’re here today to deliver a vociferous ‘no’ to the president and the misguided executive orders that are shocking to a majority of Americans and are inflicting wounds on this country.”
On Saturday night, a federal court in Brooklyn issued an emergency stay temporarily blocking part of the order amid a wave of protests at airports around the country.
The court’s decision, which affects people who have been detained in airports, came after the ACLU and other activist groups filed a class action lawsuit on behalf of two Iraqis who were held at New York City’s John F. Kennedy International Airport.
More than 100 people, including some with current visas, were detained or turned around at airports as a result of the temporary ban.
Earlier Sunday, a defiant Trump took to Twitter to address the backlash
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Connect US immigration policy these few decades to what is happening in Syria----the same happened in Asian nations several years ago----as with Latin American nations. A brutal dictator is installed----brings in a minority to be that 5% to his 1% ------the Assad's brought Alawite Muslims from Saudi Arabia to be his administration killing the 99% of Syrians. Saddam Hussein did the same with the Sunnis in Iraq-----and MAO did the same in China during the GREAT LEAP FORWARD---MOVING FORWARD by the same global 1%. The tensions in Syria stem from sovereign citizens having lived many centuries in Syria being repressed and impoverished by IMMIGRANTS TO SYRIA. The Alawite citizens are not bad ----they are simply being USED BY GLOBAL 1%.
We have shouted that all installations of Foreign Economic Zones start this way----a nation is filled with NGOs and CIA creating civil tensions and unrest. ASSAD was never the target for removal by global Wall Street----the war was about displacement of global citizens inside Syria-----many centuries-old sovereign Syrian citizens are those pushed to refugee camps and global labor pools around the world.
'The differences between Alawites and Sunnis in Syria have sharpened dangerously since the beginning of the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad, whose family is Alawite. The reason for tension is primarily political, rather than religious: top position in Assad’s army are held by Alawite officers, while most of the rebels from the Free Syrian Army come from Syria’s Sunni majority'.
After these few years of civil war it is time to bring in WORLD BANK----IMF----to build Foreign Economic Zones inside Syria. This further isolates IRAN---and PALESTINIANS. While Obama simply allowed all this to play out---it is now Trump's turn to call for peace and building Syria's economy. All NGOs know this is the same game plan over several decades and it has NOTHING TO DO WITH RELIGION.
"Whatever you think about President Assad, the fact is that he is the president of Syria,” Tulsi replied. “In order for any peace agreement, in order for any possibility of a viable peace agreement to occur, there has to be a conversation with him,” Gabbard said'.
Just Back From Syria, Rep. Gabbard Brings Message: 'There Are No Moderate Rebels'
By Susan Jones | January 26, 2017 | 5:43 AM EST
Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) meets with Syrian religious leaders in Aleppo, led by Archbishop Denys Antoine Chahda of the Syrian Catholic Church of Aleppo, and joined by Archbishop Joseph Tabji of Maronite Church of Aleppo, Rev. Ibrahim Nseir of the Arab Evangelical Presbyterian Church of Aleppo, and others. Each called for peace, and an end to foreign support of terrorists who are trying to rid Syria of its secular, pluralistic, free society. (Photo from Gabbard's website, courtesy of Abraham Williams)(CNSNews.com) - Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, a Hawaii Democrat, says she made a secret, four-day trip to Syria -- meeting with ordinary people and even President Bashar al-Assad -- because the suffering of the Syrian people "has been weighing heavily on my heart."
"I wanted to see if there was in some small way, a way that I could express the love and the aloha and the care that the American people have for the people of Syria, and to see firsthand what was happening there, to see that situation there," Gabbard told CNN's "The Lead" with Jake Tapper on Wednesday.
She returned with a message:
"I'll tell you what I heard from the Syrian people that I met with, Jake, walking down the street in Aleppo, in Damascus, hearing from them.
“They expressed happiness and joy at seeing an American walking through their streets. But they also asked why the U.S. and its allies are providing support and arms to terrorist groups like al-Nusra, al-Qaida or al-Sham, ISIS who are on the ground there, raping, kidnapping, torturing and killing the Syrian people.
"They asked me, why is the United States and its allies supporting these terrorist groups who are destroying Syria when it was al Qaida who attacked the United States on 9/11, not Syria. I didn't have an answer for them,” Gabbard said.
“The reality is... every place that I went, every person that I spoke to, I asked this question to them, and without hesitation, they said, there are no moderate rebels. Who are these moderate rebels that people keep speaking of?
Regardless of the name of these groups, the strongest fighting force on the ground in Syria is al Nusra, or al Qaida and ISIS. That is a fact,” Gabbard said.
“There is a number of different, other groups -- all of them essentially are fighting alongside, with, or under the command of the strongest group on the ground that's trying to overthrow Assad.
“The Syrian people recognize and they know that if President Assad is overthrown, then al Qaida -- or a group like al Qaida, that has been killing Christians, killing people simply because of their religion, or because they won’t support their terror activities, they will take charge of all of Syria.
“This is the reality that the people of Syria are facing on the ground, and why they are pleading with us here in the United States to stop supporting these terrorist groups. Let the Syrian people themselves determine their future, not the United States, not some foreign country.”
Gabbard said initially, she didn't plan to meet with President Assad: "When the opportunity arose to meet with him, I did so because I felt it's important that if we profess to truly care about the Syrian people, about their suffering, then we've got to be able to meet with anyone that we need to if there is a possibility that we could achieve peace, and that's exactly what we talked about."
Tapper noted that Assad is responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths and millions of people being forced from their homes and even their country during the five-year civil war:
"Did you have any compunctions about meeting with somebody like that, giving him any sort of enhanced credibility because a member of the United States Congress would meet with someone like that?" Tapper asked.
"Whatever you think about President Assad, the fact is that he is the president of Syria,” Tulsi replied. “In order for any peace agreement, in order for any possibility of a viable peace agreement to occur, there has to be a conversation with him,” Gabbard said.
“The Syrian people will determine his outcome and what happens with their government and their future, but our focus, my focus, my commitment is on ending this war that has caused so much suffering to the Syrian people.”
In a speech on the House floor earlier this month, Gabbard criticized America’s “interventionist wars.”
“Our limited resources should go toward rebuilding our communities here at home, not fueling more counterproductive regime change wars abroad.”
She urged her fellow lawmakers to support her bill, the “Stop Arming Terrorists Act,” legislation that would stop the U.S. government from using taxpayer dollars to directly or indirectly support groups allied with terrorist groups such as ISIS and al Qaeda in their war to overthrow the Syrian government.
“The fact that our resources are being used to strengthen the very terrorist groups we should be focused on defeating should alarm every American,” Gabbard said.
I urge my colleagues to support this bipartisan legislation and stop this madness.”
Gabbard supported Sen. Bernie Sanders for president, but after the election, she was one of many people invited to meet with President-elect Donald Trump at Trump Tower in New York.
"President-elect Trump asked me to meet with him about our current policies regarding Syria, our fight against terrorist groups like al-Qaeda and ISIS, as well as other foreign policy challenges we face," Gabbard said about the meeting.
“I felt it important to take the opportunity to meet with the President-elect now before the drumbeats of war that neocons have been beating drag us into an escalation of the war to overthrow the Syrian government -- a war which has already cost hundreds of thousands of lives and forced millions of refugees to flee their homes in search of safety for themselves and their families.”
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Some Americans over these few decades have though all this empire-building was PATRIOTIC------what WE THE PEOPLE must do is look at what was done OVERSEAS---and see how global Wall Street policies are doing the same thing today in the US-----our US cities deemed Foreign Economic Zones......and think about far-right immigration policies installed through CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA now Trump moving forward these same goals.
Left social Democrats were always shouting against these deliberate instability/occupation policies while right wing voters tended towards thinking it was patriotic........well, now it is right wing voters thinking these same policies brought back to US are bad. OF COURSE THEY ARE BAD---THEY ALWAYS WERE.
Did Reagan Finance Genocide in Guatemala?
- By SANTIAGO WILLS
Ronald Reagan (left) was a close ally of Efrain Rios Montt (right), the former Guatemalan dictator who was recently convicted to 80 years in prison for the genocide of the Ixil people. As U.S. president Reagan provided military aid to Guatemala, in spite of warnings of human rights violations in the Central American country.On Monday, a Guatemalan court ordered the country's government to apologize to the Ixil population for the crimes of José Efraín Ríos Montt, a dictator who was sentenced to 80 years in prison for his role in war crimes committed between 1982 and 1983.
The verdict concluded that the army, under the command of Ríos Montt, had engaged in a campaign of genocide against the Ixiles, a small Mayan ethnic group. In that sense, it finally offered an answer to the thousands of victims' families who had pleaded for justice since the 1980s.
The trial did not answer all questions, however. For example, it did not place much attention on the extent of U.S. involvement in Guatemala during the 17 months of Ríos Montt's regime. That's in spite of the fact that America reached out to the Central American country offering military aid to combat left-wing guerrillas.
THOSE LEFT WING GUERRILLAS ALWAYS THE REASON FOR US MILITARY WEAPONS TO FLOW INTO NATIONS.
"U.S. military and intelligence units worked closely with the Guatemalan army over the decades of Guatemala's civil war," said Geoff Thale, Central America Program Director at the Washington Office for Latin America (WOLA). "Direct U.S. military aid was suspended during the Carter Administration, but then restored by the Reagan Administration, whose Cold War worldview clearly prioritized the fight against insurgents and their civilian supporters over respect for human rights."
Indeed, declassified documents and various reports by human rights organizations depict a story that was widely ignored during the trial, and that raises questions about U.S. foreign policy and the role the country played during the Ixil genocide.
A Bum Rap: Reagan and Guatemala
In 1966, the U.S. trained Guatemalan forces in counterinsurgency operations to fight the growing numbers of left-wing guerrillas that were slowly taking over rural areas of the country. Like many other South and Central American countries, Guatemala was in the midst of a civil war that pitted communist guerrillas against right wing governments helped by brutal armies. The origins of the conflict, which would ultimately total nearly 200,000 deaths, were in part caused by a CIA-backed coup that removed Jacobo Árbenz, a progressive president that intended to promote a full-fledged land reform.
Árbenz was replaced by a military junta led by Coronel Castillo Armas in 1954. The coronel was killed three years later, and replaced by a series of military officers who gradually continued to escalate the violence against guerrillas and indigenous populations.
In 1977, the U.S. State Department published a human rights report that ended military aid to Guatemala. The document detailed abuses and acts of violence that forced the Carter administration to cut direct security assistance. Previously pledged direct or indirect aid, however, was not forbidden, according to Memoria del silencio, a 1999 report written by Guatemala's truth commission. Despite mounting concerns about human rights abuses, between 1978 and 1980, the military received $7.9 million through the State Department's Military Assistance Program and Foreign Military Sales program.
"The main way that Guatemala used to obtain dual use military equipment and technology (for military and non-military purposes) during the period of 1978 to 1982 was though the United States," the report concludes.
Ríos Montt became the country's leader after a bloody military coup in March 1982. He set up a military junta, suspended the constitution, and began a crackdown on violence that was initially praised by the United States. U.S. State department officials highlighted the end of the feared death squads that roamed Guatemala City, and said that the general was doing a good job handling the country.
Meanwhile, journalists, human rights activists, and opposition leaders warned international observers about massacres and war crimes in the mountainous regions of Quiché and Chimaltenango. The army was targeting the Ixil and other indigenous groups, killing them indiscriminately, whether they had helped the guerrillas or not.
Ríos Montt, an evangelical Christian known for his supposed piety, repeatedly denied the accusations, labeling the reports as acts of propaganda from left-wing groups. "There is no repression by the army," he told documentary filmmaker Pamela Yates in 1982. "Our strength lies in our capacity to make command decisions. That's the most important thing, because if I can't control the Army, then what am I doing here?"
In the meantime, the Reagan administration had tried to improve its ties with Guatemala. In various news shows, officials proclaimed the possible arrival of a new era for the country. By November, Reagan's administration proposed renewed arms aid, citing an improvement in the human rights situation.
The following month, Reagan met with Ríos Montt, "a man of great personal integrity and commitment," according to the president. When Reagan was asked about human rights violations in Guatemala he said, ''I am inclined to believe they've been getting a bum rap.''
Several months before the meeting, the CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency had already concluded otherwise, according to declassified documents compiled by the George Washington University's National Security Archive. And, according to forensic archivist Kate Doyle, by that October, the U.S. embassy was investigating credible reports of numerous massacres involving the Guatemalan military.
Reagan's administration ultimately decided to ignore the warnings, and indirect assistance was secretly resumed through the CIA. "Overall, U.S. intelligence, training, political support and assistance to the Guatemalan government and military in the early and mid-1980s uncritically supported counter-insurgency strategies that targeted civilians, in the cities and in rural areas like the Ixil Triangle," Geoff Thale said. "U.S. policy makers of that era bear some responsibility for the human rights abuses that took place."
Ríos Montt was overthrown in August 1983 in yet another military coup. Nevertheless, he maintained an active public life. He founded a political party called the Guatemalan Republican Front in 1989 and ran for the presidency, despite a constitutional ban. He also served as a congressman from 1995 to 2004, and then from 2008 to 2012. While he was in Congress, his office gave him immunity from prosecution. In January 2013, when the immunity finally expired, a Guatemalan judge charged him with genocide and war crimes (a Spanish court had done the same years earlier).
In the past few months, 96 witnesses testified against him in court and his conviction raised hopes of similar proceedings in Guatemala and across the globe.
"The trial of General Rios Montt is a victory for human rights activists in Guatemala and internationally," Thale said. "It shows that societies that have been deeply scarred by massive human rights abuses do not have to simply bury the past."
________________________________________________
Accepting Syrian refugees was never the question in immigration. The problem is global Wall Street's part in creating these sovereign instabilities over and over and over globally then fixing that problem by sending citizens as refugees and it has been documented---many end in Foreign Economic Zones as global sweat shop labor.
What is the next stage here in the US in bringing America to ONE WORLD ONE GOVERNANCE FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONES? Creating these same instabilities in our US cities-------that is what drove CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA and its supposed liberal stance on immigration----they EXPLOIT AND ENSLAVE GLOBAL LABOR POOL----because they are far-right wing so the intent was never to integrate our immigrant citizens with justice. REAGAN/BUSH did not open Texan and CA borders to Latin American floods of immigrants because they are kind people----they did it to exploit and destabilize US economies. Again, it is not the immigrant families fault that REAGAN/CLINTON have made their nations unlivable-----and are now doing the same in US cities deemed Foreign Economic Zones.
'Why aren't Gulf states taking them in?'
The Gulf states partnered with global Wall Street-----Saudi Arabia----Bahrain----Qatar-----Jordon----have spent several decades getting rid of their sovereign citizens by pushing them into the global labor pool so NO, THEY DON'T WANT TO TAKE more citizens in. These middle-eastern nations tied to global Wall Street have a super-majority of global immigrant population in their nations. They are the global 1% and their 2%-----
These kinds of civil unrest are now coming to US and it will be the same far-right wing MARXISTS and NGOs creating the same instabilities in our US cities----all for no reason other than our government has been hijacked and we simply need to GET RID OF THE GLOBAL WALL STREET PLAYERS----no violence needed.
Syrian refugees: Which countries welcome them, which ones don't
By Michael Martinez, CNN
Updated 5:22 PM ET, Thu September 10, 2015
A cold reception: Gulf states shun Syrians 01:52Story highlights
- Obama unveils U.S. effort to take in at least 10,000 Syrian refugees next fiscal year
- Turkey is home to almost half of the 4.1 million Syrian refugees
- Several Gulf countries have offered zero resettlements to Syrians
Some 4.1 million Syrians are fleeing a homeland riven by more than four years of civil war. Some countries have taken in so many migrants it's caused a population spike, while others have done little or nothing at all.Here's a country-by-country look at what is being done to address the worst refugee crisis since the Rwandan genocide more than 20 years ago, according to experts.Which countries take in the Syrian refugees?
Turkey: 1.9 million
Remarkably, this country now shelters almost half of the Syrian refugees and clearly has more than it can handle.
It's the No. 1 destination for displaced families.
Erdogan: 'Western world to be blamed' for migrant crisis 03:12
Geography explains much of it: Turkey and Syria share a border.
The masses are so vast that 14% of them are sheltered in camps, U.S. figures show.
A staggering share of them are children and teens: More than half are under age 17, according to U.N. figures.
Lebanon: 1.1 million
The influx is so profound in Lebanon that the 1.1 million Syrian refugees mark a 25% increase in the country's 4.4 million population.
Those figures make Lebanon the country with the highest per capita concentration of refugees, the United Nations says. It also shares a border with Syria.
"The influx of a million refugees would be massive in any country. For Lebanon, a small nation beset by internal difficulties, the impact is staggering," U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres said last year.
Jordan: 629,000
Jordan provides shelter to a large number of refugees from Syria, Iraq, Somalia and Sudan, but Syrians constitute the majority of Jordan's refugee population, the United Nations says.
Jordan has a history of taking in refugees. Nearly half of its 7 million population is of Palestinian origin.
The Syrian arrivals, however, strain resources and "could have a negative impact on Jordanian public opinion of refugees and make preserving the country's asylum space in the country challenging," the United Nations says.
About 20% of the Syrian arrivals live in camps.
Iraq: 249,000
Like Syria, Iraq has been torn by attacks launched by ISIS, the extremist Islamist group that has captured portions of both countries for what it calls its Islamic caliphate.
Not surprisingly, most of the Syrian refugees have settled in northern areas such as Irbil, Duhuk and Nineveh, which are among the closest to the Syrian border and have large Kurdish populations, the United Nations says.
The notion of Syrian refugees in Iraq may strike some as ironic, if not absurd, because Iraq has deteriorated under sectarian strife and ISIS assaults, producing a sizable population of Iraqi refugees.
Photos: Destination unknown: The struggle of refugees at Keleti station
"As Syria's civil war has dragged on, the direction of forced migration for many Iraqi refugees has reversed. Tens of thousands of Iraqis who sought refuge in Syria between 2003 and 2011 have returned home, joining about a million Iraqis who were already internally displaced," Refugees International said.
About 38% of the Syrian refugees live in camps in Iraq, the U.S. State Department says.
Egypt: 132,000
Egypt rounds out this look at how the Mideast hosts most of the Syrian refugees.
No refugees live in camps there.
In fact, Egyptian billionaire Naguib Sawiris, one of the region's wealthiest men, has offered to buy an island for refugees. He would like to buy an isle from Greece or Italy. His name for the proposed island home: Hope.
Which countries are getting Syrian asylum requests?
Germany: 98,700
As Germany faces the largest share of Syrian requests for asylum in Europe, Chancellor Angela Merkel called for quotas to be set for each country to take a share of displaced people, including from Syria.
Germany expects the overall asylum requests to soar above the current U.N. count of 98,700 from Syrians alone.
A Syrian family arrives at a train station in Saalfeld, Germany.
There could be 800,000 applications for asylum in Germany this year, and the country could take 500,000 refugees annually for several years, Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel has said.
Sweden: 64,700
Sweden joins Germany in demonstrating a high standard of responsibility in the refugee crisis, and Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Lofven joined Merkel at a press conference this week in urging a Europe-wide solution for hosting refugees.
In the 1990s, Sweden accepted 84,000 refugees from the Balkans.
"We accept that every person has a right to seek asylum," Swedish Foreign Affairs Minister Margot Wallstrom said. "This also puts the European solidarity to a test. I think it's important that we signal being a community that rests on common values of democracy and defense of human rights."
France: 6,700
The number of asylum requests has been relatively low.
But they will surely increase now that French President François Hollande has said France is ready to take on more responsibility and host 24,000 refugees over the next two years.
The French leader said this number would be France's share under a proposal by the European Commission for EU nations to take in 120,000 refugees over the next two years.
"We will do so because it is the principle to which France is committed," Hollande said.
United Kingdom: 7,000
The United Kingdom will likely see an upswing in asylum requests now that it has said it will take up to 20,000 Syrian refugees over the next five years.
British PM says UK will resettle 20,000 new refugees 02:47
But Britain will focus on resettling vulnerable refugees from camps in countries bordering Syria, not those who have already entered Europe, Prime Minister David Cameron said Monday.
"This provides refugees with a more direct and safe route to the United Kingdom rather than risking the hazardous journey to Europe, which has tragically cost so many lives," he said.
The refugees will receive a five-year humanitarian protection visa, Cameron said. Britain has been the second largest provider of humanitarian aid to Syrian refugees within the Middle East region, according to U.N. figures.
Denmark: 11,300
Denmark has received a relatively large number of Syrian asylum requests but has sought to discourage the arrival of more migrants.
On Wednesday, Danish authorities tried to restrict migrants from crossing into the country from central Europe. Danish police said via Twitter it blocked access to some highways and suspended some international railway traffic.
The country earlier had paid for ads in Arabic in four Lebanese newspapers to get the word out about its new, tightened restrictions -- such as reducing social benefits -- to try to prevent refugees from getting into the Scandinavian nation.
"We cannot simply keep up with the present flow," Immigration and Integration Minister Inger Stojberg, a member of the right-wing Venstre Party, said on Facebook. "In light of the huge influx to Europe these days, there is good reason for us to tighten rules and get that effectively communicated."
Hungary: 18,800
Many Syrian refugees are reluctant to register an asylum application in Hungary.
Having traveled north through the Balkans, those arriving on the country's border with Serbia have had police greet them, and they've been forced to wait, sometimes for days, in holding areas and transit camps, where conditions are said to be poor.
Tensions flare along Serbia-Hungary border 02:17
Many migrants would prefer to register as refugees in countries such as Germany, Sweden and Austria, continuing their journey through Hungary to Northern and Western Europe.
Hungary's right-wing government, which has been trying to stop the flood of migrants, has erected a barbed wire fence along its more than 160-kilometer (100-mile) border with Serbia to prevent them from crossing there.
Serbia, which has received 49,500 asylum requests from Syrian refugees, is not a member of the European Union.
Other European countries
Syrian refugees have made a wide range of requests for asylum in other parts of Europe, including -- between April 2011 and this July -- 5,500 in Spain, 14,100 in the Netherlands, 18,600 in Austria, 8,300 in Switzerland and 15,000 in Bulgaria, according to the United Nations.
Italy, where many migrants who've made the perilous Mediterranean crossing from North Africa first land, had received 2,143 asylum applications as of July, the United Nations said.
Greece, which lies on a popular transit route from Turkey north through the Balkans to Northern Europe, has seen more than 250,000 people arrive on its shores this year, according to the International Organization for Migration. It had received 3,545 asylum applications as of July, U.N. figures show.
What's North America doing?
United States: 1,500 resettlements
About 1,500 Syrian refugees have been admitted to the United States since the start of the conflict in 2011, the vast majority of them this fiscal year.
Here's a breakdown: 23 in 2011, 41 in 2012, 45 in 2013, 249 in 2014 and 1,199 so far this fiscal year, which ends September 30, according to the State Department.
About 300 more refugees are expected to be admitted by the end of this fiscal year. This equates to a grand total of about 1,800 refugees from Syria's four-year civil war being admitted to the United States by October 1, according to U.S. officials.
In the face of growing questions about such small numbers, President Barack Obama ordered his administration to "scale up" the number of Syrian refugees -- at least 10,000 in the next fiscal year, a White House spokesman said Thursday.
The proposed resettling of at least 10,000 Syrian refugees would be allocated out of a U.S. quota of 75,000 refugee admissions slated for next fiscal year, beginning October 1, a senior administration official said.
That quota applies to refugees from all over the world and is determined at the beginning of the fiscal year, but Obama can raise that quota if there's a crisis. Secretary of State John Kerry has already indicated to lawmakers that such an increase is in the works.
Should the U.S. be doing more to help Syrian Refugees? 05:01
The United States has given the largest share of aid to the Syrian refugee crisis, more than $574 million, or 31% of total aid donated, the United Nations said.
Opinion: Why U.S. should do more for refugees
Canada: 10,000 resettlements
More than 2,370 Syrian refugees have resettled in Canada since January 2014, and the government promised in January to accept 10,000 Syrian refugees over a three-year period, the Toronto Sun reported.
Since that pledge, 1,074 Syrian refugees arrived in Canada, the newspaper said.
What about other wealthy nations?
Australia: 12,000 resettlements
Prime Minister Tony Abbott said his country would take in an extra 12,000 migrants fleeing conflict in the Middle East.
The intake almost doubles the number of people currently allowed into Australia through its humanitarian program, which is capped at 13,750 each year.
Photos: 24 hours of Europe's migration crisis
Priority would go to persecuted minorities -- especially women, children and families -- who are in camps in Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey, Abbott said.
Canberra also plans to spend $44 million on food, blankets and emergency supplies to support 240,000 people in UNHCR camps as part of its $230 million aid program
Amnesty International said other high-income countries -- specifically Russia, Japan, Singapore and South Korea -- have offered zero resettlements to the Syrians.
Are countries obligated to take in refugees?
How many refugees are Gulf countries taking in?
Saudi Arabia: 0
Kuwait: 0
Qatar: 0
Bahrain: 0
United Arab Emirates: 250,000
They are collectively known as the Persian Gulf states, and even though they share a language and the Arabian Peninsula with Syria, the Gulf nations are among the few nations that haven't participated in the 1951 U.N. treaty on refugees, the agreement that energizes the West's efforts to provide asylum to refugees from far-flung corners of the globe.
A cold reception: Gulf states shun Syrians 01:52
In short, the Gulf nations aren't legally obligated to provide refuge or asylum.
Nadim Houry, Human Rights Watch deputy director for the Middle East and North Africa, has called those wealthy countries' inaction in the Syrian crisis "shameful."
The United Arab Emirates would seem to be the exception.
The UAE has received more than 100,000 Syrian nationals since the Syrian crisis began in 2011 and extended residency permits to them, bringing the number of Syrians living there to almost 250,000, a UAE government source told CNN.
"We would like to see the Syrian refugees stay close to their homeland and to support them while they are there, so they can eventually return to their homeland," the source said, adding that most refugees fleeing to Europe will likely never return to Syria.
The source said the UAE also is financing al Mreejab Al Fhood refugee camp in Jordan, contributing some $72 million over two years for camps elsewhere in that country and in Lebanon, Iraq and Turkey.
The Gulf nations have said each has given millions of dollars to help the refugees, amounting to more than $500 million over 2½ years, according to the United Nations.
The Gulf states also say that Syrians have entered their countries on visas and continue living there.
Why aren't Gulf states taking them in?
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Throughout Obama was saw FRACKING CORPORATIONS moving in across Eastern Europe under the guise of helping those sovereign citizens while simply maximizing wealth----who owns the fracking natural gas industries-----the same global 1% owning the oil and gas industries. Russia and Putin stood with Assad in Syria while the people having installed the Assad family----global Wall Street pretended to be concerned about these wars and atrocities. Geopolitics does see Russian rich wanting to keep global Wall Street at bay----but the Gorbachev RUSSIAN OLIGARCHS are global 1% ONE WORLD ONE GOVERNANCE.
Trump used the ending of war in Syria to install his EXXON-MOBILE GLOBAL 1% into Russia ----so Foreign Economic Zone building will begin in Syria with Putin saying little.
IT IS ALL TEAM GLOBAL 1%-----IT IS BAD FOR SYRIAN PEOPLE -----IT IS BAD FOR AMERICAN PEOPLE.
These oil corporations are all the same global 1%--------Bush/Koch-----and all want Syria as a Foreign Economic Zone----
Gabbard is simply that step-----bring peace with the sale of WORLD BANK/IMF building of Foreign Economic Zones to create jobs.
Dec 15, 2016 @ 03:10 PM
Exxon's Sanctioned Russian Oil Deal Threatens Rex Tillerson As Trump's Secretary Of State
Kenneth Rapoza ,
Contributor
I cover business and investing in emerging markets.
Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.
Russia's President Vladimir Putin (R) and ExxonMobil Chairman and CEO Rex Tillerson (L) attend at the ceremony of the signing of an agreement between state-controlled Russian oil company Rosneft and ExxonMobil in the Black Sea port of Tuapse back in June 2012. A joint venture with Rosneft has been on hold because of sanctions against Russia. (Photo by MIKHAIL KLIMENTYEV/AFP/Getty Images)
President-elect Donald Trump wants him. But many Russia-phobic Republicans and arguably not a single Democratic in the Senate will vote for Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State.
Tillerson announced his retirement Wednesday as CEO of Exxon after 41 years at the oil giant following Trump's nominating him to replace John Kerry at the State Department. Tillerson brings years of experience in dealing with foreign leaders in oil rich nations, including unsavory ones in the Middle East. But of most concern is likely to be Tillerson's relationship with Vladimir Putin. Exxon has a $720 million joint venture with Rosneft, run by Putin's friend Igor Sechin. That deal has been put on ice since the White House sanctioned Russian oil and gas companies in July 2014.
In 2013 and 2014, both Rosneft and Exxon established various entities to conduct exploration and research activities throughout Russia. Each joint venture remains on hold based on rules and regulations set in the sectoral sanctions policies of both the U.S. and E.U. Exxon says that its maximum before-tax exposure to loss from these joint ventures as of December 31, 2015, was $1 billion.
Exxon is not commenting on Tillerson's nomination.
Anti-Putin Republicans led by John McCain will likely vote against Tillerson's appointment in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. No date has been set for that vote. McCain's office did not return requests for comment either. But Republican Senator and Chairman of the Committee, Bob Corker, called Tillerson "a very impressive individual" who "has an extraordinary working knowledge of the world. I congratulate him on his nomination and look forward to meeting with him and chairing his confirmation hearing." Corker was also in the running for cabinet post.
While Corker's nomination may be Trump transition team's way of buttering up the Senator to get their man through committee, Corker will have to do the same with McCain and another Putin skeptic, Lindsey Graham. Both may put the position on hold in committee, meaning it never gets to the Senate floor.
"Tillerson's nomination reflects Trump's comfort with top tier CEOs and other business people. He is a great example of the businessman-statesman," says Ariel Cohen, a senior fellow for the Atlantic Council in Washington. "He succeeded in cutting an unprecedented oil deal with Rosneft and has an outstanding working relationship with the Kremlin. But his nomination may run into some headwinds," he says. "Some Republicans on the Hill are concerned about the perceived threat of Russia. They may oppose his nomination precisely because of his business dealings with the Kremlin."
Tillerson has a long history in Russia. He was involved in negotiating the sale of exiled Russian oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovosy's Yukos Oil in a bidding war with Chevron. The Rosneft joint venture to drill in the Kara Sea made sense at the time when oil was $85 a barrel, but drilling through ice and rough, cold northern seas for hydrocarbons may not look as attractive with oil in the $50s.
It is not unheard of for the Senate to reject a president's nomination for a cabinet position. In 1989, George H.W. Bush's candidate for Secretary of Defense, John Tower, was blocked in a senate vote for serving under the president. It was the first time the senate blocked a presidential nominee in 30 years. Tillerson could face a similar fate because of the Russia factor.
If Tillerson is not confirmed, then it will be back to the drawing board for Trump.
Generally speaking, the President of the United States has the authority to impose and remove sanctions using the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. According to the State Department, the President can delegate administration of a sanctions regime to State or Treasury to determine which individuals and organizations meet the criteria for sanctions. But congress also has the authority to legislate sanctions and despite it being a Republican congress, it is more or less a Cold Warrior congress that considers Russia a natural enemy. George W. Bush and Russia had good working relations and Obama called for a reset of Russia relations in his first term.
Oil Markets Waiting
Tillerson's appointment was applauded by Russian fund managers and some oil industry investors who are hopeful that sectoral sanctions get removed at some point next year.
"I think sanctions will be lifted within one month after inauguration of Trump," says an overly optimistic Arent Thijsen, CEO and partner at Blauwtulp Wealth Management in The Netherlands. Thijsen invests in the Russian market. "It feels to me like Trump has made his geo political analysis and has concluded that Russia will never be able to compete with the U.S. as superpower. The might of Russia is based on the past, Soviet nuclear weapons. Their economy is small and there is messy leadership. The only country which can really U.S. power is China."
Oil industry investors and physical oil traders in Russia say that Tillerson provides more hope of sanctions relief sooner rather than later. On the margins, if Tillerson is sworn in, which is not necessarily a given, a less antagonistic attitude towards Moscow could lead to a re-pricing of Russian assets.
Market consensus is that sanctions are retained next year, and that an Executive Branch controlled by Trump wouldn't give Russia sanctions relief without getting something in return.
___________________________________________
AND HERE IT IS---------same game plan over these several decades in Asia and Latin America----same global 1% players as religious leaders---as NGOs---pretending to help citizens while building structures of extreme wealth and extreme poverty with global human capital distribution systems. Our national media these few decades has been pure propaganda on all this-----baby boomers remember when our media used to out all these right wing polices as BAD.
This is why Clinton global Wall Street sent GABBARD in to pretend to be FEELING THE BERN---with a Trump appointing her as Defense Department head-----Trump wants Syrian people/American people to think this is all good----
This is why Clinton global Wall Street sent GABBARD in to pretend to be FEELING THE BERN---with a Trump appointing her as Defense Department head-----Trump wants Syrian people/American people to think this is all good----
This is the Clinton global Wall Street 5% to the 1% of women players -----they like calling themselves NASTY WOMEN----and they are the one's leading these MARCH ON WASHINGTON PROTESTS never protesting REAL ISSUES FOR WOMEN.
Business News | Tue Apr 12, 2016 | 10:15am EDT
World Bank urges reconstruction strategy as way to foster peace in Syria
Development organizations should support an ambitious reconstruction plan in order to help foster a sustainable peace in Syria, the World Bank said on Tuesday.
Reconstruction and peace in Syria "are two sides of the same coin," the World Bank said in its short-term economic outlook report on the Middle East and North Africa.
"A credible reconstruction strategy, therefore, can be used as an instrument to bring warring parties closer to a peace deal in the first place," the report's authors said.
Syria has been ravaged for the past five years by a civil war, which has killed more than 250,000 people, displaced about half the population and caused a refugee crisis in neighboring countries and throughout Europe.
Growth in the Middle East and North Africa region will average 3 percent for 2016, according to the World Bank's latest predictions.
The World Bank did not spell out how substantial development aid could be made available. A ceasefire in place since last month between the government and rebel forces is near collapse, with more peace talks planned in Geneva this week.
Syrians lack access to basic services such as clean water, reliable electricity, healthcare and education and there is a need for development institutions to immediately work "more actively" with neutral and well-established local groups outside of the Syrian government, the report said.
"By securing grant funding and technical assistance, international organizations can provide needed relief in the country while engaging in a knowledge generating process," the report said. "This would allow the international community to gradually scale up its assistance once peace is reached."
More than 70 percent of Syrian refugees want to return home when fighting stops, the report said, adding that the international community, including the World Bank, can make future reconstruction commitments an instrument for peace negotiations.
___________________________________________
Here is the raging global 1% Wall Street DAILY BEAST-----again making sure 99% of citizens are looking at the WRONG QUESTIONS regarding policies around immigration. Is the issue the cost of the wall? Is the issue the blocking of immigrant travel?
The issue is this-------the 1% and their 2% Latin American citizens are OLD WORLD SPANISH EUROPEAN families who have these several decades literally cleaned house on sovereign Latin American citizens. CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA saw not only open borders to low-income Latino immigrants but to those global 1% and their 2% old -world Spanish rich controlling Latin American nations. There are already plenty of global Latin American rich in America -----there is no need for more migrations from the south. Latin American 1% don't want it-----American global Wall Street doesn't want it. We have around a 30-30-30 of white/Latino/black ----that is generalized----now the emphasis is growing the Asian/Arabic/South Pacific populations and a WALL will be needed for that.
Global labor pool distribution in Foreign Economic Zones around the world have as a goal of filling these factories and global campuses with people from all over the globe---not because they are the BEST OF THE BEST----but because they do not want one culture or nationality to gain power of association. That is what ONE WORLD IS----breaking down global citizens' ability to organize as a group to fight enslavement.
This coming decade is about flooding US Foreign Economic Zones with Asian immigrants---Asian foreign corporations----just as Latinos have had these few decades. It brings no value to 99% of global citizens trapped in these human capital distribution systems----it only maximizes wealth and power for the global 1%.
Latino rich don't care ----they already have their businesses and LATINO IMMIGRANT human capital labor pool inside US.....the goal is not to implode the American society and economy. THE WALL works for all global 1%. Meanwhile national media is selling this as a conservative right wing policy promise on immigration.
OH, NOW THE 99% OF WHITE CITIZENS ARE BACK IN CHARGE----WAKE UP white citizens are MOVING FORWARD to this same enslavement as fast as any population group.
GONNA BE BEAUTIFUL
Donald Trump Can Build His Wall—But Will It Work?
If Congress agrees to fund it up front, Trump can get his wall built, and he even has ways to make Mexico pay. But absent a change in U.S. hiring practices, will it work?
Ruben Navarrette Jr.
01.18.17 1:00 AM ETAt the center of the newly reignited national dialogue over Donald Trump’s campaign promise to build a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border, you’ll find three major questions:
Is Trump going to keep his promise and build some sort of barrier on a border that spans roughly the full 2,000 miles? Will it be a real “wall” made of brick, stone, and mortar, or the much cheaper alternative of fencing? And will Mexico really pay for it?
These questions are fueled by more than idle curiosity. If Trump doesn’t keep the promise to build the wall, or builds something that appears to be more “fence” than “wall,” or cannot get Mexico to pay either directly or indirectly for whatever he builds, then the new president will have failed at what seems to be the major component of his immigration agenda.
Trump had the chance to answer all three queries on the wall at last week’s news conference in response to a single question from a reporter that went like this: “With the border fence, it now appears clear U.S. taxpayers will have to pay for it up front. What is your plan to get Mexico to pay for it?”
That’s a fair question. After all, according to House Republican officials, members of Trump’s transition team have told Republicans in Congress that the president-elect wants to pay for the border wall upfront through the appropriations process and then later seek reimbursement from Mexico.
This would mean that the more than 73 million people who voted for Hillary Clinton, Gary Johnson, Jill Stein or the multitude of names written in by mischievous or disgusted voters would have to pay for a border monstrosity they never supported or wanted. That would be a tough pill to swallow, and so we can expect pushback from the states and even a lawsuit or two.
Although I have to say, the whole idea of paying for something you oppose should give liberals a new appreciation for the complaints of conservatives who have to fund organizations whose mission they disagree with, such as Planned Parenthood. Elections have consequences, folks.
It was back in October that Trump first floated the idea that the United States would foot the bill for the wall and then recoup its investment from our neighbor in one form or another.
Trump began his answer by making clear that he intends to build some barrier, and describing what it would look like.
“On the fence—it’s not a fence,” he said. “It’s a wall. You just misreported it. We’re going to build a wall.”
Trump argues that it’s just faster and more efficient for the United States to pay the costs of the wall. “I could wait about a year-and-a-half until we finish our negotiations with Mexico, which will start immediately after we get to office,” he said. “But I don’t want to wait… We’re going to start building.”
Then Trump repeated his vow to stick Mexico with the tab.
“Mexico in some form, and there are many different forms, will reimburse us and they will reimburse us for the cost of the wall,” he said. “That will happen, whether it’s a tax or whether it’s a payment—probably less likely that it’s a payment. But it will happen.”
As far as some Trump voters are concerned, it had better happen. The president-elect acknowledged that the idea of forcing Mexico to pay for the wall was a real crowd-pleaser during the election. His supporters loved hearing this line, and not just because they’re probably not so eager to pay the cost of the structure itself — which Trump estimates could be $12 billion, and an independent study by The Washington Post found could run as much as $25 billion.
It’s about more than that. For many of them, making Mexico pay for the wall is a matter of fairness. The current arrangement is a sweetheart deal for our neighbor, which gets rid of uneducated low-skilled workers that its economy has no room for anyway and then makes a profit in the form of remittances that start off in private hands but quickly circulate through the Mexican economy. Mexico should have to pony up something in return, the argument goes.
Finally, as he tends to do after delivering a kick in the shins, Trump heaped on some flattery.
“And by the way, Mexico has been so nice, so nice,” he said. “I respect the government of Mexico. I respect the people of Mexico. I love the people of Mexico. I have many people from Mexico working for me. They’re phenomenal people.”
But with Trump, flattery often comes with a side of insult or a dash of provocation. So he ended the answer like this.
“The government of Mexico is terrific,” he said. “I don’t blame them for what’s happened. I don’t blame them for taking advantage of the United States.”
But who is taking advantage of whom? In conversations about the wall, or stopping illegal immigration, Americans somehow never acknowledge how much illegal immigrants contribute to the bottom line and increase profits for U.S. industries like agriculture, hotels, restaurants, construction, and others. Nor will they admit how having a supply of cheap and available immigrant labor benefits the U.S. economy.
Meanwhile, some in the media characterized Trump’s pivot on the funding issue as a flip-flop and a broken promise. The president-elect responded in a tweet: “The dishonest media does not report that any money spent on building the Great Wall (for sake of speed), will be paid back by Mexico later!”
As House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Michael McCaul (R-TX) told the hosts of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” last week, the United States has options when it comes to squeezing cash out of Mexico after the fact. As McCaul noted, the United States could increase the fee for visa applications, charge a hefty toll for the thousands of people who cross the border each day from Mexico to work or shop in this country, or levy taxes on the estimated $25 billion worth of remittances sent into Mexico annually from expatriates on this side of the border.
McCaul also brought up NAFTA. The North American Free Trade Agreement — which was signed by President Bill Clinton in 1993, and intended to spur trade between Canada, Mexico, and the United States — is likely to be renegotiated during the Trump presidency. This will happen with Mexico’s blessing given that the Mexicans are also unhappy with aspects of the agreement, including provisions that Mexicans blame for decimating its corn industry. Those trade talks could give the United States leverage to get Mexico to pay for the wall, McCaul said.
So it would seem, at least from last week’s news conference, the major questions about the proposed border wall have been asked and answered. But that isn’t so. The skeptics and opponents of the project are just getting started. And here’s the one question that no one ever seems to ask Trump about his beloved, “big, beautiful wall”:
Without changing the behavior — namely the hiring practices — of those on this side of the border, will it do any good?
_________________________________________
THIS IS WHERE GLOBAL WALL STREET BRINGS IN ITS FAR-RIGHT MARXISM
please think how America is full of these same groups-----ready to create these same conditions in our US cities deemed FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONES.......
'Similarly, Honduras has been transformed into the U.S. military’s primary foothold in Central America. U.S. Coordinator of the National Popular Resistance Front (FNRP) and Refoundation Party (LIBRE) Lucy Pagoada explained in a 2015 interview that “[Honduras] has turned into a large military base trained and funded by the U.S. They even have School of the Americas forces there.”
“There have been high levels of violence and torture since the [2009] coup,” Pagoada continued'.
All of these elements of civil instability have been filling our US cities these few decades waiting for an ECONOMIC CRASH FROM MASSIVE BOND MARKET FRAUD AND A TRUMP TO GIVE EXTREME AUSTERITY.
Obama’s Legacy In Latin America: Militarization, Right-Wing Coups, & The Rule Of Wall St.
With just hours left for the Obama administration, independent geopolitical analyst Eric Draitser reviews the president’s legacy of destabilizing, militarizing, and exploiting Latin America.
By Eric Draitser @stopimperialism | January 20, 2017
Magnets for sale decorate a tourist shop, one showing an image of U.S. President Barack Obama smelling a cigar, at a market in Havana, Cuba, Monday, March 16, 2015. (AP/Ramon Espinosa)
“Tis now the very witching time of night,
When churchyards yawn and hell itself breathes out
Contagion to this world”
– William Shakespeare, from “Hamlet”
NEW YORK — (Opinion) It seems we have arrived at the witching hour of Obama’s presidency, when corporate media ghouls continue to breathe out the infectious contagion of liberal lies and half-truths about the Great Dissimulator and his accomplishments.
Whether it’s The New York Times’ opinion pages hailing Dr. Changelove as “The Most Successful Democrat Since F.D.R.,” or the noxious nostalgia for the present injected into the public discourse like so many palliatives into the bloodstream of a terminal patient, the true history of Obama’s presidency is being veiled behind a mask of delusion.
Maybe it’s the Orange-Headed Hydra assuming power in Washington that gives the outgoing administration that air of dignity and grace. Maybe it’s the desire to craft a narrative in which “Hope” and “Change” were something other than hollow campaign slogans deftly employed by a charlatan of the first order. Or maybe it’s just business as usual in the heart of the U.S. Empire. No matter the reason, Barack Obama’s media-induced sainthood is now all but complete in liberal America’s collective psyche.
But the United States is not the only “America.”
Indeed, crossing the southern border and entering into that mysterious place called “Latin America,” one encounters a very different Obama legacy, one that is defined by the same policies that Yankee imperialists have employed for more than a century: destabilization, militarization, and exploitation.
Yes We Can!…continue to pursue a neocolonial agenda in Central and South America.
Obama’s love affair with the right wing
An artist who prefers to remain anonymous for security reasons pastes up one of his “interventions” that shows President Barack Obama at a podium surrounded by Honduran politician in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, Thursday, Nov. 21, 2013. (AP/Eduardo Verdugo)
A mural in Lithuania depicting Russian President Vladimir Putin and President-elect Donald Trump embracing in a passionate kiss has gone viral. The meaning of the image is about as subtle as a sledgehammer to the skull, but it is no less perspicacious for its lack of subtlety. And while Russia has indeed tacitly, and rather shamefully, supported far-right candidates and causes for its own coldly pragmatic political reasons — Brexit, Trump, Le Pen, etc. — the truth is that Obama’s administration has also backed right-wing reactionaries and extremists where it has suited its interests.
Throughout Latin America, President Obama has been a driving force behind the resurgence of right-wing forces that have rolled back the gains of socialist and social democratic governments, targeted indigenous and African diaspora communities, assassinated activists, and toppled governments where they could.
So, yes, let’s talk about “legacy.”
In Honduras, Obama’s legacy was cemented from the very beginning of his presidency. In the summer of 2009, Manuel Zelaya, the country’s democratically-elected left-wing president, was removed from power in a midnight coup orchestrated by then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her cronies in Washington and in Tegucigalpa. And while Obama’s tepid condemnation of the coup elicited cheers from many liberals in its contrast to the Bush administration’s loving embrace of the coup against Hugo Chávez in Venezuela in 2002, the reality is that, as with all things Obama, it was mere words. The support of the president and his henchwoman was the driving force behind the coup.
Clinton is never one to shy away from an opportunity to boast about the amount of blood on her hands. In a passage which removed from later editions of her book “Hard Choices,” she rather brazenly admitted:
“In the subsequent days [after the coup] I spoke with my counterparts around the hemisphere, including Secretary [Patricia] Espinosa in Mexico. We strategized on a plan to restore order in Honduras and ensure that free and fair elections could be held quickly and legitimately, which would render the question of Zelaya moot and give the Honduran people a chance to choose their own future.”
Obama’s top diplomat was instrumental in installing a right-wing government backed by the wealthiest business interests in Honduras and powerful players in Washington. As Clinton bagman Lanny Davis openly stated in an interview just weeks after the coup:
“My clients represent the CEAL, the [Honduras Chapter of] Business Council of Latin America. … I do not represent the government and do not talk to [interim] President [Roberto] Micheletti. My main contacts are [billionaires] Camilo Atala and Jorge Canahuati. I’m proud to represent businessmen who are committed to the rule of law.”
OH, REALLY?????
Indeed, Davis quite candidly exposed himself as an agent of powerful oligarch financiers and landowners who, until the election of Zelaya, had always maintained firm control of the reins of government in Honduras. These are precisely the people, backed by the Obama administration, wielding power in Honduras today through a violent right-wing government that assassinates indigenous leaders and human rights defenders such as Berta Cáceres, Margarita Murillo, and many others for the sake of investors who seek to develop indigenous, Afro-Caribbean, and peasant lands for massive profits.
Student protesters clash with police over the president’s decision to run for re-election in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, a year after a controversial Supreme Court ruling voided a longtime constitutional ban on presidential re-election, Thursday Nov. 10, 2016. (AP/Fernando Antonio)
Beyond the killings of activists and the political backing of a right-wing coup government, Obama’s legacy in Honduras is also one of militarization. In 2014, The North American Congress on Latin America reported:
“The steady increase of U.S. assistance to [Honduran] national armed forces has, if anything, been an indicator of tacit U.S. support. But the U.S. role in militarization of national police forces has been direct as well. In 2011 and 2012, the Drug Enforcement Administration’s Foreign-deployed Advisory Support Team (FAST)—which had previously carried out military-style missions in Afghanistan—set up camp in Honduras to train a local counternarcotics police unit and help plan and execute drug interdiction operations …
Supported by U.S. helicopters mounted with high caliber machine guns, these operations were nearly indistinguishable from military missions, and locals routinely referred to the DEA and Honduran police agents as “soldados” (soldiers).”
The NACLA report further noted that the Obama administration deployed at least five “commando style squads” of FAST teams across Central America. It added that, in Honduras, U.S. and Colombian special forces units have been training, equipping, and deploying with a new “elite” police unit called the Intelligence Troop and Special Security Group, or TIGRES (Spanish for “tigers”), which human rights groups argue is military in nature.
Ultimately, the man who rode the crest of a wave of “Hope” and “Change” not only brought more of the same to Honduras, and Latin America generally, he actually accelerated the re-conquest of the region by the forces of the military-industrial complex and finance capital.
Obama’s rightward push in South America
Demonstrators march with a sign that says in Portuguese “Get out Temer” and a drawing of Cuba’s late President Fidel Castro, as they demand the impeachment of Brazil’s President Michel Temer in Sao Paulo, Brazil, Nov. 27, 2016. (AP/Andre Penner)
Another example of this confluence between Obama’s right-wing fetish and Wall Street’s boot on the neck of Latin America came last year in Brazil, when Dilma Rousseff’s democratically-elected government was removed from office in what can only be described as a parliamentary coup.
In mid-April of 2016, Reuters published a story exposing Michel Temer, the right-wing vice president at the time and the current president, as preparing the shortlist of his presumptive cabinet months before the Rousseff government had been toppled.
Temer tapped Paulo Leme to serve as either finance minister or head of the Central Bank. Leme is the chairman of Goldman Sachs’s operations in Brazil, making him perhaps the preeminent representative of Wall Street in the country. While his appointment may have been perceived as too brazen, the trend of Wall Street representatives steering the ship of Brazil’s economic and political life is impossible to ignore.
Perhaps it is no coincidence that the Obama administration, too, has been dominated from the beginning by the same types of financiers — often from the very same companies such as Goldman Sachs — that control the coup government in Brazil. The not-so-invisible hand of finance capital is now tightly coiled around the neck of Brazil. Another feather in Obama’s legacy cap.
Of course, there’s Obama’s graceful tango with the new right-wing government in Argentina led by Wall Street darling Mauricio Macri. While Obama was wining and dining the neoliberal reactionary, Macri was busy loading his new government with Wall Street insiders and representatives of Big Oil and other major industries.
This was the real Obama, the one who will not be paraded before Americans as the revered dear leader already missed before he’s left the stage. Rather, this was the man who, without conscience or compunction, ushered in a wave of right-wing reaction throughout the Western hemisphere.
And he did it with a smile.
Obama’s quiet militarization of Latin America
President Barack Obama, left, talks to Colombia’s President Juan Manuel Santos before the start of their meeting at the Casa De Huespedes during the sixth Summit of the Americas, in Cartagena, Colombia, Sunday April 15, 2012. (AP/Carolyn Kaster)
One of Obama’s great accomplishments in the service of the military-industrial complex was his below-the-radar militarization of the region. The pervasive myth of Obama as distinctly different from George W. Bush lives on in the diseased minds of liberal sycophants, but the facts tell a different story.
Obama represented continuity with, and an expansion of, the worst policies of George W. Bush and Bill Clinton when it came to Latin America. Plan Colombia, the broad heading for the billions of dollars spent on U.S. military engagement and cooperation in Colombia begun by Clinton and expanded by Bush, was further expanded under Obama.
Just totaling the military, police, and economic aid to Colombia for 2010 to 2015, the United States has given nearly $3 billion to Colombia in the form of “aid” to fight the so-called “War on Drugs,” widely seen as merely a cover for U.S. military power projection in South America. Add to that the fact that during Obama’s tenure, and under former commander of the U.S. Special Operations Command William McRaven, special forces troop deployments ballooned to more than 65,000, with many spread throughout Latin America.
In an eerily similar fashion, Obama expanded funding and scope for the Mérida Initiative, a project launched by Bush in 2008 which essentially makes Mexico’s military and law enforcement into a de facto arm of the U.S. military and government. As with Plan Colombia (and AFRICOM), even though Obama did not launch this initiative, he expanded it significantly, providing more than $2.5 billion since 2008.
But if liberals want to soothe their broken hearts with the fact that Obama did not actually launch these programs, they might want to consider the Central American Regional Security Initiative, created by Obama in 2011.
According to a March 2014 report from the Igarapé Institute, an independent security and development think tank based in Brazil, CARSI and Mérida alone received nearly $3 billion (2008-2013). It is an open secret that the massive funding has been channeled primarily into military and paramilitary programs. Though the United States touts these programs as success stories, their expansion has coincided with increased militarization in every country where U.S. funds have been provided.
In El Salvador, the government led by President Mauricio Funes consolidated military control of law enforcement in the interests of its U.S. backers. These changes took place simultaneous to the implementation of CARSI, and should be seen as an outgrowth of U.S. militarization. In Guatemala, the government of Otto Pérez Molina, a former military leader with a record of atrocities and genocide, further militarized the country before being imprisoned for corruption in September of 2015.
Similarly, Honduras has been transformed into the U.S. military’s primary foothold in Central America. U.S. Coordinator of the National Popular Resistance Front (FNRP) and Refoundation Party (LIBRE) Lucy Pagoada explained in a 2015 interview that “[Honduras] has turned into a large military base trained and funded by the U.S. They even have School of the Americas forces there.”
“There have been high levels of violence and torture since the [2009] coup,” Pagoada continued.
Of course, no discussion of Obama’s actions in Latin America would be complete without an examination of Washington’s attempts to reassert its influence in the region with the simultaneous thaw in relations with Cuba and the destabilization of Venezuela.
Obama signed an executive order on Jan. 13 declaring both Venezuela and Cuba “national security threats” despite no evidence of any such threat. Isn’t it interesting that the president being lauded as the man who sought to normalize relations with America’s long-standing foe in Cuba still manages to not only classify the country as a threat, but to expand that same status to another geopolitical and strategic enemy in the region?
The Obama administration has attempted to undermine and destabilize Venezuela using as pretexts everything from a border dispute with neighboring Guyana to artificially created scarcity of staple goods and speculation against the currency by elites who control commodity distribution networks in the country, and whose backers reside in Madrid, Miami, and Washington. Julio Escalona, an economist and former Venezuelan ambassador to the United Nations, told me in Caracas in 2015: “Our currency is not being devalued by speculation, but by hyper-speculation.”
And, in signature Obama style, Washington has backed the right wing, including many far right fanatics, in an attempt to wrest political control of the country away from the ruling Socialist Party (PSUV) led by President Nicolás Maduro (and in spirit by Hugo Chávez).
Perhaps the best example is the targeted assassination of numerous prominent members of the PSUV, including the 2014 killing of Robert Serra, an up-and-coming Chavista legislator seen by many on the Venezuelan left as the “next Chávez.” Serra was assassinated by individuals connected to Álvaro Uribe, the former president of Colombia and long-standing U.S. proxy.
Similarly, the well-respected journalist and prominent Chavista Ricardo Duran was murdered outside his home in Caracas in January of 2016. Likewise, Fritz St. Louis, international coordinator of the United Socialist Haitian Movement and secretary general of the Haitian Cultural House Bolivariana de Venezuela, was assassinated in March of 2016. In all these killings, the hidden hand of the right wing and its backers in the United States has been an open secret.
And where is the outcry from the liberals who continue to laud Obama? Perhaps now that a Republican is in office they might soon dust off their political consciences to raise their voices against continued U.S. neocolonialism and imperialism in Latin America? Apparently, their interest in human rights and peace is dependent on the color of the tie worn by the man or woman in the Oval Office.
Obama’s legacy in Latin America is, like that of all other U.S. presidents of the last century, one of profit and exploitation, death and destruction. This is surely no secret in Latin America, where millions have raised, and will continue to raise, their voices in opposition to the Yankee Empire.
Unfortunately, the myth of the Nobel Peace Prize winner has become stronger than the reality of lived experience.
In this witching hour, the twilight of Obama’s presidency, let us not be entranced by spells cast by the coven of corporate media warlocks. Let us instead remember Obama’s legacy in Latin America not as “Hope” and “Change,” but as “More of the Same.”
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We have been shouting since 2010 how bad this coming economic crash will be---it was designed to be bad by Clinton Congress and Obama at the same time they were loading our US cities with immigrants from around the world. Now we will see a TRUMP make sure all population groups are largely unemployed AND ANGRY---WANTING TO FIGHT----CREATING CIVIL UNREST. Who knew this would occur? All Wall Street Baltimore Development 'labor and justice' organizations --those pesky 5% to the 1% creating these condition for civil unrest. A WALL CONTAINS THAT CIVIL UNREST.
CLINTON/OBAMA created the conditions for tension----Trump will light the fire---global right wing NGOs will see it ends with WORLD BANK/IMF taking control of our sovereign governments to install FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONE ONE WORLD ONE GOVERNANCE.
There are still those US citizens both right and left thinking these groups are working for them and not just the global 1% .
Politics | Fri Dec 2, 2016 | 1:14pm EST
Trump's dilemma: slower job growth or rising rates and inflation?
By Howard Schneider | WASHINGTON
A drop in the U.S. unemployment rate last month to a 9-year low signals the risk of a collision between President-elect Donald Trump's plans to goose the economy and the Federal Reserve's efforts to tap the brakes with higher interest rates.
Since Trump's election, officials at the U.S. central bank have cautiously introduced the possibility that his spending and tax cut plans could prompt a faster pace of rate increases than the two hikes currently foreseen in 2017.
An increase is already expected when the Fed meets in two weeks. Fresh economic projections, the first since the election, will also be issued and Fed Chair Janet Yellen will hold a news conference when the meeting concludes on Dec. 14.
With November's decline, the jobless rate is now already below the most optimistic projections from Fed policymakers for where it would stand at year end.
If it keeps moving lower, Trump's spending and tax cut plans may be adding fuel to a tank that's already brimming. Possible new trade or immigration restrictions could make markets even tighter, and switch the Fed from worrying about the risk of deflation to fighting price rises before they get out of hand.
"There is much more than the Trump election driving the ... rally that started the day after the election," Bank of the West chief economist Scott Anderson wrote. "We are seeing signs of a synchronized rebound in the global economy."
When Fed policymakers issued their last projections in September, the lowest level predicted for the unemployment rate at the end of the year was 4.7 percent. In November, it fell three-tenths of a percentage point to 4.6 percent.
The decline was partly due to a drop in the labor force participation rate, which officials have expected to begin falling again because of an aging population with more retirees. In general, the lower the unemployment rate, the slower the pace of job growth the economy can sustain without pushing up wages and prices too quickly.
Policymakers insist they still have time to move rates higher to keep price increases under control. Several officials feel it may even help fix some of the damage from the 2007-2009 recession if inflation moved above the Fed's 2 percent target for a while. That might, for example, allow steady wage increases to restore some of the ground lost by workers.
However, in recent months even ostensibly dovish officials, like Boston Fed President Eric Rosengren, have cautioned that steady rate hikes might be needed to avoid the need for even faster increases that could trigger a recession.
"I view a small step up in interest rates as appropriate, not because I want to curtail the expansion, but because I believe it will help prolong the expansion," Cleveland Federal Reserve Bank President Loretta Mester said on Wednesday..
Trump's victory gives that debate more urgency. His plans for a big infrastructure spending package, tax cuts and tighter controls on immigration could test the limits of what the economy can absorb before overheating.
For a year now, Fed officials have said they expect job growth to slow as the economy nears full employment. It hasn't happened, meaning Trump will take office at what may be a tough point of inflection: either job creation slows or inflation jumps.
Jed Kolko, chief economist at the Indeed job site, said the current pace of job growth and low unemployment rate "sets a baseline for the Trump administration."
"Recent wage gains and unemployment declines make this a tough economy to improve on," he said.
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For those not following GLOBAL STARBUCKS it indeed is that same global corporation tied to ONE WORLD ----we have heard for decades the connections of Starbuck's logo to old world global 1%-----the far-right global Wall Street have now captured the policies of left immigration to being the global human capital distribution system----they say we only want to help global citizens trapped in global Wall Street instability and war==== now they use this to hire global labor pool. As a former Seattlite having sat in these fledgling Starbucks coffee shops when they were really artisan fair trade coffee houses----they long ago went bad BECAUSE they went global. If the left social Democrats keep protesting FOR GLOBAL LABOR POOL----FOR GLOBAL FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONES-----they are protesting for
FAR-RIGHT WING HUMAN CAPITAL DISTRIBUTION AND GLOBAL WALL STREET WARS AND CIVIL INSTABILITY.
Do we hear ANY OF THESE SUPPOSED IMMIGRANT PROTECTING GROUPS------saying 'the US Constitution requires immigrants be protected in workplace having same rights as US citizens in wages and rights if working in US? DO WE HEAR THAT FROM OUR ACLU? This is a basic civil liberties stance that never is mentioned because ACLU is staffed with Clinton global Wall STreet far-right Libertarian civil liberty lawyers---not left social Democrat.
Americans now have global Amazon.com BEZOS telling us who our left populist leaders are owning the Washington Post ----and global STARBUCKS telling us what our left immigration policies are-----both are far----far-----far right wing global Wall Street.
U.S. | Mon Jan 30, 2017 | 10:16am EST
Starbucks CEO Schultz plans to hire 10,000 refugees after Trump ban
Starbucks Corp Chief Executive Officer Howard Schultz said on Sunday that the company planned to hire 10,000 refugees over five years in 75 countries, two days after U.S. President Donald Trump's executive order banning refugees from certain countries.
Trump on Friday put a four-month hold on allowing refugees into the United States and temporarily barred travelers from Syria and six other Muslim-majority countries, saying the moves would help protect Americans from terrorist attacks.
The order sparked widespread international criticism, outrage from civil rights activists and legal challenges.
Starbucks in a letter from Schultz told employees it would do everything possible to support affected workers. (bit.ly/2kIFjLE)
The hiring efforts announced on Sunday would start in the United States by initially focusing on individuals who have served with U.S. troops as interpreters and support personnel in the various countries where the military has asked for such support, Schultz said.
Starbucks Corp Chief Executive Howard Schultz, pictured with images from the company's new ''Race Together'' project behind him, speaks during the company's annual shareholder's meeting in Seattle, Washington March 18, 2015. REUTERS/David Ryder Schultz has been outspoken on various issues and has put Starbucks in the national spotlight, asking customers not to bring guns into stores and urging conversations on race relations.
Schultz said on Sunday that if the Affordable Care Act is repealed and employees lose healthcare coverage, they would be able to return to health insurance through Starbucks.
Trump and a Republican-controlled legislature are seeking to undo much of the Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare.
Schultz will step down as CEO in a few months to focus on new high-end coffee shops, handing the top job to Chief Operating Officer Kevin Johnson, a long-time technology executive. He will become executive chairman in April.
Schultz also affirmed the company's commitment to trade with Mexico, another subject that has been front and center of Trump's campaign.
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It would be the US ACLU fighting these few decades against global labor pool being installed in the US knowing these citizens were being staged for the same extreme exploitation as seen in Asia and Latin America. ACLU knows this----they know all Foreign Economic Zone nations have that same 1% gaining all the wealth with extreme poverty. Having an ACLU that protects those global 1% and their 2% at the expense of global 99% IS NOT LEFT IMMIGRATION POLICY-----it is far-right wing Libertarian soon to be MARXISM.
To pretend these global human capital distribution systems were NOT BUILT BY CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA but rather simply a byproduct of globalization is a DISGRACE.
The REAL American left immigration stance is ENDING FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONES AND GLOBAL LABOR POOL policies.
Please glance through this long article------remember most American colonists came to US as slaves and/or indentured servants-----European KINGS AND QUEENS regularly shipped their citizens off to colonial outposts so this is not only global black or brown citizens---this is ALL CITIZENS----and contrary to what is THE ATLANTIC trying to downplay US involvement or Obama's support-----global Wall Street and Foreign Economic Zone policies have driven this these several decades and have been installing this in the US.
Slavery's Global Comeback
150 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, buying and selling people into forced labor is bigger than ever. What "human trafficking" really means
- J.J. Gould
- Dec 19, 2012
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Slaves pan for gold in Accra, Ghana. Some have children with them as they wade into water poisoned by mercury used in the extraction process. (Lisa Kristine)
RANGOON, Burma — Earlier this year, Ko Lin, 21 at the time, left his hometown of Bago, 50 miles northeast of Rangoon, with a friend to look for work in Myawaddy, near the Thai border. The two found jobs there as day laborers loading and offloading goods, anything from rice to motorcycles, being illicitly transported by truck in and out of Thailand. After a month, Ko Lin had saved up the equivalent of about US$150 and decided to rejoin his family in Bago. Stopping first to pray at a local pagoda with, he and his friend met a super-amiable young woman who ended up pitching an opportunity to work in Thailand. Her uncle, she said, could arrange great jobs for them there.
Ko Lin was reluctant but bent to his friend's enthusiasm. The uncle turned out to be a trafficker who sold the two into forced labor in Chonburi, a city 60 miles east of Bangkok. They were taken there by an irregular route that involved walking through the jungle for eight days. Several weeks after arriving in Chonburi, Ko Lin was told he'd now be working at sea. When he resisted, he was knocked unconscious and woke up separated from his friend on a fishing boat in the Gulf of Thailand. From this point on, for months, he rarely if ever had more than two hours of sleep a night, always on a shared, cramped bed; he was given three meals only on days when the captain felt he'd pulled in enough fish to earn it; and when he was fed at all, it was always dregs from a catch that couldn't be sold on the market. His arms regularly became infected from the extended exposure of minor wounds to sea water. If he complained that he was feeling unwell, the crew would beat him. He was injured multiple times by heavy blocks or booms, once having to tend to a head wound with a handful of wet rice. Three months out, Ko Lin was rescued in a police raid.
There are now twice as many people enslaved in the world as there were in the 350 years of the transatlantic slave trade.Ma Moe, 34, and her husband lived in a suburb about an hour outside Rangoon, poor enough that on some days they had nothing to eat. A friend offered her a job as a domestic worker in China where, she was told, she could make between $100 and $200 a month. Despite her husband's objections, she decided to go. Near the border, her friend told her the trip would soon get rough and she should take some pills so as not to get carsick. The pills knocked her out almost immediately. When she came to, she was in a small village in China; she still doesn't know where. Kept with a few other women in a small house, Ma Moe was then taken around to different villages where she was offered up for sale as a "wife." After a failed escape attempt, when she was beaten by local police, a man from northern China bought her. By now, having spent a month-and-a-half as a Burmese commodity on a Chinese black market, she could hardly eat from the stress and was emaciated. Her owner was concerned—he wanted a child—so he had Ma Moe's blood tested; the results showed that she's HIV-positive; and he ended up abandoning her at the bus station. With no hope of being able to get back to Burma, she prayed to die. But a young newspaper seller, fending off an attempt by another apparent trafficker to get Ma Moe to go with him, called a police hotline for trafficking victims. The police coordinated Ma Moe's transfer to a Burmese anti-trafficking task force, and they ultimately took her home.
There's a plain-language word for the horror stories that Ko Lin and Ma Moe have survived, as anachronistic as it might sound: slavery. Though now universally illegal, slavery still exists, and it's common—here in Burma, across Southeast Asia, and around the world.
The leading demographic accounts of contemporary slavery project a global slave population of between 20 million and 30 million people. The highest ratios of slaves worldwide are from South and Southeast Asia, along with China, Russia, and the former satellite states of the Soviet Union. There is a significant slave presence across North Africa and the Middle East, including Lebanon. There is also a major slave trade in Africa. Descent-based slavery persists in Mauritania, where children of slaves are passed on to their slave-holders' children. And the North Korean gulag system, which holds 200,000 people, is essentially a constellation of slave-labor camps. Most of the world's slaves are in sedentary forms of servitude, such as hereditary collateral-debt bondage, but about 20 percent have been unwittingly trafficked by predators through deception and coercion. Human trafficking is often highly mobile and dynamic, leveraging modern communications and logistics in the same basic ways contemporary business does generally. After the earthquake of 2010 devastated Haiti, Hispaniola was quickly overrun with opportunistic traffickers targeting children to sell into forced domestic work or brothels.
As pervasive as contemporary slavery is, it's remained marginal as a global issue until relatively recently. There are a couple of big reasons why—one having to do with the scale of the problem, the other with the idea of slavery itself.
The Scale
The International Labor Organization (ILO) estimates the number of slaves in the world today at around 21 million. Kevin Bales, of Free the Slaves—the U.S. affiliate of the world's oldest human-rights organization, the U.K.-based Anti-Slavery International—(and the author of Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy) puts it at 27 million. Siddharth Kara of Harvard's Carr Center for Human Rights Policy says more than 29 million.
That range represents a tightening consensus. In the 1990s, some accounts had the global slave population as high as 100 million; others had it as low as 2 million. "It was nuts," says Bales. "I traced all these numbers back. The 100-million number, I finally found this guy in India who'd said it at at UN conference. I asked him, 'How did you get that?' And he said, 'I don't know, it was just a guess.' So nobody had the number."
Bales's 27 million—which as a statistician he considers a "conservative estimate" —is derived from secondary-source analysis. "It's still not great," he says, "in the sense that it's not based on random-sample surveys at the grass-roots level. We're doing that now, though, building much sounder numbers, and they're still coming out in the same range. ... So we're getting closer."
In which case, assuming even the rough accuracy of 27 million, there are likely more slaves in the world today than there have been at any other time in human history. For some quick perspective on that point: Over the entire 350 years of the transatlantic slave trade, 13.5 million people were taken out of Africa. That's equal to just half the the world's slave population today.
The Idea
Some of what's obscured contemporary slavery, then, has been a matter of quantitative analysis; but some has been conceptual: In the West, and particularly in the United States, slavery has long settled in the public imagination as being categorically a thing of the past.
One consequence of this is that when people apply the idea of slavery to current events, they tend to think of it as an analogy. That is, they tend to use the word to dramatize conditions that may be exploitive—e.g., terrible wages or toxic working environments—but that we'd never on their own call "slavery" if the kind of forced labor we used to call "slavery" still existed. "In 1994, when I was in the United Nations Working Group on Contemporary Forms of Slavery," Bales recalls, "a group came in and said they wanted the UN to declare incest a form of slavery. And we were like, incest is incest; you don't have to call it slavery."
But there's an inverse consequence to seeing slavery as a thing of the past, too: It can mean having a harder time recognizing slavery when it's right in front of us.
A slave in Kathmandu, Nepal, stacks 18 bricks at a time, each weighing four pounds, carrying them to nearby trucks for 18 hours a day. (Lisa Kristine)
Right after the end of the Cold War, people in Western cities—in Berlin, Paris, Amsterdam, London, New York—started noticing something pronounced about migration patterns out of the just-collapsed Soviet Bloc: The "immigrants" were disproportionately young women and girls. It took no one long to understand that these were prostitutes—or much longer to understand that they weren't operating freely; criminals were trafficking them out of Eurasia effectively as black-market goods, like opium or Kalashnikovs.
The dominant rhetoric that the coalition of Christian conservatives and anti-prostitution feminists who took the lead on this issue used at the time wasn't "slavery" but "trafficking for sexual exploitation." Around the same time, a movement started against sweatshop labor that developed its focus not broadly on the issue of forced labor but narrowly on the conditions of the sweatshops themselves, sometimes even just on safety issues within them.
Luis CdeBaca, the U.S. ambassador at large to monitor and combat trafficking in persons, sees both of these frameworks as inhibiting and, intentionally or not, ways to feel too comfortable about addressing the issues in question. "If we say the problem with domestic servants is that they're not covered by the Fair Labor Standards Act, and so let's just go out and make sure they get covered by labor laws around the world, we get to ignore, for example, the fact that domestic servants are being locked in and raped. It's not a wage issue; it's a crime issue. If we look at prostitution and we devolve back to the old debates about whether prostitution should be legal and regulated, should it be illegal and criminalized, we won't say, '... hey, why doesn't the 13th Amendment apply to a woman in prostitution just as much as to a woman on a farm?' Then we end up missing the reality of modern slavery."
Pattern Recognition
CdeBaca thinks we've been using euphemisms about slavery in our recent history scarcely less euphemistic than were "servant" or "peculiar institution" before the U.S. Civil War, noting current preferences for "gender-based violence" or "rape as a weapon of war" to describe what goes on in eastern Congo. "If rape becomes the more comfortable word than slavery," CdeBaca says, "you know slavery is a highly emotive term."
But if the president of the United States has nevertheless embraced the term "slavery," as Barack Obama now has with his speech at the Clinton Global Institute in September, you know it's also an emotive term whose time has come—or come again. The State Department, meanwhile, answers the question "What is modern slavery?" by implying, virtually to the point of stating, that it now considers "slavery" the umbrella term for crimes of "trafficking":
Over the past 15 years, "trafficking in persons" and "human trafficking" have been used as umbrella terms for activities involved when someone obtains or holds a person in compelled service.
The United States government considers trafficking in persons to include all of the criminal conduct involved in forced labor and sex trafficking, essentially the conduct involved in reducing or holding someone in compelled service. Under the Trafficking Victims Protection Act as amended (TVPA) and consistent with the United Nations Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children (Palermo Protocol), individuals may be trafficking victims regardless of whether they once consented, participated in a crime as a direct result of being trafficked, were transported into the exploitative situation, or were simply born into a state of servitude. Despite a term that seems to connote movement, at the heart of the phenomenon of trafficking in persons are the many forms of enslavement, not the activities involved in international transportation.
(Emph. added)
CdeBaca understands the Trafficking Victims Protection Act and the Palermo Protocol that State mentions here, both dating from 2000, to be crucial preconditions for the change in social conceptions about human trafficking and forced labor that have followed. Usually the dynamic is the other way around, CdeBaca says: A social movement grows and, if it's successful, after 10 years or so, Congress passes legislation or the UN (or some other international body) passes a resolution. With contemporary slavery, more than a decade of governmental and trans-governmental initiatives have seeded the social conversation, which has in turn articulated an emerging consensus around the language of slavery.
CdeBaca thinks this consensus is hugely consequential, not just domestically in the U.S.—where Obama has now both embraced the term "slavery" and issued an executive order to remove human trafficking and forced labor from federal contracting—but globally. "The fact that we're able to come into a place like Burma, which has come so far so fast just in the last 10 or 12 months, with this unified message is wonderful," he says, "because the government here isn't going to have to unlearn those differences. When we talked to the government [on Friday], they were talking about forced labor and forced prostitution as though they're the same concept. We didn't have to talk through 'here's why you need to care about forced labor as much as you care about forced prostitution,' or 'here's why the girls in the brothels matter.' They got it. And I think it's because they come into this at this moment, now."
The New Abolitionism
It's to the not-modest credit of modern civilization that the awareness of slavery has always given rise to anti-slavery movements. Abolitionism today may be more complex than what went before it only because it has to be. Contemporary slavery is, as Ethan Kapstein wrote in Foreign Affairs back in 2006, "a product of the same political, technological, and economic forces that have fueled globalization"—or as Andrew Forrest, the chairman of Fortescue Metals Group and founder of the anti-slavery group Walk Free, has it, "Slavery is the dark side of globalization."
In essence, organizations like Walk Free, or the Global Business Coalition Against Trafficking (gBCAT), want to harness the good, or at least potentially good, aspects of globalization to eliminate its most evil aspect. Forrest believes that it now makes maximum sense for global big businesses to integrate their risk-management strategies with their corporate-social-responsibility strategies and their procurement strategies, cleaning their supply chains of any involvement with forced labor once and for all. Forrest believes in the constructive power of potential shame, too, being focused currently on a campaign to recruit major corporations around the world to sign Walk Free's "zero tolerance for slavery pledge."
Slavery today is driven by the same political, technological, and economic forces as globalization itself.Projects like this won't necessarily be easy; in fact, their success will necessarily be a tough question. There are certainly precedents for it: Nike may be one of the most slave-free garment manufacturers in the world today, because it got hammered for its labor practices in the 1990s by a very successful campaign against it as a brand—brand equity being a very important, very bottom-line issue for a company like Nike. But what if we're looking instead at a mining company that needs to procure concrete for railway tracks to get its materials out, and the best-deal concrete is made by slave labor in Abu Dhabi by some nameless supplier? There's no brand equity at stake there. Mineral extraction is a similarly faceless industry. We all know who makes our cell phones; few of us know who makes the tantalum and coltan that go into them. That doesn't have to be note of cynicism, but it does get at the complexity of the challenge in leveraging global business's better angels against its worst instincts.
There will meanwhile be new opportunities for political will against slavery, particularly now that Obama has used the word—new legislative efforts, new instruments of international cooperation—and there will be new opportunities to build important anti-trafficking capacities, with law enforcement, with victim care and rehabilitation, and so on.
And then there will be social-awareness campaigns—which may represent the one strand of the contemporary anti-slavery movement skeptical observers are more inclined to be cynical about than they are about the leadership of global business. If you're tempted to think that way, consider before anything else that here in Rangoon, it's not only perfectly reasonable but a vital public-service announcement to say, "Kids, this is how you recognize it if someone's trying to trick you into slavery, and this is what you do about it ...." When I asked Ma Moe, who'd been sold into slavery by a friend, what was the most important thing she wanted people to understand about her experience, she lit up emotionally in a way she hadn't up to then, insisting emphatically on how crucial it is that people in Burma—especially young people—get the coaching they need to insulate themselves and their families against the risk of being trafficked, particularly given how sophisticated traffickers are at profiling victims and preying on trust.
Neither is any of this the hard part compared with the complex task of changing or putting an end outright to kinds of social norms that heighten the risk of capture by traffickers, particularly in contexts governed by the caste system or other forms of entrenched social hierarchy. Which aren't uncommon across South and Southeast Asia, and which can create barriers to human empathy every bit as powerful as what morally and psychologically enabled the open slave trade of the 16th-19th centuries.
Precedents
On the global level, there are historical reasons why a heightened social awareness of slavery could prove more effective than we might first be inclined to think.
"Stowage of the British Slave Ship 'Brookes' Under the Regulated Slave Trade, Act of 1788" (Thomas Clarkson)
As Bales likes to remember, there have been three major anti-slavery movements in the modern era prior to the nascent contemporary one. The first was started in 1787 by Anti-Slavery International—or as it was called at the time, the Society for Effecting the Termination of the Slave Trade—in London. Twenty years later, the slave trade in the British Empire was finished. This movement worked entirely through social mobilization; in fact, it was one of the first major social movements in the West. The Society inundated parliament with huge petitions against slavery, 517 altogether. It passed around anti-slavery cameos that fashionable women wore in bracelets and pins. And it disseminated Thomas Clarkson's drawing of the Liverpool-based slave ship Brookes, illustrating the horrible reality that slaves were forced to cross the Atlantic packed together like sardines, lying in their own excrement and vomit, for months. This picture was extremely shocking—and effective.
The second anti-slavery movement was marked by some of the most pivotal moral leadership in U.S. history, but it was also thwarted by a virtually total social division between the North and the South, and it culminated an enormous war that resulted in upward of three-quarters of a million deaths and new troubles for the United States' former slaves that have cast long shadows since.
Hierarchical societies still create empathy barriers as powerful as what enabled the open slave trade of the 16th-19th centuries.The third movement is less well known but offers a precedent for contemporary abolitionism that may be in some ways as compelling as the first. This was a global movement, which included luminaries like Mark Twain and Sarah Bernhardt, against the enslavement of between 5 and 10 million people in the Congo as the personal property of King Leopold II of Belgium. The purpose of this enslavement was to feed new technologies, particularly pneumatic rubber tires. But the breakthrough for this movement was also thanks to new technologies: portable cameras that enabled abolitionists to do magic-lantern shows in big theaters across Europe and America—a kind of documentary film before documentary films—graphically demonstrating the routine physical mutilation of Congolese slaves who failed to meet their "rubber quotas," which truly freaked viewers out and helped mobilize the public broadly. After this anti-slavery campaign was able to show the photos it had captured, social indignation turned to outrage, and Leopold, who'd completely denied everything until then—he could, because there was no proof of what he was doing—gave up, ended the enslavement, and, in 1908, relinquished the Congo to the Belgian government.
Let's see what the fourth one does. The most optimistic view says that as massive as slavery is today, it's also on the edge of its own extinction, needing only the right push. If the global slave population is 27 million, it's still 27 million out of a total of 7 billion, making it—and here's the paradox—the smallest fraction of the global population to be enslaved ever. If slavery generates between $30 billion and $45 billion a year to the global economy, it's a big industry, but it also amounts to the smallest ratio of the global economy ever represented by slave labor and slave output. While slavery has grown in absolute terms, it's shrunk in relative terms, and so, the theory goes, it's increasingly vulnerable.
A possibly less optimistic but still hopeful variation on this theme—well clear of the most pessimistic view, at any rate, which would be that slavery is simply endemic to global capitalism—is that slavery isn't just growing more slowly than the rest of the world is; it's also increasingly toxic to the rest of the world; and it's increasingly toxic in ways that the rest of the world will be forced to defend itself against. The same interests responsible for human trafficking and forced labor are, after all, also responsible for fostering other types of crime, as well as the kinds of corruption that slave-labor operations need for survival. If developed countries let slavery go unchecked, it will threaten to corrode the bilateral and multilateral agreements, and the international rule of law, that the whole global economy depends on. If developing countries don't check it, it may or may not mean slower short-term growth, but it will definitely complicate long-term growth growth, or stunt it altogether, as outside investors bring more scrutiny and demand more transparency. In the meantime, the more visible an issue slavery becomes globally, the less inclined I'd be to forget some of the most consequential uses that mobile technology and social media been put to around the world in the last two years—or to ignore the analogies between these uses and the tactics of the first and third modern anti-slavery movements.
The relationship between a country's tacit willingness to abide slavery and that country's risk of being left behind by the currents of global civilization isn't one that Burmese officials are necessarily inclined to discuss candidly. When I asked Brigadier General Khin Maung Si, chief of police and head of the human-trafficking office in the ministry of home affairs, about his government's emerging commitment to eliminating forced labor, he spoke only of poor economic conditions as a cause of slavery, not of slavery as a cause of economic stagnation. But it's a relationship that his government's new commitments acknowledge implicitly.
It's also a relationship that the leading exponents of the second modern anti-slavery movement were emphatic about and staked their political reasoning on. As The Atlantic's first editor, James Russell Lowell, wrote in the magazine's endorsement of Abraham Lincoln for president in 1860:
The inevitable tendency of slavery is to concentrate in a few hands the soil, the capital, and the power of the countries where it exists, to reduce the non-slaveholding class to a continually lower and lower level of property, intelligence, and enterprise. ... We do not, of course, mean to say that slaveholding states may not and do not produce fine men; but they fail, by the inherent vice of their constitution and its attendant consequences, to create enlightened, powerful, and advancing communities of men, which is the true object of all political organization.
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CLINTON/OBAMA create the conditions for harming the 99% by PRETENDING TO BE WORKING FOR THEM----Bush/Trump are installed to make the harm as bad as they can. TAG TEAM The posers are those at the lowest level of HADES because they are that knife in the back player.
Once the 99% sees this TAG TEAM pattern they know when they are being played---------stop allowing global 1% create factions when it is a 5% to the 1% who are the problem-----around the world and inside America-
'Growing Civil Unrest in the United States
October 18, 2016 Brandon
Social Divide
social-unrest-1
This last one is a bit of a blanket statement. Sure, it encompasses the last two divides but also a bit more. Similar to the political aspect of the divide, social divisions seem to have hit between party lines. Traditionalists are clashing with progressives and vice versa over how our society ought to operate. The downside is the progressives (who by definition support a larger government) have the government on their side. Of course politicians are going to lean towards the progressive side because it means more stuff they can justify getting paid for'.
I wanted to post the above article title------GROWING CIVIL UNREST IN THE UNITED STATES for this-----this article was written by that far-right wing MARXIST-----look at how they claim PROGRESSIVES are large government-----we all know Clinton global Wall Street ECONOMIC PROGRESSIVES are small government and have worked to build small government with Republicans. The big government is the connection of global corporate tribunals----NOT LEFT SOCIAL PROGRESSIVE----- we should be able to see when a BRANDON is setting us up................nothing says far-right than our survivalists!
'Brandon
Brandon is a survivalist from the U.S.’s North-east. He’s been an active camper and survival enthusiast since a young age and began TheSurvivalist.net with the hopes of sharing knowledge and bringing preppers together'.
10 Signs That Economic Riots And Civil Unrest Inside The United States Are Now More Likely Than Ever
By Michael Snyder, on August 14th, 2011
You should let the video footage of the wild violence that just took place in London burn into your memory because the same things are going to be happening all over the United States as the economy continues to crumble. We have raised an entire generation of young people with an “entitlement mentality”, but now the economy is producing very few good jobs that will actually enable our young people to work for what they feel they are entitled to. If you are under 30 in America today, things look really bleak. The vast majority of the good jobs are held by people that are older, and they aren’t about to give them up if they can help it. It is easy for the rest of us to tell young Americans to “take whatever they can”, but the reality is that there is intense competition for even the most basic jobs. For instance, McDonald’s recently held a “National Hiring Day” during which a million Americans applied for jobs. Only 6.2% of the applicants were hired. In the old days you could walk down to McDonald’s and get a job whenever you wanted to, but now any job is precious. The frustration among our young people is palpable. Most of them feel entitled to “the American Dream” and they feel like the system has failed them. Unfortunately, many of them are already turning to violence. But the economic riots and the civil unrest that we have already seen are nothing compared to what is coming. Americans are angry, and as the economy continues to collapse that anger is going to reach unprecedented heights.
In recent days, even many in the mainstream media have been openly wondering if the riots that happened in London could happen here too. There is a growing acknowledgement that this country is headed down a very dark path.
The sad thing is that these riots accomplish absolutely nothing. The recent London riots did not create any jobs and they certainly did not solve any economic problems. Instead, they actually hurt the economy even more because a huge am0unt of property was destroyed and people are even more afraid to continue with business as usual.
But when people get to the end of their ropes, most of the time they are not thinking rationally. When frustration erupts, the results can be very, very messy.
All over the United States we are already seeing some very troubling signs of the violence that is coming. The following are 10 signs that economic riots and civil unrest inside United States are now more likely then ever….
#1 Going to the state fair used to be such a fun thing for American families to do. But now no place is safe. The following is how one local ABC News affiliate described the “flash mob” attacks that took place at the Wisconsin state fair recently….
Milwaukee police said that around 11:10 p.m., squads were sent to the area for reports of battery, fighting and property damage being caused by an unruly crowd of “hundreds” of people. One officer described it as a “mob beating.”
Police said the group of young people attacked fair goers who were leaving the fair grounds. Police said that some victims were attacked while walking. They said others were pulled out of cars and off of motorcycles before being beaten.
One eyewitness said that the flash mob attacks at the Wisconsin state fair absolutely overwhelmed the limited police presence that was there….
When I saw the amount of kids coming down the road, all I kept thinking was, ‘There’s not enough cops to handle this.’ There’s no way. It would have taken the National Guard to control the number of kids that were coming off the road. They were knocking people off their motorcycles.
#2 According to a new Rasmussen survey, 48% of Americans believe that reductions in government spending are “at least somewhat likely” to result in civil unrest inside the United States. Unfortunately, perception often greatly influences reality.
#3 U.S. consumer confidence is now at its lowest level in 30 years.
#4 Joblessness among young Americans is at an epidemic level, and when rioting does break out it is usually young people that are leading the way. That is why the following statistics from an article in The Atlantic are so troubling….
One in five Americans are between 15 and 29-years old. And one in five of those Americans are unemployed. For minorities and the under-educated, the picture is much worse. Black teenagers have an unemployment rate of 44 percent, twice the rate for white teens.
#5 We are starting to see mindless violence in a lot of areas that used to be considered safe. In Kansas City on Saturday night, three young people were hit with bullets as they walked the streets of the Country Club Plaza. Mayor Sly James was about 50 yards away when the gunfire erupted. Authorities in Kansas City are considering a stricter curfew for that area.
#6 “Flash mobs” have become such a problem in Philadelphia that the mayor has imposed a strict curfew on young people. Now all teens between the ages of 13 and 18 must be indoors by 9 o’clock at night. The mayor also says that teens need to start pulling up their pants….
“Pull your pants up and buy a belt ’cause no one wants to see your underwear or the crack of your butt.”
#7 All over the United States we are seeing that many struggling Americans will do just about anything for money. For example, in Detroit recently three masked men crashed a vehicle through the entrance of a gas station and took off with an entire ATM machine.
#8 Desperate people do desperate things. Many of America’s “forgotten poor” are trying to survive any way that they can. For instance, a group of vagrants recently set up “a makeshift camp” near Prospect Park lake in Brooklyn. According to the New York Post, many nearby residents have been disturbed by what these “drifters” are doing to survive….
The drifters have been illegally trapping and cooking up the critters that call the park home, including squirrels, ducks and swan-like cygnets.
They used crude tactics to hunt their prey, including barbed fishing hooks that ripped off the top half of one poor gosling’s beak. They then cooked the meat over illegal fires. Some of the animals were eaten raw.
#9 According to CNN, sales of safes and vaults are absolutely soaring right now. One store owner told CNN that she believes that she is selling a lot more safes now because people are scared that civil unrest could be coming….
“Folks are worried about the decreasing value of the dollar, burglaries on the rise in their neighborhoods … and even the possibility that the unrest we are seeing in other parts of the world slipping over to our country.”
#10 Over the past 100 years, the American population has moved steadily into our big cities and the surrounding suburbs. This has created virtual “ghost towns” in our rural areas from coast to coast. Back in 1910, 72 percent of Americans lived in rural areas. Today, only 16 percent of Americans live in rural areas. But when you crowd huge masses of people close together that makes riots and civil unrest much more likely.
Most Americans are already fed up, and the economy is not even that bad yet. One recent survey found that 73 percent of Americans believe that the nation is “on the wrong track”. Another recent poll found that only 17 percent of Americans now believe that the U.S. government has the consent of the governed.
Millions of very frustrated young people believe that the economic system has failed them and that the political system no longer holds any answers.
America is rapidly approaching a breaking point. I have written previously about the collapse of society that we are already witnessing all over the United States. When the economy totally breaks down, most Americans are not going to be able to handle it.
Sadly, instead of coming together and trying to do something productive, many Americans will resort to rioting, looting and civil unrest. We have already seen this during local emergencies such as Hurricane Katrina.
But mindless violence accomplishes absolutely nothing positive. It just always makes things worse.
Unfortunately, logic and reason are not going to be enough to stop the gigantic wave of frustration that is coming. For most of the rest of us, it will be hard enough to get out of the way and protect our own families from the economic riots and the civil unrest that are coming.
The thin veneer of civilization that we all take for granted is starting to disappear. Hatred and anger are growing by the day. The United States is becoming a very frightening place.
So get ready. Our politicians certainly don’t have any answers for us. The debt ceiling deal was a complete and total joke, and corruption is absolutely rampant in Washington right now. Barack Obama is getting ready to leave for yet another vacation, and most of our politicians are only focused on the next election.
So don’t expect a “miracle” from those that are supposed to be leading us.
They don’t care about you.
You need to take care of yourself and your family and your friends.
A massive economic collapse is coming, and most Americans are going to be totally blindsided by it.
Don’t let that happen to you.
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