‘…Helen—a smart, cheerful five-year-old girl—is an asylum seeker from Honduras [….]
In July, Helen fled Honduras with her grandmother, Noehmi, and several other relatives; gangs had threatened Noehmi’s teen-age son, Christian, and the family no longer felt safe. Helen’s mother, Jeny, had migrated to Texas four years earlier, and Noehmi planned to seek legal refuge there. With Noehmi’s help, Helen travelled thousands of miles, sometimes on foot, and frequently fell behind the group. While crossing the Rio Grande in the journey’s final stretch, Helen slipped from their raft and risked drowning. Her grandmother grabbed her hand and cried, “Hang on, Helen!” When the family reached the scrubland of southern Texas, U.S. Border Patrol agents apprehended them and moved them through a series of detention centers.
[….] Helen was given a pack of crayons and spent the summer coloring patriotic images: busts of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, the torch on the Statue of Liberty. She was granted an hour of “Large Muscle Activity and Leisure Time” each day, and received lessons on the human respiratory system, the history of music, and “the risk and danger of social media.” “Helen,” a caseworker observed, “has excellent behavior at all times.” She had no major sources of stress, her reports noted, aside from “being separated from her family.” Her teachers encouraged her to develop “smart goals”—ambitions that are “Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound.” Helen’s goal was simple: “Minor disclosed wanting to live with her mother and family in the U.S.”
[….] On Helen’s form, which was filled out with assistance from officials, there is a checked box next to a line that says, “I withdraw my previous request for a Flores bond hearing.” Beneath that line, the five-year-old signed her name in wobbly letters…’
Always read the end of NYT articles, that's where the info is. It looks like Trump is for a permanent occupation of parts of Syria...
/jd
‘…[Trump] has spoken positively about the idea of withdrawing the approximately 2,000 American soldiers who are based in eastern Syria in areas once controlled by the Islamic State, although he now appears committed to leaving them there. In August, his administration decided not to spent $230 million that had already been earmarked for stabilization programs in that area.
The Saudi money, in addition to another $50 million given by the United Arab Emirates, will allow American programs there to continue, but on other countries’ tabs.
The funds will be used by USAID and the State Department for a variety of programs, including infrastructure repairs and provision of health, education and sanitation services.’
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/16/world/middleeast/saudi-arabia-money-syria.html
Those Raised Fists Still Resonate, 50 Years Later
‘…And beyond that, the Olympics were taking place amid turmoil around the nation and around the world. Two major assassinations in the United States. A student riot that paralyzed much of Paris. The Czech uprising against Communist rule that became known as Prague Spring. People beaten in the streets during the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
And in Mexico City, dozens, perhaps hundreds, of students protesting the country’s authoritarian government were killed by that same government.
The games went on anyway…’
‘…Smith and Carlos were banned from future participation in any Olympics for life. (They were in their early 20s in Mexico City, and this effectively prevented them from competing in other races in Munich and Montreal.) There were no offers of the complimentary stadium tickets usually offered to medaled athletes.
(Peter Norman suffered many of the same indignities when he returned to Australia. He was ostracized, never allowed on an Australian Olympic team again, despite qualifying in several national trials. His offense: wearing an Olympic Project for Human Rights button, like Smith and Carlos, and refusing to disavow his podium mates. When he died, in 2006, Smith and Carlos flew to Australia to be pallbearers.)
But for all the detractors, many thought of Carlos and Smith as heroes, especially in black America. Their upraised fists became a symbol of black refusal to submit to racial injustice — a precursor to today’s take-a-knee protests by NFL players…’
And, I think people assume the white guy was separate from the black guys, not true
/jd
The third man: The forgotten Black Power hero
‘…Yet few know that the man standing in front of both of them, the Australian sprinter Peter Norman who shocked everyone by powering past Carlos and winning the silver medal, played his own, crucial role in sporting history.
‘…On his left breast he wore a small badge that read: “Olympic Project for Human Rights” — an organization set up a year previously opposed to racism in sport. But while Smith and Carlos are now feted as human rights pioneers, the badge was enough to effectively end Norman’s career. He returned home to Australia a pariah, suffering unofficial sanction and ridicule as the Black Power salute’s forgotten man. He never ran in the Olympics again.
[….] Australia too, was in the midst of racial strife. The country’s “White Australia” policy had provoked protests of its own. It put heavy restrictions on non-white immigration — and a raft of prejudicial laws against its indigenous aboriginal population, including a policy of taking Aboriginal children from their birth parents and handing them to white couples for adoption, a practice that continued until the 1970s…’
https://edition.cnn.com/2012/04/24/sport/olympics-norman-black-power/index.html
Even capitalist Forbes magazine is telling us capitalism is the problem, and still no one listens,,,,
quarterly reports are the motive of every corporation. corpos are zombies. only the living can stop them.
/jd
Bittersweet Justice in Guatemala
A Guatemalan court found that the army committed genocide against the Maya Ixi, but at the same time acquitted the chief of military intelligence of wrongdoing.
‘…In 2013, Guatemala brought charges against the former dictator, Efraín Ríos Montt, and his chief of military intelligence, Mauricio Rodríguez Sánchez, for the crimes of genocide against the Maya Ixil population. It was an historic trial, marking the first time in Guatemala that a former head of state was put on trial for serious human rights violations.
During Guatemala’s thirty-six-year civil war (1960-1996), 200,000 people, mostly civilians, were killed or disappeared and countless others were subjected to torture, sexual violence, forced labor, and forced displacement. Some 600 villages were destroyed. A UN commission found that ninety-three percent of atrocities were the responsibility of the Guatemalan military…’
https://progressive.org/dispatches/court-delivers-bittersweet-justice-in-guatemala-181016
A new study reveals the real reason Obama voters switched to Trump
‘…One of the most puzzling elements of the 2016 election, at least for a lot of Americans, was the millions of voters who switched from voting for Barack Obama in 2012 to Donald Trump in 2016. Somewhere between 6.7 million and 9.2 million Americans switched this way; given that the 2016 election was decided by 40,000 votes, it’s fair to say that Obama-Trump switchers were one of the key reasons that Hillary Clinton lost.
[….] The study, from three political scientists from around the country, takes a statistical look at a large sample of Obama-Trump switchers. It finds that these voters tended to score highly on measures of racial hostility and xenophobia — and were not especially likely to be suffering economically.
“White voters with racially conservative or anti-immigrant attitudes switched votes to Trump at a higher rate than those with more liberal views on these issues,” the paper’s authors write. “We find little evidence that economic dislocation and marginality were significantly related to vote switching in 2016.”…’
Some Bad News For Earth
by Tom Tomorrow
the rest of this cartoon at: https://thenib.com/some-bad-news-for-earth
Howard Zinn’s “Three Holy Wars”