Roaming Charges: Who Shot the Tariffs? |
Sabertooth tiger skull and Bay Bridge, San Francisco waterfront. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.
Nationalism is our form of incest, is our idolatry, is our insanity. ‘Patriotism’ is its cult…Just as love for one individual which excludes the love for others is not love, love for one’s country which is not part of one’s love for humanity is not love, but idolatrous worship.
– Erich Fromm
Here’s Theodor Adorno at his sharpest and most relevant to our current dire predicament:
As we know, fascist agitation has by now come to be a profession, as it were, a livelihood. It had plenty of time to test the effectiveness of its various appeals, and through what might be called natural selection, only the most catchy ones have survived. Their effectiveness is itself a function of the psychology of the consumers. Through a process of “freezing,” which can be observed throughout the techniques employed in modern mass culture, the surviving appeals have been standardized, similarly to the advertising slogans, which proved to be most valuable in the promotion of business. This standardization, in turn, falls in line with stereotypical thinking, that is to say, with the “stereopathy” of those susceptible to this propaganda and their infantile wish for endless, unaltered repetition. It is hard to predict whether the latter psychological disposition will prevent the agitators’ standard devices from becoming blunt through excessive application. In National Socialist Germany, everybody used to make fun of certain propagandistic phrases such as “blood and soil” (Blut und Boden), jokingly called Blubo, or the concept of the Nordic race from which the parodistic verb aufnorden (to “northernize”) was derived. Nevertheless, these appeals do not seem to have lost their attractiveness. Rather, their very “phoniness” may have been relished cynically and sadistically as an index for the fact that power alone decided one’s fate in the Third Reich, that is, power unhampered by rational objectivity. (“Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda,” 1951)
Like the Israelis in Gaza, the Trump kidnap-and-deport squad sure as hell isn’t trying to hide what they’re doing: “We need to get better at treating this like a business,” Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons said, explaining he wants to see a deportation process “like [Amazon] Prime, but with human beings.”
The Trump White House wants to spend $45 billion this year on facilities to detain noncitizens. Last year, the total amount of federal money allocated to ICE was about $3.4 billion.
I wonder if MAGA will be surprised that the noncitizens they accused of ripping off Americans by not paying taxes are now being haunted down for deportation by ICE using tax records provided by the IRS:
“The IRS agreed to share information with ICE to help locate people for deportation, court records show. This is a fundamental change in the IRS, which had gained the trust of migrants and encouraged them to file their taxes.”
Students are being deported for objecting to this: Israeli soldiers were ordered to destroy everything in the Gaza perimeter. “We’re not only killing them, we’re killing their wives, their children, their cats, their dogs,” an Israeli officer said. “We’re destroying their houses & pissing on their graves.”
Only days after taking office as Columbia University’s new trustee-president, Claire Shipman personally terminated the appeal process of disciplined students and workers, including former union leader Grant Miner, crushing any hopes that she might at least allow due process for the students to make their case.
Martin Heidegger demonstrated more resistance to the Nazi takeover of Freiberg University than the Ivy League schools have shown against Trump–and he went so far as to ban his mentor Edmund Husserl from the library to curry favor with the Brownshirts.
Federal judge Paula Xinis’ order that the Trump Administration must return Kilmar Garcia from the El Salvadoran prison he was sent to through an “administrative error” back to the US:
“[Trump officials] do indeed cling to the stunning proposition that they can forcibly remove any person—migrant and U.S. citizen alike —to prisons outside the United States, and then baldly assert they have no way to effectuate return because they are no longer the ‘custodian.’”
Andry José Hernández Romero.
Photojournalist Philip Holsinger on Andry José Hernández Romero, the gay makeup artist, who was kidnapped, abused and deported to El Salvador by ICE for having a “Dad” tattoo on one arm and a “Mom” tattoo on the other: “He was being slapped every time he would speak up. He couldn’t help himself. Then he started praying and calling out, literally crying for his mother.”
In its report last weekend on Trump’s deportations, 60 Minutes could find no criminal records for 75% of the Venezuelans the US sent to a mega-prison in El Salvador, meaning that 100s of innocent people have been incarcerated in a hellhole, perhaps for the rest of their lives.
The US is paying El Salvador at least $6 million a year to house in one of the world’s most notorious prisons noncitizens it deported–most of whom have no criminal record and aren’t wanted for any crime, many of whom have no ties to gangs. Why are those who’ve committed no crime being kept in prison? On what authority? What will El Salvador do with these poor people when the US stops paying the bill? If the US is paying the bill, why can’t it demand that El Salvador release the people it sent there “by accident”?
In a unanimous ruling handed down on Thursday night, the Supreme Court ordered the Trump administration to “facilitate” the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia from the El Salvadoran hellhole he was “accidentally” sent to by Trump’s ICE goons in violation of a protective order banning Abrego Garcia’s deportation to El Salvador, where his life is at risk. When you’ve lost Alito and Thomas…
A couple of weeks ago, Trump’s AG, Pam Bondi, gave a nationally-televised press conference fingering Henrry Villatoro-Santos as the East Coast leader” of the MS-13 gang. Now, the Justice Department is dropping its charges against him and planning to deport him without any judicial review of the allegations against him would violate Justice Department policy. “Historically, and consistently, if someone truly is a leader of a violent gang,” said Scott Frederickson, a former federal prosecutor, “we would always prosecute them first and convict them first and make sure they can’t get back into the country.”
On March 27, a mother and her three children were kidnapped by ICE in Sackets Harbor in northern New York, the hometown of Tom Homan, who’s commanding the immigration raids for Trump. All four of them were handcuffed, including a third grader, and kept in detention for 11 days. They were finally released this week after more than 1,000 people showed up to protest their baseless arrests.
The Los Angeles United School District said plainclothes ICE agents tried to question students at two elementary schools in Los Angeles on Monday but were denied entry by administrators. Superintendent Alberto Carvahlo said the agents falsely claimed they had parental permission to question the kids.
Here’s the declaration of Luis Alberto Castillo Rivera, who entered the United States legally from Venezuela, had committed no crimes while in the US, yet was kidnapped without a warrant by ICE and sent to the notorious Camp 6 at Guantanamo Bay, where he was fed wretched food, kept shackled in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day, denied medical care, mocked and humiliated by guards, saw a prisoner beaten by guards for refusing to return a toothbrush, had their Bibles and passports seized and were denied phone calls with family and lawyers for two weeks…
NYT: “Trump has already invoked the Alien Enemies Act, absurdly, against a Venezuelan gang. There is no reason to think Trump would hesitate to use his extraordinary powers to deploy the U.S. military on American soil to put down protests he doesn’t like.”
Ian Boudreau: “If you abduct someone and send them involuntarily and without recourse to a country where they’ve never lived to be imprisoned, that isn’t deportation; it’s human trafficking.”
Americans voted for their own version of Brexit, fully aware of how much British voters almost immediately regretted their own impulsive act. It’s a case study in the Missing Limb Theory of Politics. Many American voters long to be reunited with the aristocratic myth of life in the UK. They regret being separated by the Revolution and have an infantile longing to be trans-Atlantically reattached with the Mother (breast) country, no matter what the cost in terms of self-abuse.
Trump’s really emphasizing the poor in Standard and Poor’s, as if he wants to make Poor the new Standard…
Trump will eventually declare a new “national emergency” to consolidate more executive power because of the economic wreckage resulting from the tariffs he imposed after he initially declared a “national emergency.”
Under Trump’s latest tariff scheme (10% on everyone and 125% on China), the net increase in the effective tax rate in the US is expected to be 20%. The White House later clarified that the 125% China tariffs were on top of, not inclusive of, the 20% IEEPA (International Emergency Economic Powers Act) tariffs already in place, making the maximum rate on Chinese imports 145%.
William Huo, Intel’s first rep in Beijing: “America got conned by its own elite. And now we’ve got the privilege of importing our own poverty in shiny containers labeled “Made in China. When a politician promises to bring back American manufacturing with tariffs, ask them: who’s going to rebuild the ecosystem Wall Street torched three decades ago? Tariffs won’t fix decades of........