Tuesday 5th of November 2024

immigration and refugee capers — modern slavery.........

For years now, Fox News and other right-wing media have warned about an invasion of “illegal aliens” into the United States that supposedly threatens national security.

Donald Trump catapulted himself to the presidency in 2016 by vowing to crack down on illegal immigration and to build a border wall, which the Biden administration has extended.

 

Human Migration Results From Economic Imperialism and Reflects System of Global Apartheid Dividing North and South, Says Brooklyn College Professor     By Jeremy Kuzmarov

 

Among the false claims promoted by Trump and his supporters is that Biden’s “Open Border” policy is behind a fentanyl epidemic, though most fentanyl is smuggled into the U.S. through legal ports of entry—and it’s brought in by U.S. citizens, not migrants.

According to Brooklyn College Professor Immanuel Ness, author of the new book Migration as Economic Imperialism (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2023), the xenophobic climate in the U.S. has helped institutionalize a system of global apartheid dividing privileged sectors of the Global North from people in the Global South who migrate primarily because of desperate economic conditions, along with, in some cases, displacement by U.S./NATO wars.

The desperate conditions in the Global South have resulted from centuries of colonial and neo-colonial exploitation by countries in the Global North.

The latter today use institutions like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) to impose neo-liberal policies designed to facilitate the extraction of natural resources and monopolization of wealth by multinational corporations.

Loans from these institutions are conditioned on the host government enacting economic austerity measures that cut vital social services and access to public education and health care and that weaken labor unions, thereby keeping wages low and poverty entrenched.

The high migration patterns are driven in part by demographic shifts in the North that necessitate an influx of cheap imported labor to work at menial jobs in industries (agriculture, construction, food service, health care) people in the North generally do not want to work.

Amazingly, many economists—including those working for agencies such as the World Bank, IMF and UN—consider the growth of human migration as a positive social phenomenon.

They claim that the remittances that people send back to their families help spur economic development and provide a substitute for foreign aid or foreign direct investment. Migrants are further said to imbue Western democratic values, which they can transport back to their home countries in fighting authoritarian governments.

Ness’s book effectively challenges such triumphalist views, showing the growth in migration rates to be a direct consequence of entrenched social inequalities fueled by neo-liberal economic policies, which yield little benefit for countries in the Global South.

While remittances may assist individual families, they do not fuel national development.

The latter could only result from coordinated government programs to expand public transportation and infrastructure, facilitate local manufacturing and industrial development, promote land reform, and improve access to quality public education and health care.

Many migrants who travel to the Global North are thrust into hazardous and discriminatory work environments, which they lack basic rights to challenge, and are subject to potential arrest and deportation.

They are separated from their families and communities for long periods, with heavy human cost, and do not upgrade their job skills in a way that would enable them to benefit their home countries if and when they return.

Often, migrants are forced to pay unscrupulous middle-men to get jobs or visas, and do not make adequate incomes to assist their families very much.

Labor unions have historically shunned migrants whom they see as a threat to their rank-and-file members because they are seen to affect a downward drive on wages.

The allure of the West leads to a brain drain from countries, which need skilled workers and undermines social protest movements there as people who might help lead those movements move away.

Rather than fostering development, contemporary migration patterns reinforce an artificial class divide in countries in the Global South and stifle the kind of social solidarity that can result in a successful social movement.

The primary beneficiaries are multinational corporations, which gain access to cheap labor sources even as xenophobic politicians rail against the supposed alien invasion across American borders.

 

Case Study #1: Nepal

To illustrate his major argument, Ness analyzes the situation in Nepal, a primary organizing center for employment training of prospective migrant laborers, which sends its citizens to work abroad in large numbers.

In the early 2000s, as Nepal’s neo-liberal policies were put into place, World Bank consultant David Seddon (2005) suggested that Nepal was over-dependent on agriculture as the major source of GDP and should diversify by exporting labor, which the country followed. By 2019, remittances contributed to 29.9% to Nepal’s GDP.

The negative consequences were apparent in April 2015 when Nepal experienced a devastating earthquake and the country had a deficit of workers to reconstruct the economy since much of the population between the ages of 18 and 34 was working overseas to earn higher wages.[1]

Ness writes that “Nepal’s economic dependence on remittances from migrant laborers working abroad has not [generally] translated into economic development. Almost all remittances are sent to families for modernizing homes or buying consumer products. The country has yet to spend remittances on building schools, health-care facilities, transport or major development of infrastructure.”[2]

Eerily, visitors to Kathmandu, Nepal’s capital and largest city with a population of about 1.5 million, notice a stark absence of services like public transport, motorways, streetlights and other amenities found in most other major cities in Central and South Asia.

Kathmandu’s narrow streets are poorly maintained and the parks are unkept. Apart from wealthy residents and tourists, the urban area is impoverished. The business districts are dominated by recruitment agencies, banks and ATM machines, vocational training schools, and tourist firms. Few venture out after dark as, in most areas, there are no streetlights.[3]

 

Case Study #2: El Salvador

El Salvador is another dystopian society where dependence on remittances has given rise to recessions when foreign demand for Salvadoran labor has moderated—like during the world financial recession of 2008-2010 and COVID-19 pandemic.[4]

Because of heavy migration patterns to the U.S., El Salvador has a shortage of workers in health care, education, housing, construction, hotels and restaurants, transport and services.

Essential aspects of economic development are consequently foreclosed.

Ness writes that, for El Salvador, “migration is not a source of development but the consequence of the failure of economic development.”[5] The “primary beneficiaries…are the U.S. economy, which benefits from low wage workers and the Salvadoran oligarchy, which profits from controlling remittance spending and displacing class-conflict…”[6]

 What Should Be Done and Where Are We Headed?

According to Ness, the U.S. government has not formulated a migration law to allow foreign workers to enter the country legally as it imposes stringent border-control measures. The result makes the lives of migrants more precarious as they enter the country illegally or overstay their temporary visas and never obtain citizenship rights.

A first step for ameliorating this situation would be formulation of a new law that allows for legal entry and affords basic social protections and human rights to migrant workers, including the right to safe workplace conditions and adherence by employers to existing labor laws.

Ness considers as utopian the call for open borders, which would not alleviate the symptom of global inequality that compels many people to migrate.

Short of a major world socialist revolution, Ness supports adherence to the Global Compact for Migration (GCM) that was passed by the UN General Assembly in 2016 and has been endorsed by 152 nation-states and opposed by only five (Czech Republic, Hungary, Israel, Poland and the United States).

The global compact advocates for a) minimizing the adverse drivers and structural factors that compel people to leave their country of origin; b) fair and ethical recruitment by foreign employers of those who want to move; c) establishing a fair process for legal entry into countries; d) strengthening transnational response to the smuggling of migrants; e) coordinated international efforts to find missing migrants; and f) a commitment to well-managed and secure borders.[7]

Since the GCM is non-binding under international law, most of its provisions have been ignored. Any attempt to make it legally binding would thus be highly significant.

In the 1990s, a small number of trade unions and NGOs established workers’ centers and independent unions in North America and Western Europe chiefly to represent precarious migrant workers in the manufacturing, food service, and construction industries who were largely abandoned by most established trade unions.

Many of these have faded and NGO worker support has evolved primarily into advocacy for improving migrant rights directed at public and elected officials. However, direct organizing and protests, strikes and demonstrations led by worker-led unions would be more effective.

A strengthening of the International Labor Organization (ILO), which is chartered since its founding in 1919 to try to establish international labor standards and resolutions applicable to all UN member states, would also be greatly beneficial.

Since the hardships experienced by migrant laborers are ultimately the consequences of a fundamentally unequal global economic structure, the solution to their predicament lies in the need for a fundamental alteration of the global economy and the empowerment of Global South nations.

For decades, U.S. foreign policy has been committed to preventing that from occurring, though American imperial overreach and U.S. decline combined with initiatives like China’s One Belt and One Road raises hope that a new era of history may be on the horizon.

https://covertactionmagazine.com/2024/09/26/human-migration-results-from-economic-imperialism-and-reflects-system-of-global-apartheid-dividing-north-and-south-says-brooklyn-college-professor/

 

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

not dancing.....

UN says it can’t afford to support Ukrainians
The organization’s refugee agency has less than half the funds it needs for the upcoming winter, a senior official has said

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) lacks the funds to assist Ukrainians during the upcoming winter, while the demand for help is only increasing, according to the body’s representative in Ukraine, Karolina Lindholm Billing.

Speaking to AFP on Thursday, the senior official said the organization, as well as other humanitarian bodies, are severely underfunded and cannot provide support to Ukrainian refugees and internally displaced persons in full.

“The reality is that the funding situation for organizations like ours is far too low at this time of the year – we are 47% funded,” she said.

Kiev’s need has been increasing, with the situation deteriorating even further in recent weeks. “The expectations and asks from the authorities for support from organizations like UNHCR is actually increasing,” Lindholm Billing stated.

Ukraine has some 3.6 million internally displaced people and nearly 100,000 more have recently fled their homes, according to the official. Some 650,000 receive aid to make it through the winter, including warm clothing and kits to insulate their homes, the representative explained.

“If we can get the funds, I am convinced we’ll be able to help them,” Lindholm Billing said.

The official called for a concentrated effort to fix Ukraine’s critical infrastructure damaged during hostilities, as well as to invest more into decentralized energy generation in the country. Without such measures, the numbers of refugees and internally displaced people are expected to grow rapidly, she warned.

The upcoming winter is expected to be the toughest one for Kiev yet, with some 50% to 80% of its electricity generation capacity already lost, according to various estimates. Back in August, Ukrainian Energy Minister German Galushchenko warned the country would suffer major power outages, with electricity supplied to customers for only a few hours daily.

https://www.rt.com/russia/604912-un-ukraine-aid-funding/

 

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

imagine....

Karen Greenberg, The Forever Prison and the Forever Wars  POSTED ON OCTOBER 1, 2024

 

Can you even imagine a world where the response of President George W. Bush to al-Qaeda’s acts of horror in September 2001 wasn’t the launching of “the Global War on Terror” which, from Afghanistan and Iraq across the Middle East and deep into Africa, became a global set of disastrous conflicts that might, in truth, have been al-Qaeda’s dream? Well, dream on.

And while you’re at it, keep in mind that, according to the remarkable Costs of War Project, this country ended up spending at least $8 trillion on those wars. (Imagine how that money might have been used to help rather than hurt people globally!) According to that project, an estimated 940,000 people died directly thanks to America’s war on terror (almost half of them civilians) and 3.6 to 3.8 million indirectly in its war zones, bringing the total to nearly five million dead. Meanwhile, that group has estimated that 38 million other human beings were displaced from their homes, lives, and often worlds.

And if that isn’t the definition of a nightmare, I’m not sure what is. As it happens, TomDispatch regular Karen Greenberg has followed that “war” (those wars? Those armed disasters?) all too grimly and strikingly for years now, while focusing particularly on the issues of torture and imprisonment. Yes, this country proved all too quick to begin torturingits war on terror prisoners — though the term the Bush administration preferred to use was “enhanced interrogation techniques” — while creating a series of strikingly grim offshore sites of imprisonment beyond the rule of American or any other law, particularly — and on this subject Greenberg has made herself a leading expert — the prison the Bush administration set up at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

Today, while thinking about all those years in which she covered the horrors of those ongoing wars, Greenberg wonders whether it is indeed finally, in some sense, all over. Let her explain. Tom

Will the Forever Wars Ever End?The War on Terror 23 Years Later BY 

 

September marked the 23rd anniversary of al-Qaeda’s 2001 attacks on the United States, which left nearly 3,000 people dead. For the two decades since then, I’ve been writing, often for TomDispatch, about the ways the American response to 9/11, which quickly came to be known as the Global War on Terror, or GWOT, changed this country. As I’ve explored in several books, in the name of that war, we transformed our institutions, privileged secrecy over transparency and accountability, side-stepped and even violated longstanding laws and constitutional principles, and basically tossed aside many of the norms that had guided us as a nation for two centuries-plus, opening the way for a country now in Trumpian-style difficulty at home.

 

Even today, more than two decades later, the question remains: Will the war on terror ever end?

Certainly, one might be inclined to answer in the affirmative following the recent unexpected endorsement of presidential candidate Kamala Harris by two leading members of the George W. Bush administration which, in response to those attacks, launched the GWOT. First, Bush’s vice president, Dick Cheney, who, after September 11th, sought to take the country down the path to what he called “the dark side” and was a chief instigator of the misguided and fraudulently justified invasion of Iraq in 2003, endorsed Vice President Harris. Then, so did Alberto Gonzales who, while serving as White House counsel to George W. Bush and then as his attorney general, was intricately involved in crafting that administration’s grim torture policy. (You remember, of course, those “enhanced interrogation techniques.”) He was similarly involved in creating the overreaching surveillance policy designed and implemented during the first years of the war on terror.

Consider those surprising endorsements by former Bush war hawks a possible coda for the war on terror as a major factor in American politics. In fact, for almost a decade and a half now, there have been signs suggesting that the denouement of that war might be at hand (though it never quite was). Those markers included the May 2011 lethal raid on the hideout of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden; President Barack Obama’s December 2011 authorization for the “final” withdrawal of American troops from Iraq (though a cadre of 2,500 military personnel are stationed there presently and another 900 are in neighboring Syria). In August 2021, 10 years after the killing of bin Laden, the U.S. did finally exit, however disastrously, from its lost war in Afghanistan. And in 2022, a U.S. drone strike killed bin Laden’s successor, Ayman al-Zawahiri.

The counterterrorism measures have had an impact on the American threat environment. As reported in the Department of Homeland Security’s 2024 Homeland Threat Assessment, in 2022, “Only one attack in the United States was conducted by an individual inspired by a foreign terrorist organization” such as al-Qaeda or ISIS.

 

Terrorism Prosecutions

Notably, prosecutions of alleged international terrorists have declined precipitously since the Bush administration years (and some of the convictions then have been reversed or altered). In a 2009 report, the Justice Department stated that, “since September 11, 2001, the Department has charged 512 individuals with terrorism or terrorism-related crimes and convicted or obtained guilty pleas in 319 terrorism-related and anti-terrorism cases.” Soon after that, however, the decline began. TRAC, a database that monitors such cases, reported that, in October 2014, “[t]here were no prosecutions recorded that involved international terrorism.” By 2022, TRAC was reporting that the number of domestic terrorism prosecutions far outnumbered international terrorism cases, due in large part to the charges leveled against those involved in the January 6th insurrection. And that trend has only continued. This year, as TRAC indicated, “Overall, the data show that convictions of this type are down 28.6 percent from levels reported in 2019.”

And when it comes to terrorism prosecutions, something unthinkable not so long ago has now happened. Several judges have recently given early release or simply overturned cases involving individuals convicted and sentenced in jihadi-inspired terrorism cases during the first decade of the war on terror. In July 2024, Eastern District of Virginia Judge Leonie Brinkema threw out three of 10 charges against and overturned a conviction carrying a life sentence for Ali Al-Timimi, a U.S.-born computational biology scholar sentenced in 2004 for soliciting treason by inspiring his followers to commit acts of violence abroad to defend Islam. Judge Brinkema reversed her decision following a 2019 U.S. Supreme Court decision that found the term “crime of violence” to be “unconstitutionally vague.” Al-Timimi’s fate on the other counts is now on appeal. Having been released to home confinement after the onset of the Covid pandemic, he now no longer faces a life sentence, though, as the Associated Press reports, he could potentially see “decades of prison time beyond the 15 years he already served.”

Nor was this Brinkema’s first reversal in a terrorism case. In 2018, she ordered the release of two prisoners convicted in what was known as the Virginia “Paintball Jihad” case following two Supreme Courtrulings that held the charges in those cases to be similarly unconstitutionally vague.

And Judge Brinkema was not alone in reviewing and reversing post-9/11 terrorism convictions. This year, in two controversial cases, judges reassessed rulings they had once made, releasing from prison those they had sentenced in the war on terror years. Judge Colleen MacMahon granted “compassionate release” to James Cromitie, after six months earlier ordering the release of his three codefendants, commonly referred to collectively as the “Newburgh Four.” At sentencing, MacMahon had indicated her disagreement with the initial outcome of the case which led to 25-year sentences for the defendants convicted on charges that involved plotting to bomb synagogues and shoot down American planes with stinger missiles, describing their crime as that of “allegedly planting ‘bombs’ that were packed with inert explosives supplied by the FBI.” She further chastised the FBI in her compassionate release ruling, claiming, “Nothing about the crimes of conviction was of defendants’ own making. The FBI invented the conspiracy; identified the targets; manufactured the ordnance; federalized what would otherwise have been a state crime… and picked the day for the ‘mission.’”

Four years earlier, in late 2019, a federal judge in Lodi, California, overturned the conviction of Hamid Hayat, convicted in 2006 for attending a terrorist training camp in Pakistan and plotting an attack on this country, on the grounds that his counsel had ineffectively assisted him. Following that vacated conviction, the National Security Division at the Department of Justice reviewed the case and decided against filing new charges concluding “that the passage of time and the interests of justice counsel against resurrecting this 15-year-old case.” Having served 14 years of a 24-year sentence, Hayat was released.

The “passage of time” in these cases had led to a rethinking of the uses of justice and law after 9/11. Sadly enough, it has not resulted in sunsetting two of the major initiatives of the war on terror — the authorization for the initial military response to the 9/11 attacks that led to this country’s disastrous military engagements in Afghanistan and elsewhere, and the creation of the Guantánamo Bay Detention Facility.

 

The 2001 AUMF

One glaring element of the war on terror that has defied any sense of ending is the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force, or AUMF, passed by Congress in the days just after 9/11, which initially greenlighted the invasion of Afghanistan. It’s still on the books.

Unlike prior authorizations for war, the 2001 authorization included no temporal limits, no geographical boundaries, and no named enemy. It was a classic blank check for launching attacks anywhere in the name of the war on terror and has indeed been used to justify attacks in dozens of countries throughout the Middle East and Africa, including against “unspecified organizations and individuals connected to international terrorism,” as a Council on Foreign Relations overview reports. As Georgetown professor Rosa Brooks has pointed out, the temporal open-endedness of that AUMF defied international law and norms in which “a state’s right to respond to an armed attack is clearly subject to some temporal limitations; it does not last indefinitely.” Or at least it shouldn’t.

Year after year, Congress has indeed considered sunsetting that 2001 AUMF, as well as the 2002 authorization for war in Iraq. After all, the landscape of international terrorism has changed vastly since the post-9/11 years. While the threat hasn’t disappeared, it has been transfigured. As the 2024 Annual Threat Assessment issued by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence points out, “While al-Qa’ida has reached an operational nadir in Afghanistan and Pakistan and ISIS has suffered cascading leadership losses in Iraq and Syria, regional affiliates will continue to expand.”

The war in Gaza has, of course, further changed the terrorism landscape. According to FBI Director Chris Wray, Hamas’s October 7th attack on Israel took the threat of foreign terrorism to “a whole ‘nother level.”

However, the 2001 authorization for the war on terror that remains in place is not an apt authorization for the new brand of terrorism or for the war in Gaza. It has so far made no difference that a 2022 National Security Strategy issued by the Biden White House pledged “to work with the Congress to replace outdated authorizations for the use of military force with a narrow and specific framework appropriate to ensure that we can continue to protect Americans from terrorist threats.” To date, no such narrowed framework has come into existence. And while Congress has repeatedly tried to sunset that piece of legislation, largely under the leadership of California Democratic Congresswoman Barbara Lee (the sole member of Congress who insightfully opposed it in 2001 on the grounds of its expansive overreach), such efforts have failed year after year after year. With Lee’s departure from office this coming January, the possibility of such a sunset will lose its most ardent proponent.

 

The Forever Prison

By far the most egregious relic of the war on terror is undoubtedly that forever war’s forever prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. True, the number of detainees still held there — 30 — is down dramatically from the “roughly 780 detainees” in 2002. And 16 of those detainees have now been cleared for release (a review board having determined that they no longer pose a threat to the United States), while three remain in indefinite detention, and 11 others are in the military commissions system either facing charges or convicted. And true, President Biden’s administration has made some progress in those commissions, arranging plea deals to resolve the cases of those who have been charged, as in that of two detainees who had been tortured and who pleaded guilty to charges related to terrorist bombings in Bali, Indonesia.

But whatever progress has been made during this administration, there have been two major setbacks.

First, early in the fall of 2023, the Biden administration reportedly arranged for the transfer of 11 Yemeni detainees to Oman. As the New York Times‘s Carol Rosenbergreported, thanks to Hamas’s October 7th attack on Israel, “A military cargo plane was already on the runway at Guantánamo Bay ready to airlift the group of Yemeni prisoners to Oman when the trip was called off.” Had that transfer occurred, the prison population would have dwindled to 19. But worries about a newly unstable Middle East left members of Congress uneasy and, according to Rosenberg, they expressed their concerns to the State Department and so succeeded in halting the transfer.

In July, however, a momentous forward step did take place. Brigadier General Susan Escallier, the Pentagon’s Convening Authority for Guantánamo, the person in charge of the military commissions there, finally authorized a plea deal that had been in the works for years. It involved three of five defendants in that prison’s signature case, the prosecution of those accused of conspiring in and abetting the 9/11 attacks, including their alleged mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. The grim years of torture of those five codefendants at CIA “black sites” around the globe had long made it impossible to bring the case to court.

However, a deal was finally reached. As Chief Prosecutor Rear Admiral Aaron Rugh explained, “In exchange for the removal of the death penalty as a possible punishment, these three accused have agreed to plead guilty to all of the charged offenses, including the murder of the 2,976 people listed in the charge sheet.” Other parts of the agreement remain secret, but it still seemed like a huge step forward had been taken in bringing justice to the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks. After endless pretrial hearings, filings, and motions — and no trial — there seemed at least to be a glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel. In the words of Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL), the plea deal “was the best path forward to finality and justice.”

Unfortunately, only two days after the announced deal, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin mysteriously revoked it, issuing a two-page memorandum that managed to provide no explanation whatsoever for his decision.

Twenty-three years later, there is arguably no greater reminder of both the need to put the war on terror behind us and an all-American inability to do so than the continued existence of Guantánamo. There, at an estimated expense of more than $13 million per prisoner per year, judges and lawyers, many of whom favor plea deals, continue to play their roles as if a trial in the 9/11 case will ever be possible; as if the passage of time without resolution is an acceptable solution; and as if the example of indefinite detention, the use of torture, and a system that can’t adjudicate justice doesn’t continue to undermine the American promise of justice for all.

 

Moving Forward?

If only, in acting to restore a balance between punishment and the law, even when it comes to post-9/11 terrorism cases, Judges MacMahon and Brinkema had set an example for others. Certainly, at this truly late date, President Biden and Secretary of Defense Austin should have accepted — and should now reconsider and accept — the plea deal for those 9/11 co-defendants as a way of helping this country finally move past the 9/11 era and those endless, disastrous wars on terror. Isn’t it time to free the country up to focus on truly pressing national concerns instead of letting the aberrations of the past continue to haunt the present moment? Along these lines, perhaps it’s also the moment for Congress to sunset the 9/11 authorization for open-ended all-American global warfare.

Isn’t it truly time to move on from the war on terror’s lingering and painful legacy?

 

https://tomdispatch.com/will-the-forever-wars-ever-end/

 

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.